Lucius counterattacked with blistering speed, his first cut removing the warrior's blade, the second opening his throat. A third blow all but severed the head, and he threw himself flat as another spiked halberd stabbed for the space between his shoulder blades. He came to his knees, swords crossed before him to catch the blade as it descended. The strength behind the blow was awesome, far in excess of his own, but Lucius twisted his blades to drive the blade down into the deck. Steel shrieked as the crackling blade tore up the decking. Lucius thundered his fist into the Phoenix Guard's helmet, cracking the visor and drawing a grunt of pain from within. The warrior lost his grip on the halberd and blocked a dazzling cut to the neck with his forearm.

Lucius's blade severed the arm at the elbow, and he spun inside to ram the Laeran blade through the warrior's chest. His victim fell with a gurgling cry, grabbing Lucius's wrist and dragging him down with him. Lucius was pulled to the deck, but kept the momentum of his tumble going as the last Phoenix Guard's halberd swung for him. He twisted in the air and landed lightly on the balls of his feet, leaving the blade trapped within the Phoenix Guard's chest.

Armed only with his Terran blade, Lucius dropped into a theatrical en garde position, keeping his sword high and moving the tip in tiny circles. An old trick, but the Phoenix Guard was not a subtle warrior, and Lucius saw his foe's eyes follow the motion of the blade. Lucius leapt forwards, feinting right as the warrior realised his mistake. A clumsy block swept around, but Lucius had already altered the angle of his thrust. The Terrawatt clans of the Urals had forged the blade in the days before Unity, and its edge had never failed him.

Until now.

The tip of the blade caught the broken nub of an eagle's wing on the warrior's plastron, and the impact sent a jolt of force along the sword. It snapped, and the tip sprang back at Lucius in a spinning arc of razor steel. Even Lucius's preternaturally swift reactions could not save him, and the shard sliced a deep furrow from his left temple to his lower jaw.

The pain was so sudden, so blissful and so wonderfully unexpected that it almost killed him as he took a moment to savour it.

Given a reprieve from death, the Phoenix Guard thrust his halberd towards Lucius. The tip kissed the metal of Lucius's war plate, but that was as close as it came to the swordsman's skin. Lucius hacked the weapon's haft in two with his broken sword and waved an admonishing finger.

'That was careless of me,' he said with a faintly embarrassed sigh. 'Imagine being killed by a sluggard like you. I'd never live it down.'

Before the warrior could reply or lament the loss of his weapon, Lucius spun inside his guard and executed an exquisitely aimed decapitating strike that sent the Phoenix Guard's head spinning across the chamber.

Lucius bent to retrieve the Laeran sword, twisting the handle back and forth to ease the pull of flesh. The blade slid clear and he tore the mask of dried skin from the first warrior's face, curious to see what someone who thought he could fight him and live looked like.

It was an unremarkable face, and in the flat planes of its features, he saw Loken's mocking grin. Lucius's good humour evaporated in an instant, and he stood with a grimace of bitter memory. He stamped down on the warrior's face. Once and the bone broke, twice and the skull cracked. Three times and it caved in, a wet crater of pulverised brain matter and skull fragments.

Angry now, Lucius cleaned his sword on the dried rag of skin, his mood changing like the wind as he held up the skinned face before him like an actor upon the stage.

'Trust me, you're better off,' he said, gesturing to the broken skull of the warrior from whom he had taken the flesh mask. 'He was an ugly bastard, that one.'

He tossed the face aside, making his way to the arched doors of La Fenice.

They had once been adorned with gold and silver leaf, but were now virtually bare. Frantic madmen, desperate to relive the beautiful horrors of the Maraviglia, had worked their hands to bloody nubs of bone in their attempts to gain entry. Lucius saw fragments of splintered fingernails embedded in the doors and plucked a few from the wood, enjoying the thought of how it must have felt to have them ripped from the nail bed.

'What do you hope to achieve?' he asked himself.

He had no answer, but the days since the Legion's departure from Prismatica had only intensified his desire, his need, to see what lay behind the sealed doors to the abandoned theatre. This was disobedience on a grand scale, and the very illicitness of the venture was reason enough to seek it out.

The killing of the Phoenix Guard made withdrawal a moot point anyway.

Lucius pushed open the doors and entered the abandoned theatre.

8.

