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[h3]Ursh: The Blade Falls[/h3]
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[i]Kazzig-Sohn[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Kazzig-Sohn felt the familiar, wet heat of his own organs failing. His reinforced heart stuttered, a rhythmic percussion of genetic decay. It didn't matter, he breathed it in like a tonic.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He swung a massive, notched power-blade, shattering the ribcage of an Urshite "Ogre-Thall." The Thunder Warriors were not built for finesse, but they could out duel these monstrosities at any juncture.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Lightning! Raptors!" he roared, the sound more a beast's baying than a man's cry.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Around him, his brothers were a whirlwind of bronze and crimson. They were the Emperor's first magnificent and murderous. He saw a squad of the "First" moving with a cold efficiency nearby. Kazzig felt a flicker of resentment. That flicker was soon suppressed by a surge of killing desire as he plunged back into the fray.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]The First[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The warrior moved through the smoke. His gray, unadorned power armor was caked in the black soot of Urshite pyres. He did not feel the manic blood-lust of the Thunder Warriors. He felt nothing but the mission.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He raised his rifle and fired three-round bursts into the aperture of a bunker.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Target suppressed. Advancing to the primary stairwell."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He stepped over a pile of dead Urshite priests. Their sorcery had tried to flay his mind, but his conditioning held. He was a weapon of logic in a world of madness. He glanced at a Thunder Warrior nearby who was laughing as he tore a man apart with his bare hands. [I]Obsolete,[/I] the Astartes thought.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Valdor[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Valdor stood at the threshold of the citadel. He regarded the carnage: the dying Thunder Warriors, the cold efficiency of the new Astartes, and the broken bodies of the Imperial Army.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He checked the chronometer on his HUD. The breach was behind schedule by forty-two seconds.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Clear the hall," Valdor commanded. His voice was a calm, resonant anchor in the screaming chaos. "The Master of Mankind approaches. Let no filth remain to witness His arrival."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He stepped forward, the Apollonian Spear spinning in a lethal arc. The Unification was nearly done. The Old Night was ending, and the dawn of the Imperium was beginning to rise over the corpses of the tyrants.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Elara[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Elara's hands were shaking so violently she had to tie them to the vox-caster's frame. Around her, the 44th didn't exist anymore. They had been caught in a lingering sorcerous trap.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]To her left, her Lieutenant was frozen in a scream, his body suspended in a pocket of slowed time where a single second took a century to pass. To her right, her squad-mates had aged into dust in a heartbeat, their flak-armor collapsing into piles of gray ash.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Command... this is... 44th," she wheezed into the receiver. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and rot. "Sector 9-G is... We didn't reach the walls. We didn't even see the enemy."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]There was no reply. She felt like a ghost, her own skin began to wither and peel away. She didn't pull back. There was nowhere left to go.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Hallow[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]There were no beds left, only cold, oil-slicked earth. Hallow moved between the rows of the broken, his narthecium kit empty of everything but a dull cauterizing iron.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He stopped before a young girl, hardly twenty, who had been blinded by the last grasp of Urshite sorcery. Her eyes were just pits of black glass.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Can you... can you see the Emperor?" she whispered, clutching his blood-stained sleeve. "I always wanted to —."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Hallow looked out the tent flap. He saw the Citadel burning. He saw the Thunder Warriors executing the wounded Urshite prisoners in the distance. He saw the massive, utilitarian troop-transports landing to take the "viable" survivors to the next front.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Yes, child," Hallow lied, his heart a cold stone in his chest. "The Emperor fights with us now."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]As he moved to the next man, whose legs had been fused into his own armor by a plasma-leak, Hallow realized he couldn't remember the names of the last hundred people he'd watched die. Ursh knew it was dying, but it had conspired to take as many true sons and daughters of mankind with it as it screamed into the Abyss.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Hallow only had a few further moments to contemplate the futility of it all before the final gasp of Kalagann's artillery annihilated him, along with the kilometer square of the medical station.