Chronicle, entry number sixty-four.
I presented myself before Primarch Mortarion wearing a face mask, carrying two spare filters and a medical certificate.
He looked down at me from the height of his scythe with those sunken eyes and said, in his voice like a broken bellows, “Take that off, chronicler. The air here won’t kill you. I might, but I can’t be bothered.” I took it off.
I coughed for an hour.
He laughed.
I think it’s the first time anyone has seen him laugh.
I don’t recommend it to anyone.
I.
The Hatred of the Death Guard
Mortarion hated magic.
It was no ordinary aversion.
It was an ancient, deep-rooted hatred, born in his childhood on Barbarus, a poisoned world ruled by sorcerer-lords who fed on the fear of humans.
Mortarion had grown up as the slave of one of them.
He had spent years breathing the poison of its mountains, surviving on rage alone, and when at last he could lift a scythe, he used it to cut off every one of their heads.
Ever since, every time he saw a spell, he saw those sorcerers.
That was why, when the Mechanicus’s auspexes detected an entire kingdom ruled by magic—with magical queens, wands, monsters and a Magic High Commission that decided the fate of dimensions—the Emperor sent the XIV Legion.
Some thought it was a mistake.
Others, that it was exactly what the kingdom deserved.
The kingdom was called Mewni.
* * *
Mewni was a place of bright colors, fairy-tale castles and peasants who grew corn.
Its royal family, the Butterflies, had ruled for centuries with a magic wand passed down from mother to daughter.
The current queen, Moon, was a serious, cold woman.
Her daughter, Star, was the complete opposite: a chaotic, cheerful, loud princess who had spent some time on Earth with a boy named Marco Diaz and had come back as something close to a revolutionary.
Because Star had discovered the truth about Mewni: that her kingdom had been built on the lands of the monsters, whom the royal family had spent centuries oppressing.
And that her great-great-grandmother, Eclipsa—the “Queen of Darkness,” sealed in crystal for three hundred years—was not a villain but a woman who had fallen in love with a monster and been punished for it.
When the Death Guard arrived, Star had just freed Eclipsa.
And her husband, the gigantic monster Globgor.
And their daughter, little Meteora, who had been turned into a baby and was now sleeping in her mother’s arms.
Everything was starting to fall into place.
And then the fog appeared.
II.
The Green Fog
The Death Guard didn’t arrive in drop pods or ships.
They came on foot through a thick green fog, in their discolored armor, with slow, heavy, inevitable steps.
The peasants of Mewni saw them emerge from the forest and ran to hide in the barns.
Mortarion walked at the front, his scythe Silence on his shoulder and his face hidden behind his rebreather.
“Let the sorcerers come out,” he said.
His voice was heard across the entire kingdom.
Queen Moon came out to meet him with her wand in hand and the Magic High Commission at her back: Omnitraxus Prime, the lord of time and space, a giant cosmic skull; Rhombulus, a crystal monster with snakes for arms who trapped everyone in crystal; and Lekmet, an old man with goat horns who spoke only in bleats.
“I don’t know who you are,” said Moon, “but this kingdom is under the protection of magic.”
“I know,” Mortarion replied.
“That is why I have come.”
* * *
What happened over the following hours is one of the darkest chapters of the Second Great Crusade.
The archives of the XIV Legion sum it up in a single line: “The Magic High Commission of Mewni was neutralized in its entirety.”
Rhombulus tried to encase Mortarion in crystal.
The crystal cracked, darkened and dissolved like wet sugar.
Omnitraxus tried to shunt him into another dimension; the dimensions, apparently, didn’t want to keep him.
Lekmet bleated one last time, with great dignity.
Queen Moon was the last to fall.
She fought with everything she had, with spells that had defeated armies of monsters.
Mortarion didn’t flinch.
When at last he had her on her knees before him, he looked down at her from the height of his scythe.
“Do you know how many sorcerers like you I have seen?” he said.
“All of them believed magic made them better than everyone else.”
“I’m not like them…”
“They all say that.”
III.
Star
Star Butterfly didn’t hide.
She never had.
When the Death Guard reached the castle, she was on the stairs, her wand turned into a bow of light and her eyes full of tears and rage.
