Bonar set his pen down.
Something had shifted.
Through the Warp-mirror, he saw what was unfolding in the material world.
A massive fleet hung in high orbit, raining fire down onto the surface below.
Drop pods struck the ground and cracked open, and Astartes in white armour poured out, cutting through the population with their boltguns.
People ran.
Some grabbed whatever weapons they could find and charged back at the soldiers.
Against that kind of slaughter, it didn’t matter.
Titans strode through the chaos, each artillery round enough to erase a city block.
On the ground, the Astartes pushed forward in steady lines, and alongside the mortal troops they tore through the unarmed in their thousands.
Bonar recognized the markings.
The XVI Legion.
And there, moving through the press of warriors, he caught a single figure.
A low, furious sound escaped his throat.
“Horus…”
He closed the book and stood up.
He had to kill this wicked traitor.
He had to end the prophecy.
“Warmaster.
Something is wrong with these enemies.”
Abaddon reported it and looked out ahead.
“What are these things?”
The planet’s surface should have been barren.
Instead it had become a world of thick muddy swamps and rotting forests.
And the rebels moving through it fought like walking corpses — bodies riddled with shots, still advancing, completely indifferent to the damage.
Yet any Astartes who took even a single hit from their decayed weapons went down and did not get back up.
“Stay calm,” Horus said, his voice level.
“Advance steadily.
Call in fleet artillery to clear that vegetation.”
He wanted to know what had happened here.
More than anything, he wanted to know that.
Then he heard it — a shriek that split the air.
“Horus!.”
The space in front of the Imperial line tore open.
Cascading light spilled across the planet’s surface, and from within that rift, an enormous figure stepped out.
Hooves like a ram’s, thick columns of muscle rising above them.
Heavy, rotting iron armour encased its body.
Its powerful arms were wrapped in countless slender tendrils, one hand gripping a Chainsword, the other a twisted longsword. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Bone wings spread at its back, a tail swaying behind it.
From its head, crowned with two great black horns, blazed a light that burned like an open flame.
Every soldier in the Imperial Army froze.
“By Terra,” an Astartes breathed.
“What is that thing?”
The creature found Horus in almost the same instant.
That single locked gaze was enough.
Horus felt the killing intent come off it like a physical force, vast and bottomless.
“Take it down!” he ordered.
The volley that followed was immense: light rifles from the mortal soldiers, heavy artillery from the Titans, everything.
Every single round hung suspended in the air before the creature, stopped cold, as though time itself had quit.
The creature let out a mocking laugh.
The space around it began to warp, its outline blurring.
It appeared in front of Horus between one blink and the next.
The Chainsword roared down toward his head.
Horus swung his right arm up and caught the blow, but the impact drove him to one knee.
The earth cracked open beneath him.
Then the creature thrust with its other sword.
The speed was beyond anything, even a Primarch couldn’t track it.
Horus brought the Worldbreaker up on pure instinct and blocked the strike, but the force launched him backward regardless.
The Wolf Guard reacted.
They threw themselves at the creature from every direction.
It didn’t help.
The space around it had grown subtly warped, and shots refused to track true.
The warriors had no choice but to close in with blades and hammers.
The creature gave one irritated swing and sent First Captain Abaddon hurtling away.
Then it swept the Chainsword in a single arc, faster than any Astartes could follow, and cut the Wolf Guard in half at the waist.
Still the Astartes charged.
They couldn’t stop it, but they threw themselves at it anyway, buying their father whatever time they could.
The creature looked mildly annoyed.
Its eyes flickered once.
Across the field, Sons of Horus ignited where they stood, burning from the inside out.
A casual wave of its hand sent sheets of lightning crashing through the lines, reducing noble Astartes to pulp of blood and iron.
Then gravity seized them.
Astartes across the field were ripped off the ground and crushed in midair, compacted by some invisible force into solid iron spheres.
The Titans fired.
A devastating, coordinated volley — and it stopped.
The creature blurred and vanished.
Moving with agility that had no business existing in a body that size, it reached up and tore the leg clean off.
The Titan toppled.
On the way down it crushed a Knight that couldn’t clear the impact zone in time.
The remaining Knights charged.
Heavy strides, weapons raised, everything they had.
Before the creature, they moved like old men shuffling toward a grave.
The Chainsword went through them without resistance and left nothing behind.
Horus staggered upright.
He spat blood, looked out at what was happening to his sons, and bellowed:
“Can you only slaughter the weak, you filthy thing?!”
The creature glanced over at him.
It shook a Knight loose from where it was lodged on the Chainsword blade.
Horus felt it smile.
The bone wings beat once.
The creature accelerated in a way that had nothing to do with physics and crossed the gap in an instant.
Horus barely had time to raise the Worldbreaker.
The power hammer was knocked clean out of his grip.
Then the creature had him, pinning him to the ground and dragging him across it, carving a deep furrow through the earth.
When it stopped, a fist crashed into his face.
He tried to drive his Wolf Claw up into the creature’s gut.
The creature was faster.
One foot came down and snapped his right arm.
Then the cold hit him.
The twisted sword punched into his chest.
Bone-deep cold flooded through him instantly, spreading to his fingertips, his throat, everywhere at once.
The creature raised its sword high, the way a hunter raises a trophy.
Horus was the trophy.
Frenzied fire came pouring in from every direction.
The warships in orbit opened up without concern for their own forces on the ground.
None of it reached.
Every last round froze in place around the creature, suspended in the air, going nowhere.
A Warp rift tore open.
The creature tossed Horus through it without ceremony, then walked in after him.
The XVI Legion went silent.
The most destructive, most devastating rebellion in the history of the Imperium of Man had begun.
History would call it the Horus Heresy.
And Horus Lupercal was the first loyal Primarch to fall.