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Jhen[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Jhen's boots slipped on something that wasn't mud. It was a slurry of melted snow, spent brass, and the gray, pulpy remains of her platoon. Of the sixty hussars who had entered the gorge, only four remained. They were huddled in a shallow crater created by a redirected orbital strike, pinned down by a turret that hummed with a sound that made Jhen's teeth feel like they were vibrating out of her gums.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Fix... fix bayonets," Jhen croaked. Her vox-caster was dead. Her lascarbine was whining, the power pack depleted to a useless flicker.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Across the ridge, the Urshite defenders, beings that had once been human but were now elongated, multi-limbed horrors clad in jagged scrap-iron, began to descend. They skittered, their movements twitchy and predatory. Jhen knew the end. She had seen it a thousand times in this long, wretched war. They would be flayed alive to fuel whatever darkness lived at the heart of the citadel.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"For Terra," she whispered, a hollow prayer to a leader she had only ever seen as a golden dot on a distant balcony.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]A blur of auric light descended from the heights above, striking the center of the Urshite pack with the force of a falling comet.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Jhen blinked, her vision blurred by the sudden, blinding radiance.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Standing between the four survivors and the encroaching nightmare was a giant. He was twice the height of a man, encased in armor that seemed to be forged from the sun itself. He did not seek cover. He was a singular point of absolute reality in a canyon of shifting madness.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The turret that had pinned Jhen down turned its baleful, glowing eye toward the golden interloper. Before it could discharge its payload, the giant raised his spear. Two bolts, perfectly placed, shattered the turret's focusing lens. It exploded in a shower of violet sparks.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Silence returned to the gorge, save for the heavy, wet breathing of the four hussars.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"M…My, E….Emperor?" Jhen managed, pulling herself from cover to regard the golden demigod as he turned to face her.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"A little busy, small one, you shall have to suffice with me." Aristagoras' easy tone was modulated by his helm, but the grin to his words could still be felt. "With me now, the Emperor has need of us still." As he drove on the remains of the Hussars into hell itself.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Aeternus[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]How much time had passed since the fall of Mosvoroth's Titan Gates? How many of his vaunted siblings still breathed the same air as he in their suicidal assault? Did the Emperor witness their final, glorious charge and weep for their success? Was their victory in the valley enough to quell the unquantifiable murder of those who aligned with the Raptor?[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Rex could answer none of these as his hearts hammered against his chest. Fatigue threatened to crawl over his skin, but he remained stalwart against exhaustion as he had always. He could feel the wounds festering on his body, regardless of the protection his Tyrant armor provided. Perhaps he should be glad that he lived long enough to see the end of Kalagann's reign and the birth of Unification; however, Aeternus could not elate on his survival. Too many had died, perishing on the battlefield that sealed their victory.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]His auspex pinged with a hundred different Imperial signatures. Astartes and Cataegis of myriad legions roamed the battlefield in hunting packs, slaughtering Urshites with brutal and efficient methods. The Excertus Imperialis pushed in enormous, suicidal waves for every square inch of Mosvoroth. Killteams of pledged mercenaries, city-state conscripts, and altruistic techno-scavengers combed through the ruins for Urshic survivors to plunder.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]It all paled in comparison to the madness that lingered like a thick, crimson haze in Kalagann's city. Neverborne still hunted, even in their weakening state. Clumps of struggling vityaz with their inhuman pets desperately fought to retreat from their fate. The diasporic slave-warriors across all of Terra tried to surrender in vain, each cut down for their wayward servitude to their profane masters. Guttering, hulking machine-daemons were annihilated before their stomachs could be filled with raw flesh and meat.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Aeternus cared for none of these as he sprinted through the meat-clogged streets of Mosvoroth. A gaggle of legionnaires followed after him. None of their number were a Primarch save for the God-Slayer himself. He did not know where the rest of the Thunder Primarchs hunted, or even if they were still alive. Nor did he know where the remainder of the First Legio Cataegis fought. The chaos that followed the breach was unlike any other, filled with the sorcerous madness that caused reality to sneeze and snap. They were split, but they would soon reunite as the Raptor's claws squeezed on Kalagann's domain.