Reserve forces of Iron Hands were moving in, encircling the node and its guardians in a ring of black ceramite.

'Laying siege to a foe isn't really our way though, is it, Shadrak?'

Meduson gave a feral smile. 'No, first captain. It is not.'

'They hold tenaciously to something.'

'Sounds like you admire them.'

Santar's eyes never left the holo-slate, thinking and strategising. In his time as equerry, he had learned much from Ferrus Manus. Often the Gorgon stood in Guilliman's shadow but he was just as adroit a tactician. Others claimed his only drawback was that his single-mindedness sometimes left him slightly myopic. Though he would never speak of it aloud, Santar believed Ferrus didn't have the Battle King's patience for endless scenario-making either.

'Admire them? No,' said Santar with absolute certainty. 'I want to understand them so I can better destroy them.' Then he added, 'Have you breached the energy shield even once?'

'We haven't even reached it. I expected their capitulation when facing our obvious numerical superiority, first captain. It's only logical.'

'Perhaps there is no concept of inevitability in the eldar culture.'

Meduson's silence intimated he didn't understand that.

'Suggestions then?' asked Santar.

'Hit them harder, throw more warriors against their defences until they shatter.'

'Fortunately I have brought some with me who are keen to be reunited with their clansmen.'

The Morlocks strained at the leash behind him.

Meduson cast them a quick glance. 'Hungry too.'

'War is an unsubtle thing, Shadrak,' Santar said. 'Sometimes you just have to wield a larger hammer. Show me where you would like it to fall and we'll make that breach for you.'

'That is comforting to hear'

Meduson held up a hand, pausing to listen to a series of reports across the feed as the various commanders advanced or altered position. He met Santar's gaze when he was finished. 'I assumed you'd take command upon your return, first captain. I've already sent our troops' dispositions across the feed to your retinal lens.'

'Not necessary,' said Santar. 'You have this in hand, brother. I want to dirty my claws with xenos blood.'

Meduson thumped his armoured chest, unable to stifle his pride at the first captain's confidence in him.

'Then let your wrath fall here, my lord.'

As the words registered in Santar's feed, an icon lit up on his retinal display. The other troop dispositions overlaid it. The rest of the Morlocks were holding at the very brunt of the battle, attacking the eldar defenders at close quarters. Here the defences were thickest, here the aliens wore heavier armour and brought their most devastating weapons and gun platforms to bear.

Even at a distance it looked ferocious.

Ignoring the cauldron he was about to step into, Santar scrutinised the distant shield as if he could discern a weakness just by looking at it.

'How deep do you think it goes, brother?'

Meduson followed his first captain's eye line. He smiled when he realised what Santar was suggesting.

Santar touched a finger to his gorget to open the comm-feed. 'Ironwrought.'

Ruuman came back between loud salvoes of heavy weapons fire.

'I need you to do something for me...' Santar said, and relayed his plan.

'You are the hammer,' said Meduson when the first captain closed the feed again.

Santar's lightning claws slid free of their sheaths. He fed a crackle of power down the blades.

'Then it's time we swung and struck.'

Arrogance deliberately visible and overflowing, Santar forged through the Iron Hands ranks that parted for him and his entourage of Morlocks. He kept his helmet maglocked to his thigh plate. He was more vulnerable without it, but the warriors around him needed to see his face. Without the primarch, it was up to him to inspire.

Behind his mask of ferocity, he hid his desire to be fighting alongside his lord. He could not imagine a time when that would not be so.

He raised his iron fist to the Morlocks and roared.

'Iron and death!'

An insistent voice inside him intruded on Santar's belligerence and the resounding affirmation of his charges that was hard to ignore.

Father, where are you?

Ferrus scowled.

'Petty tricks,' he stated flatly, though none of the hanging skulls in the abattoir seemed to hear him.

Death did not unnerve the Gorgon, even the prospect of his own. Long ago, in the desolate wastes of Medusa, he had come to terms with the inevitability of his own mortality. He would live longer than most, perhaps even millennia, for who could say what the limits of the Emperor's gene-science were? But he was a warrior and warriors would eventually meet their end at the edge of a blade. Ferrus hoped his ending would be glorious. He also hoped, one day, for peace. But without war he wondered what would then become of his purpose and function?

