Chapter 122 - The Emperor Delivers Equipment
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Sevatar had been waiting. Or rather, he had already guessed what the old king on the throne would do.
Curse him. Mock him. Sneer. Whatever it was, Sevatar could accept it. He was already a traitor who had forsaken the Imperium and the Emperor; that much had been settled long ago.
But the old king did none of that.
He simply watched. Quiet. His gaze carried a faint trace of regret and disappointment.
And something else. A thread of expectation. In those ancient eyes, Sevatar saw it clearly: the certainty that he would go and do exactly what the king willed.
That infuriated him.
"I will serve you no longer, false Emperor. You deceived me. You deceived all of us."
"My father included."
He bit the words out through clenched teeth.
"You made my father into that thing. You are a tyrant. A derelict father. A fumbling magician. You are no different from the fallen Horus. His ambition, your hypocrisy. I spit on both."
"Your grand plan was always destined to be an illusion. Just like your flagship. The Imperator Somnium."
There was more he wanted to say. He wanted to tear into the old king, to unload everything. But he found he no longer had the emotional violence of his youth. Age had worn that edge down. He had grown accustomed to quiet. He could not muster the anger.
The last time he had truly been angry was seven thousand years ago.
What remained now was something softer. Reminiscence. Lament. A kind of release. Sevatar drew a slow breath, rose to his feet, and studied the old king with eyes that held too many things at once.
Death to the false Emperor.
He remembered shouting that once. Now those words were practically the signature slogan of every fallen soul and traitor in the galaxy. And had the false Emperor actually been put to death?
No. He had not. The false Emperor still sat upon the Golden Throne, the shared symbol of the human race, the spirit of the Imperium itself. Even as that Imperium rotted from within, the false Emperor remained the name on every suffering soul's lips, the object of their cries, their prayers, their desperate hope.
Sevatar found that his hatred had changed. It was no longer the raw, absolute thing it had been ten thousand years ago.
"What exactly do you want from me?"
"Is my father's return your doing?"
He stared directly into those bright eyes.
The king blinked. A slight nod. Both questions answered at once.
Then the king raised a finger and pointed to the other side of the chamber. Sevatar looked. A new door had appeared. A small robed figure stepped through it and gestured for him to follow.
The Prince of Crows glanced once more at the old king, then strode forward and followed the Dark Watcher through the door.
The world lurched.
From the moment he crossed the threshold, his mind went heavy and slow. But he kept walking.
The pitch-black corridor began to brighten.
Fragments. Countless fragments, flashing past his eyes.
The Prince of Crows went still, his breath catching.
The Unification Wars of Terra. Twenty gestation pods. He watched the Emperor create the primarchs, the whole process laid bare before him. Then the Great Crusade unfurling across the stars. Then the first cracks of the Heresy splitting everything apart.
When he found himself facing the corrupted Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit in first person, he felt something shift inside him. Something that had been locked tight for a very long time.
His thoughts. His certainties.
Then a force seized him and pulled him deeper.
He was the Emperor now.
He watched the corrupted Warmaster bare a smile that turned his blood cold, and heard him speak.
"Hello there...
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Traitor!"
Lion El'Jonson took a solid punch to the left side of his face.
He was standing in a grand hall. And across from him stood his mortal enemy. His brother.
Leman Russ.
The Wolf King's punch sent the Lion staggering.
The Lion was furious. But underneath the fury, something else moved through him: joy, vigilance, and a strange relief, all tangled together.
He had fought Russ before, on Dulan. He knew the truth of the man, that Russ was nothing like the savage brute the galaxy believed him to be. Quite the opposite. The Wolf King possessed astonishing restraint. Real intelligence behind those eyes.
The Lion knew his brother carried terrifying power. But that power only came out when Russ chose to release it.
This Russ was a fake. He was acting exactly like Angron: nothing but reckless, mindless fury.
The Lion seized the opening. A side-body punch, clean and hard. He sent the false Russ crashing into a stone pillar.
But the words stung.
"Traitor! You know that is not the truth!"
The Lion roared.
"Then why do you still dwell on it?"
The Wolf King's image shifted. Russ became Horus.
Not the Horus of the Heresy. The Horus of the Great Crusade: radiant, magnificent, beloved. The Warmaster the galaxy had once adored.
He looked at the Lion with something close to contempt.
"My brother. I will never truly die. An ancient Terran sage once said that a man is only dead when he is forgotten. And you will never forget me. You keep my memory alive because you use it, to avoid becoming what I became. You cannot be your true self, Lion. Not while I still haunt you."
"I know you are not him. That doesn't make me want to destroy that face any less."
The Lion roared and charged. They grappled, crashing into each other.
