“A waste of lives,” said Ahriman, looking at the bodies the Spireguard were carrying from the broken fortress and arranging in neat lines for incineration.

“An unavoidable one,” responded Hathor Maat.

“Was it?” said Ahriman. “I am not so sure.”

“Lorgar led negotiations with the Phoenix Court,” said Phosis T’kar. “A primarch no less, yet every attempt was rejected. What more proof do you need that these cultures are degenerate?”

Ahriman did not answer, having renewed his acquaintance with the Word Bearers’ gold-skinned primarch at the greeting ceremony held to honour the arrival of the Thousand Sons. It had been a glittering day of overblown ritual and proselytising, as pointless as it was time-consuming.

Leman Russ had not attended the ceremony, nor even bothered to send representatives. He and his huscarls were at war in the soaring peaks of the east, and did not waste time with ceremony when there was fighting to be done.

For once, Ahriman found himself in complete accord with the Wolf King.

He put thoughts of the XVII Legion from his mind and turned his gaze upwards. A too-wide, too-blue sky yawned above him, and omnipresent clouds of birds filled the air: wheeling, black-winged corvus, long-legged migratory birds and circling carrion eaters.

Ahriman had seen altogether too many of the latter in the past six months.

THE THOUSAND SONS had proven to be instrumental in breaking open the defences of the Ark Reach Cluster, their additional weight of force tipping the balance of war in favour of the Imperium.

First contact with the disparate cultures of the binary cluster had been made two years previously, when scout ships of the Word Bearers’ 47th Expeditionary Fleet discovered six systems linked together by trade and mutually supporting defence networks.

Four of those systems had fallen to the combined forces of the Word Bearers and the Space Wolves, the fifth soon after the arrival of the Thousand Sons. Only the Avenians remained to be conquered.

The defeated empires all stemmed from an incredibly diverse genetic baseline, far removed from the archetypal human genome by millennia of separation from the world of their birth. Mechanicum geneticists confirmed such variances were within tolerable parameters, and thus Magnus had arrived in expectation of acquiring treasure troves of accumulated knowledge in the wake of compliance.

He was to be sorely disappointed.

Ahriman had seen a taste of the war the Space Wolves made on Aghoru, but the scale of what Russ’ Legion left in their wake was nothing short of genocide. Their single-minded savagery left no room for anything other than the foe’s complete and utter destruction.

Nor were the Word Bearers any more forgiving. In the wake of their triumphs, great monuments were carved in the flanks of the mountains, ten-thousand metre high representations of the Emperor and his conquests. Such a blatant challenge to the Emperor’s edict on such things set a dangerous precedent, and Ahriman was uncomfortable with such behaviour.

Kor Phaeron had declared vast swathes of the indigenous culture unwholesome, resulting in virtually every repository of knowledge, art, literature and history being burned to ashes.

From Ahriman’s perusal of the encounter logs, it appeared that Lorgar and Kor Phaeron had met with the Phoenix Court, a polyarchal leadership of the various worlds’ kings and system lords, offering numerous overtures to entice them into the fold of the Imperium. Despite his best efforts, Ahriman could find no record of what these overtures had comprised.

In any event, all had been rejected, and thus the war of compliance had been unavoidable.

The histories of the Great Crusade would record it as a just war, a good war.

The subjugation of the Avenians had begun well, with the outer worlds falling quickly to the combined Imperial forces, but Heliosa, the cardinal world of their empire, had proven a tougher nut to crack.

Violent tectonic forces in ages past had shaped its landscape into three enormous continents almost entirely composed of jagged, mountainous terrain separated by wide expanses of azure seas. Its people lived in silver towers that clung to the flanks of the tallest peaks, with glittering, feather-light bridges spanning the chasms between them, while their people soared on billowing thermals on the backs of graceful aerial beasts.

As well as this lost strand of humanity, Helios was a world that belonged to the creatures of the air. The skies were alive with flocks of every description, from tiny, insect-sized creatures that fed on guano to rabid pterosaurs that hunted from lairs in hollowed-out peaks. More than one Imperial craft had been lost to bird strikes before weapon systems were modified to provide continuous clearance fire.

Its air was clean and its skies boundless. It reminded Ahriman of Prospero.

Ark Reach Secundus was the Imperial Cartographer designation for this world, a convenient label that began the process of assimilation before envoys were even despatched or shots fired in anger. Its people called it Heliosa, but the Imperial Army had another name for it, a name synonymous with the razor-beaked killers that were the bane of soldiers forced to assault the aerie fortresses.

They called it Shrike.

SINCE AGHORU, THE power of Ahriman’s cult had risen, buoyed by unexpected swells in the Great Ocean, and the Corvidae were saving Imperial lives. They had seen echoes of future events, returning to their bodies with the locations of their enemies’ hidden aeries and foreknowledge of their ambush tactics.

Armed with such vital intelligence, the Thousand Sons and the Prospero Spireguard had launched a campaign of coordinated assaults on the aeries housing the fighter aircraft protecting the principal strongpoints of the Avenian defence network.

Magnus himself led many of the assaults, wielding the power of the Great Ocean like weapons that could be drawn or sheathed at any time. No force could stand against him, his mastery of time and space, force and matter beyond the reach of even his most gifted followers.

While the Word Bearers quelled the civilian population of outlying mountain cities, the Thousand Sons cleared a path for the Space Wolves to deliver the deathblow to the heart of the Avenian Empire. With the fall of Raven’s Aerie 93, that battle was days away at most.

Ahriman walked the line of dead bodies, stopping to examine one of the Avenian warriors whose body had not been too brutally destroyed in the fighting. Aaetpio flickered at his shoulder, flitting down to the dead body to enhance the fading patterns of the soldier’s aura.

Fear, anger and confusion were all that remained of the man’s imprint on the world: fear that he was going to die here, anger at these inhuman invaders for defiling their homeland, and confusion… confusion born of not knowing why. Ahriman was surprised at this last emotion. How could he not know why the Imperium’s forces were making war against his world?

The dead man wore thin black armour, form-fitting and gracefully proportioned to match his tall, overly slender form. A two-headed shrike with outstretched wings was moulded into the chest piece, an icon so similar to the Imperial bird of union that it was almost inconceivable that these warriors were enemies.

The Avenians were graceful and fine-boned, their facial features sharp and angular, like the mountains in which they lived. Their bodies appeared weak and fragile, but that was a lie. Autopsies had discovered bones that were flexible and strong, and their armour was augmented with fibre-bundle muscles not dissimilar to those within Astartes battle armour.

Ahriman smelled hot animal sweat, recognising the sharp, bitter tang of ice and claw that were the hallmarks of a Fenrisian wolf. The wolf barked, and Aaetpio fled to the aether. Ahriman turned to find himself face to face with a fang-filled maw and amber eyes that wanted nothing more than to devour him. Behind the wolf stood Ohthere Wyrdmake, wrapped in a wolf-pelt cloak. He looked past Ahriman to the dead bodies.