Khalophis considered that for a moment.

“Do you ever take them off?” he asked.

“For bathing, yes.”

“What about mating?”

Yatiri shook his head and said, “It is unseemly for you to ask, but you are not Aghoru, so I will answer. No, we do not take them off, even then, as pleasures of the flesh were among the greatest vices of the Elohim.”

“That explains why there’re so few of you on this world,” said Khalophis, wanting nothing more than to return to the encampment and re-establish his connection to Sioda. With the power of the Pyrae in ascendance, his Tutelary was a winged essence of shimmering fire. His connection with Sioda allowed Khalophis and the 6th Fellowship to burn entire armies to ashes without firing a single shot from their many guns.

The thought empowered him and he snarled, feeling his anger rise to the fore. It was good to feel controlled aggression after so long keeping it in check. This world was nothing to the Thousand Sons, and he railed against their enforced presence here when there were wars to be fought elsewhere. The Wolf King had demanded their presence in battle, and yet they wasted time on a forgotten world that offered nothing of value.

Khalophis reached out and ran his hand across the Titan’s foot, feeling the smoothness of its surface. Such a material must surely be brittle, and he longed to destroy it. He clenched his fists and dropped into a boxer’s stance.

“What are you doing?” cried Yatiri, leaping to his feet.

Khalophis didn’t answer. The strength in his arms built, the strength to shatter steel and buckle the hull of an armoured vehicle. He pictured exactly where his fists would strike.

“Please, Brother Khalophis!” begged Yatiri, putting himself between Khalophis and the enormous, splay-clawed foot. “Stop this, please!”

Khalophis distilled his focus into his clenched fists, but the blows did not land. His consciousness rooted itself in the eighth sphere of the Enumerations, but he forced his thoughts into the seventh, calming his aggression and shackling it to that more contemplative state of being.

“Your strength would be wasted,” cried Yatiri. “The guardians are impervious to harm!”

Khalophis lowered his arms and stepped back from the target of his violence.

“Is that what you think?” he asked. “Then what’s that?”

Rising from the ground and spreading into the foot of the towering construct like cracks in stonework, thin black lines oozed upwards like malevolent, poisoned veins.

“Daiesthai?”hissed Yatiri.

KNEELING ON THE sun disc of his glittering pyramid, Magnus closed his first eye and unshackled his body of light from his flesh. His captains and warriors required the Enumerations to achieve the separation from flesh, but Magnus had mastered spirit travel in the aether without being aware that such a thing might be considered difficult.

The Enumerations were philosophical and conceptual tools to allow a practitioner of the mysteries to sift through the myriad complexities involved in bending the universe to his will. Such was his gift, the ability to achieve the impossible without knowing it was beyond comprehension.

On a world such as Aghoru, that process was eased by the aetheric winds that blew invisibly across the planet’s surface. The Great Ocean pressed in, as though around a precious and delicate bubble. Magnus plucked a thought from the third Enumeration to express the concept; this world was a perfect sphere, structurally impossible to improve upon, yet the Mountain was a flaw, a means by which that perfect balance might be upset. When he had entered the cave with Yatiri, he had observed all the formalities of the Aghoru ritual of the dead, but the pointless chanting and somatic posturing had amused him with its naivety.

The Aghoru truly believed they placated some dormant race of devils imprisoned beneath the earth, but the time was not yet right to disabuse them of that notion. Standing in the dark of the cave, he could feel the vast pressure of the Great Ocean far beneath his feet, leeching up through wards worn thin by uncounted aeons.

There were no devils beneath the Mountain, only the promise of something so incredible that it took Magnus’ breath away. It was too early to be certain, but if he was right, the benefit to the human race would be beyond imaging.

What lay beneath the Mountain was a gateway, an entrance to an indescribably vast and complex network of pathways through the Great Ocean, as though an unseen network of veins threaded the flesh of the universe. To gain control of that network would allow humanity free rein over the stars, the chance to step from one side of the galaxy to the other in the blink of an eye.

There was danger, of course there was. He could not simply open this gate without the Great Ocean spilling out with disastrous consequences. The secret to unlocking this world’s great potential would be in careful study, meticulous research and gradual experimentation. As Yatiri intoned the meaningless rituals for the dead, Magnus had drawn a filament of that power upwards, and had tasted the vast potential of it. It was raw, this power, raw and vital. His flesh ached for its touch again.

The things he could do with such power.

Magnus rose up, leaving his corporeal body kneeling upon the sun disc. Freed from the limitations of flesh, his body truly came alive, a lattice of senses beyond the paltry few understood by those whose only life was that lived on the mundane realms of existence.

“I will free you all from the cave,” said Magnus, his voice unheard beyond the walls of the pyramid. His body of light shot through the pyramid’s peak, rising into the night sky of Aghoru, and Magnus relished this chance to soar without company or protection.

The Mountain reared over him, its immense presence towering in its majesty.

He rose up thousands of metres, and still it dwarfed his presence.

Magnus shot higher into the sky, a brilliant missile that twisted, spun and wove glittering traceries of light in the sky. His dizzying flight was invisible to all, for Magnus desired to remain alone, and masked his presence from even his captains.

He flew as close to the Mountain as he could, feeling the black wall of null energy radiating from artfully fashioned rocks and peaks designed with but a single purpose: to contain the roiling, unpredictable energies trapped beneath it.

Magnus spun around the mountain, relishing the aetheric winds whipping around his body of light. Ancient mystics had known the body of light as the linga sarira, a double of the physical body they believed could be conjured into existence with time, effort and will, essentially creating a means to live forever. Though untrue, it was a noble belief.

Onwards and upwards he flew. The atmosphere grew thin, yet the subtle body needed no oxygen or heat or light to sustain it. Will and energy were its currency, and Magnus had a limitless supply of both.

The sun was a fading disc of light above him, and he flew ever upwards, spreading his arms like wings as he bathed in the warmth of the invisible currents of energy that permeated every corner of this world. The world below was a distant memory, the encampment of the Thousand Sons a pinprick of light in the darkness.

He saw the vast swathe of the galaxy, the misty whiteness of the Milky Way, the gleam of distant stars and the impossible gulfs that separated them. Throughout history, men and women had looked up at these stars and dreamed of one day travelling between them. They had balked at distances so vast the human mind was incapable of conceiving them, and then bent their minds to overcoming the difficulties in doing so.

Now the chance to take those stars, to master the galaxy once and for all, was in their grasp. Magnus would be the architect of that mastery. The ships of the Thousand Sons hung motionless in the void above him, the Photep, the Scion of Prosperoand the Ankhtowe. Together with Mechanicum forge vessels, Administratum craft and a host of bulk cruisers bearing army soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard, they made up this portion of the 28th Expedition.