‘I saw clusters of stars,’ said the cyclops, gazing down from his throne. ‘Constellations that danced across the galactic plane, wrapped in motions and revolutions. I saw the crown of the celestial sphere. Nebulae swelled over me like waves, becoming the tides of the Great Ocean and I swam, drunk on the currents, until I woke into a dream.’

The cyclops’ halls were boundless and as mercurial as his words. Vortices of electricity spiralled around him forming great spheres of hieratic text, lightning cages that turned wildly and dragged his court closer, carrying magister and daemon alike to the rhythms of a beautiful hymn.

Zadkiel glided through the dazzling lights and ranks of silent Rubricae, shoving the colossal warriors aside with his crook staff, eager to reach his monarch.

The cyclops was Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, daemon primarch of the XV Legion and seer lord of the Thousand Sons. ‘Darkness drives evolution,’ he continued. ‘Darkness, doubt and fear. Paucity of understanding. The ultimate catalyst.’

Magnus billowed, rising on a thunderhead, towering over the drifting crowds, causing even his great captains, the Rehati, to stumble and shield their eyes. ‘When men first crawled from the earth and looked to the heavens, what did they see? They saw madness. How else could they have described it? What else could they have thought as they watched the sun, their god, sink behind the horizon? Their bright lord was abandoning them. Never to return. Their father had betrayed them. It was the death of light and the end of life. And when the dusk turned to true night, and our forebears witnessed the birth of stars, what must they have thought, confronted by such majesty? How could they explain the heavenly spheres? How could they rationalise the moon? What must they have done?’

He laughed, shimmering back down into his throne, shrinking until he was barely larger than his Adeptus Astartes attendants. ‘They would have asked questions. And sought answers. They would have felt the hunger that has always been in us. A hunger for knowledge. Even then, even in its earliest, crudest form, mankind must have sensed the apotheosis that lay ahead. They knew as we knew. As we have always known. We are not destined to cower in the dust, humbled by the cosmos – we are destined to conquer and rule. We are destined to understand, to understand everything. It is our divine right to be unshackled from ignorance and bathe in the light of reason. To deny that is the only real betrayal.

‘I have traversed the Great Ocean beyond the stars, I have crossed it countless times, exiled for doing what I was born to do, commanded to do, and after centuries beyond counting, I finally realised my true crimes. Not treachery. Not the study of forbidden lore. These things were not my failings. My failing was false humility. Lack of ambition. Denying my true nature. There is no shame in what I am. In what we are.’