'Drink, my children,' he said as though what had just happened was a minor thing. 'Fill your chalices and drink to the great victory I give you. We will make war on Prismatica and show the Warmaster how this campaign should be waged!'

The Emperor's Children surged forwards, each eager to be the first to drink the primarch's gift to them. Still clutching Eidolon's head, Fulgrim ascended the plinth to his throne and spread the golden weave of his cloak behind him before sitting. He looked down on his warriors, his gaze at once indulgent and faintly condescending.

Lucius thought back to the way Fulgrim had moved as he drew his sword and cut Eidolon's head from his body. With the eye of a master swordsman, he analysed every movement the primarch's body had made, his stepped lunge, the turn of his shoulder and the pivot of the hips as he struck.

One movement had flowed into another, as if no other could ever have been possible. The primarch's flawless body was always in balance, yet Lucius saw something no one but the greatest living mortal swordsman could ever have seen, and it gave him a delicious thrill of excitement and disappointment.

It was an impossible thought, a treasonous thought, but Lucius couldn't help but follow it through to its logical conclusion.

I could beat you, thought Lucius. If you and I fought right now, I would kill you.

4.

The warriors of the Mechanicum were powerful enemies, augmented and enhanced beyond mortal norms, but Lucius wondered if they even bothered to tutor their warriors in the arts of close combat. He danced through a swirling melee, his twin swords moving in whirling arcs that opened jugulars, removed limbs and lifted the lids off skulls.

These men were brutes, crudely enhanced to be bigger and stronger than most mortals, but there was little subtlety to their power. Anyone could pump a man full of growth chemicals and graft a host of combat augmetics to his frame, but what good was that if they were not trained in their use?

A weaponised servitor creature encased in azure war plate and bearing little that could be called organic came at him. Its shoulder mounted cannon spat a torrent of shells, tearing up shards of glassy, volcanic stone, but Lucius was already moving. He rolled beneath the blitz of fire, slicing away the furiously rotating barrels of the gun and lancing his Terran blade through a thin gap in the abdominal armour plates.

Oily black blood sprayed from the wound like pressurised hydraulic fluid, and Lucius spun inside the reach of its remaining arm. The snapping, energy-wreathed lifter claw slashed low, and Lucius used the arm as a springboard. He vaulted onto a projecting stub of armour plating at the servitor's hip and somersaulted onto its wide shoulders. The silver Laer blade stabbed down into the construct's armoured skull, and Lucius felt something wet and living burst apart inside. He vaulted from the dying servitor's body, pleased to see red wetness on the blade of his sword.

The bio-machine staggered, but did not fall, though it was clear it was dead.

Lucius paused in his killing to flick the blood from his swords as a thunderous detonation mushroomed into the sky with concussive force. A petrochemical stink filled the air as the unrefined promethium burned off and mingled with the fluorocarbon-rich atmosphere to form a potent breath that gave Lucius a momentary flush of pleasurable dizziness.

Emperor's Children swarmed around him, shooting with abandon into the mass of fighting warriors. What had begun as a carefully orchestrated act of mass murder had become a screaming free for all. Hundreds of augmented warriors protected the main refineries and processing plants, but they had no chance of survival. Three companies of Emperor's Children had fallen on the defenders of Prismatica, and there would be no survivors.

Though he had been careful not to let any hint of his true feelings show, Lucius was forced to agree with the late Lord Commander Eidolon's assessment of this venture. It had taken the fleet, led by Andronius and Pride of the Emperor, a mere ten hours to batter a path through the picket line of system monitors and cripple the last defence orbital. Three bulk carriers had been captured, kilometres-long behemoths loaded with billions of tonnes of shimmering, reflective crystals.

With orbital space secure, hunting squadrons of Stormbirds had descended on the main manufactories at the southern tip of a vast forest of towering crystal spires and the slaughter had begun. The Mechanicum facility was burning, aflame from end to end as the Emperor's Children ran rampant through its vast storage silos and hangar-sized refining structures. Vast drilling engines towered above the battling figures, tall augers and serrated drilling arms raised to the sky like the limbs of praying mantises.