He drew a lungful of stagnant air as the darkness enfolded him like a midnight lover. It tasted of metal and meat, dust and age. La Fenice had once been a place of magic, but without any breath of life to sustain it, the theatre was little more than an empty shell, bereft of any hint of joy. Lucius struggled to recall the wondrous anarchy that had once filled this place, the stark violence and manic copulation that had filled its parquet and gallery boxes with a celebration of all things visceral.

His memories of the event were grey and dull, like faded echoes instead of the glorious moment of awakening he wanted to remember. The stage was splintered and stained with blood, the walls daubed with smears of reeking fluids and hung with rotted vines of organs that had no place outside of a human body. The songbirds that had trilled from gilded cages were gone, the golden footlights extinguished and the bodies he had expected to find sprawled in decomposition were nowhere to be seen.

Who would have taken them and for what purpose?

A number of answers presented themselves for pleasure, for dissection, for trophies but none seemed likely. Lucius saw no drag marks, simply stained outlines where the bodies had lain, as though they had been drained of substance by something within this room, something that could draw strength from the presence of so much death.

Lucius moved through the echoing vastness of the deserted theatre, his steps carrying him with unerring inevitability towards the centre of the parquet. Above him was the Phoenician's Nest, and he cast a wary glance upwards as he felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten in anticipation of danger. He felt as though malevolent eyes were upon him, but every sense told him he was alone in here.

His gaze was drawn up to the only spot of light in La Fenice, and Lucius was not surprised to find that the portrait of Lord Fulgrim bore no resemblance to the glorious piece of artwork that had presided over the Legion's rebirth. As it appeared in his dreams, the portrait was a work of insipid blandness. To the prosaic senses of mortals, it would have been a masterpiece, but to a warrior of the Emperor's Children it was a lifeless piece.

At least that was what Lucius believed until he met the eyes of this painted Fulgrim.

Like staring deep into an abyss that looks back, Lucius saw a dreadful anguish there, a bottomless well of agony and torment that took his breath away. His mouth fell open in a wordless exhalation of enjoyment to feel such exquisite pain. What manner of being could feel such despair? No mortal or Adeptus Astartes could plunge to such unknowable depths of wretchedness.

Only one such being could know such horror.

Lucius met the eyes of the portrait and knew in a heartbeat the nature of the being held captive within its golden prison.

'Fulgrim,' he breathed. 'My lord...'

The eyes pleaded with him, and his entire body shuddered with the ecstatic knowledge he now possessed. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and a giddy sense of vertigo staggered him as he struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the deception worked upon the Emperor's Children.

Giddy with excitement, Lucius made his way from La Fenice in a fugue state, barely conscious of his surroundings. The enormity of what he now knew filled him like a supernova, the furthest edges of its illumination making his limbs tremble as though an electric charge filled his veins.

He staggered like a drunk through the doors of the theatre, and dropped to his knees as he began to exert a measure of control over his body. Lucius blinked away a confusing mass of light and colour from his eyes as the world around him became more real, more solid and more filled with vibrant possibility.

Alone in the entire galaxy, he knew something that no other did.

Yet even Lucius knew he could not act on this alone.

Galling as it was to admit, he would need help.

'The quiet order,' he whispered. 'I will call the Brotherhood of the Phoenix.'

9.

They gathered in the upper reaches of the Pride of the Emperor, in an observation bay that laid the immense starscape before the mortals who dared traverse its unimaginable gulfs. The Brotherhood of the Phoenix had not assembled since Isstvan, its members too involved in their own gratification to bother with the affairs of others.

Which was not to say that the observation deck went unused. Those who imbibed the toxically hallucinogenic cocktails brewed by Apothecary Fabius found enlightenment in its infinite vistas, and many indulged their freshly awakened carnal hungers with vicarious feasts of flesh and blades. Discarded bodies and torn heaps of broken glass lay strewn throughout the bay, and the occasional moan issued from a jumbled pile of clothing and leather restraints.

It had been a place of quiet reflection, where a warrior could meditate on the means by which he might draw closer to perfection, but now it was an arena of depravity, depthless horror and indulgences beyond all constraints of morality. No one came here to better themselves, and the grand ideals and debates once bandied back and forth were now forgotten echoes, remembered by none and actively flouted by many. If anywhere on board the Pride of the Emperor could be said to embody the utter desolation of the Emperor's Children it was this place.

They arrived in ones and twos, intrigued enough by Lucius's summons to come in hopes of some diversion interesting enough to amuse them for a time. That he so uninterested in any notions of brotherhood had issued such a summons was reason enough to appear, and by the time he judged it wise to begin, Lucius counted twenty warriors before him.

