It struck downwards with its twisted blade. Sanguinius blocked it with the Blade Encarmine. His movement felt slow, as if he were a puppet straining against his strings. Fate was inevitable, yet change tormented his frame, seeking to bend him to a new, more terrible arc, blackening the meaning of his death, turning sacrifice into atrocity. He pushed back against the daemon. The blades scraped against each other. Crimson and violet light collided. Flames that burned and flames that sliced made war against each other. The flying daemon sank lower on the spear. Its flesh boiled away from the weapon’s touch, and it wrapped the length of its tail around the author of its pain.

The horned daemon chanted, and its eyes blazed in mockery.

I know you.

Sanguinius hurled his strength against the daemon. The Blade Encarmine began to slice through the edge of the abomination’s sword.

His peripheral vision caught movement on his right. Something huge had broken through the Sanguinary Guard. It was charging him.

Gold flashed to his left. His herald leapt past him, attacking in such a blur of speed that Sanguinius would have sworn he saw the flash of wings carrying the herald upwards. He landed beside the three-armed daemon and drove his powerblade through the side of its head. The warp light vanished. The book fell from the daemon’s grasp.

The charging beast was almost upon him.

Sanguinius turned in the coils of the winged daemon with such force that he shredded the creature’s muscle. The Spear of Telesto was caught in the monster’s body, but he swung the Blade Encarmine over his head as he turned. He brought it down with a roar. He hit his target before he could truly register what it was. Behind his blow was all his rage at the paradoxes of his fate, its certain arrival and uncertain meaning. He struck at the powers that laid claim to knowing him and the purpose of his being. The sword hit the skull of a daemonic beast. Scarlet of hide and of armour, a single razored horn rising from its forehead, its jaws were parted in rabid rage. It had trampled one of the Sanguinary Guard beneath hooves of brass, pounding the legionary into a mass of pulp and splintered ceramite.

All this, Sanguinius took in after his blow. The blade split the monster’s skull in two. The blazing eyes fell to either side, their wrath flaring once more, then fading as dissolution took hold of the behemoth. Its legs buckled on the instant and it slammed into the ground. The sword-wielding daemon that rode its back was pitched forwards. Bolter fire took it apart before it landed. Sanguinius leaned into the collision, crushing the winged daemon’s coils between his armour and the fallen beast. Daemonic flesh merged and melted. Freed, he spread his wings and took to the air.