Marius Vairosean led his company of shrieking Kakophoni against the western flank of the facility, systematically razing its defences with grim, methodical dogma. Shrieking harmonics of dissonant vibrations echoed from the iron canyons between the towering structures as monstrous sonic weapons tore the atoms of matter apart with resonant frequencies that echoed between worlds.

Buildings collapsed like paper, and coruscating sound waves tore deep gouges in the basalt rock of the planet. The screams of the dying mingled with the musical crescendo of clashing sound waves, a howling symphony of destruction that brought the rapturous madness of the Maraviglia to mind.

Lucius had kept well clear of Marius Vairosean, for the Kakophoni were now virtually deaf and insensate to any but the most ear-splitting noises. A swordsman needed perfect hearing and his inner ear to be flawless. The nerve-shredding rush of excruciatingly vivid sound was simply a pleasure he would have to forego.

Fulgrim himself led the main thrust of the assault into the heart of the Mechanicum defenders, surrounded by hulking Terminators of the Phoenix Guard. Julius Kaesoron fought next to him, bludgeoning a path through the cohorts of weaponised servitors and phalanxes of skitarii that held the chokepoints with an array of automated gun platforms.

Against the brute force of the Phoenician and Kaesoron's warriors, they had no chance. A primarch was an unstoppable force of destruction and Terminator armour made a warrior nigh invincible. Even those warriors who suffered wounds found that their agony only spurred them to greater heights of ecstasy.

Fulgrim was magnificent, a towering avatar of beauty and death, his golden cloak spread behind him and reflecting the variegated sunlight in rainbow arcs of dazzling brightness. His armour shone like a beacon, and where he walked, his grey sword clove through hybrid flesh and iron without pause. He sang as he slew, an aching lament from lost Chemos that spoke of beauty's end and a lost love that can never come again.

More beautiful than anything Coraline Aseneca had sung, it seemed perverse that the machine men dying around him could not appreciate the wonder that surrounded them and the glory of the one who stooped to take their lives. They were dying without knowing how they were honoured and Lucius hated them for that.

Smoke coughed from the interior of a burning refinery, and Lucius howled in frustration as his view of Fulgrim at war was hidden behind a bank of black and violet clouds. He turned from the battles being fought elsewhere, back to his own arena of death.

Fulgrim had entrusted the eastern flank to him, and he had led his warriors in a series of daring feints that drew the enemy from their defensive formations in prosaically predictable ways. One by one, each counterattack had been beheaded until the defensive line had been bled dry and Lucius's warriors had advanced without meeting any real resistance. He wove a red and silver path through the defences, encircling each pocket of resistance and despatching its most promisingly threatening warrior with a flourish of breathtaking skill and spite.

He vaulted onto the remains of a toppled battle engine, a ten-metre-high biped with its princeps compartment breached and pink amniotic gel drooling from the cracked cockpit. Lucius had seen the machine stomp from an armoured hangar at the edge of the defences and briefly considered taking it on. His colossal vanity had intervened, and he had laughed the idea away. Only a fool would dare face such a machine alone, and it had fallen in the crossfire of sonic cannons before it had taken a dozen paces.

Lucius thrust his sword to the scintillating sky, striking an appropriately heroic pose for his warriors to see.

'Onwards! Into the fires and we will show these mechanised men the meaning of pain!'

No sooner had he shouted than the curtain of smoke parted and a thunderous crash of heavy footsteps shook the ground. High above Lucius, a snarling, bestial head emerged from the smoke. Worked in bronze to resemble a hunting mastiff, the battle engine's armoured cockpit was hung with thermal-gusted banners, and the grey and tan carapace boasted a golden eagle and crossed swords emblem.

The towering battle engine emerged from the ruins of the factory, and Lucius felt a wonderfully unexpected jolt of terror as it stalked towards its downed brother.

'Ah, yes,' said Lucius. 'They hunt in pairs.'

The battle engine's arms swung up to fire, clattering as auto-loaders drove heavy-calibre shells into the breeches of monstrously oversized guns. Lucius stood defiantly atop the broken carapace of the Titan's brother, leaping clear as its weapons fired with the deafening thunder of a thousand hammers beating at a war god's anvil. He rolled as he hit the ground, momentarily blinded by the hurricane of stone splinters, dust and propellant gases.