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Primordial Citadel — Kalagann's vaunted seat — rose overhead as he approached through the blood-soaked courtyard. An ancient, spiraling monolith of jagged spikes and tortured faces carved into pitch black stone. It was as if it had been born from the Empyrean appearing exactly as such. The area just before was equally as disturbing with burning fleshtrees and hanging corpses of dissidents and profligates. All had been torn asunder by the Raptor's warriors, who faithfully guarded the entrance into the citadel.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]His transhuman knights remained at the bottom of the stairway, recovering their wounds and reloading their weapons for another defense. He pressed upwards with Apocrypha nestled against his right, oversized pauldron. To a mortal man, traversing the steps into the Citadel would've taken a breathless hour; however, it took several minutes for the Emperor's genecrafted giant. At this height, Rex could ascertain the tactical scenario without the assistance from his devices. Ursh was dying, coughing viscera for every beleaguered breath it took. Infernoes sprouted up like purifying storms across the endless stretch of trenches beyond the city. Explosions continued to plume up from sporadic engagements. It was horrifyingly beautiful.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Gleaming geneknights in gilded armor stood motionless at the top of the stairway, their conical helmets affixed to a single direction and observing the siege around them. Their palatine spears were hoisted upward, calm and unaffected by the chaos meters away from their position. Primarch Aeternus reunited with them and glanced at the entrance into Kalagann's stronghold. A shimmer of light twinkled from within, one that would not disappear no matter how much he blinked his eyes. That was proof enough of their victory.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He turned away from the threshold of the Citadel, shouldering Apocrypha from his pauldron and planting its tip down into the stairs beneath him. If Valdor was to join the Emperor against Kalagann, then it would be the God-Slayer that remained to bar the tide that would come. Whether it were a tide of flesh-morphing monstrosities or the last of Ursh's profane knights, the First Primarch would be ready.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"... May you find victory, my king," Aeternus muttered in his solitude as Mosvoroth burned.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]Aristagoras[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The sound reached him before the sight did — a rhythmic, heavy thudding of pressurized boots, interspersed with the frantic, uneven stumbling of mortal feet.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Then, emerging from the chemical fog like a ghost of the Golden Age, came the form of a Custodian.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Aristagoras breached the perimeter of the courtyard, his auric armor splattered with the black, oily ichor of the [I]vityaz[/I]. In his wake followed a far more mundane yet equally unlikely sight: Jhen and her three surviving hussars. They were hollow-eyed, their uniforms little more than scorched rags held together by grime and stubbornness, but they moved with a borrowed strength, tethered to the Custodian's wake.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Aristagoras halted at the foot of the great stair, his spear snapping to a vertical salute as his eyes met the towering, battle-worn form of the First Primarch.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Hail, Aeternus," Aristagoras' voice rang out, devoid of the fatigue that should have claimed him. He gestured with a casual, sweeping grace toward the trembling mortals behind him. "I found these few still trying to bite the heels of the beast. It seemed a waste to let the shadows have them."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"The Master has descended into the heart of the rot," one of the Thunder Warriors spoke.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Then the end is a matter of time." Aristagoras replied, stepping up a few tiers of the staircase. He looked back at the burning horizon of Mosvoroth, where the pyres of battle lit the sky in bruised purples and sickly oranges. "A pity. I was starting to enjoy the scenery." The second spear of the Emperor adjusted his grip on his weapon, allowing the beleaguered human figures to take their place behind him. While the sounds of his own arrival had turned out to be some limited reinforcements for those who guarded the way, yet more noise was beginning to stir from within the labyrinth of the city around them. "But it seems there is still work for us to do."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Aeternus twisted his grip on the obsidian greatsword, flipping the blade with the tip facing upward. He steadily descended the stairway to stand next to the auric champion, his black gauntlet thumbing the activation rune as he did. A corona of unstable, crimson plasma coated Apocrypha's wicked edges. Shadows that dared to fall around the duo were banished into oblivion. The Primarch failed to spare a look at the auxilia that scrambled behind the Emperor's Axe.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Hail, Aristagoras," the Primarch of the First finally replied with a surprisingly fond edge to his tone. Simply hearing from the Custodian brought back memories of the early days in the Unification Wars. A time of actual unity. A hard time. He continued, "Your presence was sorely missed in the valley assault."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He jested. Even now, while millions died for the sake of Unification, Aeternus surprised himself with the callous lapse in formality. His brethren, those that remained, perished with every passing second as his King fought in the depths of Kalagann's fortress. It brought a cruel, unforgiving grin to his lips. The thought was ludicrous. What remained of the Cataegis that followed him through the breach were forming up next to Rex and Aristagoras. He'd remember their names for whatever remained of his life.