'You'll lose your head,' answered Henricos and kept cutting.

Around them, the ghosts were receding, fading along with the storm. So too was the sorcerous grip on the Iron Hands' cybernetics.

The last of the cabling and mech-servos came away in a welter of oil and sparks, leaving just the armoured vambrace housing. Beaded with nervous sweat, Henricos pulled up short and the two Iron Hands exhaled in unison.

Stuttering bolter bursts, increasingly more spread out with every passing moment, sounded on the breeze. The storm was dying and the ghosts were gone. Function returned to the stricken Morlocks but the cost revealed by the settling of the sand was dear.

Several dead Cataphractii lay on the ground, impaled on their own blades or bludgeoned by their own mauls. At least three others were slain to the wraith-warriors. Many more were injured.

Sight returning, Desaan winced at his sawn-off limb but gave nodded thanks to the sergeant.

'Judgement of my humours is not always my strongest attribute.'

'You spoke your mind, I spoke mine. No more needs to be said.'

They each gave a cursory salute and the matter was settled.

Desaan nodded again, and then looked around.

Of the enemy casualties, there was no sign.

'Was a battle even fought here?' asked Meduson as he regrouped the Iron Tenth.

'I struck one that could not have lived,' offered Desaan.

'As did I. Its head left its body,' said Tarkan as he joined them.

Desaan scowled. 'Even their dead are craven. They are all gone.'

Further discussion was stalled as a figure emerged from the dissipating darkness. He bore a brutal wound across his gorget and left pauldron, gouges that would have taken his head had they been a centimetre closer to his sternum. The four grooves were deep, scored by an energy weapon.

'So is the primarch,' said Gabriel Santar. 'Lord Manus is missing.'

Will of Iron

'He could not have fallen.'

Meduson's tone carried a trace of doubt that made Santar's jaw clench.

'Stabbed in the back...' Desaan muttered. They had all been horrifically exposed in the valley, but he dismissed the notion immediately.

'The Gorgon is unkillable,' he declared in a louder voice. 'No treacherous coward's blade could even pierce his skin. It's impossible.'

'Then where is he?' asked Meduson.

Though it had returned to its natural hue and geography, the desert valley was still rife with chasms, crags and scattered rocks. Even a cursory appraisal revealed over two dozen possible areas where the primarch could have fallen foul of enemy treachery.

Desaan found he could not answer.

Santar followed his gaze, and opened a comm-feed channel. Surely nothing as mundane as a pitfall could have undone the Gorgon.

'Ironwrought?'

Ruuman was still on the ridgeline, slowly directing his heavy divisions towards the basin now that overwatch was no longer needed.

'There was nothing to be seen, first captain. Nor could I draw a bead on your spectral enemies,' he admitted ruefully.

'And now?' asked Santar, as the rest of the officer cadre clustered around him listened.

'A vast and golden plain, but no obvious sign of our primarch. Or his passing.'

Santar cut the feed. His face was set like scoured iron.

'Lord Manus is unkillable,' he asserted with a glance at Desaan, 'but I won't abandon him. If the eldar do have him, if they have somehow ensnared him, then I pity the fools. They clasp a molten blade with bare flesh and will burn for it.'

His glare found Meduson.

'Captain, you have command of the battalions. Take them to the final node location and confirm its presence. I will remain with fifty warriors to commence a search for our liege-lord.'

Meduson said, 'We could still consolidate, await the Army divisions and press them into the search?'

Santar was emphatic. 'No. If they reach us then I'll use them accordingly. Otherwise, I want you to follow Lord Manus's orders and find the node.'

Nodding, Meduson went to gather the Legion as Santar drew close to his fellow captain and second.

'Get me fifty of our very best. Bring Tarkan and his snipers, Henricos too. The others go with Meduson under his orders until I return. Understood?'

'Yes, first captain.'

Desaan lingered.

'Is there something I have missed, brother-captain?' asked Santar.

'Where is he, Gabriel?'

As the rest of the legionaries were mobilising, Santar looked around at the endless desert.

'Out there, I hope.'

'And if he is not?'

'Then I'll trust that our lord can find his way out of whatever trouble has befallen him. You should do the same.'

'It was the storm, Gabriel. That was no natural thing we fought. There are unseen enemies abroad on the sand.'

'The world around us is changing, Vaakal. You and I have seen it.'

'Some things should be left to the darkness. I do not look forward to their return.'

Santar's silence suggested he agreed.

The world, the entire galaxy, was changing. They felt it, all the Legiones Astartes did. Santar wondered whether that was why the Emperor had returned to Terra. He wondered what that meant for all their futures. Even his favoured sons did not know and Gabriel saw the trauma that had caused echoed in his own father.

Waiting for Desaan who had gone to assemble the search party, he touched the self-inflicted gouges on his war-plate and had time enough to consider the Iron Hands' reliance on bionics. Whoever these foes were, they knew the Legion's strengths and how to undo them. Flesh and iron was a potent fusion but as with any alloy, the balance had to be right to achieve perfect forging. Their metal felt flawed at that moment. Perhaps Meduson had been right about consolidation.

It didn't matter now. They were stretched, but would overcome. That was the Iron Hands' way.

Fifty legionaries were standing in front of him, eager to act, and he met their gaze.

Someone or something had taken the primarch. Santar needed to know where and he needed to know why. And if he had to kill every xenos that cowered under the rocks of the entire desert he would.

'Quadrant by quadrant,' he growled. 'Leave no stone, brothers. You are the primarch's own praetorians. Act like it. Find him.'

Ferrus Manus did not feel lost, yet this place was unfamiliar to him.

