His vox-bead vibrated, erupting with the reports and interrogatives of his captains and Chapter Masters. He listened to them now, putting together what had happened during his absence. He realised after a few moments that he was the author of the new situation in the forge. What he had cut apart in that netherzone was now destroyed in reality. Tangles of conduits all over the manufactorum had exploded, far more than had been targeted. The complex trembled. Its song was broken beyond repair. The manufactorum screamed now. It howled a chorus of final pain and terror. Machines and power were tearing each other apart.

In the hail of reports coming over the vox, a fragment broke through. It was a single word. ‘Brother.’ The rest was lost in static. But the voice was Guilliman’s. The Blood Angels were no longer isolated from the other two Legions.

The tremors were growing more violent by the second. The forge’s scream rose higher, losing coherence, becoming a thunder of catastrophe.

‘We have triumphed!’ Sanguinius voxed to the Legion. ‘The enemy’s works fall before us.’

At his nod, Azkaellon ordered, ‘All forces, withdraw immediately.’

Spear held high, he led the turn away from the chamber. The tunnel beyond roared. Liquid flame consumed its ceiling too. The conduits split, bleeding energy. Uncanny lightning forked across the width of the corridor. It burned glowing crevasses into the walls and floor.

The Blood Angels raced to keep their victory. The mountainous forge was about to fall in on itself.

We do not die here, Sanguinius thought. My end is not yet.

And then he wondered, Are you sure?

He wasn’t. And the uncertainty elated him.

When the Blood Angels entered the manufactorum, they dropped into silence so complete, they might have been swallowed by the grave. Daemons abandoned the other manufactoria to flood the land. Under the shadow of the daemonic fortress, on a battlefield so long that the combatants at either end were over the horizon from each other, the Legions struggled against the abominations.

The Lion led his legionaries to the regions before the closed doors of the forge. The formations of Dark Angels were walls of black iron. The daemons hurled themselves against the barriers. The Dark Angels refused to give up a single step of the land they held. Their heavy artillery bombarded the swarms of monsters, and the infantry advanced methodically, the walls of iron crushing the enemy.