The shadow came for him. The immense weight on his hearts suddenly moved to crush them. ‘Mautus,’ Sanguinius voxed, about to ask if the Red Tear had engaged the contact. But the darkness attacked before he could speak again. It was not a presence. It was the mere approach of the thing in the warp that hit, a bow wave catching him and drowning him. His wings folded under the blow and he plummeted from the dome. He fell into the mouth of the fire vortex. Daemons leapt for him, the mouths at the ends of their limbs snapping in hunger. Then they were gone, and he was falling in a blackness that was absolute, but not empty. Its substance knew him, and at a level beyond the conscious, he knew it. Before he could think what it was he recognised, the dark was gone.

Sanguinius wasn’t falling any more, and he wasn’t on the Red Tear. He was running down the hall of another ship. He knew this hall. He knew the tapestries that had once hung here. He knew the runes and monstrous carvings that had replaced them. And he knew what chamber waited at the end of the hall.

He was aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was about to enter Horus’ throne room. He was going to fight his brother and die.

This was no vision. It couldn’t be. It was too real. He had no consciousness of his body being elsewhere. He heard the hammering thuds of his feet against the deck. He smelled the foulness of the ship’s corruption. He felt his wounds. He was bleeding, and his armour had been damaged in earlier fights. He had slipped from time. The future had come for him, and the time of visions was finished.

As Sanguinius closed in on the throne room, the Red Tear slipped away. Its reality faded and became a memory. The present was the Vengeful Spirit, and Horus was waiting.

Sanguinius burst into the throne room. A colossus in black armour stood before him.

There was a roar, and the chamber shook so hard it blurred.

Then it was gone.

Sanguinius was dropping through the firestorm of the Exaltatio Angeli again. He was not in the future. The roar had travelled with him, or it had summoned him back. It was louder than any of the explosions in the librarium. The Red Tear shook as the Vengeful Spirit had. A massive thrum rang the length of the hull. The dome of the Exaltatio cracked, and bookshelves twenty feet tall collapsed.