Chapter 132 - The Lion's Battle
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Sevatar had never imagined he would one day fight alongside the Dark Angels. Alongside the Lion.
Night's Whisper roared in his hands, a chain-glaive carried across ten thousand years, and the Prince of Crows drove headlong into the beastmen. Flayed meat and blood painted the hall in an instant.
The Sons of the Lion weren't about to let an outsider outperform them. They met the charge with power swords and boltguns, and they were not gentle about it.
Even in old age, the Lion's swordsmanship had lost nothing. The Sword of Loyalty moved in his left hand with a speed and precision that left no room for reaction. Beastmen were beheaded mid-stride or cleaved clean through the waist before they understood what was happening.
The Emperor's Shield worked in his right, the reward he'd earned fighting the phantoms of his Primarch brothers, smashing creatures aside as he advanced, turning las-bolts and bolt rounds away without breaking his stride.
Zabriel and Kullen stayed close to the Lion's flanks. Zabriel had the will but not the body anymore; age had taken his edge. It was Kullen who filled the gap, master-crafted power sword in hand, guarding the Lion's side. The Primaris surgery's enhancements were earning their keep.
Slaughter.
One-sided slaughter.
A handful of battle-hardened veterans cutting through a mob with no discipline and no tactics worth the name.
The beastmen broke. They scattered in every direction, fleeing.
When the Lion took the last one's head, the fight was over. Less than 3 minutes, start to finish.
"More will come. We need to find Seraphax before—"
The Lion's voice cut off mid-sentence. His senses had caught something at the far end of the room.
"Then allow me to help you with that, Father."
Seraphax stepped into the light.
The Sorcerer Lord didn't waste words. He opened with a psychic barrage, a torrent of flaming projectiles aimed straight at his Gene-Sire. The Lion caught them on the Emperor's Shield and answered with Illumination, his plasma combi-weapon raised in one smooth motion.
Seraphax deflected the shots with a thought. His eyes narrowed. Then he reached through the Warp and pulled his forces through.
A full warband of Chaos Astartes materialized around him. The Thousand Eyes, every one of them.
Among them: the Slaaneshi cultist emissary who had carried word to the loyalists on burning Karmas. Resurrected again. He came straight for Zabriel, the man who had last taken his head.
The room collapsed into a melee. But these warriors were no match for First Legion veterans. They were a delay, nothing more, buying their Sorcerer Lord the seconds he needed.
Seraphax gave the Lion a thin smile. Then he was gone.
With Sevatar and Kullen covering him, Zabriel put the cultist down a second time. The three of them were the only ones who could still follow the Lion.
"My lord. We have to pursue Seraphax."
"I know."
The Lion nodded to all three of them and led them after their quarry.
He would kill this son of his. Seraphax had become a threat to all of humanity, there was no other outcome.
They moved through corridors, tracking the rot of Warp-taint in the air until it led them to a heavy door.
The Lion kicked it without breaking stride.
How strong is a Primarch? Numbers don't really capture it. The steel door took the blow and produced a single deep, concussive BOOM that rolled through the entire corridor. The hinges tore out of the wall. The door flew inward, hit the floor, and threw up a cloud of dust.
A throne room.
Seraphax's private domain, without question.
Sevatar and the Lion were the two most psychically sensitive members of the group. The moment they crossed the threshold, they looked at each other. Both felt it, the Warp-trap potential coiled inside this room. The four of them spread out, bolt and plasma weapons trained on every shadow, every angle where the Sorcerer Lord might appear.
Then they noticed the mirror.
Seraphax appeared.
He released the projectiles all at once, a storm of psychic bolts with no gap between them.
The impacts hit all four simultaneously. Blue-violet arcs crackled across their power armor, forcing into every joint and servo-bundle. Their muscles locked. A brief, total paralysis.
Even the Lion couldn't avoid it. The Emperor's Shield covered what was in front of him. It couldn't cover his back. Against a psyker, one unguarded moment is all it takes, he can kill you a dozen times before you recover.
The Lion clenched his jaw and drove his will against the psychic restraints. But time was the one thing Seraphax wasn't going to give him.
The next attack came immediately.
Iron chains erupted from the floor beneath them, moving like striking serpents. They clashed and scraped against each other with a sound like shearing metal, twisting at wrong angles, coiling in from the sides, from behind, from below, all at once. They wrapped tight and held.
Limbs. Torsos. Weapons. Everything bound. Nothing moving.
"I am pleased, Father. Your skills have not diminished."
The Sorcerer Lord raised his hand with a smile. The chains responded to his will, lifting the Lion slowly off the ground and drawing him close.
The Lion fought it.
His muscles strained against the iron, power armor servos screaming under the load. By rights, ordinary chains should have snapped the moment a Primarch pulled against them. No mundane material could hold one.
The chains held.
Seraphax explained.