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"A transgression that is forgiven with the spilling of Urshic blood. A pity that Ushotan could not be here to fight like this one last time," the Primarch flatly stated as he readied for the oncoming vestiges of Kalagann. He chose not to waste breath on speculating any of his comrade's survival. This was their last fight. Something that they had all known as they stormed the valley together.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]While the two titans of Unification stood defiant at the foot of Kalagann's power, another hand of the Emperor moved unseen. Around the shimmering golden form of Aristagoras and the blackened armor of Aeternus, shadows were banished. Things, their sickly limbs and skeleton fingers questing just beyond the veil of reality, recoiled in horror at the mere presence of the two figures. But this new arrival to the staircase called those same shadows home.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]His form ghosted past the prying eyes of the unborn, slipped through the shadows of fingers that never had a chance to notice his existence.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Amaranthus, his form only slightly less mighty than the two champions of the Emperor at the foot of Kalagann's palace, simply appeared into existence behind the wavering Hussars.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Brother, well met," he offered to Aristagoras as he stepped forward to stand at his side. He kept a watchful eye on Aeternus as he spun his guardian spear idly in one hand, "I believe we will not be wanting for excitement," he added with the whisper of a smile evident in his words.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Well met indeed! Ha! Look at us gathered here. With a few good men we could end this war ourselves, the Emperor could have remained home to ponder his great works." Aristagoras barked in half laughter, even as the mortals who had accompanied him balked. It was beyond the scope of their world view to hear such things from the usually stoic Custodians, if they ever had the chance to meet them in person.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The good humor soon gave way to focus though. While foul sorceries began their works within the sealed hall of the Tyrant, his tormented children were called to his aid. The first creatures to enter the room were twisted and stunted things, but no less fearsome for their disfigurement. Beings who the daemonic experiments of their master had taken to with too much vigour, rotting out their human will. Beasts, but beasts that would rend and tear for their master.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"You send wheat before me? Have I not killed enough of you, Urshun." Aristagoras called as he leapt forwards. It was not just bravado — though there was plenty of that — by thrusting forwards into the mass of enemies before they could meet the line of defenders, he shielded the mortal warriors from attention as the creatures lunged for his form.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"For Unity! For the Emperor!" Aeternus cried out as he echoed Aristagoras' movements. In the short time before lunging, the First Primarch ignited Apocrypha and cleanly swung into the oncoming horde. Crimson plasma ignited the air around him as black, tainted blood turned into ichor-steam. The bulky form of his Tyrant suit instilled fear as he pushed through the beastlings, butchering wherever Aristagoras had not yet pierced.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And they fought on, weaving into each other like legendary warriors of bygone myths. The Sword of the Emperor brutally butchered and the Spear of the Emperor precisely impaled. They danced in the carnage, daemonic ichor painting their plating in fresh new hues. The other surviving Cataegis and the protected auxilia cautiously advanced behind them, offering careful fire as to not interrupt the macabre performance. The day dragged on as the slaughter on the threshold of the black citadel continued.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]The Judicators[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The unquiet dead of the First Astartes — the Judicators, as they had come to call themselves, bringing the Emperor's judgement upon the unclean — had lost many things in their service to the Master of Mankind. What lives they might have lived before he had reshaped them in his hand like so much clay was the first, and greatest, followed by nothing less than their new lives as his weapons. He had even taken the sleep of death from them, forcing their broken frames into the great sarcophagi which even now lumbered to the final conflict.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Every one knew that their sleep, long denied, was finally at hand. It was a little thing, in the end, that they had to give up to earn that. Even together, they knew that they would die alone, unremembered and forgotten, all those who could sing their songs left to guard the breach as they surged forwards in search of His Light.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]There was nothing they would change.[/indent][/COLOR]

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[i]The Emperor[/i]

