Warhammer 40K: System Error, I Summoned the Arch-Traitor!

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Sevatar crouched on the rough stone beam of the high tower like an old bat dissolved into the dark.

His withered fingers pressed against cold stone. He held his breath, ears straining to catch every flicker of movement in the governor's private garden below.

That brief exchange had been enough. Sevatar now knew exactly who those four men in battered power armor were.

Zabriel of Terra. Aphkar. Akae of Caliban. And one called Lohock.

All Dark Angels.

More precisely, Fallen Angels, marked for the hunt by the First Legion.

Now this was news worth having. Sevatar's grin split through the shadows, the scars on his face twisting into something silent and mocking.

Ten thousand years ago, during the Great Crusade, that pompous First Legion, the one that paraded itself as the False Emperor's sharpest, most flawless blade, had been rotten on the inside too.

What made it richer still was the body language of those four.

Only Zabriel, the veteran, showed the Lion anything resembling unguarded trust. The other three were all wariness, hostility, scrutiny, even open provocation.

Ten thousand years ago, the Lion would have hacked them to pieces for less.

But then a voice drifted up to Sevatar's perch, weathered, weary, soaked through with exhaustion.

The Lion spoke.

Not a lofty reprimand.

A quiet confession.

"I failed my father. I failed my brothers. And I fear I have failed my sons as well."

Hssss.

The grin died. Sevatar sucked in a sharp breath.

Is this still the master of the First Legion I knew? He... apologizes?

The Prince of Crows wasn't the only one thrown. Below him, the three Fallen Angels Zabriel had brought were exchanging stunned looks of their own.

"Is this really our Primarch?" Akae, the Caliban-born knight, cut in, hand drifting to the hilt of his sword. "The height is right. But the face, the bearing — both have changed too much. And he isn't half as vengeful as I expected. I suspect an impostor."

Hearing himself appraised like livestock, the Lion's temper kindled. He fixed Akae with a stare.

"Knight-Captain Akae. Your humor hasn't dulled with the years."

"Thank you for the compliment, Father."

"That was not a compliment."

"I know. Whether it is or isn't depends on whether the world has me figured out correctly." Akae drew his Power Sword as he spoke. "I see you brought a weapon as well, Lord Lion. I'm curious. Has your skill rotted along with your face?"

"Akae! Don't be a fool!" Zabriel barked.

Akae only laughed.

"In the Legion, my swordsmanship was the finest."

"Corswain might disagree with that," Lohock, the Crimson Whisper, said dryly.

"Hmph. Corswain was a minor inconvenience to me, and that was at his peak."

Up on the beam, even Sevatar snorted. The Caliban brat had stones, he had to give him that, challenging the Lion himself to a duel of blades.

The image flickered up unbidden in the Prince of Crows' mind: the Lion and the Night Haunter facing off during the Thramas Crusade. He hated remembering it. Self-reproach, and an old, sour resentment toward his then-companion Shen.

If Shen had been stronger, the two of them could have tied up Corswain. Instead, Sevatar had to peel away to save Shen, only to get bogged down himself by that Grand Master Alajos... and Corswain had been free to put a sword through Curze's spine.

Before Sevatar could sink any deeper into that memory, the duel in the garden began.

The Prince of Crows watched it all.

Akae was, in truth, an excellent swordsman. His blade-work was sharp, relentless, driving the Lion back step by step, footwork light and precise. With a little proper training, Sevatar thought, this one could have made a name for himself in the Great Crusade.

But what genuinely surprised him was the Lion himself. The Primarch did not counterattack. Not once. He simply evaded, again and again, dancing around his son's strikes.

That was not like him at all.

Akae's relentless pressure finally cracked the Lion's patience. One stroke came a hair's breadth from severing his arm.

"Do you want me to kill you?!"

A low, guttural roar tore out of the Lion.

"I am attacking you! Why won't you fight back?!"

"Where is the Emperor's once-greatest swordsman?!"

Akae spat the words, then drove in again.

The Lion had had enough. At a speed that everyone present, Sevatar included, could barely track, his boot lashed out and slammed into Akae's breastplate.

