Father, hear my cry.

Reality, bleeding and savaged by the Ruinstorm, tore wide open. The Blood Angels plunged into the vortex of the warp consumed by rage. A klaxon sounded as the Red Tear’s Geller field shrieked with strain.

Then reality collapsed. Only Sanguinius felt it from within his perceptions. He saw the shutters ripple and bulge. They flowed like liquid. The shapes of his legionaries smeared into nothing. Then the command deck vanished from his sight.

Blows hammered his frame and stabbed his mind. His eyes were filled with a colossal figure in sin-black armour. Crimson eyes blazed. Fratricidal hate battered the breath of life from his body. Horus was the shape. Horus was killing him. The Angel’s death fell on him with a piercing immediacy. Blood soaked his sides and poured through rents in his armour. His hearts lurched under the agony of the terminal vision. The future grasped Sanguinius, a future where his hearts no longer beat, where the pain and fire of a lost, final battle dropped him into the endless dark.

Here was certainty.

Here was the end of all doubt.

Sanguinius had thought he had come to terms with the inevitability of his death. If it was the price of saving his father, he would be the willing sacrifice. Yet now, as the attack sought to buckle him under its fury, as the maw of the dark gaped wide to swallow him, he did not feel the acceptance of the good death. He answered the rage with his own. It was rage at betrayal, at treachery and at crime that surpassed all understanding. Destruction took him, and he howled at the night, howled with a hate greater than he had ever known, yet was his completely, as much a part of his identity as the light he embraced. As the pain dragged him down, his howl filled the dark, becoming one with it. The howl grew, echoing, redoub­ling, shattering time and reason and hope.

Death was his destiny. So too, was the howl.

Father.

My cry.

Sanguinius fought back. He hurled his will against the wall of night and pain. Horus was not here. Horus was not looming in triumph over him. The reality of his death was not now. The future had not come. Not yet. Not yet.