Chapter 121 - The Old King of the Forest
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Sevitar moved through the soft rot of fallen leaves, eyes fixed on the broad back ahead of him.
What exactly was a Primarch?
The question had plagued the Prince of Crows for a long time.
Human? Demigod? A monster wearing human skin?
Or a pure killing weapon, forged by hand on Terra by that false emperor?
The Primarchs' abilities varied wildly. His own mad Gene-Sire, Konrad Curze, had possessed precise prophetic sight. And now Lion El'Jonson, walking ahead without a care, could apparently open a forest like this one at will.
Grey mist pressed in on all sides. Dead branches clawed outward in every direction.
"I passed through this forest from Karmas, ten light-years away, and arrived directly in Avalonis."
The Lion spoke without breaking stride, tossing the words back without turning his head.
Sevitar's scarred old face twitched.
Ten light-years.
For any voidship in the Imperium fitted with a Warp drive, that distance was standard. Unremarkable. But a Primarch with no technological assistance, nothing but his own two legs, had crossed interstellar-scale space and mentioned it like it was nothing?
Absurd.
Sevitar buried his shock and quickened his pace.
"My lord, that is a remarkable skill." He set aside his usual sarcasm. "If you could fully master this ability, you could go wherever you wished and bring others along."
He paused. Tactical instinct filled the gap.
"From a military standpoint, in an interstellar war, you could use this forest to lead an elite squad straight past every void defense line and appear directly before the enemy's leadership. A perfect decapitation strike."
Ahead, the Lion's pace slowed.
"A fine proposal." No hesitation, no flattery. "But I haven't mastered this power yet. I cannot control where the forest emerges, let alone guide it with any precision."
Sevitar stopped.
Too candid.
In the Prince of Crows's understanding, any trump card not yet fully mastered had to stay buried. Even with your closest adjutant, you held something back.
And yet this old lion of the First Legion, wary and remote and proud beyond all reason, had just casually handed a lethal secret to him. A traitor. As if it meant nothing.
"You aren't afraid I'll turn around and betray this?" Sevitar raised one eyebrow, voice dropping.
"Before you could, I would wring your neck."
The Lion glanced back. His smile was completely casual, carrying just a hint of mockery.
"Beyond that, Sevitar, I trust you." He turned forward and lengthened his stride. "You're a clever son of Curze. You wouldn't do something that stupid. And even if we ran into Curze somewhere and you told him everything, by then, I'd have this skill perfected long since."
He picked up the pace after that.
The old bastard was absolutely using his Primarch physique to run down an aging, half-spent veteran.
Sevitar ground his teeth, spat, and drove his old legs harder to keep up.
Soon the mist began to thin.
An ancient castle loomed at the end of the path, pocked and ravaged by centuries of decay. A ring of stagnant water circled its base. Before the castle's heavy sealed doors, a small figure waited in silence, draped in a dark and tattered robe.
Not human. Sevitar caught that immediately.
Strange psychic fluctuations rolled off the figure, carrying a quality that had nothing to do with the Warp at all.
"This is..."
"He calls himself a Watcher in the Dark."
The Lion answered before Sevitar could finish and walked straight toward the robed figure.
The figure slowly raised its head. Beneath the wide hood: blackness. No face, no features. And yet Sevitar had the absolute certainty that two lines of sight were moving steadily across him.
The Lion looked down at the small figure, direct as always.
"Why have you guided me here this time?"
[He wants to see you.]
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, impossible to trace.
A sleeve lifted and pointed, without preamble, at Sevitar standing behind the Lion.
[And him.]
Sevitar's frown tightened immediately.
Who would be thinking of him?
In this age of daemons and worse, who would go to such lengths to arrange a meeting with an old man who already had one foot in the grave?
He held his tongue. He followed the Lion up the moss-covered stone steps and through the castle's dark corridor without a word.
They entered the vast and ruined great hall one after the other.
At the center of the hall, on a raised platform, sat a rotting wooden throne.
On the throne sat an old king wearing a crown. The same old angler the Lion had first encountered by the pond when he'd woken in the forest.
Sevitar looked past the Lion's shoulder at the figure.
The old man's abdomen had been slashed open by a blade, a single deep wound. Crimson blood ran steadily down his withered skin and dripped onto the stone floor beneath the throne in a quiet, rhythmic fall.
By rights, a wound like that should have killed him long ago. But the old king sat perfectly upright, eyes sharp and present, scrutinizing the Primarch and the Prince of Crows who had entered his hall.
The Lion gave him a brief look-over, saw nothing alarming, and started up toward the platform.
Behind him, Sevitar stopped dead.
Cold sweat broke across his gaunt face all at once. The muscles down his spine spasmed, beyond any control.
As a psyker, the moment Sevitar's psychic sight made contact with the old king, it went white. Pure, blinding gold, total and absolute, carrying a quality that had nothing to do with the Warp.