A flaming pyre of wreckage blazed brightly behind him, and he sprang to his feet as he saw the blackened outline of the battle engine silhouetted against the flames. Its head bobbed low, as though hunting his scent, and Lucius tightened his grip on his swords.

The guns roared again, and Emperor's Children warriors vanished in a spraying blitz of shells that churned the ground to splintered rock. Armour disintegrated under the barrage, flesh vaporised, and the screams of the dying were musical, pain-filled and short.

Return fire sprayed the Titan, its shields sparking and flaring with bright squalls of energy discharge. Heavier impacts tore gouges in the invisible energy, like stones hurled into fluorescing water. A missile streaked towards the Titan and the warhead exploded with a red bloom of superheated plasma. Shrieking frequencies ripped the air, but still the shield held; though Lucius knew it must be close to collapse.

'Over here, you bastard!' he shouted, enjoying the mix of wild emotions surging through his body. The modifications Apothecary Fabius had worked on his nervous system responded to the powerful stimulus and rewarded him with a heady cocktail of pleasure responders and hormonal boosters. In an instant, Lucius became faster, stronger and hyper-sensitive to his environment.

Its mastiff head swung to face him and its war horn loosed a screaming howl born of rage and grief. Lucius matched its braying fury with a roar of his own, daring it to come and fight him. His suddenly enhanced senses took in a thousand tiny details in an instant; the fine texture of its metal skin, the cursive gusts of smoke from its weapons, the glint of colourful light on the red cockpit panes, the dripping of coolant gases from the machinery concealed beneath its carapace, and the bitter, iron flavour of the sentience at its heart.

All this and a thousand other sensations washed through Lucius in a fraction of a second. The intensity of it all staggered him, and he blinked away a host of light bursts from behind his eyes. The war horn brayed again as the Titan swung its weapons towards Lucius. The engine was wasting its strength coming for a single warrior, but it had seen him atop its fallen twin and had marked him for death.

Lucius knew he could not fight such a powerful enemy, and turned to run, but before he had taken a single step, the angelic outline of a warrior on wings of gold dropped from the smoke. He bore a flint-knapped blade in one hand and a long-barrelled pistol worked in silver and onyx in the other. His stark white hair flew around his glorious features as the heat bleeding from the Titan's reactor washed over him.

'One for me, I think, Lucius,' said Fulgrim, levelling his pistol at the battle engine.

Fulgrim shot with the calm poise of a duellist on a misty heath. A shining spear of incandescent light imbued with the heat of a newborn star spat from the gun and struck dead centre on the Titan's shields. A shrieking flare of overload banged like a host of shattering mirrors and a powerful sphere of energy pulsed out like a solar flare.

Lucius was hurled from his feet and hit hard against one of the towering crystal spires at the edge of the facility. Pain sawed up and down his back, and he grinned as he tasted blood.

Even through a haze of smoke and pain he saw what happened next with complete clarity.

Fulgrim stood alone before the war machine, his pistol cast aside and his sword held loosely at his side. The Titan's auto-loaders ratcheted canisters of shells around from its rear hoppers, and the breeches snapped shut on a fresh load. Fulgrim's free hand reached up to the battle engine, as though demanding it halt its march.

Lucius laughed at the absurdity of the gesture.

But Fulgrim intended more than simple defiance.

A shimmering nimbus of misty light gathered around the Phoenician, its substance shot with threads of barely visible lightning. Fulgrim's splayed fingers closed into a fist and he twisted his grip as though tearing at unseen ropes.

The battle engine halted in its rampage, the cockpit snapping up and its weapon arms jerking spasmodically as though the machine was suffering a hideous seizure. Fulgrim's outstretched hand continued pulling and twisting at the air, and the Titan's war horn brayed with plaintive horror. The cockpit panes shattered, spraying glass tears to the ground as it slumped back onto its hissing legs.

Lucius watched with horrified fascination as bulging wads of oozing flesh pushed their way out of the cockpit, swelling and pulsating with grotesque life. The gelatinous mass of expanding meat obscured the mastiff head, drooling from the armoured carapace in raw pink tendrils of mutant flesh.

