He saw the defences of Luna fall silent, bit by bit, and Abaddon – faithful and true Abaddon, first and best of his sons – pause beside a pool of water in a deep chamber as the echo of distant gunfire touched his ears. He saw Abaddon turn his head to look up through the shaft in the ceiling, and see not the sun but Terra looking back with reflected light. He saw Layak, the last of his soul dwindling, watching Abaddon, and listening to the distant song of a prophecy that Horus had not heard.

And the Warmaster’s gaze went on.

He saw the Phalanx roll to come about, its golden hull bleeding from its wounds. Ships detached from its flanks, and fired their engines, boosting back across the gulf towards Terra.

The Phalanx’s engines flared as it arced away from Terra into the depths of the void above the system’s orbital disc. Ships waited there: the scattered vessels of the V Legion, and the remains of the ships that had slowed Perturabo’s passage from Uranus to Jupiter. The Phalanx would find its daughters and cousins, and spill more blood before all was done.

A detail, like the survival of Rogal Dorn, now running to Terra’s walls – a detail that mattered little in the turning of this moment.

‘All ends are mine,’ he said to the light beyond. And in the void his host bore down on the Throneworld of the Imperium.

Terra

It was the thirteenth of Secundus, but day was still to break over the eastern battlements of the Palace. In the night sky above, the grey ship and the Persephone and Ophelia plunged down through the cordons of atmospheric defences as enemies chased after them. The guns of Terra started firing. The thickening atmosphere shook and screamed. Surface batteries opened up. Across the face of Terra, rockets punched into the sky from buried silos.

One of the traitor vanguard struck a drift of mines on the edge of the high orbital defences. Plasma ripped through its hull. More mines detonated. Behind it, more and more ships swarmed into orbit.

The ships that had come from the Phalanx, and across the system from Pluto’s fall, fired their retros as they burned through Terra’s atmosphere. Drop-ships scattered from their flanks and plunged down towards the Palace, fire feathering their wings. Escort fighters fell into formation with them.

The light of the new day falling on the eastern Palace walls shredded to shadows as vast ships crowded across the sun. Across the face of the planet, from the hives still soaked in night to the southern polar fortresses, the guns fired. And far below the pillars of energy pouring up into the sky, people clung to each other in the dark, or cradled weapons that they barely knew how to use.