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[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The interior of the Urshite Citadel was not governed by the geometry of man. It was a spatial nightmare, a labyrinth of non-Euclidean corridors and chambers that seemed to breathe with a wet, rhythmic pulse. Here, the Emperor did not lead as a general leads a column; He moved as a lighthouse through a storm of unreality.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Master of Mankind stepped through a veil of hanging human skin, his presence a searing heat that caused the sorcerous shadows to retreat with audible hisses. Behind Him, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and the heavy, metallic tread of his legions.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He did not look at the walls, though they were inlaid with the screaming faces of the slaves trapped in a perpetual loop of their own final heartbeats. To look at them was to acknowledge their suffering, and the Emperor had long ago moved beyond the luxury of individual empathy.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]+Focus+[/I] His mind radiated, a command that acted as a psychic anchor for the mortal soldiers struggling to maintain their sanity in His wake. [I]+The path is narrow. Do not look into the shadow. Do not listen to the voices of the unborn.+[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The transition from the corridor to the Grand Hall seemed a modest doorway, but the transition across its threshold was as abrupt as it was alien.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Reality did not simply end; it surrendered. The Emperor stepped forward, and the stone beneath His golden sabatons ceased to be granite and became something far worse. It hummed with psychic residue, as if the rock itself was carved from petrified emotion. The chamber was an impossibility. A hollowed-out cavern that was larger than the Citadel itself, stretching upward until the vaulted ceiling was lost in a far-off star scape. All of creation seemed to gleam above those few who walked alongside the Master of Mankind.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]This was the seat of Kalagann, the Tyrant of Ursh, but it was no longer a throne room. It was a wound in reality itself.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The air was a thick, viscous soup of sensory contradictions. It smelled of ancient incense and the copper tang of a fresh slaughterhouse. At the edges of the room, the laws of physics were being rewritten in real-time.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Standing in the center of this madness was the Throne of Ursh. It was not built; it had been grown from the calcified remains of a thousand wyrds, their ribcages intertwined to form the dais. Atop it sat a shape that challenged the Emperor's light, a shifting mass of obsidian armor and translucent flesh that pulsed with the rhythm of a dying star.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Emperor stood unmoved, His face a mask of absolute stillness. He simply looked at the thing that was Kalagann, seeing the puppet strings of the Warp woven into every fiber of the Tyrant's being.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]From the shadows atop the throne, a hundred eyes opened, not on a face, but across the surface of the Tyrant's armor. A voice like breaking glass replied, a chorus of a thousand stolen tongues.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]"We are the truth of the universe, little sun-king. We are the entropy that waits at the end of your sputtering candle. You bring order to a garden that wishes to rot. You have known us for as long as we have known ourselves, all your stolen gifts, and this is what you would make with them?"[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Emperor stepped forward. With every pace, the golden light intensified, burning away the non-Euclidean geometry of the hall. The walls groaned as they were forced back into three dimensions. The screaming faces in the masonry went silent, their souls finally finding the release of true death as the Emperor's proximity scorched the sorcery from their bones.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"You are a monster out of time, Kalagann, the last of your kind." The flames that blazed upon the blade of the Emperor roared into further life alongside the building crescendo of his light.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]"There is no Kalagann, you face us all, toy-king,"[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]As the Tyrant finally rose, the shadows in the impossible room began to run together, the great shapes of four terribly vast presences stamping their shadow across the reflection of the galaxy itself. Where their presence fell, the worst of the neverborn began to claw their way through the crystalline 'stone' of the chamber. What survived of the Emperor's honour guard was soon outnumbered beyond easy count.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]"And you will not steal from us again."[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Where unreality bled into the realm of the real, the honor guard met the foes uncounted.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"For the Emperor! For Unity!" the scream bellowed from the vox grille of an Astartes, their armor still the unpainted grey marking them as fresh from the genevaults. A "XVII" and the mark of a Lieutenant were the only identifying factors to pick out amongst the grey.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Lieutenant died a moment later. A torrent of balefire erupting from the eyes of an unborn as it turned to smite that which would scream praise of the Anathema in such intimate proximity of the lords He had so wronged.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Bolter fire chewed the creature to shreds even as the Lieutenant's body melted to the grieves, black ichor bubbling and boiling under successive impacts. A trio of Seventeenth ducked in close to finish the beast, chameleoline cloaks stuttering and malfunctioning, casting images of places other than the present as the unreality of the space around the Astartes and the unborn before them shorted relic circuitry and esoteric mechanisms.