~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!
No one knew how much ti had passed.
Inside this wraithbone tunnel that ignored every physical law, ti had no aning. Maybe a year had gone by outside. Maybe only a few days. The Terran Crusade followed the Ynnari's guidance across the Ultima and Solar Segntums, and finally arrived at Holy Terra's natural satellite, Luna.
Just before the exit, Yvraine and the Visarch stopped walking. The two Aeldari had done their part. They still had a craftworld's worth of problems waiting for them, and they had zero interest in getting dragged into the at grinder that was about to detonate inside the Imperium of Man.
Brief words were exchanged. The Ynnari turned and left.
Guilliman and Horus walked at the head of the column. Without a word between them, both raised their hands and slamd their faceplates shut. The crisp chanical locks clicked down the line. Behind them, every Astartes veteran, every Primaris warrior, every mortal auxiliary trooper switched to internal life support.
Everyone already knew. There was no welcoming party on the other side of that gate.
They stepped through the transit veil. Weightlessness swallowed them whole for one lurching mont, and then the full crushing weight of realspace dropped onto their shoulders.
The Crusade set foot on Luna.
Deep space pressed in from every direction, absolute and dark, broken only by the savage glare of the sun. The surface was frozen and dead, littered with the wreckage of Imperial voidcraft and the shattered bones of ancient fortifications. That lifeless tal graveyard stretched between the lunar craters in silence, a proof of everything the Solar Segntum had lost since the Great Rift tore open.
Looking up, the sky was nothing but stars. And there, at the edge of sight, hung Holy Terra, that shit-yellow marble, close enough to touch, impossibly far away.
The Webway exit sat at the bottom of a valley inside a massive impact crater.
The vanguard had just crested the ridge.
The Warp readings spiked to maximum.
Out on the plain below, a dozen ragged, twisting rifts tore open from nothing. Blue-violet Chaos energy scread out through the gaps.
The vibration reached them through the rock before the sight did. Heavy ceramite boots, grinding into lunar stone, hundreds of them, all at once.
Chaos Space Marines in blue-and-gold power armor poured out of the rifts. They moved with no tactical chatter, no individual variation, every step locked to the sa dead rhythm. They carried boltguns engraved with blasphemous runes, barrels leaking sorcerous light.
Thousand Sons. Rubric Marines.
Behind them ca the daemons. Pink Horrors and Screars, writhing and surging in their hundreds. Even in hard vacuum, their shrieks didn't need air. They traveled straight through the Warp and punched into the skull of every warrior in the Crusade.
The enemy filled the entire basin. Wall to wall.
Horus didn't hesitate. His Terminator arm snapped up, pointing at the ridgelines above.
"Take those high grounds!" His voice cracked through the encrypted channel. "Use the elevation. Establish overlapping fields of fire!"
Guilliman took over the tactical layer instantly. His superhuman processing ran hot, carving the Crusade into dozens of independent combat groups in seconds.
"Primaris heavy fire teams to the left defile! Black Templars seal the right slope! Skitarii phalanxes follow and fill the gaps!"
The loyalists opened up.
Hundreds of plasma beams and tens of thousands of bolt rounds poured down the slope. The high ground advantage was absolute. The front rank of Rubric Marines was shredded in seconds.
Bolts detonated. Fireballs blood in the vacuum, expanding fast and dying faster.
The enemy fell in waves.
Then sothing wrong happened.
The shattered blue-and-gold armor on the ground wasn't bleeding. When the helts and breastplates were blasted clear, what spilled out wasn't flesh. It was dust. Dense, grey, drifting dust, hanging suspended in the weightless vacuum in slow, eerie clouds.
Horus swept his boltgun across the slope and watched through his visor. He went still.
"Magnus's sons — their flesh-change has gone this far?" The disbelief in his voice was raw.
"Why do you think Kaelen called them deathless?" Guilliman said. "Look at the rear of their formation."
Horus found them. A handful of low-ranking Thousand Sons sorcerers, staves raised, the heads crackling with vicious light. The floating dust began to move. The scattered armor fragnts dragged across the ground, pulled by invisible hands, snapping back together piece by piece.
In seconds, the Rubric Marines that had just been blown apart were standing again. They raised their weapons and kept walking forward.
"Disgusting," Horus said flatly.
"Irrelevant." Guilliman didn't flinch. "A resurrection chanic ans nothing against sufficient fire density. Hold suppression. Their casualty rate is still within projections."
The Crusade's guns didn't let up. The Thousand Sons couldn't reach the ridge.
