Gunships touched down amongst the towers of the Palace. Doors pistoned open. Warriors in yellow and black poured out. With them walked Rogal Dorn. He paused on the landing platform as, high above, a chain of orbital mines detonated in a rippling explosion. Debris fell as shooting stars. Fire spread across a sky growing dark with the ships. Aircraft swarmed and spun in high orbit, spreading and chasing flames through the burning air.

It was the thirteenth of Secundus, and the warning sirens, which had sounded for six weeks, rose in voice as the first shells fell from the sky.

The Warp

∞

‘Here we are… Here we are at last…’

The man does not look up from the fire. It has almost died to embers. The glow held in each splintered branch is fading from yellow to red as he watches it. The stranger who stands on the other side of the fire is tall and broad, with a face distilled from the images of kings and conquerors through the ages. He wears black, just like the man sat beside the fire, but his garments are heavy and regal where the seated man’s cloak and clothes are ragged and worn. The pelt across the standing man’s shoulders is thick, and the head of a beast hangs over his shoulder. Rings glint on his gloved fingers, the gems set into each catching the dim light of the burning wood: amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire.

‘Will you not talk now, father?’ says Horus. ‘Will you not tell me the truth?’ He squats down, eyes catching the ember-glow just as the rings on his fingers do. ‘I am here. I am alone.’

The man beside the fire raises His head slowly. He looks old, His skin lined and folded with time, His hair white, but His eyes are black from edge to edge, like the holes left for eyes in the bronze statues of dead ages.

‘You are never alone now,’ He says, and turns His gaze to the shadows of the trees. ‘I see you,’ He says to the dark. For an instant the fire flares bright. Sparks fountain up, and the light is not dim but blinding. Brilliance pours into the spaces between the bare trunks and branches. Things of feather and fur and scale and bone shrink and snarl. But they do not retreat, and after the light fades, the shadows flow back to press close around the ember-glow.

‘Hypocrisy and hubris, father,’ says Horus. ‘I don’t know why it never struck me before it was revealed to me. You are a despot, no better than those whom you cast down to make your realm… A king with a false crown who built His throne on lies and slaughter and maintains it by force. Higher purpose, greater ends to justify any deed, all are just the painted skin on a rotting skull… I know, father. I have seen.’