Bonar walked toward the massive iron construct.
The bio-soldiers charged him.
Their movements slowed, then stopped, then they were ground into pulp, bone and flesh mixed together into something that had no name.
The Nordics knew something was wrong.
They opened fire.
Las-beams, bullets, plasma bolts, it didn’t matter.
Everything slowed as though time itself had thickened, hanging suspended in the air before him.
The temperature plummeted.
Wildly, impossibly fast, until the soil a hundred meters down froze solid.
Then it reversed.
Heat roared back up from the earth, the ground seeming to boil, waves of it rolling outward, igniting the distant vegetation.
Flames burned across a surface of ice.
Have you ever heard the world cry out?
I listen to the howl of the wind, the breath of this world.
I feel the pulse of the world.
The mountain ranges are the veins of the earth.
The earth applauds for me.
The sky cheers for me.
The world is me, and I am the world.
And now, I want them dead.
Bonar raised his hand, and lightning came down like divine punishment, charring the infantrymen to black cinders.
The bio-soldiers lasted a second longer.
That was all.
He heard the general inside the War Fortress roaring.
Massive shells were being fed into the barrel through the autoloader.
Mere ants.
Bonar gave a light wave of his hand.
The War Fortress’s gun barrel let out a mournful shriek.
His use of Psychic Power was crude, like a man who wanted to water a single flower and instead hurled an entire bucket from across the yard.
The brute force of it tore the ground itself loose.
Scalding magma spilled up from below.
The entire continent shook in frenzied convulsion.
Hills collapsed.
Peaks erupted from the earth.
Magma formed rivers.
Glaciers blanketed the land.
The gun barrel twisted into a spiral, steel screaming all the way.
Bonar stood there breathing hard, eyes locked on the great War Fortress.
Its secondary guns were still firing, but the War Fortress was fleeing now, scrambling in panic like a crab that had its claws ripped off.
Bonar raised both hands.
The War Fortress began to tremble.
Sparks and arcs of electricity burst across its hull.
Its six limbs were torn free by raw force, brutally, all at once.
His hands shook as he lifted them higher.
The six severed limbs hung suspended in the air like six swords of Damocles, aimed straight down at the War Fortress below, stripped now to a flat disc of a shell.
The Nordics howled and tried to run, but,
The limbs drove down into the War Fortress’s interior.
A flash of light.
Then the command tower launched off the top of the hull like a rocket, straight up into the sky, and the sympathetic detonation that followed blasted everything within 20 kilometers into nothing.
People a thousand li away felt the tremors.
Bonar looked at the spot where the War Fortress had been and smiled.
Then exhaustion hit him like a flood.
His legs gave out.
He started to fall.
He fell into golden light.
Fell into his father’s arms.
“Rest now, child.”
That was the last thing Bonar heard before he slept.
The Imperium’s war against the Nordics went smoothly.
The scheme the Nordics had devised was, by every measure, a success.
They had fed false information to the Emperor of Mankind, then unleashed weapons of mass destruction left over from the Golden Age to crush the Imperium in a single blow.
Even the Emperor himself had been temporarily held in check.
They just hadn’t accounted for Bonar.
It had never even crossed their minds that the Imperium could produce a Psyker of that caliber.
The explosion killed nearly everything in its radius.
Of the 18 Adeptus Custodes, only four survived.
The Astartes recruits and Thunder Warriors were wiped out almost to the last.
Word was that the company had been from the IX Legion.
Those warriors were going to be grieving for a long time.
Bonar slept for a full month.
When he woke, he returned to Grandfather Malcador’s side.
The Emperor had been growing busier lately; he had stayed by Bonar’s side for only a few days before returning to the front.
“Grandfather Malcador, I’m in so much pain.
I could feel them clearly.
I could feel what they felt in the moment before they —”
“It’s all right, child.
It’s all in the past now.”
The old man gently stroked Bonar’s head where he lay in bed, patient and kind, just as a grandfather should be.