Scowl became sneer, and Ferrus's lip curled derisively at the strung effigies meant to portend his doom. Swollen with righteous indignation, he had to resist the urge to destroy every one of them.

Without the lambent illumination of the gemstones, it was still light enough to see, even though the light was crimson and pulsing like a vein. The skulls were far enough apart to weave through without the need to touch them. Twisting in the breeze, one of the heads yawed around to face him.

He smiled at the cadaverous doppelganger, his eyes narrowed and cold.

'I would make a handsomer corpse,' he said, and smiled. It sounded like a remark Fulgrim might have made. At the thought of his brother, a sound echoed in the primarch's ear that he recognised, the hissing discord that had dogged his steps.

The hunter had returned. Likely, it had never left. To this Ferrus paid his full attention, for its threat was real and it was close. It was in the chamber with him, slithering alongside him, matching his every step.

'Come into the light, coward,' he snarled. 'I would like to see the enemy who wishes me slain a hundred times over. I will make a lie of that assumption, though you will only suffer one death.'

His belligerent companion did not respond.

Ferrus went on.

Halfway across the grim abattoir, the cluster of the skulls became so tightly packed that Ferrus would have no choice but to ease them apart in order to pass.

Using Forgebreaker like a cattle-prod, he tentatively pushed one of the heads aside.

A slow moan escaped the dead lips. A second of the heads echoed the first, then a third and fourth. Gripped by a sudden and terrifying epidemic, every one of the decaying skulls began to animate in a baleful chorus.

They were alive. Dragged back from damnation, these revenants wearing the flesh of Ferrus Manus had returned to haunt him. Revulsion, rage and disbelief warred inside the primarch and he backed away expecting an attack. A skull brushed his neck. Dry lips touched his skin like a kissed caress. Recoiling, he collided with another. A cheekbone shattered with the force. Bone fragments cascaded. A tooth bit into his armoured shoulder plate and stuck. Ferrus pulled it out, snarling as the moaning rose to a wail. The sound was low and accusing.

You did this to us...

You consigned us to this fate...

We are in limbo because of you!

Ferrus's fists clenched, his teeth locked.

'Shut up!' he hissed. His fury boiled over and he whirled around, bringing Forgebreaker up in front of him.

The dead should stay dead...

Such debasement only confirmed the weakness of flesh and its eventual corruption. The fact it was his own dead visage made no difference to the Gorgon. He had held back before, allowed temperance to stay his hand. Now he would smash every one of the wretched things to bone-dust and memory.

A streak of silver flashed in the darkness, the abattoir's light flowing over it like congealed blood...

Ferrus's first blow never fell.

Agonising hellfire roared up his spine, and bent it almost double. Armour plate cracked with the primarch's sudden and violent convulsions, split like hot metal cooled too fast. Pain that would kill a hundred lesser men flooded his veins and nearly crippled him. Ferrus was bowed, down on one knee and hurting. Spitting phlegm and blood, he unleashed a peal of anger and fought the poison down. Pellucid silver cooled the burning of the wound, miraculous but far from cleansing, and the primarch straightened. Ferrus's other hand was clenched around his wrist. It throbbed beneath the fingers of living metal, told him he had been hurt. Worse, he had been weakened. Forgebreaker was lost, spilled from his numbed grasp and sent clattering to the ground.

He lifted his hand gingerly, like peering beneath battlefield dressings and expecting to be confronted by gangrene. Two puncture wounds, deep and wide like dagger thrusts, pierced his inviolable metal skin. The wounds bubbled with venom and Ferrus watched in disbelief as the living metal corroded before his eyes. As if stung, he withdrew his other hand, afraid that the taint would spread to both. Beneath the bleeding silver, burned and blistered skin was revealed and in it a memory was born...

Standing at the edge of the lava chasm, the beast above.

