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The dagger froze dead in midair.
Horus's hand had closed around the Fallen Angel's wrist. The grip looked almost casual, but it pressed down on the blade's edge like an immovable mountain.
A low growl rolled out of the Fallen Angel's throat.
He did not retreat. Every muscle in both arms knotted to the limit. The servos in his black ceramite power armor scread under the strain, emitting a high, overloaded whine.
An Astartes warrior at full output could flip a Chira armored vehicle with his bare hands.
That sa force, slamming into the giant before him, produced not a single ripple.
Horus kept his eyes lowered.
On the face of this forr Legion master, there was no fury at being targeted for assassination. No reflex. No counterattack stance. Not even the first motion of one.
His expression was hard to na.
It was the look of an elder who had weathered every kind of storm, watching a hapless young nephew do sothing foolish. Tolerant. Compassionate. Faintly, helplessly resigned.
"Traitor! Kingslayer! Eternal evil!"
The Fallen Angel ignored the sharp cracking sounds his wrist bones made under that grip.
Even if his entire arm shattered, even knowing full well this was a death trap he had no hope of winning, retreat did not exist within the pride and honor of the First Legion.
His left hand dropped to the bolt pistol at his hip. One round left in the magazine. He intended to put it through this eternal sinner's face.
"Stop!" Kaelen stepped out from behind the abandoned lathe, his voice cracking across the wrecked workshop. "Snap out of it! Open your eyes and look! There's no corrupted Chaos arch-traitor here!" He jabbed a finger at Horus. "He carries none of those Chaos Gods' taint. This is the loyal Lupercal. This is Horus of Cthonia!"
Two seconds of dead silence.
Then, from behind the helt, ca a dry, rasping laugh. Like coarse sandpaper grinding back and forth over rusted iron. The contempt in it needed no translation.
Believe that?
Ten thousand years. That face had dragged half the galaxy into a bottomless abyss. The First Legion had paid a price that defied description. And now so mortal walks in, points at the greatest war criminal in human history, and calls him the loyal version?
Sensing the Fallen Angel had no intention of standing down, Horus did not panic.
He let out a faint sigh.
Then he simply let go.
Not only that, he stepped back half a pace, and deliberately exposed his broad, completely unarmored chest to the tip of the Astartes's dagger.
"Stab here." Horus even raised his hand and tapped the spot above his left heart. His tone was flat, without a ripple. "If driving that blade into my chest makes you feel you've saved this broken Imperium, then do it."
He paused. Sothing like an elder's quiet judgnt crept into his voice.
"If the Lion could see this, he might even say a few good words about you."
Faced with a gene-primarch who had dropped every defense and abandoned even the intent to fight back, the Fallen Angel's killing-charged montum stalled.
In ten thousand years of endless flight, he had seen too many Astartes swallowed by Chaos. The madness and savagery in those broken n was impossible to hide. It seeped out of them like rot through cracked stone.
But this giant was lucid. Rational. He carried a kind of vast, world-weary sorrow that had nothing to do with Chaos.
It reminded him of the Great Crusade. Of the real Wolf Shepherd, the one from his mories.
Kaelen did not let that pause go to waste.
"Calm down. Use your own senses." His words ca fast and sharp. "He's standing right in front of you. Has the veil of reality warped even slightly? Do you sll the corruption those cultists carry? Look at his eyes. Is there a single trace of Warp taint in them?"
The Fallen Angel kept the dagger locked in his fist. He stared at that face.
Inside the helt, the life-signs radar and environntal monitors were completely silent. No alerts. No anomalies.
And beneath all of that, the bone-deep instinct that belonged to every Astartes told him plainly: this man was clean.
That visceral, involuntary nausea a mortal felt in the presence of sothing evil, it was entirely absent.
But the stubbornness of the First Legion was written into their genes.
"I don't believe it! The arch-traitor personally slain by the Master of Mankind cannot be standing in front of ! This is a sche — it has to be!"
Every word ca out bitten hard.
Kaelen stopped wasting breath and went straight for the heavy payload.
"This is no illusion. And it's no sche." He held the Fallen Angel's gaze. "This is the will of the Emperor."
The Fallen Angel's pupils contracted sharply. Kaelen kept going.
"I know you don't believe . But think about it — without the Emperor's power, who could bring a slain primarch back to this galaxy untouched by Chaos corruption?"
He didn't stop. He pressed forward, step by step.
"You think that's the end of it? Before long, Roboute Guilliman, gene-father of the Ultramarines, will wake from his stasis field and retake the reins of the Imperium."
"But that's not all." Kaelen's voice dropped into sothing harder. "What I'm telling you now is this: the Lion, Lion El'Jonson, is also coming back."
