Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

The Horus Heresy

It is a time of legend .

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

Dramatis Personae

Primarchs

Russ, The Wolf King

Magnus , The Crimson King

The Rout

Onn

Gunnar Gunnhilt, Called Lord Gunn, Jarl

Tra

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl

Ulvurul Heoroth, Called Longfang, Rune Priest

Bear

Aeska, Called Brokenlip

Godsmote

Galeg

Aun Helwintr

Orcir

Jormungndr, Called Two-blade

Ullste

Erthung Redhand

Oje

Svessl

Emrah

Horune

Najot Threader, Wolf Priest

Fyf

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl

Varangr, Herald to Lord Skarssensson

Ohthere, Wyrdmake, Rune riest

Trunc

Bitur Bercaw

Imperial Personae

Giro Emantine, Prefect-Secretary to the Unification Council

Kasper Hawser, Conservator, also known as Ahmad Ibn Rustah

Navid Murza, Conservator

Non-Imperial Personae

Fith of the Ascommani

Guthox of the Ascommani

Brom of the Ascommani

Lern of the Ascommani

In the Past

Rector Uwe

PART ONE

THE UPPLANDER

‘If I am guilty of anything, it is the simple pursuit of knowledge.’

– The Primarch Magnus, at Nikaea

‘Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark! what discord follows; each,thing meets

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should become the lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather

right and wrong

(Between whose endless jar justice resides)

Should lose their names, and so should

justice too.

Then every thing, includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite.

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey, and last eat up himself.’

– attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire (fl. M2),

cited in the Prophecy of Amon of the Thousand

Sons (chp III verse 230)

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

– unattributable (circa M2)

One

At the Turning of Spring

Death had them surrounded.

It had come to cut threads, and today it wore four faces.

A burning death for those too hurt or too afraid to flee the settlement as the firestorm swept through it. A freezing death for those who ran away up the scarp to escape the murder-make. Even in spring, the wind came in off the ice flats with a death-edge that sucked an exposed man’s life-heat out through his lungs, and rotted his hands and feet into black twigs, and left him as a stiff, stone-hard bundle covered in rime.

For others, a drowning death, if they attempted to flee across the blue-ice around the spit. Spring’s touch was already working the sea ice loose against the shore, like a tooth in a gum. The ice would no longer take a man’s weight, not reliably. If the ice broke under you, down you went: fast and straight if you plunged through, slow and screaming if an ice plate tipped and slid you in. Either way, the water was oil black, and so cold it would freeze the thoughts in your brain before your lungs were even empty.

For the rest, for those who had remained to fight, a bloody death, the death of the murder-make. This was the death that knocked you down hard onto the ice with an axe or a maul, so you felt nothing except the cold burn of the ice, and the hot burn of your own blood, and the pain-scream of your crippling wound. This was the death that stood over you and knocked you again, and again, and as many times as necessary until you would not rise again, or until you were so disfigured that death could no longer bear to look at you, and moved off in disgust to find another soul to knock.

Any of those four faces would cut your thread as soon as look at you. And those were the faces the Balt were wearing.

The Balt. The Balt had brought the murder-make down on the Ascommani aett. Twenty boat. It was early in the season for a raid. A man had to be desperate to go out making red snow when he could wait for the first grasses and milder weather.

Twenty boat, and all of them still rigged for ice-running under their sea-sails.

If there had been time, the Ascomani might have wondered why their doom had come so early. Ironland, where the Balt had settled, had persisted twenty great years, but many now said its roots were soft. Many now said it would only be one more summer, two at the most, before the ocean sucked it down again into the world-forge.

Ascomani land ran from the spithead to the ice shelf, and was poor for farming and lacked natural defences, but it was yet just one great year old, and the dowsers had proclaimed it strong land, with many years left in it.

So land-thirst. Perhaps it was that.