He saw worlds on fire, worlds wracked with endless battles and entire systems ablaze with the plague of war. This was a vision of things that could never be, for these worlds were battlegrounds of Astartes, slaughterhouses where brother warriors who had marched from Terra to the edges of known space tore at each other with blades and fists. As distasteful as such visions were, Magnus did not let them affect him. The Great Ocean was a place where anything was possible and its capricious tides ever sought to unseat a traveller’s equilibrium.
The abominable stench of the charnel house rose in an overpowering wave, a potent cocktail of rotting organic matter and escaping corpse gasses. Magnus felt his gaze drawn to a forsaken world, a world once verdant and fecund, but which had fallen to disease and corruption. He saw it had not gone without a fight, its landscape bearing the scars of the war waged to subdue it. The battle had been fought on the microscopic level, the armies of bacteria and virus numbering in their trillions.
Every living thing on this world was now a factory for disease, where aggressive microbes bent their mindless wills towards reproduction and spreading their infection further.
The planet’s ending had never been in doubt, but it could no more surrender to its fate than the corruption could stop its destructive assault. It had become a world of stagnation, its marshes and forests turgid oceans of filth and oozing pestilence.
Magnus saw a rearing mass of metal in the heart of a swamp, the rusted hulk of a starship that rose like an iron cliff or an ocean-going vessel sinking to its doom. Putrescent things made their homes in its rusted superstructure, and something monstrous made its lair in its dead heart. Magnus had no clue what that might be, but saw the glitter sheen of metal and knew that the nemesis blade of the alien craftsman had found its way here.
The thought filled Magnus with panic as he heard the roar of gunfire and saw a host of marching warriors in the livery of the Luna Wolves fighting towards the crashed starship. He shouted and screamed at them, seeing his brother at the forefront of his warriors. Horus Lupercal was oblivious to him, for this was not reality, merely a fleeting glimpse of a future that might never come to pass.
The chronology of events fractured, like individual frames of a picter stitched together at random: a friend cast aside and now a bitter foe; a throne room or a command bridge; a beloved son cut down by a traitor’s sword, and the steeldust shimmer of a blade that would strike the blow to change the universe; a beloved father cut down by a rebellious son.
He saw a towering temple, a giant octagonal building with eight fire-topped towers surrounding the dome at its centre. Multitudes gathered before this house of false gods, and warriors in the ceramite plates of Astartes gathered before a mighty bronze gateway. A wide pool glistened like oil and two warriors argued at its side as the crescent reflection of the new moon wavered in the water.
Booming laughter broke the scene apart, and Magnus saw Horus Lupercal once more, a titanic figure of awesome potency. Yet this was not his brother, this was a monster, a primal force of destruction that sought to put the great works of his father to the flame. With every sweep of Horus’ clawed hand worlds died, consumed in the flames of war that spread across the face of the galaxy like a rapacious infection. An insane conductor weaving a symphony of destruction, Horus systematically reduced the Imperium to cinders, turning brother upon brother as they bled in the carnage.
Magnus peered into the thing that wore Horus’ face, but saw nothing of his brother’s nobility or regal bearing, only hatred, spite and regret. The thing’s gaze met the twin orbs of Magnus with malicious glee, and Magnus saw that Horus’ eyes were amber pits of fire.
“How does it feel, brother?” asked Horus. “To look upon the world as you once did?”
“As it always does, Horus,” replied Magnus. “Here I am as I will myself to be.”
“Ah, vanity,” said Horus, “the simplest temptation to set.”
“What are you?” demanded Magnus. “You are not my brother!”
“Not yet, but soon,” answered the monster with a maddening grin. “The new moon waits on Khenty-irty to begin his transformation into Mekhenty-er-irty.”
“More riddles?” said Magnus. “You are nothing more than a void predator, a collection of base impulses and desire given form. And I have heard that name before.”
“But you don’t know what it means.”
“I will,” said Magnus. “No knowledge is hidden from me.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes. My brother would never unleash this madness!”
“Then you don’t know him, for it is happening right now. The pawns of the Primordial Annihilator are already in motion, setting the traps of pride, vanity and anger to ensnare the egos of the knights required to topple the king.”
“You lie!”
“Do I?” laughed Horus. “Why would I attempt to deceive you, brother? You are Magnus of the Thousand Sons. There are no truths unknown to you, no knowledge hidden from you. Isn’t that what you said? You can see the truth of this, I know you can. Horus Lupercal will betray you all. He will set the Imperium ablaze in his quest for power. Nothing will survive; all will become a nuclear cauldron of Chaos, from the super-massive heart of the galaxy to the guttering stars in its halo.”
“Where will this miraculous transformation take place?” asked Magnus, fighting to keep the growing horror from his voice.
“On a little moon,” giggled the monster, “in the Davin system.”
“Even if I believe you, why tell me?”
“Because it has already begun, because I enjoy your torment, and because it is too late to stop this,” said Horus.
“We’ll see about that,” promised Magnus.
HE OPENED HIS eye, and the Horus monster was gone.
Ahriman and the Sekhmet surrounded him, their faces filled with dread.
“My lord?” cried Ahriman. “What happened?”
His hand flashed to his face, where the sacrifice he had made so long ago had once sat. The skin was smooth and unblemished with no lingering trace of the completeness his body of light enjoyed in the Great Ocean.
Magnus shrugged off the Sekhmets’ help and climbed to his feet. He could already feel the sands of time moving across the face of the galaxy, and had a brief flash of a chiming bronze timepiece with a cracked glass face and mother of pearl hands.
“We need to go,” he said, reacquainting himself with his surroundings by focusing on the trails of spilled water.
“Go?” asked Ahriman. “Go where?”
“We must return to Prospero. There is much to do and precious little time.”
“My lord, we cannot,” said Ahriman.
“Cannot?” thundered Magnus. “Not a word you should use in reference to me, Ahzek. I am Magnus the Red. Nothing is beyond my powers.”
Ahriman shook his head and said, “That is not what I mean, my lord. We are summoned back to the amphitheatre. We are called to judgement.”
THE STARS HAD moved on, though sulphurous clouds obscured many of them. Ahriman had the powerful sense of their shame, as though they wished to turn their faces from events below. Ever since Magnus had fallen, Ahriman had sought to recover the memory that lurked just on the edge of his consciousness.
Try as he might, it would not come, and though he knew trying to force it would only cause it to recede, his need to know was greater than his capacity for reasoned thought. Whatever Magnus had done involved his twin brother, but the truth was locked in the deepest well of buried memory.