"What did you say?!"
The Fallen Angel's head snapped up. Behind the helt, his eyes went wide. He stared at the mortal in front of him as if the words simply refused to process.
"I said," Kaelen repeated, enunciating each syllable, "the primarch of the Dark Angels — the Lion, Lion El'Jonson — will return." He gestured to Horus. "I know it sounds like the ravings of a Chaos sorcerer. But the proof is standing right in front of you. Living. Uncorrupted. The master of the Luna Wolves. Warrior, all of this is the chess ga the Emperor laid out to save His Imperium."
The Fallen Angel went completely still.
The Lion.
Lion El'Jonson.
His gene-father, lost for ten thousand years.
Coming back.
10,000 years. He and countless brothers had clawed through endless exile, branded with the na "Fallen Angel," hunted across the galaxy like animals by their own Legion's successors, dragged into the Rock's interrogation cells and left to rot. Their howorld shattered. Their father gone. They had carried secrets no one else knew, surviving in the dark on nothing but stubbornness and spite.
But no matter how far fate had ground them down, no matter how the rest of humanity despised them, in the deepest corner of every one of those veterans' hearts, there had always been one thing that never went out.
Absolute loyalty to that proud Lion. And the hope of seeing him again.
Even just once. Even if it ant kneeling before their gene-father and receiving a death sentence from his own hand, that would still be better than 10,000 more years of this aimless, purposeless wandering.
For a chance that slim, he would stake his life.
And even as that thought burned through him, cold reason ran the numbers in parallel:
First: he could not win. An unarmored primarch could kill him bare-handed in the span of a breath.
Second: if this truly were the Chaos-corrupted Warmaster, he had already died on Terra ten thousand years ago. There was no possible way he could appear here like this, clean, untainted, whole.
Third, and most critically: during the fight monts ago, it was the Wolf Shepherd who had pulled him out of that encirclent. If he had wanted Cullen dead, he would have let it happen. He didn't need to wait until now.
A long silence settled over the workshop.
The Fallen Angel's arm dropped. The combat dagger went back into its sheath with a clean, final click.
He stepped back. Straightened.
Feet together. Right fist against the ceramite over his left chest.
A salute from another age, the old form, from the Great Crusade, offered by a subordinate to a superior. Perford now by a veteran carrying a cursed na, directed at a man who had been his people's greatest enemy for ten thousand years.
The motion was rusty. Stiff. The words ca out like they were being forced through clenched teeth.
"I salute you... master of the Luna Wolves."
The tension in the room finally cracked.
The Fallen Angel unlatched the armor seals at his neck. Air hissed out as the pressure released, and he pulled off the heavily battle-damaged helt.
The face beneath it was carved by ti and violence. The entire left half was buried under scar tissue. Five service studs were hamred into his forehead.
Five studs. His service dated back to the Unification Wars on Terra.
"Cullen." He gave his designation. "Born in the Dregs Hive, Terra. First Legion, Dreadwing. Knight of the Third Company, Thirteenth Chapter."
The corner of his mouth tugged in sothing that might have been a smile.
"Currently one of the Fallen Angels the Dark Angels Chapter hunts across the galaxy."
Horus's eyelids lifted slightly at the designation.
The Dreadwing. One of the six Wings of the Dark Angels Legion during the Great Crusade. The coldest, most brutal killers in the entire First Legion, specialists in indiscriminate slaughter and scorched-earth campaigns.
But Cullen's attention had already moved on from the Wolf Shepherd. He turned to Kaelen, and what settled into his expression now was confusion edged with wariness.
"I've spent every year of my exile in hiding. I pick the most godforsaken, lawless corners of the galaxy on purpose." The furrow between his brows pulled tight. "So how does a mortal, in the middle of an Underhive crawling with every kind of scum, manage to pinpoint an Astartes who went out of his way not to be found?"
Kaelen spread his hands.
"The graffiti on the third brick up from the corner. Two crossed swords. A pair of broken wings between them."
"The Hexagrammaton. That was your old Legion's symbol. Am I wrong?"
The scar tissue on Cullen's face twitched.
That signal, even during the Great Crusade, only veterans knew it. After Caliban shattered, the old traditions had been severed for millennia. The current Grand Masters doing the hunting probably wouldn't even recognize it.
And yet here, in this broken-down black market on the edge of nowhere, so random junk-scavenging mortal had just casually blown his deepest cover.
Cullen's eyes locked onto Kaelen and did not move.
"You know the secrets of our Legion." His voice was low and flat. "Who are you?"
➤ Next: Challenging Horus to a Duel in the Lion's Na!
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