It was more than he had expected.

First Captain Kaesoron had come, as had Marius Vairosean and, more importantly if Lucius's suspicions were confirmed so had Apothecary Fabius. Kalimos, Daimon and Krysander were here, and Ruen of the Twenty-First. Heliton and Abranxe came also, and several others whose names Lucius had not bothered to remember. They regarded him with mild amusement, for he had always been held in faint contempt by the order. Lucius struggled to hold his temper in check.

'Why have you called us here?' demanded Kalimos, his downcast face stitched with rings and toothed hooks. 'This brotherhood has little meaning for us now.'

'I need you to hear something,' said Lucius, staring at First Captain Kaesoron.

'Hear what?' bellowed Vairosean, deaf to how loud he spoke.

'Fulgrim is not who he claims to be,' said Lucius, knowing he had to snare their interest early. 'He is an impostor.'

Krysander laughed and the skin of his face cracked with the force of it. Others joined in, but Lucius's anger was mitigated by the fact that he saw Kaesoron and Fabius narrow their eyes in interest.

'I should kill you for those words,' snarled Daimon, swinging a heavy, spike-headed maul from its shoulder harness. A monstrous weapon, one impact would crush any foe unlucky enough to be on the receiving end.

Ruen circled around behind Lucius, and he heard the whisper of an assassin's dagger being drawn. He tasted the bitter tang of the toxins on its blade, and licked his lips.

'It sounds preposterous, I know,' said Lucius. His life hung on the line here. It was one thing to defeat a handful of Phoenix Guard, quite another to take on twenty captains of the Legion. He grinned at the thought of such a fight, even as he knew he would not survive it.

'Let him speak,' said Fabius in sibilant tones. 'I would hear what the swordsman has to say. I am curious to see what has made him think like this.'

'Aye, let the whelp speak,' said Kaesoron, moving to stand beside Daimon.

Marius Vairosean unlimbered his sonic cannon, its destructive potential filling the observation deck with a bone-rattling bass note as he worked his scarred fingers over the harmonic coils.

The rest of the brotherhood spread out around him, and even as Lucius appreciated his mortal danger, he felt wonderfully alive. Krysander ran a hooked tongue over his lips, his black eyes like those of the primarch, as he slid a red-bladed dagger from a flesh-sheath cut into the meat of his bare thigh.

'I'll have your skin, Lucius,' said the warrior, licking stagnant blood from the blade.

Kalimos unhooked a coiled whip from a beringed belt at his waist, its entire length barbed with the gleaming razor teeth of a carnodon and tipped with an Inwit pain amplifier. It writhed like a snake, pulsing with an intestinal motion as it wrapped itself around its wielder's leg. Abranxe drew two swords from shoulder scabbards, as his blood brother, Heliton, slipped hooked cestus gauntlets over his fists.

They circled him in ever-decreasing rings, elaborating on the violations they would wreak upon him for wasting their time. Each captain sought to outdo the other in the depths of horror he outlined, and Lucius forced himself to ignore the barbs.

'Speak, Lucius,' said Kaesoron. 'Convince us that we have all been lied to.'

Lucius stared into Kaesoron's eyes, meeting his dead gaze, and hoping he had an ally in the First Captain.

'I don't have to,' said Lucius. 'Do I?'

'You are foolish if you think I won't kill you, swordsman,' replied Kaesoron.

'I know you can kill me, First Captain, but that's not what I meant.'

'Then what did you mean?' growled Kalimos, cracking his whip and leaving a bloody line carved into the deck plates.

Lucius scanned the faces around him. Some were as they had been before Isstvan, perfect and patrician, while grotesque flesh masks or androgynous porcelain harlequins hid many others. Still more were disfigured with gouged wounds, repeated burns, chemical scars or multiple piercings.

'Because you already know, don't you, First Captain?' said Lucius.

Kaesoron grinned, no mean feat for a man with little remaining of his face he could call his own. The look of gleeful madness Lucius saw in his eyes confirmed the suspicion that had begun to form on Prismatica.

Kaesoron already knew that Fulgrim was not who he claimed, but one ally among these warriors would not save Lucius if he could not convince the rest.

'You must have seen it, brothers,' said Lucius as Daimon began swinging his maul around his body in tight arcs. 'The Phoenician speaks, but it is not his voice. He tells of our glorious battles like he wasn't even there. He barely remembers the war against the Laer, and the victories of which he does speak sound like he reads them from a history book.'

