Horus awaits
She tells him his brother is dead. He looks down at her, his eyes slightly narrowed.
‘Which one?’ he asks.
‘The Angel,’ she replies. She waits, expecting anger, half-expecting him to strike her for delivering such ill tidings.
But all he says is, ‘How do you know?’
She tells him she felt it. He stares at her a little longer. He knows what she is. He can see the witch in her. She half-expects him to kill her for that too.
‘Can you stand?’ Dorn asks her.
She tries. She can, barely. Her limbs feel new, soft, weak. Under the heap of stones, she has died too many times, and lived again too hastily. Her body, her whole being, is still trying to mend and renew itself. Everything feels unfamiliar and untried. She must remind herself how to stand, relearn how to walk, and somehow clear the dust filling her throat. Every word she’s spoken to him has been a dry rattle. She’s just a dishevelled thing in ragged black, caked in dried blood, and so covered with talc-like dust it looks like she has been prepared for some ritual.
She must learn to use her mind again too. The crushing agonies and repeated deaths of her entombment reduced her to an almost insentient state. Only the piercing shard of Sanguinius’ death, and the blizzard of death-visions it contained, managed to penetrate and register at all. She has no idea what else has happened, or how long she has been buried.
She tries to stabilise and recalibrate, but her mind is too frail, and the unstable fury of the warp-state around them and the warp storm overhead is too great. But she can tell that the blighting cosmic stain of the Dark King is somehow gone. While she was busy dying, that apocalyptic shadow has vanished.
‘What else can you feel?’ Dorn asks her. He seems like a giant to her. She knows all primarchs exceed the stature of men or Astartes, but the scale and bulk of the Praetorian seems even greater than it should be.
She shakes her head.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing else. The warp is too loud. This place…’
‘It’s Chaos’ own realm,’ he replies. It feels like a simple, tactical assessment, as though he is considering the options of a field of war. ‘I know which way to go,’ he adds, ‘but it would be useful to know what awaits me.’
She asks him how he knows the way, and he doesn’t reply, but she can read the answer in his mind. A call. A cry, from his father. A summons. The Emperor is in danger. From that, she reasons, the Emperor must have disposed of his almighty power, or had it taken from him.
She can also read that Dorn doesn’t trust her. He has no idea what or who she is, or with which side of this war her allegiance lies. But he is pragmatic, the most pragmatic mind she has ever encountered.
‘Can you try?’ he asks. ‘Try… harder? It’s important.’
He needs intel. He needs to be able to make a plan. Her own plans are in pieces. She has neither the strength nor the assets to accomplish her purpose. All that she desired coming here is lost to her. But Dorn, this earnest, solemn soul, shaped by the very wars he has designed, still has an opportunity to achieve something worthwhile. Some work of noble note may yet be done.
‘What?’ he asks, puzzled, as if he has heard her thoughts.
She says it aloud, and tells him it’s a line from an old verse, a very old verse, that somehow just slid into her, as though carried there by the warp-winds of the wasteland.
‘“Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”’
He frowns, and says he knows it. He knows it as a work by a lord named Alfred, a philosopher of the archaic times she thought everyone had forgotten. Then he recites the end of the same verse.
We are not now the strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
There is a look of mild surprise on his face as he says the lines, as though he is perplexed that he knows them. The wasteland wind has brought them to him too, she thinks. He starts to say that he believes he knows the poem from a lecture given by an iterator, years ago. He says he attended many. He thinks it may have been one given by Sindermann, because he can hear the words in Sindermann’s voice. Or is it a woman?
He stops, realising that at some point during his awkward explanation, she has started to cry. Sobs wrack her, making her shudder, and tears stream down her face, washing streaks in the floury dust coating her cheeks. He’s not sure what to do. He’s painfully not good at comfort. He reaches out a huge armoured hand, a hand that has lifted tonnes of rock off her, but can’t bring himself to touch her, knowing that a touch of that hand would not be soothing.
She wipes her eyes, and finds a broken smile, and tells him not to worry. It’s just the trauma.
‘Can you try?’ he asks.
She nods. She closes her eyes, and lets her mind sink and settle. She ignores the tears, the effort of standing, the molten ache in her joints. She ignores the bloody pain of her torn hands, and the throb of her missing fingernails. She ignores the crust of dust coating her gullet and windpipe, and the ailing sigh of her lungs.