He thought of what Guilliman had told him on Macragge. That Horus had feared him. Loathed him. And respected him. Because they were the same, the Emperor's two most favored sons, the two most powerful.
After a bout of fighting, Horus's image changed again.
The voice dropped lower.
"You lacked foresight on Diamat."
Perturabo.
The Lion's rage ignited. That bastard had played the loyalist, smiled to his face, and swindled the Ordinatus from his hands. A black mark the Lion would carry forever.
"Perhaps you should have been a brother worth caring about!"
The Lion roared.
Then the Lord of Iron knocked him to the ground. And the boot that came down on his power armor belonged to a white silhouette.
"You should be faster."
Jaghatai Khan.
Then Magnus.
"If you had been smarter, you would have seen it coming."
The red cyclops put the Lion on the floor with a single punch. The Lion spat and looked up.
"I know you're a fake. Magnus doesn't hit this softly."
A foot pressed down on his chestplate.
"You are old and decrepit. You are no longer the warrior you once were."
Mortarion. Mocking.
The Lion didn't answer. He surged up and hurled Mortarion to the ground.
Mortarion became Dorn. The Praetorian's voice was cold stone.
"The Emperor never trusted you."
"Did you think he gave you all his secrets?"
Then Alpharius, eyes moving over him with quiet malice.
"I know everything about you, First Son. Every secret."
"Fair duel!"
Angron hit him like a battering ram. One charge, two stone pillars, the Lion crashing through both.
He tried to catch his breath, tried to swing back, but a massive metal hand closed around him.
"Where is your vengeance?!"
Ferrus Manus. A punch that rattled his skull.
"Where are your stratagems?!"
Corvus Corax drove both feet into his chestplate.
"You were never exceptional, Lion."
Fulgrim pressed a blade to his throat, smiling.
"And yet you have accepted their worship. You let them make you a god."
Lorgar. Sneering.
The Lion saw that bald head and felt his fury spike white-hot. He shoved to his feet and charged, ready to tear the Word Bearer apart.
A blue foot hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling.
"You dare to fault my mistakes?!" Guilliman's voice, furious and contemptuous. "We had a chance to return to Terra. And you chose to burn those planets instead, planets that meant nothing! The First Legion, the mightiest in the Crusade, and you made it useless!"
Then a pair of golden hands, gentle, lifting his face.
"If you had come," Sanguinius said, and his voice was full of grief, "perhaps I would still be alive."
"Perhaps I would not have died either!"
Vulkan's blow sent the Lion flying.
The Lion hit the ground, head spinning. But he understood now. None of these were his real brothers. Every one of them was a mask, a projection. And he already knew who came next.
Curze's voice, close behind him, barely above a whisper.
"You and I are the same. We are both...
-----------
Monsters!"
Sevatar roared and threw a heavy punch.
No. It was not him roaring. He was borrowing the body of the Master of Mankind, channeling its power, driving it forward.
He was locked in brutal combat with the fallen Horus. The sheer force of each collision pressed down on him like a weight he could not lift. Despair settled into his bones.
The body's true owner had struck without strength. Sevatar had felt it. And somewhere in that helplessness, he found that his resentment toward this man had changed. It was no longer simple hatred.
In this first-person battle, he felt it all. The difficulty. The helplessness. Ten thousand years of it, compressed into a single moment.
The warhammer came down. The left side of the Emperor's face split open, skin and flesh parting under the impact.
Through the searing pain, an Astartes stepped between them.
Garviel Loken.
Loken was calling out to the Warmaster, the man he had once followed, the man he had believed in. And the daemon-possessed Horus, against all reason, went still. Just for a moment. The Chaos light burning across his body flickered and dimmed.
One second.
A single second.
And in that second, something cold and certain crystallized in Sevatar's mind. This body had to move. Now. End it in this window before it closed.
Sevatar took control of the Emperor's shell and shaped it into Loken's image. Right in front of the real Loken's eyes, he gripped the golden Emperor's Sword in both hands and drove it through Horus's heart. The Emperor's Talon on his left hand followed the momentum, angling upward, punching through the Warmaster's abdomen.
Blood poured out in a torrent.
The next instant, every image of slaughter shattered.
Sevatar's eyes snapped open. He dragged air into his lungs in great ragged gasps.
He was on his knees. Cold stone beneath him. His entire body soaked through with cold sweat.
Consciousness settled back into his aged frame. He was not aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was still at the far end of the corridor in that strange, lightless space.
Something was heavy in his hands.
He looked down.
On his left hand: two golden power claws, fitted over his fingers. In his right hand: a heavy golden power hammer, solid and real.
Two weapons. Both held in his grip.
The Dark Watcher stood at his side; he had no idea when it had appeared. Its robe-sleeves stirred faintly as it issued its command, a voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
[Take them. Go and deliver them.]
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