Chronicle, entry number forty-nine.
The XVI Legion, the Luna Wolves, is the most disciplined I have ever seen.
When Horus walks into a room, the Astartes don’t snap to attention: they were already at attention, just in case.
First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon looked me up and down and asked whether I was “the writer.” I said I was.
He said: “Write that we won.” I asked: “Before the battle?” He said: “Saves time.”
I.
The Bullet That Never Arrived
The Rhine front smelled of mud, gunpowder and reheated coffee.
On that world, the Empire—another empire, a smaller one, simply called the Empire—had been at war with nearly all its neighbors for years.
Its soldiers flew with rifles and magic orbs, firing spells the way other men fire bullets.
And among all those flying mages there was one whom the enemy themselves called the Devil of the Rhine.
She stood a meter thirty tall.
She had the face of a doll.
And she was, in all likelihood, the most terrifying person on the continent.
Major Tanya von Degurechaff was hovering two thousand meters above the trenches when the Luna Wolves’ ships tore through the clouds.
She didn’t get scared.
Tanya didn’t get scared.
Tanya calculated.
In her previous life she had been a human resources salaryman in Japan, a man who fired people without blinking.
He had died shoved onto the train tracks by a resentful employee, and upon dying had met an entity that called itself God—she called it Being X—which, offended by his lack of faith, had reincarnated him as an orphan girl in a world at war.
The idea was that, in desperation, she would learn to pray.
Tanya had not learned to pray.
She had learned to climb the ladder.
“Unknown targets,” she reported over the radio.
“Hostile until proven otherwise.”
She aimed her rifle at the green-and-white armored giant that had just landed in no-man’s-land.
She loaded an explosive spell with enough power to bring down a bunker.
She fired.
Horus Lupercal raised a hand and caught the magic bullet in midair.
He held it for a moment between two fingers.
The spell sputtered, writhed and went out like a candle.
“Good shot,” said Horus, raising his voice so it would carry up to her.
“Very precise. Poorly chosen.”
Tanya lowered her rifle a few centimeters.
Only a few centimeters.
For her, that was practically fainting.
II.
The Girl Who Belonged to No One
Horus invited her aboard his ship.
She accepted, because her cost-benefit analysis indicated that refusing carried a survival probability of approximately zero.
They sat facing each other in a strategy room where the table was the size of her old apartment.
Horus poured her tea.
She accepted it without drinking.
Abaddon, standing behind his Primarch, watched her the way one watches a scorpion in a glass box.
“I’ve been watching you for a while,” said Horus.
“Your soul carries a mark. Someone has put a leash on you.”
Tanya showed no emotion whatsoever.
On the inside, her brain suffered a small short circuit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You belong to someone else,” Horus went on.
“Something that calls itself a god has been using you as a toy. It pushes you, punishes you, tests you. Am I wrong?”
Tanya set her teacup down on the table.
Very slowly.
“Being X,” she said, in the tone of someone spitting out a word.
“Is that its name?”
“That’s what I call it. It calls itself God. I call it the worst boss I’ve ever had. And I’ve had some very bad bosses. I was one of them.”
Horus burst out laughing.
A frank, enormous laugh that made the cups rattle.
“I like you, Major. Let’s go meet him.”
* * *
It wasn’t hard.
Being X had a habit of showing up every time Tanya was in danger, to offer her salvation in exchange for faith.
That night, on the bridge of Horus’s ship, time stopped.
The crew froze mid-step.
Abaddon froze mid-growl.
A golden light flooded the chamber and a deep, solemn voice said:
“Wayward creature. You may yet repent.”
Tanya rolled her eyes.
Horus, on the other hand, rose from his throne.
He wasn’t frozen.
He stretched, cracked his neck and looked toward the light.
“So you’re the one who plays with little girls,” he said.
The light wavered.
“Who are you? You do not belong to this world. You belong to no world that I have created.”
“My name is Horus. I’m the son of someone who didn’t ask your permission to exist either.”
“I am God.”
“No,” said Horus, walking toward the light.
“You’re a phenomenon. An echo in the Warp with delusions of grandeur and too much free time. I’ve seen things like you in my universe. Over there, we hunt them.”
“Begone from my creation!” thundered the voice.
The light intensified, tried to cast the Primarch out, to pluck him from that world the way one plucks out a splinter.
Horus didn’t move.
He raised his hand, just as he had with the bullet on the Rhine.
And the light went out.
It didn’t explode, didn’t scream, didn’t vanish in a dramatic flash.
It simply went out, like a lamp when someone steps on the cord.
Time began to flow again.
Abaddon finished his growl.
A crewman stumbled.
Tanya stared at the spot where the light had been.
For the first time in two lives, she had no calculation ready.
“There,” said Horus, sitting back down.
“If it bothers you again, let me know.”
“Did you… kill it?” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“I don’t know. Things like that never die completely. But I don’t think it’ll be poking its head in around here again.” He took a sip of tea.