“Leave them alone! The monsters haven’t done anything!”
Mortarion observed her with something like curiosity.
“You are not like your mother.”
“I’m worse!”
She fired.
A beam of rainbows, hearts and pure fury struck the Primarch’s armor head-on.
Mortarion took a step back.
Just one.
But he took it.
The Death Guard looked at one another.
They hadn’t seen their Primarch take a step back in ten thousand years.
Mortarion lowered his gaze to the smoking mark on his breastplate.
Then he looked back at the princess.
“Take her,” he said.
“Alive.”
“My lord?”
“Alive. I want to understand why her magic hurt me.”
* * *
Marco Diaz arrived too late.
He had come running from Earth through a portal, his dimensional scissors in his hand and his red hoodie stained with mud.
He saw Star struggling between two Death Guard legionaries.
He saw the castle in flames.
He saw Mortarion.
“STAR!”
He launched himself at the guards with a karate kick.
He bounced off a suit of armor.
He got up.
He tried again.
“Marco, go!” Star screamed.
“Use the scissors!”
Marco opened a portal.
He built up momentum to charge the guards.
And, right at that moment, a bolter round struck beside him, and the shockwave lifted him off the ground and threw him backward.
Straight into the portal.
The portal closed.
Star screamed his name until she had no voice left.
The Death Guard searched the area.
There was no trace of Marco Diaz.
The Mechanicus technicians analyzed the portal’s dimensional signature and couldn’t determine its destination.
“Scissors of undocumented type,” they wrote.
“Destination: indeterminate.”
To this day, no one knows where he ended up.
IV.
Eclipsa and Globgor
Eclipsa and Globgor tried to escape with Meteora through the tunnels beneath the castle.
Globgor, a monster the size of a house, smashed a path forward.
Eclipsa, with her parasol and her sad smile, covered the rear with dark spells.
They were caught at the edge of the forest.
He fought like a giant.
He wrecked two Rhinos.
He brought down a Terminator.
And he fell under the fire of an entire company, without budging from his spot until the very last moment.
Eclipsa knelt beside him.
She didn’t cry.
She stood up, brushed off her dress and turned toward Mortarion with Meteora in her arms.
“Do whatever you want with me,” she said.
“But she hasn’t done anything. She’s only a child.”
Mortarion looked at the baby.
Meteora looked back at him.
She had purple skin, bright eyes and a cross little face.
She grabbed one finger of his gauntleted hand with surprising strength.
The Primarch went very still.
He too had been a child on a world of monsters.
He too had been adopted by one.
“I will take her,” he said at last.
“What are you going to do with her?”
“Raise her,” said Mortarion.
“My way.”
Eclipsa looked at him for a long time.
Then she kissed her daughter’s forehead and handed her over.
The archives say that the Queen of Darkness was “eliminated” afterward.
They don’t say how.
The Death Guard who were there don’t talk about it.
* * *
The conquest of Mewni was complete.
The monsters were freed from the oppression of the royal family.
Magic was banned.
The wands were collected and sealed in a XIV Legion vault.
Pony Head, Star’s friend—a floating unicorn head, bodiless, with a very bad attitude—was found hiding in a castle wardrobe.
The Tech-priests, not knowing exactly what she was, put her in a containment jar.
Ever since, she has floated inside the jar in a laboratory on Barbarus, insulting everyone who walks by.
“Hey, you! Tin can! Get me outta here or I swear I’ll…!”
“Talking specimen,” the Tech-priest noted.
“Hostility level: high. Threat level: nil.”
“NIL?! WHADDAYA MEAN, NIL?!”
Chronicle, entry number sixty-five.
I saw little Meteora aboard Primarch Mortarion’s ship.
She sleeps in a wrought-iron cradle beside his throne.
The Death Guard take turns watching over her.
One of them, the biggest, sings her songs from Barbarus in a voice like thunder.
She laughs.
He doesn’t know what to do about that.
Nobody knows what to do about that.
Princess Star is in a cell.
She doesn’t talk to anyone.
She only asks about Marco.
Every day.
Every guard.
None of them can answer her.
V.
A Boy Who Didn’t Want to Fight
On a very different world, in a Japanese town called Seasoning City, there lived a fourteen-year-old boy named Shigeo Kageyama.
