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The station's underground lighting was a sickly white, shot through with eerie green pulses bleeding from the Blackstone Obelisks themselves.
Brief pleasantries exchanged, the Archmagos redirected his full attention back to the work.
Cawl's master brain ran tens of thousands of concurrent threads, hamring away at the alien ruins in high-intensity reverse-engineering analysis.
Progress was not ideal.
This ancient construct, with its dinsional folding and Warp-current barriers, ran on encryption logic that fell entirely outside orthodox Martian doctrine. The chanicum had no frawork for it. No precedent. Nothing.
The Archmagos stilled three of his servo-arms. His optical probe swiveled toward the Wolf Shepherd standing nearby in observation.
"Lord Lupercal, if you do not mind, I require your cerebral assistance." Cawl's electronic voice was perfectly flat. A direct invitation.
An invitation for a gene-primarch to serve as his research assistant.
In the old Legion era, that kind of request would have gotten a tech-priest riddled into a sieve by the Sixteenth Legion's Astartes. A transgression so severe it barely had a na.
But Cawl understood what a primarch actually was. Every work of the Omnissiah was sacred, and a primarch was the pinnacle of that work, a finished product standing at the apex of biological engineering, whose cerebral cortex was itself an unparalleled living supercomputer. Commanding armies, managing state affairs, battlefield micromanagent, those were rely the most superficial applications of that processing power. Give them even passing familiarity with an unfamiliar field, and they would flatten every barrier in their path, leaving ordinary scholars in the dust.
In the node analysis ahead, Horus's intuition and raw processing capability would be an excellent catalyst for cracking the Blackstone network.
"The honor is mine, Archmagos."
Horus didn't hesitate for a second.
The commander who had once shaken the galaxy walked cleanly to the scanning station. No quibbling over the drop in status. He took the high-precision surveying probe from the waiting servitor and got to work.
Kallen sat on an empty ammunition crate off to the side, gnawing on a synthetic energy bar he'd lifted from so supply depot, and nearly choked laughing at the sight.
The awe-inspiring Wolf Shepherd, dragooned into being a research grunt.
"He's adapting quite well." Kallen nudged Kullen with an elbow.
The old knight held his sword and watched in silence. No comnt.
At the center of the platform, Horus had already locked in.
"The energy circuit arrangent is highly abnormal. Non-linear closed loop." The primarch stared at the holographic projection, pupils tracking rapidly with the data stream. "My friend Kallen ntioned the creators to before. Necrons. So kind of ancient xenos that traded living souls for tal bodies."
Cawl's chanical tendrils tapped lightly on the display screen.
"Your friend has a deeper familiarity with forbidden knowledge than many Inquisitors. It is indeed Necron work."
"Hard to imagine." Horus turned a flaking fragnt of Blackstone over in his hand, genuinely admiring it. "That xenos wisdom could reach such an absurd height on the path of escaping Warp interference. This thing is like a perfect dinsional insulator."
He set the fragnt down. His tone shifted, the calm, asured cadence of a commander running warga projections.
"If during the Great Crusade we had encountered a fully awakened Necron race, the Imperium would have needed to commit at least half the Astartes Legions. Several hundred Titan Legios on top of that. Mortal auxiliary losses starting in the hundreds of millions. The slightest misstep, and the entire battle line collapses."
Cawl pulled up a comparative model and asked, almost offhand.
"Then compared to the Rangdan?"
Rangdan.
The instant the word landed, Kullen's hand tightened on his sword hilt.
"The Rangdan?" Horus shook his head. His assessnt was imdiate. "Not even close. They aren't in the sa league."
That war had carved agony into the nascent Imperium's bones. The Dark Angels had served as the vanguard, and the attrition had cost them incalculable strength. Several full-strength Titan Legios and expeditionary fleets had been buried alongside them.
Worse still, 2 entire Astartes Legions, along with their gene-primarchs, had been utterly erased from that star region. No trace left.
And here, the primarch's superb mory encountered a strange, discordant gap.
No matter how he reached for it, Horus could not conjure the faces of those 2 lost brothers. Their Legions' nas, their heraldry, all of it was smothered under an impenetrable fog, sealed away from him completely.
He did, however, rember another old matter. When the 2 brothers had been publicly expunged by the Imperium, their records obliterated, the young Wolf Shepherd had stord into the Imperial Palace in a fury. Headstrong, fiercely loyal to his brothers, he had gone to confront the Sigillite himself. To call Malcador to account.
The outco had been deeply humbling. Malcador had simply raised a hand. Pure psychic might, and the enraged Horus had been pinned in place, unable to move.
Recalling it now, Horus let out a quiet, bitter laugh.
His past self had been nothing more than a spoiled brute. His mind full of narrow oaths of brotherhood, completely blind to the cold, ruthless sacrifices the elders had to make to keep the colossal vessel of the Imperium from sinking.
"The Rangdan gave the Lion and the First Legion a hell of a mauling. The Imperium paid a grievous price." Horus reined in the smile, his gaze settling on the miniature light-shadow of the Blackstone array. "But all those war losses — even if you bundled the Rangdan Xenocides together with the destruction caused by the rebellion I later instigated — none of it was as fatal as the departure of one man."
