‘Down to the dark, we hold the coins of their lives,’ growled Targo, the Cthonian rough-edged as it came from his mouth. Others barked malformed replies. The words, like the clan runes scored into their armour and the gang talismans rattling against their battleplate, were mass-wrought. None of these warriors had even seen Cthonia, much less earned scars in its warrens. They were a mongrel brood pulled from the dark corners of a dozen worlds: Norane, Vortis, Manhansu, Cylor, Neo-geddon and other places forgotten before they were ever known. Gang killers, clan warriors, murder-cult dross. They were alike in only one way – they all had the capacity to survive what had been done to them.

The Apothecaries and bio-adepts had begun their production in batches of tens of thousands. Drugs and gene-activators had been dumped into the prospects. Thousands had died in those first minutes, their bodies pulled from the racks and dragged to the render vats. The process had continued without pause. Cutting, implanting, injecting, information deluged into their brains by hypno-rigs. And as they left each step, another batch of meat took their place. More died. The remainder survived, grew, were hacked into the shape of Space Marines.

When it was over, when they were bonded with armour and oathed to the Legion, they found themselves Sons of Horus, warriors in a war that they had not seen the beginning of and which would likely end long after their death.

Many of the new Sons of Horus took the traditions of the warriors who had been made before the Emperor’s betrayal, and wrapped those trappings around themselves, children aping adults in the hope of finding a way to belong. Cthonian was the language of that belonging, the emblems of its gangs the signs of status. Warrior cults proliferated in the ranks of the newborn: the Sons of the Eye, the Corpse Makers, the Brothers of the Seventh Crow, and more, all threaded with ritual and the mangled cultures of the worlds that had given the Legion its fresh blood.

Saduran spoke the words and wore the marks like the rest, but he had no need of the comfort of belonging. He could see this universe and this time for what it was – an age of cruelty and killers, and he needed no mark to know his place in it.

‘Thirty seconds, stand ready,’ came the pilot’s voice.

Saduran opened his eyes. The red and blue of his helm display flooded his vision. Ikrek sat opposite, bolter clamped to his harness, a red plume topping his studded helm. The sergeant slammed his closed fist into his chest as the assault ram’s booster fired.

‘For the Warmaster!’

A scream vibrated through the fuselage as the magna-melta engaged.

The ram’s impact snapped through Saduran with bone-breaking force. For a second, he was blind as G-force drained the blood from his eyes. Then the mag-harness snapped free and he was running forwards, the deck ringing under his feet.