The lumens came back on. Corposant flasks emptied to the sounds of half-formed screams. Atmospheric vents drew smoke away, revealing empty pads. Adepts consulted vid screens and paper cogitator strips, and relief crossed their faces at the readouts.

Roboute Guilliman and his warriors were aboard the Pride of the Emperor.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The Pride of the Emperor

There was always a moment of enlightenment for Guilliman during teleportation, when he hung in a state that was neither life nor death.

In those moments, when his soul straddled two worlds, he knew himself for what he truly was: not a being of matter alone, but a creature of both realities. And in those moments, he was convinced – no, he knew – that he was spun from warp stuff and matter both. Though the feeling faded and became absurd after his deliverance to his destination, at the time it was profound, as if an understanding of the mysteries of creation awaited his discovery if he had but the courage to accept his nature and look a little deeper.

He had the courage, but he never looked. Damnation lay that way.

Temptation passed. The sense of enlightenment fled. A blaze of light delivered him and his warriors back into ignorance and to their target. The afterlight was slow in dispersing, putting them at risk of attack while they were half blind. Guilliman tensed, ready to fight, but no challenge came. Greasy wisps of warp energy contorted themselves out of existence, leaving the boarding party in darkness.

It was darker than a terrestrial night, but systems in his helmet aided his superior eyes in creating a grainy image of the voidship’s interior.

For a second, Guilliman thought himself lost, cast into the empyrean itself. He looked upon a scene drawn from lonely nightmare. In the century since the end of the Heresy, Guilliman had fought daemons, he had trodden the surface of worlds changed by the unclean touch of Chaos, he had seen through windows of flesh conjured by sorcerers into depthless dimensions of evil. The interior of the Pride of the Emperor was of similar ilk.

As intended, the boarding party had emerged within the Triumphal Way, the great corridor running the length of the Pride of the Emperor. Once, the massed Chapters of the Legions had marched its length in celebration of Fulgrim’s victories for the Imperium, but those days were lifetimes dead, and the derelict avenue was empty. The warriors of Ultramar were a lonely island of blue.

Guilliman’s Invictarus Suzerains scanned their surroundings, shields and Legatine power axes held in anticipation of an attack that did not come. Hand-held auspexes whined and chimed out the all clear. Lamps stabbed out from suit mountings, their pools of bright illumination dancing over vile shapes.

Thiel was first to break the silence.

‘The Triumphal Way,’ he said. ‘It has changed.’

‘A century of years is more than enough time for evil to do its work,’ said Guilliman.