"The Sigillite. Malcador."
The Archmagos's hands paused for several seconds.
Within the chanicum's classified archives, the relationship between the Imperium's first Regent and the Wolf Shepherd was docunted as abysmal. The heads of the military and civil administration had clashed at every turn, strategic direction, resource allocation, the status of mortal humans. Many Imperial Terran historians had even partially attributed Horus's rebellion to the Sigillite's long-term suppression of his power, alongside the critical influence of Chaos.
And now, from the mouth of the bona fide Warmaster himself, ca a high evaluation of his old nesis.
Simply absurd.
"Your conclusion presents a serious logical paradox, my lord." Cawl's electronic voice carried an added layer of confused vibrato. "May I interpret this as you reminiscing over a forr political enemy?"
"Part of it, yes."
Horus didn't deny it.
He pulled up the console's input interface, packaged a segnt of an energy inversion algorithm he'd just worked out in his head, and sent it to Cawl's main terminal.
"In the past, I only saw his harshness and his power-mongering. Looking back across ten thousand years, I finally understand — that scrawny old man was the only one who could use his old bones to prop up the entire Imperium when Father was absent. The only pillar holding it up."
"Without him, the Imperium's governance rotted into a pool of stagnant water."
Cawl received the data packet. The mont the processing power integrated, logic gates lit up in clusters across his internal systems.
A critical deadlock in the Blackstone Spire unlocked. Horus's reverse-engineered solution had cracked it open with perfect precision.
A sudden flash of insight. Research progress lurched forward by a massive stride.
Cawl kept his core processors running at full speed and split off idle threads to continue the conversation.
"You said that was only part of the reason. What of the other part, Lord Lupercal?" A tal tendril tapped a short rhythm on the floor. "Are you implying that the current Imperium urgently requires a new Regent with an iron fist?"
"Precisely." Horus keyed in the final correction command on the panel. "The Imperium needs a Regent who can consolidate supre authority and suppress every interest group and factional power — soone to forcibly keep it alive. But that person will not be ."
He laid it out plainly. No hedging.
"I have already lost the right to stand at the forefront and give orders. Honor, renown, the baton of supre command, none of it ans anything to anymore."
"For whatever life I have left, I would rather follow my brother's example. Leman Russ. To be an unreasonable axe. A tool that takes on the dirty work without complaint."
"As long as I can kill enemies and help the Imperium endure, send to dig mud in the deepest trenches, and I'll do it gladly."
Those words hit Cawl's master brain like a data storm.
The Archmagos's calculations turned to Macragge. To the Lord of Ultramar. In Cawl's projections for future Imperial politics, the awakening of the Lord of Ultramar was inevitable, and with it, his rise to Regent. But the weight of that role would be imnse.
Now factor in Horus's return. His stated willingness to set aside past glory and beco a tool. He could be a powerful aide to the Lord of Ultramar. Soone to share the burden.
Guilliman's governance. Lupercal's thods.
A bold idea took shape in Cawl's mind.
With that combination, the Imperium and humanity might actually have a chance. More than a chance, sothing better. And the awakened Guilliman would not have to face it alone.
"Your resolve is admirable." Cawl's vox-speakers leaked a rare sound, 2 short bursts of static that approximated a human chuckle. "But forgive my bluntness. This deviates enormously from the image you projected ten thousand years ago, a Legion master directing affairs with bold vision and considerable ambition. Were it not for the Living Saint's endorsent, I would have flagged you imdiately as a high-emotional-intelligence Warp-mimic daemon."
"People grow, Archmagos. Gene-primarchs are subject to that sa law." Horus leaned back against the edge of the workbench and folded his arms. "I never imagined I would be dragged into the Imperium ten thousand years later. I certainly never expected to be forced to face the monstrous cris this body once committed. History gave a spectator's seat and made watch clearly, every bitter fruit grown from my own arrogance."
The Wolf Shepherd's tone dropped. Sothing weathered in it now. Worn smooth by ti.
"The past was desperate to prove himself. Now I only want to atone. To do everything within my power to help my father and my brothers save this crumbling human Imperium."
The words had barely settled when crisp clapping rang out.
Horus glanced instinctively toward Kallen on the high platform behind him, assuming his friend was playing along.
He was wrong.
The primarch's superhuman hearing locked onto the true source in an instant. Everyone turned at once.
A Necron draped in a tal cloak materialized out of the void without warning, a pair of electronic eyes flickering with an intensely excited, eerie light.
"I never imagined that a gene-primarch who rewrote the galaxy's fate ten thousand years ago could possess such noble resolve."
"I am truly moved beyond words!"
The mont Kallen got a clear look at the newcor, his eyes went wide.
The Necron Infinite. The greatest collector of rarities in the entire galaxy.
Trazyn.
(Before sleeping, I read a bit of Horus Rising, got inspired, so here's a bonus chapter.)
➤ Next: Trazyn's Principles
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