The end of the manufactorum arrived as the combined fleets came over the horizon, putting them once more in the line of fire of the keep’s guns. The surface of Pyrrhan flared white. Coronas of warp energy whipped up the pillar, growing vaster with every slashing coil. Pyrrhan imploded, vanishing in an instant, the tiny growth at the end of the pillar sucked into the climbing disintegration. Blasts the size of miniature suns rocked the pillar, and then the dissolution reached the gate itself.

The gun emplacements on the gate fired briefly. They did not destroy their targets before destruction came for them. On the bridge of the Red Tear, Sanguinius watched the holocaust. Warp-infused flames hundreds of thousands of miles high consumed the gate. The structure lost coherence. It disintegrated. Shrapnel as big as planets spun away from the main body. Solid matter millions of miles thick became vortices, hurling streams of incandescent rubble into the void. The trailing edge of one stream hit the Dark Angels cruiser Claustro, turning the vessel to burning gas. The greatest vortex appeared in the middle of the gate. The eight-pointed star spiralled into fragments. The breach spread wider with ferocious speed. The colossal structure consumed itself like burning parchment, the edges peeling away from the centre, ash that could smash a battleship to dust billowing to the galactic east and west. The sides of the ruined gate glowed, molten. Between them now was a passage millions of miles wide. The void, stained by the Ruinstorm, was visible on the other side.

Engines powering up to maximum speed, the fleet began the long crossing between walls of infinite fire.

Eleven

Eleven

Resonance

When the gravitational hold of the fortress weakened, and the fleets prepared to enter the warp again, Sanguinius called Mkani Kano to the Sanctorum Angelus. Sanguinius looked at the golden sculptures that made the space into an oasis of meditation, unable to draw peace from them.

‘Do you know how we won on Pyrrhan?’ Sanguinius asked.

‘I do not,’ Kano confessed.

Sanguinius told the Librarian a version of what he had experienced. He was circumspect about the visions. ‘I saw visions of defeat,’ he said. ‘I found a single one of victory, and chose it.’ He described the great fall, and the cleaving of the knots.

‘Then you destroyed the manufactorum,’ Kano said, awed.

‘And by extension, the fortress gate itself. With a single blow. What I saw has given me great hope. But the implications trouble me, too. I must not believe I wield such cataclysmic power. No one should. The idea is corrupt and corrupting.’

Kano shook his head. ‘The things we are seeing are beyond anyone’s experience. The scale is simply too vast for easy explanation. They seem more symbolic than real.’ He paused.