When the trouble began, it began swiftly.

The golden portal shone with its own inner light, as though some incredible heat from the other side was burning through the metal. Vast gunboxes fixed around the perimeter of the cave swung arround, their barrels spooling up to fire. Lighting flashed from machine to machine as delicate, irreplaceable circuits overloaded and exploded. Adepts ran from the site of the breach, knowing little of what lay beyond, yet knowing enough to flee.

Crackling bolts of energy poured from the molten gates, flensing those too close to the marrow. Intricate symbols carved into the rock of the cavern exploded with shrieking detonations. Every source of illumination in the chamber blew out in a shower of sparks, and centuries of the most incredible work imaginable was undone in an instant.

No sooner had the first alarm sounded than the Legio Custodes were at arms, but nothing in their training could have prepared them for what came next.

A form began pressing its way through the portal: massive, red and aflame with the burning force of its journey. It emerged into the chamber, wreathed in eldritch fire that bled away to reveal a being composed of many-angled light and the substance of stars. Its radiance was blinding and none could look upon its many eyes without feeling the insignificance of their own mortality.

None had ever seen such a dreadful apparition, the true heart of a being so mighty that it could only beat while encased in super-engineered flesh.

The Emperor alone recognised this rapturous angel, and his heart broke to see it.

‘Magnus,’ he said.

‘Father,’ replied Magnus.

Their minds met, and in that moment of frozen connection the galaxy changed forever.

EIGHT

Take but Degree Away

The Veil is Broken

Dreams of the Red Chamber

ANIQ SARASHINA’S DAY had begun badly. She woke at dawn with the lingering residue of a dream she couldn’t remember filling her gut with a nauseous, roiling ache. It felt like the sickness she suffered aboard a starship just before it translated, but more persistent. The fact that she couldn’t remember the dream was also troubling. The Mistress of the Vaticshould have perfect recall of all her visions, for who knew what clues to the future were held there?

The rest of the morning passed in a dull haze, with her blindsight blunted, as though she had been drinking heavily or imbibing mentally unfettering narcotics with Nemo. It had been days since she had taken anything stronger than caffeine into her system, so it was doubly unfair to feel so wretched. For the first time since she had taken her place in the ranks of the Telepathica, Aniq Sarashina felt truly hampered by her lack of eyes.

An oppressive sense of claustrophobia hung over her as she spent a morning digesting the latest red-flagged communications passing through the City of Sight. In the wake of the Dropsite Massacre, as many were taking to calling it, the Imperium’s armed forces were reeling, still on the back foot as Legion expeditions and Army groups attempted to reorganise their battle-lines and sort friend from foe.

Of the forces that had been betrayed on Isstvan V, almost nothing was known.

No word had been received from the Raven Guard, lending weight to careless rumours from Erscryers that Primarch Corax and his Legion had been destroyed utterly. A few elements of the Salamanders were believed to have escaped Isstvan V in disarray, but the only reports of this were third hand at best. Primarch Vulkan’s fate was unknown, but many feared that he too was lost.

The Iron Hands were all but gone, their devastated chapters scattered to the winds in the aftermath of the primarch’s death. Despite the completeness of the betrayal, Sarashina still found it hard to accept the idea that a primarch could die. But as shocking as it had been to learn of Horus Lupercal’s betrayal, subsequent events were piling impossibility upon impossibility until now nothing was beyond belief.

Rogal Dorn’s emissaries to the Whispering Tower demanded answers, but the Choirmaster had little concrete information to give them. Traitor fleets had cut the escape routes from the fifth planet, and for all intents and purposes the system was as dark as a dead moon. Nothing was getting in or out of the Isstvan system, no information, and certainly no loyalist warriors.

Worse, the defeat on Isstvan had galvanised scores of cowardly planets and systems throughout the Imperium to openly declare for the Warmaster. A sense of hurt betrayal and horrified incomprehension was paralysing the Imperium’s response to this gross betrayal when decisive action was needed more than ever.

And then a ray of hope. A message from the very edges of the Isstvan system.

Garbled and fragmentary, but bearing all the synesthesia codes of the XVIII Legion.

The Salamanders.

Sarashina rushed immediately to the largest mindhall in the Whispering Tower.

Abir Ibn Khaldun was already in place, surrounded by the Choir Primus. Only the lambent glow of dimmed lumens cast light around the chamber, its ironclad walls coffered and deaf to the psychic white noise that filled it.

Two thousand astropaths of the Choir Primus reclined in their contoured harnesses, each struggling to distil a message hurled from the outskirts of the Isstvan system. Abir Ibn Khaldun sat in the centre of the chamber, wrestling with the confused allegorical concepts and baffling symbolism they were sending him.

Sarashina had briefly linked her mind to his, but could make no sense of the imagery she saw there. A mountain dragon drinking from a golden lake, an orchid emerging from the crack in an obsidian plain that stretched for thousands of kilometres in all directions, a flaming sword hanging motionless over a world utterly devoid of life or geography. Twins conjoined by a single soul, tugging in different directions.

What did any of it mean?

Choir Primus were the strongest second-tier psykers in the Whispering Tower, and could normally distil the interpretation of a message sent from the other side of the galaxy without difficulty, but what they were sending to Ibn Khaldun made no sense.

A voice sounded in her head, cultured and deeply lyrical.

~ I confess I am all at sea, Mistress Sarashina. ~

~ As am I, Abir, ~she replied.

~ It is as though the astropath is quite mad. ~

~ That may well be the case, who knows what they have gone through to get this message to us. ~

Another thought occurred to her. ~ Could the incoming message have been intercepted en route to us? ~

~ Perhaps, but such interference is patently obvious in most cases. This message evinces no such distortion. I believe that whatever is warping this message is here on Terra, but I have no clue what it could be. ~

~ Keep trying. Lord Dorn is expecting progress. ~

Sarashina broke the link to Ibn Khaldun. He would need every ounce of his concentration to make sense of the message. Synesthesia confirmed that the message had originated with an astropath of the Salamanders Legion, but beyond its identity, nothing of its contents made sense.

She sighed, feeling the beginnings of a pounding headache building in her sinuses. Head pains were nothing out of the ordinary for an astropath, especially in the presence of a demanding communion, but she could already feel that this would be a bad one. A low-level irritation had been griping at the back of her mind all day, a persistent whining drone, like a desperate insect trapped in a glass jar.

She wasn’t the only one feeling it. The whole tower was on edge, and not just the overtaxed astropaths. Even the Black Sentinels were jumpy, as though the latent pressure from the exhausted psykers was somehow bypassing the psi-shielding of their helmets and racking up their aggression. It felt like the drawn out moment before a battle, where the tension stretched to unbearable levels before a single shot began the killing.