Everyone called him Mob.
Mob had the greatest psychic power in existence on that world.
He could lift buildings, break reality, crush armies with his mind.
But he didn’t want to.
Mob wanted to be normal.
He wanted to make friends, join the bodybuilding club and get a girl named Tsubomi to like him.
He had an internal emotional meter that went up every time he got angry, scared or sad.
When it hit 100%, something exploded.
And he worked—for a pitiful wage—for a con man named Arataka Reigen, who ran a fake exorcism agency and had absolutely no powers whatsoever.
When Magnus the Red arrived on that world, he sensed it at once.
A vast, warm, sleeping presence, like a volcano in the shape of a boy.
“What an extraordinary creature,” he murmured.
“Ahriman, I want to meet him.”
“Yes, my lord,” replied Azhek Ahriman, his Chief Librarian.
“Should we prepare for combat?”
Magnus smiled.
“No. We should prepare for an interview.”
VI.
Reigen
Reigen’s Spirits and Such Consultation Office occupied a tiny office on the third floor of an old building.
When two Space Marines in red armor and a one-eyed giant with golden horns came up the stairs, the whole building creaked.
Reigen was sitting at his desk with his feet up, reading the newspaper.
Mob was on a chair, doing his homework.
The door opened.
Magnus had to stoop very low to get in.
Even so, he banged his horns on the frame.
Reigen lowered the newspaper.
He looked at the giant.
He looked at the Marines.
He looked at Mob.
And in a single second, his professional con man’s brain calculated every possible option and picked the most absurd one.
“Ah, at last!” he exclaimed, standing up and holding out his hand.
“I’ve been expecting you! I’m Arataka Reigen, regional supervisor of psychic safety. And of the cafeteria, if there’s any curry left.”
Magnus looked at him.
Ahriman looked at him.
Mob looked at him.
“Regional… supervisor?” Magnus repeated.
“Of course. Every psychic phenomenon in this district goes through my office. Forms, permits, protocols.” Reigen pointed at Mob with a theatrical flourish.
“This is my apprentice. Very promising. Still in training, so any inquiries go through me.”
Magnus, who could read minds light-years away, read Reigen’s.
He found fear.
A great deal of fear.
One lie stacked on another, like a house of cards.
And, underneath it all, something he hadn’t expected: a huge, clumsy affection for the boy sitting on the chair.
The Primarch burst out laughing.
The laugh was so loud that a window shattered.
“You are an extraordinary liar, Mr. Reigen.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It is one.” Magnus sat down on the floor, because there was no chair that could hold him.
“A liar who survives among monsters. There are few things more difficult in the universe.”
VII.
Claw
The organization called Claw was that world’s real problem.
A group of psychic terrorists who wanted to conquer the planet, led by a man named Toichiro Suzuki, whom everyone called “the Boss.” They had bases all over Japan, soldiers with powers and a plan to seize the government.
Magnus dismantled them in two days.
His Thousand Sons entered the bases through the walls, switched off the Claw soldiers’ powers with a gesture and left them sitting in a circle, waiting to be picked up. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Serizawa, one of Claw’s commanders, a shy man who had lived shut away in his room for years, surrendered the moment they offered him a stable job.
“Does it come with health insurance?” he asked.
“It comes with health insurance,” Ahriman confirmed.
“I accept.”
But the Boss wasn’t at any of the bases.
All they found was a recording, playing in an empty room, in which Suzuki looked into the camera with a calm smile.
“If you’re watching this, it’s because someone stronger than me has arrived in my world. How exciting. Don’t worry. I’ll be back. I always come back.”
Magnus watched the recording three times.
Then he stayed silent for a while.
“Ahriman. Did you sense anything strange during the recording?”
“Strange, my lord?”
“A leak. As if someone were listening from the other side of the Webway.”
Ahriman concentrated.
He shook his head.
“Nothing, my lord.”
“Nor did I,” said Magnus.
“That is why it worries me.”
VIII.
One Hundred Percent
Magnus wanted to see Mob’s true power.
He took him to an open field on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by his Thousand Sons and with a psychic safety barrier raised.
