The thunder destroyed the real and the immaterial. It blasted through the vortex. It hurled the daemon and the Angel apart. They plummeted to the deck. The enginarium twisted and flowed. The huge dome began to spiral. Skulls and metal and stone blurred with one another. The thunder shattered all thought, all consciousness, all struggle. The Veritas Ferrum shuddered. Its existence trembled on the edge of dissolution. The colossal engine casings split, peeling back like flesh. Blood and ichor flooded the deck. The galleries collapsed. Daemons fell and thrashed. Their jaws gaped with screams that could not be heard. There was only the thunder.

Sanguinius landed at the edge of the portal. It was unstable, and howling energy slashed from its maw, jagged strikes rupturing the bodies of daemons with uncontrolled change.

Sanguinius pushed himself up. Madail’s staff had fallen from his chest, and blood pumped from the wound. He cried out again from the greater injury to his soul, shaking with horror before the new curse that would fall on his sons because of him. Even to breathe felt like a condemnation, but he saw his foe fallen before him, and he found the strength to fight on. Madail thrashed, the Blade Encarmine and the Spear of Telesto embedded in its torso.

The thunder was passing, rolling away in rumbles like the fall of mountains. The walls of the Veritas Ferrum began to stabilise. The ship had been hurt, but it was not dead. A growl began to build in the wake of the thunder. It came from a vast distance forwards, vibrating down the length of the ship. It was the snarl of a vengeful beast, about to strike back.

The fading of the thunder was the measure of the moment Sanguinius had before him. He lunged at Madail and grabbed the hilts of his weapons. He sank them deeper into the daemon, then pulled the impaled daemon towards him. He could feel the portal at his back. The material and empyrean warred with each other. The ocean stormed, waiting to swallow him one more time. Madail reared up. Sanguinius held tight to the weapons. His anger was desperate now. The storm of his destruction threatened to overturn his reason. Despair pushed his wrath to the edge of the blackness. Grief swamped him. His choice was nothing more than a choice of dooms. He would doom his sons and perhaps the Imperium if he accepted his fate, or he would be the doom of the Imperium if he surrendered to Madail. Hope had fled. He forced himself to think no further than the next second, the next gesture. He followed the path of blind duty, though it seemed even that might abandon him too. And so he dragged the weapons towards him, and his wretched fury was still enough that the Spear of Telesto burned the daemon again.