Lucius rose to his feet, awed and wondrously horrified at the death of the battle engine. Amniotic fluid fell in a drizzle from the Titan's ruptured body, its every orifice and exhaust port choked with monstrous growths of rampant flesh culled from its mortal crew. The stench was appalling, and Lucius breathed deeply, savouring the reek of burned meat that was already beginning to decay.

He approached Fulgrim as the primarch gathered up his fallen pistol.

'What did you do?' asked Lucius.

Fulgrim turned his dead black eyes upon him and said, 'A little something I learned from the forces that empower me. A trifle, nothing more.'

Lucius lifted his hand, letting a gobbet of glistening flesh drop into his palm. It was wet and veined with black necrosis. The slimy texture was mildly diverting, and even as he watched, it decayed before his eyes.

'Could I learn how to do something like this?'

Fulgrim laughed and leaned close to Lucius, placing a delicate hand upon his shoulder guard. The primarch's breath was cloying and sweet, like temple smoke and glucose, and the heat of his skin was like being close to a dangerously overused plasma coil. Fulgrim looked deep into his eyes, as though searching for something he already suspected was there. Lucius felt the power of his master's stare, and knew that what held his gaze was far older and more malicious than he could ever hope to be.

'Perhaps you could, swordsman,' said Fulgrim with an amused nod. 'I think you have the potential to be just like me one day.'

Fulgrim looked up, mercifully breaking the connection between them as the sounds of fighting died away.

'Ah, the battle is over,' said the primarch. 'Good. I was beginning to tire of it.'

And without another word, Fulgrim marched into the forest of mirrored spires, leaving Lucius alone with the dead battle engine.

5.

There was beauty here, real beauty, and it made him weep to see such glory.

His warriors saw only the physical properties of the crystal forests, but Fulgrim saw the truth in this place, a truth no one but he had eyes to see.

Spires of glittering, diamond-sheened crystal speared up from the black ground, towering monuments to the galaxy's endless geological wonder. None were less than a hundred metres tall, and even the slenderest was ten metres or more in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of these spires stretched into the distance, covering a vast swathe of ground with their glittering majesty.

They sprouted from the ground in thick clusters, growing like an organic forest of greenery with curling paths between them. He changed direction at random, plunging deeper and deeper into the shimmering forest of crystal with no thought to any direction. It would be easy to become lost in this shifting forest of mirrors, and Fulgrim recalled an apocryphal tale of a lost warrior trapped in an invisible maze upon the Erycinian Highlands of Venus.

The fool had died within arm's reach of an exit, but Fulgrim had no fear of such a fate. He could retrace his route from this impenetrable wilderness of glass without ever needing to open his eyes.

He reached out and ran his fingers along the smooth flanks of the spires, revelling in the tiny imperfections of their silicate surfaces. Some were milky and translucent and others opaque, but the vast majority were sheened with a mirror finish, like a million spear heads belonging to a giant army buried in the black sand.

Fulgrim had learned of an army that had been buried on ancient Terra, a clay army of ghosts to protect a dying emperor who feared retribution from the countless souls he had sent to the afterlife in his wars of conquest. This was no such thing, but the conceit of walking upon the graves of a vast army of colossi amused him, and he sketched a casual salute to the fallen warriors upon whose grave he strolled.

The battle to capture the Mechanicum facility had been mildly diverting, but all too brief. To fight a foe who did not despair at his own destruction or beg for mercy was a dull, lifeless affair, and Fulgrim was disappointed at the Mechanicum's lack of ability to feel the raptures he and his warriors had gifted upon them. He had known what to expect, of course, but it irked him that his opponents had so selfishly denied him the thrill of hearing their screams and feeling the ecstasy of their deaths.

His mood darkened at such boorish behaviour from a foe and he instinctively reached for the Laeran blade before remembering he had given it to the swordsman Lucius. Fulgrim laughed at the idea of Lucius becoming like him. Lucius was touched, yes, but no mortal could ever achieve what he had achieved, become what he had become.

Fulgrim paused in his walk, turning around in a slow circle as he appreciated the true beauty around him. Not the power of planetary sculpting; that was a mere accident of geology. Not the shimmering skies above him; a freak of atmospheric chemical bonds and pollution. No, the true beauty of this place was no accident, no chance occurrence; it was a singular wonder of design, of will and perfection.