Then the battlefield changed.
A pulse detonated across the plain, not physical, not psychic, sothing worse, a force that bent the laws of reality sideways. Dark energy coiled at the center of the basin, spinning faster and faster, pulling a massive vortex of fla into existence from nothing.
Horus's grip tightened on his axe. His expression went cold.
"He's here."
The pressure arrived before the figure did. Suffocating. Absolute. Then the vortex split open, and sothing enormous stepped through.
Twisted horns. Vast daemonic wings spreading wide. A single eye that burned like a dying star.
Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, stood on the surface of Luna. That eye swept up the slope and locked onto Guilliman and Horus at the crest.
The Daemon Primarch smiled. It was not a pleasant thing to see.
He raised the Blade of Hesitation in one hand and drove it into the ground. A psychic barrier erupted outward, vast and deep, settling over the entire Thousand Sons host like a do.
Plasma and bolt rounds hamred into it. Ripples. Nothing more. Every physical attack died on contact.
The suppression was gone. The Rubric Marines and the daemon swarms surged forward, ignoring the terrain entirely. The Ultramarine veterans and Black Templars at the front had no choice, chainswords and power swords ca out, and the killing got close and ugly.
"Roboute."
The voice didn't travel through air. It didn't need to. Magnus's psychic voice bypassed every physical law and detonated inside the skull of every warrior on the field.
"Your foolishness genuinely saddens ."
He tilted his chin up, that single eye bearing down on Guilliman.
"That laughable frawork of reason and order you cling to — it ans nothing on the Changer of Ways' board. Every step you took from Macragge to Terra, all that effort, all that sacrifice — you were just walking into a cage that was built for you long before you started."
Silence from the ridge.
Magnus's gaze slid sideways to the bald giant standing beside Guilliman.
"And you, my pitiable brother."
His voice climbed. Every word was a blade, and he knew exactly where to put them.
"You betrayed Father. Then you turned around and betrayed the Warp. And now you think you're so hero turning the tide?" A pause, savoring it. "You are nothing. A wretch that no one wants. Do you honestly believe Father would forgive the man who personally shattered humanity's hope? Wake up. There is no place for you on Holy Terra. There never will be again."
Horus didn't take the bait.
He straightened his back. He hung his boltgun on his hip. His left hand closed around the haft of the Macragge masterwork power axe, and the disruption field ca alive, blue arcs crawling up the blade, hungry and bright.
"Magnus." His tone was pure contempt, the kind a man reserves for sothing beneath his notice. "You've spent all this ti in the Warp and that arrogance of yours hasn't shifted one degree."
He stepped forward past the defensive line. The axe ca up, pointing straight down at the red giant below.
"I have never denied what I did. I will accept whatever punishnt Father sees fit to give ." His voice didn't waver. "But before I go back to Terra to answer for my sins, I'm going to take your head. Consider it a gift to your master — a warning. And you, brother, I don't think you even have the courage to face Father at all."
"No more words, Horus." Guilliman stepped up beside him. "We're done talking to him."
The Emperor's Sword cleared its scabbard.
Golden fire erupted along the blade, burning fierce and absolute even in hard vacuum, warping the space around it in visible waves of heat.
Two Primarchs. One ridgeline. The killing intent rolling off them was a physical thing.
"LUPERCAL! GUILLIMAN! YOU SELF-RIGHTEOUS BASTARDS, I WILL GRIND EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODIES TO DUST!"
Magnus's roar shook the battlefield. The Warp storm around him tore loose, crimson lightning lashing in every direction without pattern or rcy.
Luna's gravity was almost nothing.
For two Primarchs, that was an invitation.
They moved at the sa instant. Both legs drove into the rock with everything they had. The lunar surface cracked and collapsed beneath the force, a wide slab of it simply giving way. The recoil launched them skyward, two colossal demigod bodies arcing through the black, crossing hundreds of ters in a heartbeat, falling like hamrs toward the enraged Daemon Primarch below.
The impact hit every soul on the battlefield at once.
Three demigods. One point of collision. Utterly, completely locked in.
The epicenter beca a death zone. Shockwaves tore outward in every direction, carrying shattered rock with them, and nothing that stood too close remained standing.
➤ Next: Kullen, Death!
— .—— .—— .—— .—— .——
Enjoying the story?
Read 60 chapters ahead on Patreon.
Join the free community tier for early access to the latest updates:
patreon(.)com/DarkGolds
Reviews
All reviews (0)