Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Primarchs: Heirs Of The Emperor > Status Update

The sweaty warmth of the sun was delightful. He marvelled at the profusion of growth. He recalled another life, another time in service of his second father, who would deny all this rot and renewal. With the revelation of such splendid, fecund decay he wondered how he could ever have believed in a stable universe. The myth of man’s supremacy was laughable in the face of entropy, and so he did laugh, long and hard.

There once was a being who was divided by himself. Opposed in all he was, contrary, and doomed.
This being was a man who was not a man. He was a sorcerer who despised magic. He was a saviour who had turned to damnation. He was a treasured son who hated his fathers.
He forgot all this, for a while, and when he awoke upon the slimy moss, he recalled nothing of his life.

Kodavron suppressed the shiver that ran through her at that realisation, and forced herself to think clearly. She was one of the finest military minds in the entire Conservation, descended from generations of commanders, and she would not be undone by even such an adverse situation as this. This was her home,by all the gods, and the Imperium’s savages would not desecrate it in such a manner without feeling her wrath.

‘My Legion will not be caught thusly. My Legion is already proficient in any number of ways of making war, both overt and covert, and we maintain this proficiency by using all these tools as often as we may. We are not a swordsman who has mastered a single thrust. We hold mastery over many strokes, all of us do, so that the enemy will not know which is the killing blow.’

Yonnad stood before the console, breathing slowly and steadily, feeling his twin hearts thump sickly in his chest. It was not that he shrank from the righteous prosecution of the foe, for no threat to the Imperium could be permitted to endure, be it xenoform or human in nature. Yonnad would fight any battle, face any foe, and he would do it gladly. But what might come next was not battle; it was extermination.

‘It will not last long,’ Yonnad replied. ‘Our enemies fight with vicious tenacity, but they have nothing to truly threaten the Legiones Astartes. When the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet entered their domain, they should have capitulated at once. The Consus Drift might have been a staging post. Instead they force us to make of it a mass grave.’
He shook his head and sighed. ‘Wasteful.’

‘But we are the Thousand Sons,’ said Hakoris. ‘To succumb to fear and ignorance, that is to fall into the trap laid for us by others. To perceive ourselves as they do.’
Magnus smiled.
Hakoris’ face could do nothing but mirror it.
Was it even possible, he wondered, for a Legiones Astartes warrior to defy the temperament of his own primarch?
An interesting area of enquiry, had he not obsessions enough of his own.

He could feel the eyes of the clan upon him, but death was so woven into the everyday fabric of the utterdark, that no one thought it strange for him to be dumping a body like this. So callous a disregard for the loss of one of their own sickened Nergüi. That was nothing new, of course; life on Cthonia was nothing to be celebrated or cherished.

A ricochet blew out his knee, and a motorised, tooth-bladed axe hammered his side. It tore up through his blood-filled lungs. Nergüi’s father fell beside him, blood pouring from his ruined body.
He died staring into the boy’s shining sea-green eyes with incomprehension.
That was Nergüi’s first memory of murder, but it wouldn’t be his last.
Cthonia was a world built on murder.

Calculus. Logic. Fearlessness. The formula of victory.
Perturabo studied the telemetry of the star system. There was a floating cluster of debris forming an arch between the two moons. It was the only direct path through the system without getting caught in the gas giant’s gravitational field. It was a tight passageway: only one cruiser could fit through at a time. This was to be their undoing.