She gathers her strength, and slowly begins to explore the site around them, the slopes of fractured stone, the redundant walls, the drifts and dunes of ash, the Astartes corpses jumbled like toppled statues in the rubble. She figures, as though her mind is quickly sketching it, the time-lacked city surrounding them. It has no plan or scheme, and it tastes of primitive matter, of age so great that exposure to the warp has left it bleached and arid. It smells of stories, like an old and secret library, but the stories are so ancient they have all been forgotten. No–
‘What?’ Dorn asks.
She shakes her head, still concentrating.
Not forgotten. The stories weren’t told, once upon a time, and then forgotten. They were forgotten long before they were told. She can sense the curvature of the universe’s cyclic nature.
It hurts. Her mind is still frail, and its neuroplasticity raw. The city bites at her as she tries to read it. It doesn’t want to be known, or measured, or mapped. She persists, her mental radius expanding. She sees the wasteland, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands, the oceans of dust that have submerged other cities, the boulder fields as stark as lunar regolith, the bright pinks and crimsons of exposed coral reefs like knotted, calcified fungus, the wrecks and ruins, the abraded statues of dead gods who long to have their names remembered. She perceives the ghost of Terra, a fading imprint of matter, subsumed within the titanic irruption of the warp that is devouring it to fashion a new world from its atoms. She sees the last few pieces of the material world – a bridge, a wall, a gate, a tower – poking into view like dirt in a wound.
The warp is everywhere. The noise of it is like a drone, like endless thunder or the roar of an inferno. It spits and crackles, and every spit is a Neverborn hiss, and every crackle is an inhuman whisper.
The warp is all around them, an immense cyclonic storm pattern of neverness, like a funeral wreath. And at the heart of it, in the eye of that storm, there is a gloom that stinks of cadaverine and putrescene. A lightless thing glares back at her with a single, bloodshot–
Her hand snaps out. Dorn takes it, and steadies her.
‘Horus,’ she says. ‘Horus awaits. He is eager. He has accepted the manifold gifts of Chaos. He is Chaos Undivided, the perfect instrument, the perfect vessel. He has won. He is simply waiting to finish the last few who oppose him. He is waiting for your father. He is waiting for you.’
‘Alone?’ Dorn asks.
She looks at him and laughs.
‘That’s all you can say?’ she says. ‘Is he alone, or with others? Does he have an army at his side? Yes, he’s alone. But I’m telling you it doesn’t matter. He is all things. He is all-powerful. He doesn’t need allies now, or soldiers, or disciples. He is Chaos, and its gods dwell within him.’
Dorn nods, as though this is simply a bleak strategic update from an unfavourable battlefront. He still doesn’t get it. He’s still trying to fabricate viable tactics.
He lets go of her arm, and unstakes his sword from the ground.
‘You don’t understand,’ she says.
‘Probably better that I don’t,’ he replies.
‘You can’t defeat him. Not in any of the ways you have learned to calculate victory and defeat. You can’t beat him. No one can.’
‘I can try,’ he says.
He looks at her.
‘My brother? He’s really dead?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
He nods. ‘Horus killed him?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I felt it. He fought, to the very end. It wasn’t enough.’
‘We rise together, we fall together,’ he replies. ‘If that’s all we can do, then it is enough.’
He turns away. He’s going now.
‘You’ll die too,’ she says.
‘There’s no place for me in his world,’ he says. ‘It’s better this way. To try, I mean.’
He looks back at her.
‘Can you summon help?’ he asks. ‘With that gift of yours? Will anybody hear you?’
‘Not from here,’ she says. ‘I’m not strong enough. The warp is too loud. It would drown me out.’
‘Then,’ he says, ‘can you go back? Find a way back? Get out from under this storm and, I don’t know, find a place to call from? A place where your voice might be heard?’
‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘Who would I call to?’
‘Anyone,’ Dorn replies. ‘Anyone who is left. Any one of us still standing. No other fight matters now, no other battle, no other front line. If anyone is still alive, they need to come here now and stand with me. There are no other priorities, not even the Palace.’
‘I’ll try,’ she says. She wants to say something else, but there’s nothing left.
‘I’ll try,’ she repeats.
‘Good,’ he says. He reaches up to the breast of his dust-streaked plate, and unclasps one of the seals of his Praetorian office. He holds it out to her. ‘In case anyone doubts the authority of your message,’ he explains.
She takes the seal. It’s heavy. She imagines that every part of his duty and office are heavy.
‘You haven’t even asked me,’ she says, ‘if I’m on your side.’
He shrugs.
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he replies. ‘If you are, you’ll try. If you’re not, then all I’ve wasted is my breath.’
She watches him walk away. Once he’s out of sight, she turns and, step by step, starts to look for a way back out of the storm.