"These are not ordinary iron. Every drop of blood from every human being on Black Sable, I refined the iron from all of it. And I wove my own psychic power into every link."
"If you mean to frighten me, you should know who you're looking at!" the Lion snarled. "You defiled your Legion's honor! You murdered an entire planet! You betrayed everything you swore to protect!"
"I don't care, Father. In that, I take after you, I do whatever it takes to reach my goal."
Seraphax smiled. Then he turned his head.
"Bela. Bring the Zealot's Blade. Finish him."
A figure emerged from the dark. Slowly. Each step measured, as though the floor beneath him was made of doubt.
Bela removed the Lion's helmet. He looked at the aged face of his Gene-Sire and went still for a moment, visibly shaken by what he saw.
"Don't stop." Seraphax's voice came from above, carrying the faintest edge of impatience.
Bela set his jaw. He pressed the blade's tip to the Lion's cheek and drew it across.
Primarch blood ran down the Lion's jaw and fell. It struck the center of the Chaos eight-pointed star carved into the floor, a symbol that had been waiting there long before tonight.
The moment the first drop made contact, the star ignited. Dark crimson light poured from every carved line and flooded the throne room.
The air began to tremble. A low, droning chant rose from all directions at once, sourceless, belonging to no material world, the sound of a ritual finding its voice.
The soul-possession ritual had begun.
Seraphax's eyes were bright with satisfaction. Victory was certain. Every piece was in place.
One person had already broken free.
Sevatar.
Not completely. He had poured every scrap of his psychic power into freeing a single arm. That was all he had.
He didn't use it to free himself. He didn't use it to free the Lion. He understood, with cold clarity, that in this moment freeing anyone was less important than stopping what was happening on that floor.
He raised his chain-glaive.
He threw it with a force that nearly destroyed the weapon outright, a straight, undeviating throw, like a guided missile dropping on a fixed target. It hit the floor with unstoppable momentum.
The chain-glaive punched through the stone.
The teeth tore into a corner of the eight-pointed star. The Chaos rune's light stuttered, flared, and began going out, one segment at a time.
Cracks spread from the impact point in every direction, a web fracturing outward through the floor. Dark crimson light bled from every crack, as if the ritual itself was hemorrhaging. The low chant rose to a shriek.
Then silence.
The ritual was broken.
Seraphax clicked his tongue. Not the rage of a man whose plan had failed, something quieter than that. The sound of someone who had already accounted for this possibility.
He sighed. His fingers moved.
New chains came out of the shadows and found Sevatar. These were tighter than before, denser, wrapping around him layer by layer like a constrictor, compressing steadily. The ceramite of his power armor let out a grinding, tooth-aching SHRIEK as the metal warped. Servos threw sparks. The breastplate began to cave inward. Each breath came harder than the last.
"Jago Sevatarion. First Captain of the Eighth Legion, following my father." Seraphax's tone was almost conversational. "Don't tell me you've found faith in the Emperor again. You were the first one screaming 'Death to the False Emperor' back then."
"That was then!"
Half-crushed and running out of air, Sevatar still had venom left.
"You've been eaten through by the Ruinous Powers! If you were in my Legion, I would kill you myself! You filth!"
"Hmph."
Seraphax didn't bother. This Night Lord meant nothing to him, no history, no connection, no weight. Killing him required no more thought than closing a fist.
He closed his fist.
The chains tightened. The servos in Sevatar's armor gave one last, wretched cry. The cracks across his breastplate spread and widened, fragments breaking away. At this rate he would die from pure compression, strangled, every bone ground to pieces, the way a python finishes its prey.
Then something with absolutely no sense of timing came through the door.
The beastman. The one who had reported the Lion's arrival to Bela and Seraphax in the first place.
It had no idea what it was walking into. It was just following its orders, stumbling into the throne room at a dead run.
"Sorcerer Lord! Sorcerer Lord!" It chose duty over survival instinct, its voice cracking into a shriek from sheer terror.
Seraphax felt a headache coming on. He meant that literally.
A dull, spreading pain moved from his temples through his entire skull. He was moments from completing something that had taken years to arrange. Every piece of his plan was converging on a perfect ending. And still, still, something had to interrupt him.
First Sevatar destroyed the ritual. Now this half-formed, barely-horned creature came screaming into his throne room.
What exactly had he been feeding all this time?
"Speak." Seraphax turned. For the first time, genuine fury showed on the flame-scarred half of his face. "Or I kill you where you stand."
The beastman nearly buckled at the knees. Its voice came out in a high, shaking rush:
"The fleet in orbit — it's under attack! The Imperial fleet is here! And the comms — there's a voice on the comms — it's Horus! It's Horus's voice!"
Silence.
Then the Lion laughed.
"It seems my brother has a gift for timing."
➤ Next: The Lion Can Change
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