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The trio hacked the unborn to pieces, so injured was it already that it offered no fight. As quickly as the first beast was handled, a dozen more filled its place, their forms blasphemous renditions of man and beast combined, their existence abhorrent to every man, woman, and child who had ever been and had yet to live.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The trio fell in a flurry of strikes, their comrades continuing to lay withering bolter fire into the encroaching horde around them as they inched forward in the wake of the Emperor's psychic bastion in an attempt to keep the beasts from interrupting his most sacred duty.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The true battle waged invisible, the will of the Emperor against the Tyrant, who in truth was but a shell for far greater and terrible beings. The boundary of each seemed fluid, the aura of reality that the Master of Mankind cast fraying at the edges back into the immaterial space. As the fighting continued, the border would shift at the slightest change in combat. Where reality pressed forward the unborn would find themselves cast back into their nightmare realm, where a warrior of the Emperor was unfortunate enough to find themselves standing in a space that had only just been solid ground, they found their mind and body assaulted by the worst forces the unrealm had to offer. Some could resist long enough to make it a step back, others would crumple or burst into fatal energy themselves.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]For all the horror, it was clear, however, that the forces of Enlightenment had the upper hand. Before the will of the Emperor there could be no direct challenge. So, as ever, the Four found another way.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The flickering forms of daemons kept the mortals at bay, but as they did so, a vast but humanoid form took shape before the seat of the Tyrant's throne. A ghost of nightmare, a ghost of the future.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"We shall take them from you, Child of the Shaman, they will be our weapon, and cast you down."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The shadow moved forward. The Emperor saw twenty faces, twenty forms, blurring into one. The faces he recognised, the greatest of his champions lost to the winds of the aether. But with something approaching dread, if a being of his determination could feel such, he knew in that moment his companions did not see this amalgam. They saw one face, one being. They saw [I]a[/I] future.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"To behold the future is to know it to be truth." The one voice that was four cackled in the mind of the Master of Mankind. Then the Emperor knew, of all assembled, only he could survive.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Whatever horror that the Ruinous Powers had sought to sow, whatever discord or pause they had hoped, there was at least one force which cared nothing for it — not here, not now, as battle raged and their lord was assailed.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"Death!" blared from the warhorns of the First's own wandering ghosts, the Saturnine dreadnoughts bathing the impossible creatures of the darkest wyrd in the impossible energies of forgotten science. Reality wept as it was violated by the profound and profane in equal measure, the champions of reason twisting it into a weapon as they surged forward, and as they died in equal measure.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Agama Zur no longer knew where he was, but he knew [I]why[/I]. He was the Emperor's judgement — and there was but one penalty for those who would raise arms against the Master of Mankind. "Death!"[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Sister Angélica rounded on an unborn as it leapt from the shadows. The unwieldy sniper rifle gripped between her armored gauntlets was brought to bear even before the creature that shouldn't be was halfway to her. A bolt round screamed from the end of her barrel and slammed into the thing. Black ichor covered Angélica's unpainted armor as the unborn simply ceased to exist in front of her eyes.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]She turned and sighted another monster of the unreality, and squeezed the trigger once more. Another kill. She turned again and squeezed the trigger. And again. And again. Her bolt locked to the rear, and she slammed a fresh magazine home with hypoindoctrinated rote ability. She sighted again and hesitated.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The being before her, filling her sight picture, was not an unborn, not a creature of the enemy arrayed before her Emperor. Her sights rested upon the most magnificent being she had ever witnessed, second only to the Master of the Lines that fought it. She wept beneath her helmet at the perfect picture of a leader, the flowing black hair and features that only a perfect being could craft, looking directly at her. The being's eyes pierced her very soul as ice, and the importance of her worth was confirmed to her in that gaze, and in that very moment, she knew she was to be discarded. The being confirmed it in the pity that crept into the corners of their otherwise warm eyes, and creased their perfect smile.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]She knew this being would fight for her, die for her if need be, and she knew that the Emperor stood in the way of that longed-for future.