The aftermath was cancerous. Screams of madness and rage rose from inside the monastery towers. Sanguinius gasped in the agony of recognition. The Thirst had come for his sons. Reflected in the windows of the spires, he caught glimpses of beasts. They wore fragments of battle armour. They fought and killed each other. They tore the bodies of mortals apart and lapped their blood. The wind carried the howls over the land; the animal wailing of a Legion’s death. Soon blood ran from the windows. It streamed in torrents down the towers. It pooled in the courtyards and at the base of the monastery. It poured in great cataracts, becoming a lake, becoming an ocean. The fortress became an island. The blood kept rising. It reached the ramparts. It flooded the keep. Crimson waves broke against the towers. Still the blood cascaded. Storm-tossed, the ocean rose. The screams of the monsters were cut off, smothered beneath the blood.

Sanguinius groaned. He cried out against the flaw. He spread his wings to fly away from the rolling swells of grief. He could not. The blood lapped at his feet. His wings folded and he sank to his knees.

The sea of blood took him. He choked, drowning. The darkness filled him again.

Again he dropped through the smothering night. Falling, falling.

This is the choice. Turn from it.

Falling. The red of flame streaked the dark. He breathed again. The air burned.

He was on the ramparts of the Imperial Palace. The sky boiled with flame. The prow of a battleship plunged through the clouds. The vessel bore the gold and black of the Imperial Fists. It had broken in two. Wreathed in fire, a slow comet, the forwards half of the ship dropped to the Imperial Palace. The earth shook. A terrible sunrise filled the night. Huge fragments of domes, towers and great halls were specks of black in the fireball.

The streets were in tumult. Millions ran in panic before the advance of the enemy. Mutated Titans, spikes running down their spines and limbs, strode over hab blocks and smashed through the walls of Administratum palaces. War-horns blared, the cries of frenzied predators. They turned their weapons on the streets, making the ground molten.