Enough. These doubts were unworthy. If he did not know why the Emperor had denied the existence of gods and daemons, then the reasons were not his to know. Yet. He must have faith that he would learn in time. And he had faith. Faith that would burn the galaxy with its purity.

He charged deeper into the daemons, and the plague withered before his wrath. He brought light to the darkness, a purging, incinerating light. It blasted from the head of the Spear of Telesto. It blazed from the length of the Blade Encarmine. But it came, too, from his being. He was in the centre of a blinding fire. He was the centre. The daemons cried out. They fell, they burned, they disintegrated. Their existence was an insult to him and everything he had given his life to forge.

Yes, he would return them back to the darkness of myths. He would expunge even the memory of the myths.

Bolter shells screamed on both sides. They were a destroying wind, ripping the abominations apart. Sanguinius marched towards the rift. He was inexorable. The daemons’ advance halted. It reversed. He waded through a dissolving mass of bodies and disintegrating weapons. The bell still sounded, but he thought he heard alarm in its toll now, a frantic, futile call to arms.

At the mouth of the rift, daemons still tried to force their way onto the bridge. They were hampered now by the immobilised crowd of their kin. Behind them, howling in the writhing darkness and infernal colours of the warp, still more daemons raged to break through. There were other kinds of monsters there, alongside those the Blood Angels had fought on Signus Prime. Mingled with the daemons of rage and change were creatures whose movements were sinuous, corrosive invitations to unnameable sensations. The tear in the bridge was a glimpse into an abyss of every foul hunger. It was an eye that opened onto the reality of souls, and that reality was hideous. ‘I deny you!’ the Angel shouted. He scythed through the daemons.

He slashed the Blade Encarmine across the front of the rift, from edge to edge. ‘I deny the lies. I deny the madness. My father’s kingdom of reason will triumph!’

Sanguinius cut through unflesh. A gash opened wide in the invisible veil between the materium and the warp. Blood erupted out of the air. The outline of the rift trembled. Sanguinius aimed another burst of the spear’s power into the centre of the tear. He bellowed a curse and defiance as the cleansing lightning enveloped the abominations. They burst into flame and fell to ash before they could manifest themselves on the bridge. The daemonic horde fell back. Around him, his sons battered the plague monsters out of existence. The smell of burned fyceline filled his nostrils, the clean sting of battle cutting through the viscous stench of bodies bursting like overripe fruit.