His reflections surrounded him, the most incredible perfection captured in living form.

Fulgrim watched his image grow and recede as he took turns at random, enraptured by his exquisite features, his noble countenance and his regal bearing. What other could match him in perfection? Horus? Hardly. Guilliman? Not even close.

Only Sanguinius approached him in aesthetics, but even his wondrous appearance was flawed. What manner of perfect being could be cursed with mutant flesh that marked him as a reminder of ancient myth and belief?

And Ferrus Manus... what of him?

'He is dead!' roared Fulgrim, his voice echoing strangely through the dense layers of the crystal forest.

DEAD, DEAd, DEad, Dead, dead...

Fulgrim spun around as the distorted cries came back to him like accusations. His mood turned thunderous and he drew his sword. He hacked at the nearest spire, sending razor shards of crystalline glass spinning. He hacked at his reflection, daring it to answer him, cutting into its lattice structure with mighty blows of terrible power.

The flint-knapped blade chopped like a woodsman's axe, yet it lost none of its edge at such careless treatment. Sentience beyond human understanding had crafted it, and the power to end gods was bound within its rude appearance.

'My brothers are all cruel and magnificent in their own way!' screamed Fulgrim, each word punctuated by a hewing blow. 'But each is a flawed creation, marred forever by a curse that will one day undo them. I alone am perfect. I alone have been tempered by loss and betrayal!'

At last his capricious anger was spent and he backed away from the ruined spire. In his anger, he had cut through fully half its thickness, and it swayed as its structural stability was undone. Glass popped like gunshots as the spire snapped where Fulgrim had cut into it, and it toppled like a felled tree, smashing its way to the ground in a storm of shattering crystal. Its fall took a dozen others with it, and a vast swathe of the crystal forest fell to the hard ground in a deafening, crashing tumult of broken glass.

The sharp thunder of the falling spires echoed around Fulgrim, a never-ending crescendo of musical destruction, and the pain of so brittle a sound lancing into his brain was a very real pleasure. His warriors would hear the noise, but if they came at all it would not be fear for his life that drew them, but to bask in the sublime sound of such wanton devastation. He wondered how long it had taken these spires to achieve their titanic height. Thousands of years, maybe more.

'Millennia to grow, and a moment to destroy,' he said with more than a hint of wanton spite. 'There's a lesson to be learned here.'

The echoes of the spire's collapse faded and Fulgrim listened for any other voices in the forest. Had he truly heard someone speaking the name of his dead brother or had he imagined it? He held his sword out before him, staring at the glitter-sheen of its flinty surface as a nagging memory that would not coalesce tugged at his consciousness.

He had heard a disembodied voice before, hadn't he?

It had told him dreadful, secret things. Unendurable things.

Fulgrim closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his temple as he tried to remember.

I am here, brother, I will always be here.

Fulgrim looked up in surprise, and an emotion he had long cast aside in his ascent to glory stabbed into his chest like the thrust of a lance driven by the Khan himself.

Deep in the forest of mirrored spires, he saw a powerful warrior in battered war plate the colour of tempered onyx. A face hewn from granite stared back at Fulgrim, and he cried out as he saw the look of endless sorrow in the silver nuggets of his eyes.

'No!' whispered Fulgrim. 'It cannot be...'

Fulgrim clambered through the sharp fangs of glass that jutted from the ground, slicing open his hands and scarring the unblemished plates of his armour in his haste. He staggered like a drunk, smashing aside nubs of crystal and fallen shards that had once stretched out to the heavens.

'What are you?' he yelled, the echoes of his cry bouncing around him so that it seemed as though a host of angry voices demanded answers. He lost sight of the warrior in black as he ran, pushing deeper into the maze of mirrors without heed for any thought other than unmasking this invader of his solitude.

Every time he looked up he saw nothing but his own desperate reflection, his aquiline features twisted and pulled into ugliness by the crazily angled spires. To see his wondrous face so deformed by a quirk of reflective geometry enraged him, and he pulled up short in a ragged clearing of spires.