What sat on that broken throne was no wandering ghost.
"Wait—"
The word dried in his throat. By the time he reached for it, the Lion had already stopped before the throne.
The towering Primarch and the wounded old king held each other's gaze.
The old king showed no anger at the approach. No sharp command to step back. That ancient, wrinkled face held something else entirely: an anticipation, very carefully buried.
The Lion caught it.
He remembered the Watcher's earlier words: You have not asked the right question.
This kind of circling game disgusted the Lord of the First Legion. He had no patience for riddles. What he wanted was a direct order, someone to point him at a target and tell him to move.
But instinct said the old king was not silent by choice. Something had sealed his lips.
The Lion drew himself up.
"Who are you?"
The old king stared at him. Nothing.
The brief flicker of anticipation disappeared. What replaced it was unmistakable dejection.
Wrong question.
The Lion's brow knotted hard. He shifted his gaze to the wound, the raw, gaping slash across the old man's abdomen.
"How do I heal you?"
This time, there was no dejection at all.
That aged face filled with irritation, and beneath the irritation, something heavier: deep, open disappointment.
Standing over ten meters back, Sevitar read that look with perfect clarity.
The wound is already being handled. That's not your concern, Lion. Do your own job. And don't push further.
At that moment, Sevitar's psychic instinct yanked him to the right.
He turned instinctively toward the massive, dust-filmed floor-to-ceiling window on the right side of the hall.
In the mist outside the glass, a phantom shape flashed past. A wolf, enormous beyond all reason, head raised high. There for a heartbeat. Gone.
The air left Sevitar's lungs.
Before he could sort through what he'd seen, the standoff on the platform had already turned ugly.
The old king's anger was plain. The Lion's temper had risen to match it.
He was not Magnus, that self-righteous fanatic who drowned himself in sorcerous ritual and called it wisdom. He was a hunter. He needed clear targets. Show him where the prey was, and he would act. That was the entirety of it.
The Lord of the First Legion squared his back and glared at the old king. Neither gave ground. The silence in the hall turned thick and strained.
Sevitar took a deep breath, pressed down on his hammering heart, and stepped forward.
He stopped half a meter behind the Lion and dropped his voice.
"Follow your heart, my lord."
The Lion heard him.
He closed his eyes. A long, slow breath, and the tension drained out of him.
When he opened them, the impatience was gone.
No more pressing questions about origins. No more questions about secrets.
"What must I do?" The words came out deliberate, one by one. "How must I do it?"
That was it.
The anger left the old king's face instantly. The disappointment went with it.
Anticipation flooded the hall.
The old man slowly raised his trembling right arm. A gaunt finger extended.
On the left side of the hall, a thick stone wall that had appeared entirely seamless shuddered and ground apart, the deep mechanical groan of ancient stone on stone filling the silence. A hidden passage revealed itself in the gap.
The robed figure that had been standing outside had somehow already taken position at the passage entrance, one sleeve raised in a guiding gesture.
The Lion moved without another word.
Sevitar lifted his foot to follow.
The Watcher in the Dark took a single step sideways and filled the passage doorway.
[You should remain here.]
Sevitar went still.
Ahead, the Lion turned and looked back at him.
"Stay put. Don't wander." A beat. "I'll come find you when I'm done." He turned and followed the small figure into the dimness.
The hidden door slammed shut behind them. Seamless. No sign it had ever moved.
The great hall held two figures now.
Silence.
Only the steady drip of blood on cold stone from the old king's wound. Nothing else.
Sevitar stood in place, staring at the frail and utterly unreachable figure on the throne. The gaunt muscles of his face had started to twitch and convulse.
Ten thousand years. He had lived ten thousand years. He had survived the blood-soaked fury of the Heresy and scraped his way through more hopeless corners than he could name. He had thought, somewhere in the long stretch of it, that he was long past caring about life or death or old grievances.
But recognition hit him, and everything he thought he'd buried came surging back from somewhere deeper than memory. That primal, involuntary reverence, tangled inseparably with a hatred that had been eating at his bones for ten thousand years. Both of them, beyond his control.
This was the source of it all. The wound at the root of everything. The one responsible for the fall of their Gene-Sire.
Sevitar's cracked lips parted.
A laugh came out. Low, hollow, aimed entirely at himself. It echoed in the empty hall and carried something that had no clean name — desolation and helplessness, the particular bitterness of things that cannot be undone.
He knew resistance was meaningless. He knew, with complete clarity, that his own survival, every impossible decade he had clawed through, counted for nothing before this existence.
This old bat. Ten thousand years of outlasting everything the universe had thrown at him.
His knees stiffened. Then gave.
Left leg bent. Right knee cracked against the cold stone floor.
He let his head drop, chin settling against his collar, and when he spoke, his voice was a rasp scraped raw, soaked through with a mockery that went all the way to the bone.
"Hello there, False Emperor."
➤ Next: The Emperor Delivers Equipment
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