“I’m staying on this world, Major. And you no longer belong to anyone.”
Tanya took a second to answer.
Then she did something none of her subordinates had ever seen her do: she stood to attention and saluted with absolute perfection, without a trace of irony.
“Major Tanya von Degurechaff, at your command.”
“Say it with more conviction.”
“For the Emperor.”
“Better.”
III.
A Regiment for a Terrible Little Girl
The conflict ended in weeks.
No nation on that continent had anything to throw against an Astartes Legion.
The Republic, the Russian Empire, the Northern Alliance: they all signed.
Horus gave Tanya command of a full Astra Militarum regiment, with Leman Russ tanks, artillery and an assigned Commissar.
The Commissar, a man named Oberst Kessler, reported on the first day with an immaculate cap and a bolt pistol on his hip.
“Major,” he said.
“My duty is to make sure this regiment never falters in its faith or its discipline.”
Tanya looked him up and down.
“Commissar, my regiment doesn’t falter. If anyone falters, I send them to the front line. If they survive, they stop faltering.”
Kessler opened his mouth.
He closed it.
He spent two weeks observing her.
At the end of those two weeks, he wrote in his report: “The major is stricter than I am. I request reassignment or, failing that, a vacation.” The request was denied.
Kessler ended up being her best friend, or the closest thing to a friend Tanya had ever had, which was someone she had no plans to fire.
The soldiers of her old battalion, the 203rd Aerial Mage Battalion, received lasguns as a welcome gift.
They looked at them like children looking at new toys.
“It doesn’t need ammo!” shouted Weiss, her second-in-command.
“It recharges in the sun!”
“And there’s no recoil!” squealed Grantz.
Lieutenant Serebryakov, the only person in the world who made coffee good enough for Tanya, took a rifle into the kitchen “to see if it heats water too.” It did.
The Mechanicus opened an investigation.
* * *
The last holdout was the Republic, whose generals refused to sign.
Tanya asked permission to handle it personally.
Horus granted it, on one condition:
“No cities. Armies only.”
“It’s less efficient, my lord.”
“It’s less cruel, Major. Cruelty is inefficient too: it creates enemies you don’t need.”
Tanya thought about it.
She frowned.
She ran the numbers.
Then she nodded, and her expression made it clear she had just learned something neither of her two lives had ever taught her.
The Republic campaign lasted four days.
The archives describe it as “exemplary.” The Republican generals describe it, from their cells, in words I will not repeat in this chronicle.
Chronicle, entry number fifty.
I briefly interviewed Major von Degurechaff.
I asked her what she thought of her new lord.
She answered: “He pays on time, gives clear orders and switched off my old boss with one hand. He’s the best employer in history.” I asked her whether she believed in the Emperor.
She told me: “I believe in the Emperor the same way I believe in gravity: I don’t need faith, it’s enough to have fallen once.” Then she asked me not to publish that.
I’m publishing it anyway.
It’s too good.
IV.
A World Where the Gods Have Names
The Emperor of Mankind almost never took part personally in the Webway campaigns.
He had an Imperium to rule, a palace to guard and a secret project beneath Terra that no one spoke of.
But there was one world he had asked to see with his own eyes.
A world where the gods existed, had first and last names, and behaved exactly as mythology had described them: badly.
He arrived in Greece with Malcador the Sigillite at his side and an escort of golden Custodes, among them Captain-General Constantin Valdor.
They descended on the shores of the Aegean in the middle of a storm.
The sea was raging.
On the horizon, a gigantic figure made of water and rage towered above the waves: Poseidon, god of the seas—and before him, climbing up his body like an ant on an elephant, a pale-skinned man with red tattoos, screaming in fury.
“Kratos,” said Malcador, consulting some ancient scrolls.
“The Ghost of Sparta. He killed his own family, deceived by the god of war. Ever since, he has devoted his life to killing gods.”
“How many so far?”
“Several. It seems he’s just getting started on the important ones.”
The Emperor watched the battle in silence.
Kratos tore out Poseidon’s eyes with his bare hands.
The god fell into the sea with a scream that shook the coast.
The sea grew calm.
Kratos stood on the rocks, soaked, panting, the chains of his blades dragging at his feet.
Then he saw the Custodes.
And the Emperor.
Kratos raised the Blades of Chaos.
“Another god,” he growled.
“Another god come to tell me what to do.”
“I am not a god,” said the Emperor.
“They all say that.”
“No.” The Emperor approached, with no weapon in hand.
“Every one you have met said the opposite.”
Kratos attacked.
Constantin Valdor stepped between them, unhurried.
The Blades of Chaos struck his guardian spear with the sound of a bell.
The Spartan fell back a step, surprised.
No one—not even Ares—had ever stopped him like that.
“Enough,” said the Emperor.
And he reached out a hand toward Kratos’s brow.
* * *
No one knows exactly what he did.
Malcador later described it as “tidying up a house in ruins.” The Emperor did not erase the Spartan’s memories: he erased the nightmares.
