He did not land, but he stopped falling. He floated in the black. The darkness became mist, gathered definition, and became the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit. He was there again, as present as he had been when he had slipped between realities on the Red Tear. And again, Horus struck him down.

The pain again. The pain of final dissolution. He felt himself die, and he felt the grief at treachery and the grief of failure, the grief that his death was meaningless. There was no doubt now. He died, and Horus won, and that was all.

He fell into the dark, and light pierced it again; it became shadows and then substance again, and once more Horus towered over him. Once more, Horus slew him.

The pain, the grief, the futility… It was all there again.

And then again.

And again.

And again.

He lived his final moment over and over. The pain never diminished. Each iteration of his doom was as excruciating as the last. He tried to turn his head as the Vengeful Spirit materialised. He was confronted with the same perspective. He groaned, and with a wrenching effort of will, he turned his back on Horus. He spun himself away from the vision, though he heard the sound of his boots against the deck.

The effort was futile. He turned and turned and turned, and he died and he died and he died. There was no escape, no meaning, no hope. Each time Horus killed him, he saw a trace of the future that would come. Every death brought its consequences. None were repeated. All were terrible. Horus was endlessly triumphant. All that changed was his immediate route to power.

Sanguinius spun faster, the movement no longer of his volition, and he saw endless iterations of his fate at once, as if he were in a mirror corridor, with the same image reflected to infinity. But this was more than an image. It was real. He died a thousand times at once, and the pain was a thousand times amplified.

A new blackness rose. This one was his. It came from within. It was anger that dwarfed the pain. Its jaws were immense, jagged with fangs, breathing flame and hatred. It consumed him, and yet the jaws were his too. With them, he would repay the treacherous galaxy with blood. He roared in an agony of wrath as the images of his death endlessly repeated. Darkness within lashed at the darkness without. Deep in his mind, buried in the agony, a sliver of his identity protested. It did not want this thing he had become. It rejected the black monster that claimed him as its father. His last piece of rationality reached out in desperation for any trace of hope. It flashed through the deaths upon deaths upon deaths, becoming weaker and dimmer as it looked for any meaning, any sign of doom leading to consequences other than eternal night for the Imperium.