“Grandfather Malcador…
so what was that power?” Bonar asked.
“Child, that power…
you had best not touch it.”
Bonar nodded.
Grandfather Malcador said not to touch it.
So he wouldn’t touch it.
“Of course,” Grandfather Malcador added, “putting it to simple use isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I can teach you the art of controlling it.”
Malcador had decided to teach Bonar how to use Psychic Power.
He had no real choice, Bonar’s ability could no longer be suppressed.
He had already spoken of this with the Emperor.
“My lord, if things continue this way, I fear there is no solution.”
The Emperor looked at Bonar, still unconscious, and gently stroked his head.
His forehead was warm.
“I have decided to infuse a portion of my power into him.”
Malcador said nothing.
He only nodded.
It was a solution born of necessity.
The violent Psychic Power still reverberated through the Warp.
The Psychic Fluctuation had come close enough to dragging Terra itself into the Warp that nearly every Psyker on the planet died without warning.
All at once.
And within the Warp, in that layered, abstract, indescribable place, there lay a crimson sanctuary.
Eight straight avenues formed a grid across a vast city, and within it gathered pilgrims of every race: graceful Aeldari, savage Orks.
That they could stand in the same place without tearing each other apart was owed entirely to the presence on the Brass Throne.
Countless structures encircled eight magnificent arenas.
Each arena could host 8,888 simultaneous duels, every one filled with glory.
The eight arenas orbited the Skull Fortress like stars, and from the fortress walls, blood boiling like magma poured down in rivers, cascading straight into the moat below.
Upon the Brass Throne sat one of the oldest gods in the universe.
Khorne.
He had existed since the first battle ever fought in the cosmos.
He sat on his throne and watched the fighting and brutality of mortals, and every drop of blood spilled was a pleasure to him.
He never cared whose sake living beings bled for.
Never cared which throat the blade was turned upon.
So long as there was battle, he was glad to grant you power.
Even if you raised the blade against him personally, he would be pleased, it already took supreme courage simply to swing a weapon at the ancient Blood God.
Though not from behind.
That went without saying.
A flicker of clarity appeared in the ancient god’s eyes.
He looked toward the distance, faintly surprised.
That pure fury, transmuted into a fierce and overwhelming desire for slaughter.
And a powerful psychic existence at that.
It nearly made him feel something he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
It lasted only an instant, but he caught enough detail.
This kind of pure existence had no business being here.
He could feel it: that rage, the need to tear enemies apart, rising from the very depths of the soul.
He wanted more.
But.
He looked with a darkened expression toward the neighboring pink sanctuary, thick with decadent music.
Toward the lush, teeming green sanctuary.
Toward that blue Crystal Labyrinth that looked as if someone had crammed it full of LED lights.
He felt their gazes land on him at the same time.
Damn it.
“Oh my, what a kind child — how full of compassion he is.
I can feel his heart in anguish.
He would surely be the finest family among us all,” came a simple, earnest voice.
“No, no, no — that extraordinarily gifted intellect, capable of controlling his own Psychic Storm?
He should become the wisest sorcerer of all,” came another, though it sounded like ten thousand voices tangled together, impossible to pin down.
“Oh~~~~~, a sweet, innocent, oblivious little fool, none of you touch him, he’s mine!” A third voice, silken and alluring.
This was perhaps the only thing the four of them had agreed on in a very long time: getting that “Traceless One” away from the Cursed One.
Khorne suppressed the urge to bellow and picked up a brass horn.
He quietly summoned the greatest warrior daemon under his command.
“Angron.
Take everyone who can move and go smash their dens.”
“As you command, my lord.”
In the mortal world, Khorne’s followers who had been busy killing each other stopped.
Every last one of them, the ones attacking humans, Orks, Aeldari, the undead, turned away from whatever front they were on.
Then, all at once, they charged headlong at the followers of the other three.
➤ Next: The Book of All Knowledge