The voices that hounded him every night.
The image of his wife and daughter, dead by his own hand, which Ares had carved into his soul so that he would never stop hating.
The poison did not.
Kratos fell to his knees.
He let go of the blades.
For the first time in years, he heard nothing inside his head.
Only the sea.
“What… have you done to me?” he asked, his voice broken.
“I have given you back your silence,” said the Emperor.
“What you do with it is your own affair.”
Kratos stood a long time staring at the water.
Then he lifted his gaze toward Olympus, far above, among the clouds.
“I still want to kill them.”
“I know,” said the Emperor.
“And I want to help you.”
V.
The Fall of Olympus
The war against the Greek gods was short, brutal and, at certain moments, frankly absurd.
Hermes tried to escape by running and discovered that the Custodes, despite their size, were quite fast.
Hera refused to leave her garden and demanded to speak to the manager; the manager turned out to be Malcador, who listened to her with infinite patience for twenty minutes and then ordered her removed “carefully, but quickly.” Hades tried to unleash the dead against the Custodes, and the dead, upon seeing the golden armor, decided they were already dead enough.
The Titaness Gaia, mother of all, rose from the earth, the size of a mountain.
A single Custodian—Brother Aquilon, according to the archives—planted himself before her and stopped her, holding up her finger with the haft of his spear for two full hours while the Mechanicus engineers worked out how to immobilize her.
When they were done, Aquilon lowered his spear, dusted himself off and remarked:
“Heavy.”
It was the only word he said during the entire campaign.
* * *
Zeus was saved for last.
The Emperor could have destroyed him with a thought.
He did not.
He stood aside, at the summit of Olympus, beside Malcador, and let Kratos be the one to climb the final steps.
The fight between father and son—for Zeus was, indeed, Kratos’s father—lasted an entire afternoon.
Lightning against chains.
Thunder against screams.
In the end, Zeus lay on the marble floor of his own palace, without lightning, without throne, without anything.
“My son…” he began.
“No,” said Kratos.
And that was the end of Olympus.
Kratos came down the mountain slowly.
At its foot, the Emperor was waiting for him.
The Spartan stopped before him.
He looked at his own hands, stained with the blood of gods.
Then he did something he had never done before anyone.
He knelt.
“My vengeance is over,” he said.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“I do,” answered the Emperor.
“Rise, my son.”
Malcador, beside him, raised an eyebrow.
He had heard that word from his lord’s lips very few times.
VI.
The New Son
What happened next shook the entire Imperium.
In the Imperium’s universe of origin, the II Astartes Legion never existed.
Its name, its records and its Primarch were erased from history for reasons no one knows and no one dares ask about.
For ten thousand years, in the place where its banner should stand, there has been nothing but a gap.
The Emperor filled that gap.
At a ceremony in the ruins of Olympus, before the Custodes, before Malcador and before one Tobías Garza, who had arrived late because his shuttle landed on the wrong continent, the Emperor named Kratos of Sparta Primarch of the II Legion.
“Your Legion will have your blood and your discipline,” he said.
“Its warriors will be Spartans. They will fight in phalanx, with shield and spear. And they will hunt down anything that calls itself a god and feeds on humanity.”
“What will it be called?” asked Kratos.
The Emperor considered it for a moment.
“The Godeaters.”
Kratos nodded.
He did not smile, because Kratos did not smile.
But something in his face relaxed, like a fist opening for the first time in years.
“There is one more thing,” said the Emperor, and he stepped aside.
Behind him, among the Custodes, stood a young man with the same red tattoos as Kratos, though in a different pattern.
He had the look of someone who had just woken from a very long dream.
Kratos went utterly still.
“Deimos,” he whispered.
His younger brother.
The one the gods had torn from him as a child.
The one he had found, in the end, only to watch him die in his arms.
No one knew how the Emperor had done it.
Malcador, when asked, answered with a single word: “Classified.” Deimos embraced his brother, and Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta, the slayer of gods, wept in front of every one of the Custodes.
None of them ever mentioned it.
Deimos became the first Chapter Master of the Godeaters.
The Legion’s colors would be the red of blood and the white of ash.
Its symbol, an omega pierced by a spear.
* * *
Chronicle, entry number fifty-one.
Today I saw a man regain his silence and a Primarch be born at forty-something.
I don’t know whether to laugh or worry about what it means: if the Emperor can create new Primarchs, what else can he do?
I asked Malcador.
He looked at me for a long while and said: “Write prettily, Garza. And don’t ask so many questions.” Then he gave me a cookie.
I believe it was a threat.
It was oatmeal.
Tomorrow I go back to the Salamanders.
Primarch Vulkan has written me a letter in his own hand: “We have a world with rebel robots and some color-coded warriors who drive very fast. Bring spare socks.” I don’t know why socks.
I suppose I’ll find out.
I’ll be releasing 2 chapters a day until we reach the final 10 chapters.
After that, I’ll switch to 1 chapter per day.
Thank you for reading and for your support!