Reigen went too, because Mob didn’t go anywhere without him, and because Reigen refused to leave his “apprentice” alone with “a four-meter-tall guy with horns.”
“I don’t want to fight,” said Mob.
“I am not asking you to fight,” Magnus replied.
“I am asking you to show yourself.”
And carefully, very carefully, he began to press on Mob’s mind.
To push on his emotions.
Not with pain: with memories.
With fear.
With the idea of losing Reigen, his brother, his friends.
Mob’s meter began to rise.
50%.
70%.
90%.
The air vibrated.
The ground cracked.
The Thousand Sons reinforced the barrier.
Ahriman was sweating.
100%.
The Thousand Sons’ psychic barrier—which had withstood daemons of the Warp—began to crack like glass.
A white light, pure and formless, poured out of the boy and rose toward the sky.
Magnus watched it, fascinated, his single eye wide open.
“Extraordinary,” he whispered.
“Absolutely extraordinary.”
The barrier was on the verge of shattering completely when Reigen came running onto the field—no powers, no protection, in his cheap suit and crooked tie—and planted himself in front of the Primarch.
“Hey! You! Mr. Medieval Cosplay!” he shouted.
“Get off the stage right now!”
Magnus blinked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This kid is not an experiment! He’s not a weapon! He’s not a show! He’s a fourteen-year-old boy with math homework!” Reigen turned to Mob, who was floating in the air wrapped in light.
“Mob! Listen to me! You don’t have to do this! You don’t have to prove anything to anyone!”
Mob looked down at him from the air.
“Master…”
“I’m your master! And I’m telling you that’s enough! Let’s go get ramen!”
The light wavered.
It flickered.
And, little by little, it began to fade.
Mob came down to the ground.
The meter went back to zero.
Reigen put a hand on his shoulder, trembling from head to toe.
Magnus looked at them for a long while.
Then he bowed his head, very slowly.
The Thousand Sons looked at one another.
Their Primarch bowed to no one.
“You are right, Mr. Reigen,” said Magnus.
“I let my curiosity carry me away. It is a family flaw.”
“Well, control it,” said Reigen, his voice cracking.
“Control it a lot.”
IX.
Re-education and a New Post
Seasoning City was integrated into the Imperium without a single shot being fired.
Schools for psykers were opened under the supervision of the Thousand Sons.
The members of Claw were re-educated.
Serizawa got his health insurance.
Dimple, a green dumpling-shaped spirit who had spent months stuck to Mob with the intention of using him to found a religion, was captured by Ahriman and locked in a psychic cage the size of a fishbowl.
“This is an outrage!” shouted Dimple, pressed against the bars.
“I’m a god! I have followers!”
“You have three,” said Ahriman.
“And one of them is a cat.”
Reigen, for his part, received an official letter from the Imperium with a golden seal.
He opened it with trembling hands.
It said he had been appointed Diplomatic Psychic Representative of the Imperium in Seasoning City, with a salary, an office and the right to an escort of two Thousand Sons.
“Is this real?” he asked Mob.
“I think so, Master.”
“I don’t have any psychic powers.”
“They already know, Master.”
Reigen stared at the letter.
Then he tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, next to his heart.
“Well,” he said.
“I guess now I have to learn to lie in High Gothic.”
* * *
Chronicle, entry number sixty-six.
Two Primarchs, two worlds with magic.
One banned it; the other embraced it.
One took a little girl away to raise her; the other returned a boy to his master.
I asked Magnus which of the two had done the right thing.
He looked at me with his single eye and said, “Tobías, if my brother Mortarion and I ever agreed on anything, I would know the universe was ending.”
Then he told me something else, quietly, when he thought I had stopped writing.
He told me he had felt the leak again.
That sensation of someone listening from the other side of the Webway.
He said it wasn’t Malcador.
He said it wasn’t the Emperor.
He said it smelled of rust, of gasoline and of something else.
Something he knew very well and didn’t want to name.
Thus ended what the archives will call the Book of Secondhand Heroes.
What comes next, according to Primarch Guilliman, is “the part where we start running into things that are truly dangerous.” He told me his next destination was a tournament.
I asked him what kind of tournament.
He told me: “One where the prize is that they don’t erase your universe.” I thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.