Sanguinius hovered briefly over the melee. The herald had only just withdrawn his blade from the body of the chanting daemon. He saluted the Angel and turned back to the fray. The war called, yet Sanguinius felt compelled to watch the herald a moment longer. He had the vertiginous impression of seeing himself wade into the crush of monsters.

Amit had detached his company from the main advance, leading his men in an arc around the edges of the flood of daemons pouring from the gate. Now he took them back in, cutting across the flow before the doorway. Amit sent a flight of rockets just ahead of them. The legionaries charged into the dust of the explosions. They went in fast, reckless in fury, bolters and blades punishing the reeling monsters while the fireballs were still fading. Amit’s anger was who he was, and it could take him too far, but it was not the Thirst. It was the shadow of the Blood Angels’ nobility, the brutal reality of warfare. They aspired to the sun, but they drew blood too. Right now, the burst of Fifth Company’s anger was the exemplar for the Legion.

The main advance of the Blood Angels was less than a hundred yards from the narrowing gap between the doors. The swirl of daemons was confused. There were fewer emerging from the manu­factorum, and the ones at the entrance were striking out in every direction, momentarily unsure of the primary threat.

Sanguinius rose higher, faster, his wings beating hard against the thin air to hold him aloft, the confluence of events giving him speed.

‘Lord primarch,’ Azkaellon voxed. Sanguinius was pulling away from his escort.

‘Be ready,’ Sanguinius told him. ‘We are about to take the forge. All heavy weapons,’ Sanguinius voxed. ‘Fire forwards, and fire now.’

Lascannons and rockets by the hundreds obeyed his command a second later. The sudden holocaust cut through the ranks of the daemons, punching craters in rock and gouging out trenches of incinerated warp flesh. Sanguinius streaked downwards, and he was another flame, a comet of war. He held the Spear of Telesto before him as he flew to the nexus of daemons. He charged the spear with the psychic force of the angelic war, and unleashed its judgement.

The beam was a blinding sear in the gloom of Pyrrhan. It sliced through clusters of sinuous, hooved, long-necked abominations. It turned them into ash. Sanguinius flew in on the path of the beam, wings folding back. Spear extended and blade sweeping before him, his descent was a bloody streak. He decapitated daemons with the speed and force of his strike. He was unstoppable.