On the first level, Sanguinius slashed the Blade Encarmine across the torso of a spinning abomination. Pale blue daemonflesh parted. Two halves of grotesquery twisted away from each other, their mouths wailing anguish. The Angel charged to the centre of the floor, wading deep into the spawn of the warp. Jawed arms snapped at him. Unnatural flame washed over him, and he felt his bones try to change. He hurled the madness away. The destiny of his visions waited for him in the future. He was not going to fall here.

Beneath the peak of the Exaltatio’s dome he paused. As Raldoron and the Sanguinary Guard formed a cordon around him, he struck the ground with the end of the Spear of Telesto’s shaft, splintering a flagstone. The spear’s blade glowed brighter and brighter. ‘Put every­thing to the flame,’ Sanguinius ordered, his voice thunder over the din of battle.

Raldoron looked at him sharply. ‘Everything?’

‘My lord,’ Orexis voxed. ‘We might yet save part of the archives.’

‘We have already lost them,’ Sanguinius replied. ‘We cannot know the full extent of the corruption. The changes we cannot see are the most dangerous. History altered is worse than history forgotten. The poison must be excised. Burn it. Burn it all.’ He fired the spear in anger, in anguish, and most of all in righteousness of purpose. Purity blazed magnesium-bright. The beam sliced through clusters of whirling daemons. Their babble turned into a choir of screaming distress, and then they were consumed. The blast took out five shelves at a stroke. Flame raced through the histories, the treatises and the literature of Baal. The untouched and the corrupted alike burned.

Raldoron’s gasp was almost as subtle, and as deeply felt. Azkaellon’s agony came through in the anger with which he ordered flamers deployed. ‘Give me fire!’ he yelled. ‘Give me flames as high as the dome!’ There was a desperate fury in his voice that was closer to the violence of Amit than Azkaellon normally allowed himself to come. The Sanguinary Guard obeyed. Three of the legionaries stepped forwards with heavy flamers. Streams of burning promethium arced across the space of the librarium, igniting a firestorm around its periphery. They marched around the ring formation, gradually raising their weapons’ nozzles, creating a spiralling conflagration. Daemons lurched and danced through the blaze. They resisted the burn, but it devoured the archives before the warp flame could transform them further.

The other Blood Angels sent mass-reactive hell into the fire. There was no more restraint now, and the full-auto bursts of shells shredded the monsters of disease and flux. From beyond the veil, the dark bell tolled and tolled, and its clamour sounded angry now.

We defy you, Sanguinius thought. And we deny you. Defeat is insupportable to you. You will come to know it well.