'Old wars,' sneered Ruen, tasting the poison on his blade. 'Wars won in another's name. What do I care how they are remembered?'

'Who I was is forgotten,' said Heliton. 'Only what I am now is important.'

'A bad dream from which I am awakened,' added Abranxe. 'If the primarch forgets it too, so much the better.'

Lucius drew his sword as the ring of warriors tightened on him. Heliton slammed a spiked fist into his shoulder. Hard enough to hurt, not enough to provoke a reaction. Lucius curbed his natural instinct to take the bastard's head. Kalimos's whip cracked, and Lucius grimaced as it scored a red line at his shoulder, leaving a white tooth embedded in the plate.

Ruen's dagger licked the groove cut by Kalimos's whip, and Lucius felt the nerves in his shoulder spasm as the viral toxin bathed his nerves in fire. He staggered, seeing bright colours dance before his eyes.

'I saw the portrait in La Fenice,' he said through gritted teeth. 'It's him. It's him before the massacre.'

He sensed a pause in the captains' murderous attentions, and let the words pour from him in a stream of rabid consciousness.

'You all saw it, the glory of its life,' he said. 'It was Fulgrim as he was always meant to be, a shining avatar of perfection. A celebration of his transcendent beauty. It was everything we aspire to be, a vision we were compelled to worship. It was all that we beheld of beauty and true gratification and bliss. I have seen it, and that vision is gone. It's as though they've swapped places, like twin souls displaced by unnatural means.'

'If we do not follow the Phoenician then who has commanded us since the battle on the black sands?' demanded Kalimos.

'I do not know, not for sure,' said Lucius. 'I don't understand it all, but the power we saw in the Maraviglia... I saw it take the flesh of that mortal singer and rework it like wax before a flame. You all saw it. The power Fulgrim showed us makes soft clay of flesh, and who is to say what limits it has? Something else came through at Isstvan, something powerful enough to overcome the mind of a primarch.'

'Lord Fulgrim called such beings daemons,' said Marius Vairosean. 'An old word, but an apt one. They scream in the nights we travel between the stars, and scratch at the hull of the ship with nightmares and dark promises. They make glorious music in my skull.'

Lucius nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'A daemon, that's it. You all saw what they could do in La Fenice. The powers they have. Lord Fulgrim has such powers now. I saw him unleash a curse upon a Mechanicum battle engine on Prismatica. Its shields were down, and without even touching it, he caused every living thing inside it to grow and mutate in a storm of flesh that ripped the war machine apart from the inside. Lord Fulgrim was mighty, but even he wasn't that powerful. Only the Crimson King has such powers.'

'Lord Fulgrim is no sorcerer!' cried Abranxe, lunging at Lucius with his swords extended. Lucius batted away the clumsy attack, and his riposte gave Abranxe a neat scar on his cheek for his trouble.

'I didn't say he was,' said Lucius, dropping into a defensive crouch, 'Listen, we knew the Warmaster was treating with such things, but this is a step too far.'

Kaesoron pushed the other captains aside and gripped Lucius by the edges of his breastplate. 'You think Horus Lupercal is behind this?' he snapped.

'I don't know. Maybe,' said Lucius. 'Or maybe Fulgrim went further than any of us thought he ever could.'

Kaesoron glanced over at Fabius, who had remained impassive throughout the unfolding drama. The First Captain drew a curved gutting knife and placed the tip of the blade against the pulsing artery at Lucius's neck. Sensing bloodshed, Daimon's hands slipped down the length of his hammer's shaft in preparation for a crushing blow.

'What say you, Fabius?' demanded Kaesoron. 'Is there any merit to the swordsman's words, or should I kill him right now?'

Fabius ran a hand through his thin white hair, his pinched features belying the strength in his limbs. The hissing, clicking chirurgeon machine that squatted at his back like a parasite reached over his shoulder, caressing Lucius's cheek with a slender blade. Lucius felt its feather-light touch, the blade so sharp that he only knew he had been cut when the blood ran over his lips.

The Apothecary's dark eyes glittered with amusement, and he nodded thoughtfully as though weighing the outcomes of a trial by combat where the fighters were equally matched.

'I too have seen things that have given me cause to wonder what our beloved primarch is becoming,' said Fabius, his desert-parched voice like the hiss of a snake's belly on sand.

'What manner of things?' said Kaesoron.

'A change in the composition of his blood and flesh,' replied Fabius. 'It is as though his molecular structure has begun to dissolve the bonds linking its constituent parts into a cohesive whole.'