Beiträge von Manwe

The Emperor was fighting His way through a howling mob of the largest greenskins Horus had ever seen. Most were the equal of a primarch in stature. One even dwarfed the Emperor Himself.

His father fought to reach a fragmenting ring of iron surrounding the blinding plasma core, but the greenskins had Him surrounded. This was a fight not even the Emperor could win alone.

Horus’s sword was broken, his twin bolters empty of shells. The sword had snapped halfway along its length, the edge dulled from hewing countless greenskin bodies. He’d fought his way onto a stepped bridge, killing scores of monstrously swollen orks to reach a crumbling ledge just below the Emperor.

Blood drenched him, his own and that of the orks.

His helmet was long gone, torn away in a grappling, gouging duel with an iron-tusked giant with motorised crusher claws for arms and a fire-belching maw. He’d broken the beast over his knee and hurled its corpse from the bridge. Rogue gravity vortices hurled it up and away.

More of the greenskins followed him onto the bridge, grunting and laughing as they stalked him. Their grim amusement was a mystery to Horus. They were going to die, whether he killed them or they were burned to ash by the colossal plasma reactor’s inevitable destruction.

Who would laugh in the face of their death?

The Emperor fought an armoured giant twice His height and breadth. Its skull was a vast, iron-helmed boulder with elephantine tusks and chisel-like teeth that gleamed dully. Its eyes were coal-red slits of such vicious intelligence that it stole Horus’s breath.

Horus had never seen its equal. No bestiary would include its description for fear of being ridiculed, no magos of the Mechanicum would accept such a specimen could exist.

Six clanking, mechanised limbs bolted through its flesh bore grinding, crackling, sawing, snapping, flame-belching weapons of murder. The Emperor’s armour was burning, the golden wreath now ashes around His neck.

Chugging rotor cannons battered the Emperor’s armour even as claws of lightning tore portions of it away. It was taking every screed of the Emperor’s warrior skill and psychic might to keep the mech-warlord’s weaponry from killing him.

‘Father!’ shouted Horus.

The greenskin turned and saw Horus. It saw the desperation in his face and laughed. A fist like a Reductor siege hammer smashed the Emperor’s sword aside and a fist of green flesh lifted him into the air. It crushed the life from Him with its inhuman power.

‘No!’ yelled Horus, battering his way through the last of the greenskins to reach his father’s side. The Mech-Warlord turned his spinal weapons on Horus, and a blistering series of lightning strikes hammered the walkway.

Horus dodged them all, a wolf on the hunt amid the ash and fire of the world’s ending. He had no weapon, and where that wasn’t normally a handicap to a warrior of the Legions, against this foe it was a definite disadvantage.

No weapon of his would hurt this beast anyway.

But one of its own...

Horus gripped one of the warlord’s mechanised arms, one bearing the spinning brass spheres and crackling tines of its lightning weapon. The arm’s strength was prodigious, but centimetre by centimetre Horus forced it around.

Lightning blasted from the weapon, burning Horus’s hands black. Bone gleamed through the min of his flesh, but what was that pain when set against the loss of a father?

With one last herculean effort, Horus wrenched the arm up as a sawing blast of white-edged lightning empted from the weapon. A searing burst of fire impacted on the Mech-Warlord’s forearm and the limb exploded from the elbow down in a welter of blackened bone and boiling blood. The beast grunted in surprise, dropping the Emperor and staring in dumb fascination at the ruin of its arm.

Seizing the chance He had been given, the Emperor bent low and surged upwards with His bluesteel sword extended. The tip ripped into the Mech-Warlord’s belly and burst from its back in a shower of sparks.

‘Now you die,’ said the Emperor, and ripped His blade up.

It was an awful, agonising, mortal wound. Electrical fire vented from hideous metal organs within the wreckage of the greenskin’s body. It was a murderous wound that not even a beast of such unimaginable proportions could take and live.

Yet that was not the worst of it.

Horus felt the build up of colossal psychic energies and shielded his eyes as a furious light built within the Emperor. Power like nothing he had ever seen his father wield, or even suspected He possessed. All consuming, all powerful, it was the power to extinguish life in every sphere of its existence. Physical flesh turned to ash before it and what ancient faiths had once called a soul was burned out of existence, never to cohere again.

Nothing would ever remain of he who suffered such a fate.

Their body and soul would pass from the finite energy of the universe, to fade into memory and have all that they were wiped from the canvas of existence.

This was as complete a death as it was possible to suffer.

That power blazed along the Emperor’s sword, filling the greenskin with killing light. It erupted in a bellowing golden explosion, and lightning blazed from the coruscating afterimage of its death, arcing from ork to ork as it sought out all those who were kin to the master of Gorro. Unimaginable energies poured from the Emperor, reaching throughout the entirety of the chamber and burning every last shred of alien flesh to a mist of drifting golden ash.

Horus watched as the power of life and death coursed through the Emperor, saw Him swell in stature until He was like unto a god. Wreathed in pellucid amber flames, towering and majestic.

His father never claimed to be a god, and refuted such notions with a vengeance. He had even castigated a son for believing what Horus now saw before him with his very own eyes...

Horus dropped to his knees, overcome with the wonder of what he was witnessing.