Breath of cold and sulphur.

Hands raw and bleeding, but taut enough to snap anvils.

The beast was waning. The battle they'd fought had taken its toll.

Molten silver upon its flanks reflected the magma glow and shimmered with heat haze.

Such a magnificent creature.

He would kill it anyway, his dominance proved beyond doubt.

I am stronger.

Fangs bared, a song of fury upon its lips.

He would prove it.

He would find a way to pierce its miraculous flesh and kill it.

The lava beckoned. His forge.

Here, weapons were made and unmade.

I will prove I am stronger.

I must, for if I do not what does that make me?

Memory faded, vague and indistinct. Myth and fact wove a single narrative that left him wondering at the truth of his own origins. Distraction was momentary. Need for survival and his warrior instincts took over. Rather than search for Forgebreaker, Ferrus ripped a spatha from his waist, a thick, meaty blade that was keen-edged and deadly. Numbed by the virulent poison, his wounded arm hung low at his side. Ferrus took the blade in his left hand, adjusting stance and grip before he scored a slit down his wrist to release the poison. Burning brine-yellow fluid seeped like acid down his red raw hand, dripping off bloodied fingers. Pain eased, so too the clamour in his skull that felt like it was being pummelled by a dozen gauntleted fists.

Like my head is being cut from my shoulders...

Ignoring the mournful cries of the heads, shutting out the death rattle of his own voice heard a hundred times over, Ferrus searched the shadows. He turned quickly at the glint of silver in his peripheral vision. It flashed with the urgency of a warning beacon.

Preternatural reflexes saved him from being maimed further. He lashed out, but the creature was swift beyond reason and slid from the primarch's enraged clutches.

Serpentine, but like no snake Ferrus had ever encountered. Silver scaled, it was not unlike the spawn of a beast he had fought long ago. Stars were merely chips of granite in the darkling sky back then, when there was only Medusa and the endless arctic night. Swallowed by shadow, the impression of the creature was fleeting but familiar.

Perhaps we have met before...

A tail crack made the Gorgon turn and he swung again, blindly, and cut only air. He felt slower. Despite excising the poison, the sting of his wound was creeping up his shoulder and into his neck. The phantom pain he'd felt around his throat ever since coming to the desert burned like white fire.

Real or imagined, this creature could hurt him. Pulled from some black abyss of Old Night, it had manifested in this nether realm intent on his undoing. His gaolers knew his past, his primordial fears and desires, and taunted him with visions of an imagined future. They plucked strands of unrealised fate and watched the vibrations resonate through the primarch's demeanour.

Ferrus knew he could not give in to it.

Delirium had started to affect his senses as whatever venom the serpent possessed did its work.

Endure.

The word was like his anchor. Lose that and he would be cast adrift upon an endless sea of chaos.

The hiss of living metal as it dripped from his arm and splashed onto the ground in molten gobbets brought the primarch back around. He shook his head to banish the worst of the fog threatening at the edge of his vision.

Basilisk, khimerae, hydra, such fiends had many names and forms. The creature was none of those. But it was powerful. It had to be to undo what was supposed to be incorruptible.

Is nothing incorruptible?

What were all the frost giants and ice drakes compared to that?

Ferrus pushed the unworthy thoughts aside, realising they were being fed to him. The raging core bubbling beneath his cold exterior began to vent. His grip tightened on the spatha and the leather bindings wound around the hilt cracked.

The weapon had been a gift from Vulkan, and the memory of his brother gave him strength.

'I forged it to fit your hand, Ferrus,' he had said. 'It is your sword, not the equal of Forgebreaker I grant you, but a worthy weapon I hope. You honour me by carrying it.'

Ferrus had turned it over in his hand, his cold eyes running across the filigree and ornate intaglio, the inlaid gemstones and Nocturnean inscription. The fine serrated teeth were diamond-sharp and acid-edged, the metal of its forging dense and unyielding.

Ignoring the weapon's obvious craft and beauty, Ferrus had at once seen its potential as a blade, but chose to be harsh instead of praising his brother's craftsmanship.