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]She squeezed the trigger, and the bolt flew wide.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Emperor did not move as the amalgam advanced.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He had fought gods. He had unmade horrors older than the sun. He had walked through the howling vacuum between stars with nothing but the iron architecture of his own will to keep him breathing. He was ten thousand years old, perhaps older, even he had stopped counting.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He had never flinched.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And yet.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]We remember when you loved them.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The voice was not Kalagann's. It was not the Four. It was something assembled from the residue of twenty souls he had personally forged, and it wore their faces in rotation like a lantern casting slides. He recognized each one in the half-second it occupied the amalgam's features before the next replaced it. A face he had shaped with his own hands in the dark beneath the Himalazian rock. A woman destined to be his keenest blade.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]We remember when death still held sway over you.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He pushed forward. The blade of his weapon cleaved through the space the amalgam occupied, and the amalgam simply was not there. It had stepped sideways through a fold in reality as casually as a mortal man might cross a hab highway.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]When did you stop counting them?[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Emperor's psychic bastion flickered.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]It was the briefest contraction, a single heartbeat's worth of diminishment, but in this room, this wound, it was enough. At the margins, where reality had been holding its ground by the width of a razor, the floor simply ceased to be floor. Two of his guard fell into the absence, their screams cut short as the unreality consumed them. He did not look. He could not afford to.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]That is the toll,[/I] the amalgam said, and now it wore only one face. [I]This is what your enlightenment costs.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"The cost of inaction would be the extinction of every soul alive and every soul that will ever live after them."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He said it without hesitation. He had said it before, in various forms, across various centuries, to various people who had asked him why. It was true. It remained true. He advanced again and drove the fire of his will against the amalgam like a prow driving through ice, and the amalgam bent around him, bending, as if delighting in the pressure, and for just a moment, one of its twenty faces was his own.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]You are not what you were.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He stopped.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]You were born the same as any of them. You remember hunger. You remember cold. We have seen what you buried beneath the mountain. We have read the parts you sealed away so that you could be what you needed to become. You remember a morning light. You remember names that have nothing to do with conquest.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The fire on his blade guttered.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]What are you now, little man? What is left of the shepherd? You are so vast. You are so certain. The certainty is a wound you have dressed so many times you have forgotten it was there.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The honour guard was dying in his peripheral awareness. He could feel each one as a guttering candle, and he was losing them too fast. The dreadnoughts of the First were buying seconds, their ancient sarcophagi blazing as they gave the last of what they had been denied for so long. The mortals — his soldiers, his ordinary, mortal, expendable soldiers, were fighting and falling in the dark at the edges of his light, and his light was shrinking.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Because he was hesitating.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The amalgam raised a hand that was all twenty hands at once, and the four vast presences behind it pressed forward, and the Emperor felt the weight of them as he had not felt anything as weight in longer than he could measure. Something groaned in the psychic architecture he had spent millennia constructing. A buttress, somewhere deep, cracked.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]You sealed it away so thoroughly. You had to. We understand. How else does a being of your scope function? How else do you look at a soldier you have made and sent to die without the grief of it consuming your capacity to act? You built walls. We admire the craftsmanship. But walls can be broken from both sides.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]Let us show you what you buried.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And then through a violation he could have anticipated or defended against —[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He remembered a morning.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Not a battle. Not a theorem. Not the cold, elegant satisfaction of a campaign unfolding correctly. A morning. The light through a window that no longer existed in a city crumbled to dust. The weight of a blanket. A sound from a room adjacent. The smell of bread. The small, damp warmth of something ordinary and irretrievably lost.