‘Why?’

The daemon’s uneven jaws clicked together. It does not matter. Tell me, what do you see in this place?

Lorgar took a breath, tasting the hot and sweat-ripened air of his armour’s internal ventilation. ‘Can I breathe here?’

Yes. We are no longer on Shanriatha.

Lorgar disengaged the seals at his collar and lifted the helm clear. Cold air caressed his face, while his next breath pulled a welcome chill into his burning lungs.

He turned his calm, scholarly eyes upon the daemon. ‘How did we leave the dead world?’

We are there, and we are here. You will understand one night, Lorgar. For now, explanations are a waste of time and breath. Some truths cannot be contained by the mortal mind.

The primarch smiled to hide the curl of his lip. ‘For a guide, you are doing precious little guiding.’

I am an emissary. A viator. Ingethel slithered along the lush red carpet, leaving a slug’s smear. You are here, for all that it matters. You can breathe here, and die here, if we are not careful. The warp is everything and nothing, and you are adrift in its tides.

‘Very well.’ That would do, he supposed, for now.

Do you hear that, Lorgar?

Lorgar took another refreshing breath, letting the chill fill his chest. ‘Battle, in the distance?’ He shook his head. ‘This vision is a lie. The Imperial Palace has never been besieged.’

No? You look upon this endless chamber with mortal eyes. Use an immortal’s sight.

Easier said than done. His sixth sense, never reliable, was a curled core within his mind, suddenly resistant to being unlocked in this place. With concentration, he managed to pry his psychic gift open, as if pulling apart the fingers of a stiffened fist.

Lorgar managed to say ‘I…’ before he was drowned in the battle raging around him.

GHOSTS WAGED WAR in every direction, their spectral bodies falling victim to the bite of each other’s bolters and blades.

The illusion was complete enough to force his body into a physical response – a quickening of the heart, a shallowness of breath, the crucial urge to draw steel and leap into the fray. He considered himself a seeker, a scholar before a soldier, but the battle’s intensity demanded instinctive reaction. Through clenched teeth, Lorgar watched warriors in the clashing shades of Legiones Astartes armour fighting and dying at his feet.

Amongst their chaotic ranks were beings of twisted inhumanity, their wrenched faces and bleeding bodies serving as ironclad evidence of their Neverborn origins. Claws snapped and cleaved; fleshy tendrils of barbed skin lashed and coiled in strangling embrace; eyeless faces howled above the grating clatter of bolters. Thousands upon thousands of warriors, mortal and immortal alike, grinding and slaying, shrieking and roaring. Many bore wings of flame and smoke; while others soared to the high ceiling on chiropteran pinions, casting bats’ shadows on the fighting below. These last daemons hurled the struggling bodies of captured Imperial Fists down, bombarding the warriors below with their own brothers.

Lorgar released a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. In a voiceless exhalation, he said the words, ‘Witness before me, the very heart of heresy.’

Ingethel hunched next to him. A reflection of the tumult showed plain in his swollen eye. Your own words, Emperor’s child?

‘No. A quote, from an old Covenant text.’

Lorgar stared as a towering figure, taller even than a primarch, waded through a broken phalanx of Imperial Fists. The creature was clad in cracked fragments of ceramite armour, warped into a colossal image of Legionary purity. The brutal familiarity of a Mark II snarl-mouthed helm had become a jawed monstrosity, crested by great, curved horns of iron and ivory. Its hands, once human fists in armoured gauntlets, were swollen into gnarled claws ending in scything black barbs, akin to a bird of prey’s talons. Even from this distance, the aberration reeked of something poisonous – a perversely pleasant, cloying malignancy, promising death the moment its sweetness ever touched a tongue. The lethal, deceptive scent poured off the leviathan in waves.

‘That creature,’ Lorgar watched with wide eyes. ‘It wears the armour of the Legions, but I cannot mark its allegiance.’

Ingethel gestured with its two left arms. Do you see the warriors clad in cardinal red?

Lorgar couldn’t fail to see them. An entire Legion unknown to him, their bolters crashing as they advanced in mixed ranks with the bellowing Neverborn. Imperial Fists fell back before them, their numbers diminishing with each passing moment.

They are the Bearers of the Word.

‘They…’

Yes, Lorgar. They are.

And they were. His Legion, his own loyal sons, armoured in a shade of spilled blood and oxidised iron. Prayer scrolls marked their armour, their piety declared with defiance even as the parchments were ripped and scorched in the heat of battle. Many helms bore horns in mimicry of officer crests, and every shoulder guard showed a daemon’s twisted visage, wrought in blackened bronze.

Watching them brought their chants to life. Who were these warriors, to adorn themselves in skulls and daemons’ faces, chanting ritual verse as they advanced? What had become of his Legion?

Ingethel pried the thoughts from Lorgar’s mind. The future holds many changes, primarch.

He didn’t answer. Lorgar moved among the warring Legionaries, utterly ignored by all of them. The warriors moved to fire around him, but paid no more heed to his existence. With a hesitant shove, he pushed one of the red-clad Word Bearers’ shoulder guards. The warrior cursed at a missed shot, moving aside and adjusting his aim. The bolter started up its thunderous refrain a moment later.

Surrounded by advancing Legionaries, the primarch looked back to his guide. Ingethel slinked closer, its sinuous, muscled worm’s body parting the crowded warriors with the same ease.

This moment is fifty years distant from when we stand on Shanriatha.

‘Why do they wear red?’

Ingethel reached to one of the Word Bearers, its nails streaking over the daemonic visage on the warrior’s pauldron. The Legionary hesitated; for a moment Lorgar wondered if the daemon had made their presence known. Instead of noticing them, the warrior reloaded, immediately adding his fire back to the assault.

The Legion’s old armour was cast aside to herald the changes taking hold of humanity. They are no longer the Bearers of the Emperor’s Word, Lorgar. They are the Bearers of yours.

‘This cannot be true.’ The primarch flinched as a bolt shell detonated nearby, killing the Word Bearer closest to him. ‘You have still not told me what that creature is – the one that wears the armour of my Legion five decades from now.’

He watched it move, its bunched musculature in concert with the exposed power cables and layered crimson ceramite armour. As it pulled one of the Imperial Fists apart with its immense claws, the black smoke misting from its wings was an acidic shadow, slowly eating into the golden armour of every Imperial Fists warrior nearby.

‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered. In the great beast’s grip, the bisected Imperial Fist fought on, firing his bolter down into the daemon’s face. The armoured creature hurled the warrior’s legs aside, turning its corrupted helm from the shells cracking against its faceplate. Lorgar watched in silence as the winged daemon slammed the halved Imperial Fist onto its taurine crown, impaling the Legionary on its right horn. That, at last, stilled the warrior’s defiance. His bolter fell from his hands, clattering down the shadow-wrapped wings. The daemon fought on, untroubled by the weight of the armoured torso punctured onto its ivory crest.

‘What is that thing?’ the primarch asked again. ‘Its soul is… I do not have the words for it.’ Lorgar stared through the grinding crash of unfolding carnage, peering to see beneath the monstrosity’s flesh. Where a flaring emanation would pulse in a living being, and a hollow chasm would swallow light within one of the Neverborn, this creature possessed both. An ember burned hot in the blackness beneath its skin.