It was a cavern, a vast and echoing space that went on into infinite darkness. A long, jagging scar split the vaulted ceiling above and he assumed he had fallen into an unseen chasm in the desert.

Wan sunlight permeated through the crack, but failed to leaven the gloom.

He had tried several times to raise the Morlocks, but the comm-feed was dead. Not even static. The retinal lenses offered little, coming back with a series of blank returns, so he removed his battle-helm.

'How deep am I?' he wondered out loud. There was no echo to the sound, despite the vastness of the cavern. The air was fresh and cool. He felt it against his skin like a caress, but there was the reek of oil and something else... perfume on the breeze. The scent was cloying, utterly anathema to what he was used to. It was decadence and hedonism; as far from solidity and the discipline of function as one could reach.

Slowly, more details of his surroundings resolved as his enhanced sight caught up to his other senses. There were columns, the faded remnants of carved frescoes and sweeping triumphal arches rendered from the rock. He saw monolithic statuary. The subjects were all human but he did not recognise either their faces or their attire. The stone strangers glared at him from on high through time-ravaged features. One, a noble warrior bereft of his head, pointed down at him with an accusing finger.

'I didn't cut your neck, brother,' Ferrus told him and started to walk.

Like his voice, Ferrus's footsteps did not echo and he assumed it was some quirk of geology. Ferrus had spent some time with his brother Vulkan who had illuminated him, oft at length, about the virtues and variances of earth and stone.

'Show me how to craft it into something with function and purpose,' he had replied, much to the other primarch's chagrin. Otherwise, what's the point?

Alike and yet so different were the Gorgon and the Drake.

Ferrus followed the breeze, hoping it would lead to some fissure he could crack open and use to rejoin his Legion. It took him from the vast cavern into a wide gallery that still had the essence of some submerged kingdom of Old Earth. Columns punctuated a long, dark processional and soared to a tall ceiling that was lost in shadow. Underfoot the earth was dark. The odour of crematoria ash and burned flesh pervaded. A mortal man might have been unsettled by it, but Ferrus was far removed from such flesh-born weakness.

Black sand...

The thought came unbidden as he looked down at his armoured feet.

Just like in the valley.

'A tomb or mausoleum, perhaps,' he considered aloud. But there were no crypts, not even a reliquary, yet the gallery stank of death.

Slivers of reflective obsidian, black like the earth, shimmered in the light of luminous crystals as he passed through the gallery. He caught sight of something, or rather a piece of an image, in the glassy rock. A massive conflagration burned in its fathomless darkness, and something else... It was familiar, yet alien.

Like grabbing the broken fragments of a dream, Ferrus could not hold it steady long enough to see it clearly. Whenever he stopped to get a better look, the obsidian merely reflected his face back at him, dour and displeased.

Perhaps it was another quirk of the light and geology of this place. Certainly, there was something unique about it.

Ferrus resisted the urge to unsheathe Forgebreaker and smash the stone asunder, knowing it would achieve nothing, and fended off the desire to vent.

He would not be so easily goaded, and doggedly pressed on.

He was about to leave the long gallery when something else pricked at the primarch's senses.

Ferrus could hear... weeping.

A trick of the wind perhaps? He could feel no breeze, yet the sound carried easily enough.

It was a mourning song, something so baleful that it seeped into his marrow and made his limbs leaden. Grief was not something the primarch had ever experienced. It pained him to lose his sons in battle but that was a risk inherent in the purpose for which they had been bred. He could accept it. He had never felt true loss and yet now it crept upon him, a simulacrum of the real thing. Images filled his mind of his brothers slain or close to death, the skeletal corpse of his father.

'What is this?'

Wrath supplanted grief as Ferrus realised he was the victim of further alien witchery. He defied it, forced strength back into his body only for the plaintive lament to metamorphose into something else, something worse. Death cries haunted the air, as if whatever revenants lingered in this grim place relived their final moments before the end.

'Come out!' Ferrus demanded, seeking out the witch that was haunting him with its sorcery. 'Reveal yourself or I shall tear this chamber apart to find you.'

His challenge was met by the low grind of distant engines, the ear-splitting crescendo of mass gunfire and the feral shout of warriors. Thousands of war sounds crashed together in terrifying cacophony, bent towards murder and death. A theatre of battle evolved around the primarch, one to which he could only listen and even then from a great distance, perhaps through time itself. Ferrus did not need to bear witness to it to know wherever or whenever this was meant to be, it was hell.

As the illusory war ground on, he discerned a voice that made his blood run as ice.

The sound that escaped the primarch's lips was a rasp, ill befitting a lord of battle.

'Gabriel...'

He stopped, tried to listen harder, hoping that closer interrogation would put the lie to his suspicions, but the din abated and silence filled the chamber in its place.

Breathing, low and fast. Chest heaving beneath war-plate forged by a demi-god's own hand. The sudden stillness surrounding him brought fresh and unwelcome disquiet to Ferrus.

The smallest step, tentative and wary, brought the return of hell in his mind. Another and the cries grew louder. One more and they were near deafening.

'Gabriel!'

Ferrus glowered at the darkness, searching every column, every shadow for a sign of his first captain. Frantic and incredulous, acting in a way he did not recognise... In his tortured mindscape, Gabriel Santar was being brutally murdered.

Others followed... Desaan, scorched to ash by atomic flame; Ruuman, stabbed to death by half a dozen spatha blades; even Cistor, the Master of Astropaths, spitting blood and locked in a convulsive death spasm... A thousand dying voices screamed as one.

Ferrus hit earth and realised he was on his knees. Assailed by the apocalyptic visions, he raised silvered hands to his forehead in an effort to push them down. 'Impossible...'

He had seen something in his waking dreamscape, something so terrible he could barely countenance it, let alone give it voice.