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"Details."
"Or I will consider it a lie — and I will punish you!"
The words scraped out of the Wolf Shepherd God's throat, dry and raw, like bone dragged across stone.
He didn't believe it. Or rather, he didn't dare.
Karen sighed and pulled up the System Panel only he could see.
Deduct 100 Points.
Redeem: [Historical Holographic Projector Scrap].
A palm-sized disc crusted in verdigris dropped out of thin air into his hand. He slapped the side of it twice and tossed it onto the blood-soaked tal floor.
A pale blue column of light shot upward.
Ten thousand years of blood and grief forced themselves into that narrow, lightless corridor.
The images lurched and flickered.
The once-great human Imperium, riddled with misery at every level. The grinding poverty of the underhive masses. Crushing tithes that bled entire worlds dry. Wars without end, sparked by rebel factions and alien races alike.
The image cut.
Terra.
The palace that had once stood as the pinnacle of human reason and glory.
Still gleaming gold. But the throne itself was buried under a tangle of pipes and cables and dry, crumbling bones.
Sothing sat on it. A withered skeleton wearing skin.
10,000 Psykers fed to it every single day, drained to nothing, just to keep the Astronomican's guttering light from going out entirely.
Cut again. The Primarchs.
Brothers who had fought side by side, who had laughed and raised cups together. Every one of them a monster now.
Angron, brass tubes punched through his flesh, screaming into mountains of corpses. Fulgrim, a vast four-ard serpent dragging a long tail through an eternity of pleasure and ruin. Mortarion hunched under rotting wings, his body crawling with decay. Magnus, a one-eyed red daemon with wings spread wide.
And the ones who hadn't turned?
Guilliman, throat slit by a poisoned blade, lying motionless in a stasis field. Lion's howorld Caliban torn apart by civil war, the Lion himself vanished. The Khan rode into the Webway and never ca back. Corax beca sothing that haunted the Warp like a shadow. Ferrus lost his head.
And Sanguinius, the Great Angel, beloved by all...
Horus had torn his wings off with his own hands. Caved in half his face. Left him to drown in his own blood on the deck of the Vengeful Spirit.
The image held on the final fra. Endless war, stretching in every direction.
In the underhive, hundreds of billions of humans were being wrung dry like livestock. Cultists made living sacrifices in dark alleys. Genestealers bred freely in the shadows, unchecked and unafraid.
"This is the 41st Millennium." Karen extended one finger and pressed it into the holographic shadow of the skeleton on the throne. "The future you personally built."
"That great rebellion ten thousand years ago crippled the Imperium. It has been rotting ever since. There is no coming back from it."
"Where is the Sigillite?!"
Horus turned to Karen. The mortal he despised most. The Emperor's most favored servant. The supre authority of the Imperium's entire bureaucratic machine.
"He is a Perpetual. What has he been doing for ten thousand years!?"
"He's dead too. Magnus destroyed the Webway, so the Emperor had no choice but to face you in battle. The Sigillite took the Golden Throne in his place. By the ti the Emperor returned to it, Malcador was gone."
"He died a hero. The Throne drained every last drop of his soul and his power."
The light column sputtered out.
The scrap had reached the end of its life. It crumbled into fragnts on the floor.
The corridor went silent. Not even breathing.
Horus folded.
"Throne... what have I done?"
That body, once tall enough to hold up half the Imperium, curled in on itself like a dying beggar. The moon-white Terminator plates ground against each other, a sound like teeth on tal.
Both hands slamd over his face. His thick fingers dug into his scalp, dragging down, leaving 10 red lines in their wake.
No roar.
Just a sound from sowhere deep in his throat. The sound an animal makes when a trap bites through the bone and it can't get free. Low and long and muffled, bouncing off both walls, going nowhere.
The brightest star of the Great Crusade. The first-found son. The one the Emperor had loved most.
He had believed, completely and without doubt, that everything he did was for humanity's freedom and glory. For his father's great vision. And now he had seen it with his own eyes: he had shoved all of humanity into the deepest pit there was.
His hands moved without thinking, pawing through the scattered gore on the floor.
His fingers closed around a broken chainsword fragnt from the Iron Skull Gang thug. A jagged piece of scrap tal, slick with machine oil.
Horus reversed his grip. Pressed the point against his own chest, against the blood hole the repair fluid had only just sealed.
And pushed.
Death.
Maybe only death could pay for sothing this unforgivable.
"Are you out of your mind?!"
Karen roared and threw himself forward.
Both arms locked around Horus's massive forearm. He hung off it with his full weight, feet scrabbling against the floor.
It ant nothing. A mortal against a Primarch. The jagged edge was already half an inch from Horus's chest, pressing a white line into the new skin.
Karen's face went red. The veins in his neck stood out like cables. His voice cracked completely.
"Sejanus!"
He scread it at that bowed head.
"Torgaddon! Loken!"
The arm stopped.
Solid as iron, and completely still.
"Think about your sons! The ones who respected you, loved you, who looked at you like you were a god! If they could see their father right now, the master of the Luna Wolves, the man who blazed across the Great Crusade, reduced to this — trying to run from it all by dying — what would they think?!"
Horus's mouth hung open. His bloodshot eyes locked onto Karen and didn't move.
Karen was still gasping, still hanging off the Primarch's arm. He spoke slowly, one word at a ti.
"You made this ss. You started this darkness. And you want to just close your eyes and walk away? What gives you the right to leave the mortals and your loyalist brothers to carry ten thousand years of blood debt on their own?"
"I need you alive. You have to stand next to and fix what you broke."
Then his voice shifted.
"But it's not entirely your fault."
Karen took a slow breath and steadied himself.
Horus's eyes were full of grief. And fury.
"Why? You just told I caused all of this. Why are you changing your words now?"
"Your na is Horus Lupercal. The loyal Warmaster, the one they called Lupercal, died a long ti ago. He died in that Chaos temple on Davin."
"The one who marched on Terra and launched the Heresy was a puppet wearing his face. Nothing more than a shell the four Chaos Gods pulled the strings on."
Karen held his gaze.
"You know what your na ans. You are the Wolf Shepherd God."
"The Emperor gave you that na himself. That was his gift to you."
"Are you really going to throw it in the dirt and grind it under your heel?"
➤ Next: We Are Friends Now, Wolf God
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