Lucky for the knight that the Lion wore no power armor. Lucky too that Sevatar's eye was sharp enough to catch the detail in the Lion's leg, the deliberate, careful pulling of force.

Akae was hurled flat on his back. His sword clattered loose beside him.

The Lion stepped in and pressed his blade against the gorget at Akae's throat. His growl was low.

"Do not test me again."

Absurd.

Sevatar felt like he was staring at a counterfeit Lion El'Jonson.

The Lion he had known would never have tolerated a challenge, not from a stranger, not from his own son. Any provocateur paid for it in blood, and then in life.

This duel, certainly, was proof enough that this was the Lion. But the change in him sat strangely in Sevatar's gut.

His goal achieved, Akae sank to one knee, pulled off his helm, and beamed up at the Primarch like a man without a care in the world.

"Forgive me, my lord. Anyone can mouth pretty words about reconciliation, but in this age trust is expensive. So I tested your identity with steel. Besides, you could have killed me, and you didn't, hm?"

You can't strike a smiling face, as the saying went.

The Lion laughed, the kind of laugh that came from pure exasperation.

"And if I had decided to kill you?"

"Then my two companions would have known you are exactly the same as you ever were, and we would simply leave. The 'reconciliation' would have been nothing but a ruse on your part."

The Lion remembered Akae's gift for self-aggrandizement. He also remembered other sons telling him, more than once, that Akae had been born into the wrong Legion. He belonged with his brother Fulgrim's Emperor's Children, where the strutters and the peacocks gathered.

Next, the Lion turned to the remaining two Fallen. Lohock agreed without hesitation. Fallen or not, his sword had always been the Lion's. Aphkar took a long, heavy moment, then nodded as well.

What a touching little family melodrama. Father and sons, hatchets buried, tears practically welling.

Up on the rooftop, Sevatar rolled his eyes.

Show's over. So a real Lion had come to Avalon, but this old lion's temper had mellowed. That made him less of a threat to the planet, not more.

He'd just go back to being an old butler.

Slowly, carefully, Sevatar rotated his stiff knees, getting ready to slip back along the stone pillar and disappear.

And precisely as his right heel shifted backward —

Click.

A chip of stone the size of a fingernail caught on the anti-slip tread of his boot and came loose.

It tumbled twice down the sloped eaves and dropped into the leaves of the garden below.

The sound was nothing. Barely louder than an insect's chirp.

But there was a Primarch standing in that garden.

A pressure slammed up against Sevatar's hiding place, a gaze like an arrow made physical, pinning him into his own shadow.

Vrrrrm,!

Lohock followed the Lion's eyes in an instant. His plasma gun whined up to charge, that ghost-blue killing light locking onto the high tower beam.

"Who's there?! Come out and face me!"

A killing intent like a great cat's roar boiled out of the Lion, smothering half the garden.

Sevatar froze.

He could vanish back into the dark, vault the wall, be gone before any of them squeezed a trigger. Easy. But it would land on Otharya and her family afterward.

The old butler sighed.

"Don't shoot. I'm coming down."

A dry, hoarse voice slid out of the darkness.

Under the wary gazes of the Lion and his four Fallen sons, a heavily hooded figure dropped from the heights with effortless grace. A silent mid-air roll bled off the impact, and Sevatar landed cleanly on the flagstones, a dozen meters out.

"Throw back your hood!" The Lion's blade leveled at the uninvited guest. "Name yourself!"

"My lord, I think once you see my face, even ten thousand years won't have been enough to make you forget."

The cold, rasping laugh slid out from under the hood.

Sevatar raised both hands slowly, caught the edge of the cowl, and yanked it back.

That gaunt, pale face, scarred in crisscrossed ruin, emerged into the lamplight of the governor's garden.

The Lion's pupils contracted.

One second. That was all it took. Memory dulled by ten thousand years roared back to life, and the old face below the hood snapped into perfect alignment with a name.

The Primarch of the First Legion took a single step forward. His voice carried shock, and a fury so old it should have been ash.

"Yago Sevatarion?!"

The Lion spat out the name that had been buried for ten thousand years.

"You traitor — you're still alive?!"

➤ Next: The Unfamiliar Lion

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