Then the energies and the moment collapsed. Matter and light rushed back into the point where the War Oath had vanished. For a second there was just an empty volume of space. Then glowing cracks lashed out, flowing through the void, threading through the space where ships still moved and poured fire at each other.

The broken circle of the Ring trembled, then began to fall, sliding back down into the weak grasp of the moon it had protected. Vast sections of docks and defences met the grey Lunar surface. Clouds of rock and dust fountained up and up in the faint gravity.

Abaddon opened his eyes. Around him the whirlwind of darkness became the smooth stone of Luna’s caverns. There were figures moving beyond the settling shadows, clad in amber-yellow, guns firing, bolts and beams converging on him and the circle of warriors around him.

Reality asserted itself like a hammer blow.

‘Fire,’ he said, and around him the first of Horus’ warriors to set foot on the moon that made them obeyed.

Comet shrine, Inner System Gulf

+Go,+ willed Ahriman. The gunship kicked free of the comet shrine. Around it dozens of others flew free, engines bright as they raced for the ships already moving to make distance from the comet.

Ahriman felt the universe turn under the surface of reality. Images bled into his mind’s eye. The spin of the Solar System above the night sky of Terra. The sages and sorcerers of ancient times, looking up and imagining the truth of the universe in the movement of stars. They were wrong, of course, but within their ignorance they were also right. They had thought that existence revolved around that Old Earth. It did not, not in the way they thought. The planets and stars and the arcing swirl of the galaxy turned without thought or care for the ball of rock that had spawned humanity. But another universe, one that lived in ideas and dreams, followed different rules. In that realm, the importance and power of objects and people did not follow the dry rules of atoms and gravity. Things made themselves important by the place they held in hopes and fears and in the stories that people told themselves. And now, at this moment, this small sun and its circle of moons and planets truly was the axis of all existence.

Ahriman saw Menkaura, his blind brother, floating in the centre of the solatarium. Cords of light held him aloft as bloody and burning spheres turned through the air. Ahriman felt perception and time and space flatten and bend, felt his inner eye fill with a view that held everything from the sun’s core to night’s edge.