Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

This is Fate. It is written in the stars. Lorgar knows that humanity needs divinity – it is what shaped his life and Legion. It is why he was chosen as the favoured son.

Xaphen closed his eyes, murmuring a litany from the Word. ‘Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it.’

Argel Tal drew his weapons. The swords of red iron slid free from their scabbards with twin hisses.

Yes. Yes...

Both blades sparked into electrical life as the captain pulled the handle-triggers. Xaphen regarded him with hooded eyes.

‘Do it,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Let it begin.’

Argel Tal whirled the blades in slow, arcing loops, their crackling power fields growing more intense, the blades emanating ozone mist as they burned and rasped through the frozen air.

‘Aurelian,’ whispered Malnor. ‘For Lorgar.’

‘For the truth,’ Torgal said. ‘Do it, and we will carry these answers back to the Imperium.’

Argel Tal looked at Dagotal; the youngest of his sergeants, only recently promoted before the Legion’s humiliation. The outrider commander’s eyes were distant.

‘I am weary of being lied to by the Emperor, brother. I am so tired of being ashamed, when what we believe is the truth.’ Dagotal nodded, meeting his captain’s eyes at last. ‘Do it.’

Three.

He stepped forward, staring at a cluster of vein-like cables twitching as they channelled artificial blood around the semi-organic tower machine.

Two.

Argel Tal span the swords, leaving blurred trails of lightning in their wake.

One.

The blades chopped down, crashing through steel, iron, rubber, copper, bronze and vat-grown blood.

Both swords exploded in his hands, their blades shattering like smashed glass and decorating his bare face with bloody cuts.

And then, for one horrific, familiar moment, Argel Tal saw nothing but burning, psychic gold.

EIGHTEEN

A Hundred Truths

Resurrection

Return

‘I heard your brother,’ Argel Tal confessed.

The primarch was no longer writing. For several minutes, Lorgar had done nothing but listen in mounting emotion as the captain relayed the events in Ingethel’s vision. Now, at these words, he released a breath he’d been holding for some time.

‘Magnus?’

Argel Tal had never heard his sire speak so softly. ‘No. The Warmaster.’

The golden-skinned giant brushed his hands over his face, seemingly afflicted by a sudden weariness. ‘I do not know that title,’ he said. ‘Warmaster. An ugly word.’

Argel Tal chuckled in two voices. ‘Of course, forgive us, Lorgar. He will not be named that for some time. He is still merely Horus. When the vision ended in golden light, we could see nothing beyond the flare. But we heard your brother Horus. The machinery was breaking down, rattling and crashing. There was gunfire. The rush of the most powerful wind we’ve ever felt. And we heard Horus’s voice – shouting, defiant, enraged. It was as if he were there with us, seeing what we saw.’

‘Stop saying “we”. You are Argel Tal.’

‘We are Argel Tal, yes. In forty-three years, Horus will speak four words that will save humanity or lead to its extinction. We know what those words are, Lorgar. Do you?’

Lorgar cradled his head in his hands, fine fingers pressed to the elegant runes inked onto his skin.

‘This is too much. Too much to bear. I... I need Erebus here. I need my fa— Kor Phaeron.’

‘They are far from here. And we will tell you something more: neither Erebus nor Kor Phaeron would struggle to accept the truths that we speak. Kor Phaeron has always kept his belief in the Old Ways hidden behind lying smiles, and Erebus drools in the presence of power. Neither of those twisted warlocks would hold their heads in their hands and panic about how the Imperium will–’

Argel Tal’s voices fell silent, quenched by the golden hand around his emaciated throat.

Lorgar rose to his feet in a smooth and effortless motion, dragging the Astartes up with him, the captain’s feet lifting from the deck.

‘You will watch your tongue when you speak the names of my mentors, and you will speak with respect when you address the lord of your own Legion. Is that understood, beast?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer. His hands clawed at the primarch’s forearm in desperate futility.

Lorgar hurled the skeletal figure against the wall. The captain crashed against the metal and tumbled to the floor.

‘Wipe that filthy grin from your lips,’ Lorgar demanded.

When the Astartes lifted his face to regard the primarch, it was Argel Tal who looked out through his own eyes once more.

‘Control yourself, captain,’ Lorgar warned. ‘Now finish your tale.’

‘I saw things.’ Argel Tal tried to rise on trembling limbs. ‘When the gold faded, there was more to see. Visions. I can’t explain it any other way, sire.’

Sensing his son’s return to the fore, Lorgar helped Argel Tal to a seating position.

‘Speak,’ he said.

One by one, the pods came down.

Alone now, Argel Tal stood on the surface of each world and watched them strike home. Not all of them; and that itself was a source of mystery. Was there some significance in the planetfalls he was entitled to witness? Why these, and not others?

The first was a blazing meteorite, ploughing into the soft soil of a temperate world. The pod didn’t punch deep; it carved a furrow in the ground and skidded to a halt in the midst of an evergreen forest so dense that the overhanging trees refused the moonlight above.

The child that emerged from the broken pod was pale of skin and fierce of eye. His hair was as black as the armour of the warriors he would grow to lead.

Twilight fell without warning–

–withering the trees to dust, their ashes scattering in the sudden wind. In place of the lush forest was bleak tundra reaching from horizon to horizon, populated by black rock and stunted, colourless flora.

The pod rained down aflame from the grey sky, crashing against the jagged slopes of a cliff side and causing an avalanche of tumbling rocks in its wake. When the dust finally cleared, Argel Tal saw a slender child rise from the wreckage of metal and stone, brushing his dusty hands through hair the white of flawless marble.

The boy looked to his surroundings, while–

–Argel Tal was alone on a mountaintop, snow clinging to his armour as it fell. On a distant peak, a fortress stood silhouetted against a clean sky, its exquisite stone battlements and towers lit by the sun shining down through a break in the clouds.

The Word Bearer stared upward, feeling the light snowfall cool his fevered skin as he watched the pod fall from the heavens. When it struck the earth, it hit with enough force to drive itself into the side of the mountain, shaking the ground with the anger of an artillery barrage.

Argel Tal waited, watching the wound in the mountainside. At last, a child emerged, climbing over the rocks with ease, his skin bronze in the high sun. For a moment, it seemed the child saw him, but–

–no world should ever be this dark.

Argel Tal’s eyes took a few seconds to pierce the deep night, and what met his gaze was no better than the preceding darkness. A lightless sky was dominated by an imposing moon that eclipsed the starlight rather than reflect the sun. A sprawling city on the horizon was barely lit, as though the eyes of its denizens would rebel against any true illumination.