“I spent many hours finding even more designs that became infinitely more complex as my powers of observation grew with practice. Then I began to log them in my grimoire; and as I counted designs and described them, the pages began to fill as the sun made countless passages across the sky. Days passed, but my passion for the designs I was seeing was all-consuming.”

“And that’s how Amon found him,” said Ahriman, “squatting in a pile of broken stones.”

“Amon?” asked Lemuel. “The captain of the 9th Fellowship?”

“Yes, and my tutor on Prospero,” said Magnus.

Lemuel frowned at this apparent contradiction, but said nothing as Magnus continued.

“I had begun my second grimoire when Amon found me. Now, Amon is a quiet, private fellow, not easily given to company. Like many such solitary men, he is a poet and deeply interested in the hidden nature of things. When I saw him, I cried, ‘Amon, come quickly! I have discovered the most wondrous thing in the universe.’ He hurried over to me, anxious to see what it was.

“I showed him the carpet of stones, but Amon only laughed and said, ‘It is nothing but scattered shards of stone!’ I took his hand and proceeded to show my old tutor the harvest of my many days study. When Amon saw the designs he turned to my grimoires and by the time he was finished with them, he too was overwhelmed.”

As much as Lemuel was having trouble following Magnus’ logic, it was impossible not to be swept up by his enthusiasm. He saw that Ahriman was similarly carried along by the irresistible tide of the primarch’s passion for his tale.

“Now Amon was much moved,” said Magnus, “and he began to write poetry about each of the incredible designs. As he wrote and contemplated, I became sure that the designs must mean something. Such order and beauty was too monumental to be senseless. The designs were there, the workings of the universe laid bare. Together, Amon and I returned home, where he read his poetry, and I showed the masters of Tizca the workings in my grimoires. These were great men, and their love of beauty and nature was marvellous to behold. So amazed were they that they joined me on a pilgrimage back to the cliff where the statue had fallen. The shards were just as I had described them, and the masters of Tizca were overcome with emotion, filling their own grimoires with fantastical writing. Some wrote about triangles, others described the circles, while yet others concentrated all their attention on the glittering spectrum of coloured stones.”

Magnus directed all his attention on Lemuel, his amber eye flickering with internal fires.

“Do you know what they said to me?” asked Magnus.

“No,” breathed Lemuel, hardly daring to add his voice to the telling.

Magnus leaned down.

“They said, ‘How blind we have been.’ All who could see the designs knew that they had to have been put there by a Primordial Creator, for nothing but such a great force could create this immense beauty!”

Lemuel could picture the scene, the sheer immensity of the cliff, the broken carpet of multi-coloured shards and the awed gathering of students of the esoteric and the outlandish. He sensed their awe and felt the tide of history rising up to sweep away the old beliefs and leave a new way in its wake. Lemuel felt as though he were there, as though he inhabited the body of one of the venerable philosophers of Tizca, and found his mind opening to a host of new possibilities, like a blind man suddenly shown the sun.

“It was amazing,” he whispered.

“That it was, Lemuel. That it was,” said Magnus, pleased he truly appreciated the significance of what he was being told. “It was a great moment in the history of Prospero, but as is the way of history, nothing of import is ever achieved without bloodshed.”

Lemuel felt his chest constrict with panic, feeling the horrible sensation of impending danger, as though he stood on the cusp of an abyss, waiting for a shove in the back.

“We had been lax in our mental discipline,” said Magnus, and a trace of sadness entered his voice. “Such was our excitement at what I had found that we allowed our guard to drop.”

“What happened?” asked Lemuel, almost afraid of the answer.

“The psychneuein,” said Magnus. “They were drawn to us in their thousands, blackening the sky with their numbers as they descended like a plague from ancient times.”

Lemuel drew in a breath, picturing the dark swathes of psy-predators as they swarmed from their darkened caves, organically shifting clouds of deadly clades, the relentless buzzing of thousands of crystalline wings the sound of inevitable doom.

“The males swarmed in, a hurricane of snapping mandibles and tearing claws, and fifty men died in the time it takes to draw breath. Behind the males came the females, engorged with clutch upon clutch of immaterial eggs. Their furious reproductive hunger was insatiable, and dozens of my friends fell to their knees in horror as they felt the psychneuein eggs take root in their brains. Their screams will stay with me forever, Lemuel. It is the sound of brilliant men who know that soon they will be raving madmen, their brains pulped masses of digestible tissue.”

A hushed silence filled the library, as the visceral terror of that notion took hold.

Magnus poured wine for them all before continuing.

“The beasts swirled around us, battering us with psychic thrusts, scrabbling at our mental barriers to seed our minds with their eggs, and only the strongest of us remained. Amon and eight of the masters of Tizca stood with me, and as the psychneuein attacked again, I knew this was what I had been seeking all along, a true test of my abilities. I would finally discover whether I had limits. I would see if I was the master of my powers or was to be found wanting.”

To look at Magnus as he told his story, Lemuel couldn’t believe that such a warrior could ever be found wanting. Even telling the story gave his skin a faint luminosity, a heat that flowed through his veins. Magnus’ amber eye had darkened to a fiery orange, the glittering sparks in its depths now swimming in his pupil.

“Then, as the psychneuein came at us again, something magnificent happened. I felt something move within me, I felt changed, as though an immense power that had lain within me, dormant and untapped, surged to life. As I contemplated the moment of my death, raging fires erupted from my hands. I hurled torrents of flame into the sky, as though I had always known I had such powers, and smote hundreds of psychneuein to ruin with every gesture.

“Memphia and Cythega, masters who had seen the patterns in the red stones, stood at my side, and walls of flame sprang up at their command. Ahtep and Luxanhtep plucked beasts from the air and dashed them on the rocks with the power of their minds, for they had found the spiral patterns of white stones. Hastar and Imhoden had seen the eight-angled crown of shards and willed the vital fluids within the psychneuein to boil within their exo-skeletons. Amon had been first among the hidden masters to see the patterns in the shards, and his mastery of them was second only to mine. Images of the future and imminent danger seared though his mind, and he cried words of warning to his fellows, telling them of dangers to come and of how they might avoid them.

“Phanek and Thothmes had seen the dance of squares, circles and triangles, the interaction of line and curve speaking to them of the hidden thoughts of all. They sensed the lust within the psychneuein to plant their psychic seed within our minds, the relentless animal hunger that drove them to feed and propagate. They reached into the minds of the beasts and twisted their perceptions so that they became blind to us.”

“The cults of the Thousand Sons,” said Lemuel. “That’s where they came from.”

“Just so,” said Magnus. “The subtle nuances of the Great Ocean were revealed to me that day, and when we returned to Tizca the members of my fellowship returned to their pyramid libraries to contemplate what they had learned. I watched over their deliberations and guided their studies, for I had seen the patterns of the broken statue first and knew better than any man how to wield the power of the aether. The nine masters devoted their every waking moment to what they had learned in the desolate wastelands, honing their unique abilities to become the first Magister Templi of the Prosperine cults.