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He had been a man.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He had been young, and tired, and uncertain, and he had stood at a window in a city whose name he would not speak even in his own mind.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The amalgam pressed its advantage. The crack in the buttress widened. He felt the Four lean into it like hands through a door.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And the Emperor stopped fighting it.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]This was not surrender.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He understood, in that fraction of a second, in the time it takes a heart to beat, what the Four had miscalculated. They had found the buried human thing and torn it open and used it as a blade against him, and they believed that humanity was weakness.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]They had been fighting men and women for so long. They had grown accustomed to that being true.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He let the memory come.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He let it all come. The morning. The window. The cold. The hundred thousand names he had stopped counting. The weight of every face in every theater of every war that had purchased this moment. The faces on the walls of the corridor, he let them in. He felt each one of them. He let himself be accountable to each one, not in the abstract, not as a number in a calculation, but as a person who had stood at a window once and been afraid.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The grief was enormous.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And it was [I]his[/I], which meant it was real, which meant it was precisely what did not exist in the howling immaterial chaos of the Four, who had never known a window or a morning or what it felt like to be afraid of your own future in that ordinary, human way, the way that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with love.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]He held it in himself. Not the god-machine, not the psychic lighthouse, not the Master of Mankind, but the man who had stood at the window, and he named what he felt with the same precision he had once brought to theorems and genetic architecture.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]Loss.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]Fear.[/I][/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent][I]Love.[/I] The oldest and most intractable.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The amalgam recoiled.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]It had expected the grief to paralyze. It had modeled a being who had sealed feeling away because feeling had become incompatible with function, and it had expected that the sudden restoration of that feeling would be catastrophic. It had not modeled a being who had sealed it away precisely because it was too [I]important[/I] to risk.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The Emperor raised his weapon, and it blazed.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"I remember all of them," he said.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"I remember every single one."[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The blade came down.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The amalgam's twenty faces opened their twenty mouths, and what came out was not language. The vast presences behind it lurched forward in the fraction of a second before impact, pressing everything they had against the burning edge.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The horrendous wound that the Tyrant had forged in reality for centuries burst inwards, collapsing down and into its own singularity as the Emperor wielded his own mortality as a weapon. It blazed with the light of the Sun, yet all the Master of Mankind could feel was a dreadful cold. The absence in his heart of what it had cost to wield such power. To dispense of that last shred of the man he was.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]As the horror compacted into nothingness, reality began to impose itself once more. The endless impossible sky vanished, and the walls that towered greater than physics would allow any creation within reality to reach crumbled away. The true form of the citadel at last revealed, a smoking, ashen ruin, with a skeleton upon a chair. A king of rubble alone.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"My…. My Lord, is it…finished?"[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]The voice rasped from behind the Emperor as he watched the throne, before the Master of Mankind turned, and wrath blazed in his eyes.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]"It has." Spoke the voice without grief, and the blade swung once more.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]Across the room, at the feet of the crowned skeleton, was a bundle of fabric. Or — no, a cloak, wrapped around the curled-up body of a young woman with ink stains on her hands. When she awoke, she felt first a driving anxiety, and then a grief so overpowering that tears sprang to her still-closed eyes.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]She sat up and opened them, allowing the tears to stream down a face covered in the dust of stones that were not here, that should have crushed her utterly. She opened her eyes, and before her she saw the Emperor, who was beautiful, and terrible, and had been kind to her.[/indent][/COLOR]

[COLOR=darkgray][indent]And she saw that he had changed, and she wept.[/indent][/COLOR]

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