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

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After completing his military operations against the Tau Empire, Horus turned his fleet north toward Ultramar, moving to close the jaws of a pincer with Guilliman against the Plague Fleet.

No Astropaths were needed. Each understood the other's tactics and objectives without a word exchanged.

That silent coordination left Mortarion strategically blind. The Lord of Death had no choice but to fix his full attention on Guilliman pressing from the front, while Horus's fleet quietly curved around behind him, and he never noticed.

Fulgrim's fleet had its own problems. The fallen Phoenician was fighting his way toward Mortarion's position, but progress was grinding. He had Orks and Necrons erupting out of the northwest to deal with, and Guilliman's mobile squadrons nipping at his flanks with harassing strikes whenever they found an opening.

Tactically, the fallen serpent had committed a sin most military commanders would consider unforgivable. He knew it and did not care. His only objective was the clone. The cost in Emperor's Children ships and lives did not register as a factor worth calculating.

After months of brutal fighting, Guilliman's fleet reached Iax.

This world had once been one of the most radiant jewels in the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. Now its name appeared only in casualty notices.

The entire planet was blanketed in hardened yellow, like the corpse of a giant that plague had drained dry. It was ten times the size of Holy Terra, and every centimeter of it had been steeped in Nurgle's rot and the corrupting power of the Warp. The scale of what reclaiming it would demand was almost beyond calculation.

Guilliman set foot on the surface.

With him came his Honour Guard, First Captain Felix and Sicarius, a detachment of Custodes and Sisters of Silence, the Clone Phoenician Fulgrim, and Kaelen with his bodyguard Cullen.

When the Clone Phoenician stepped into view of the Ultramarines assembled on the surface, the reaction among those blue-armoured Astartes was not warm.

Most of them simply looked away.

A clone or not, it made little difference. Ten thousand years ago, the original had carved a wound into their Gene-Sire's neck, a wound that did not fade with time. You did not ask the Ultramarines to forget that.

It was the same reason that even with Sanguinius restored, most Blood Angels still looked at Horus with barely-suppressed hostility.

Some things time cannot smooth over.

The Clone Phoenician paid no attention to any of it. His gaze had already moved past the warriors in blue to the ruined land stretching out around them.

The group passed through streets warped by corruption and came to the rear garden of what had once been a magnificent palace.

Survivors had gathered there.

The moment Guilliman's silhouette appeared at the garden entrance, the mortals surged. They rushed forward in a desperate mass, fell to their knees before him, thrust out arms gone skeletal from starvation, and with throats so ravaged they could barely produce sound, screamed his name over and over.

Nurgle's plague had taken them all. Dark green blotches crawled across their skin. Some had limbs that had swollen and begun to fester. But the survival instinct drove them forward anyway, crawling to the primarch's feet, begging the Lord of Ultramar to heal them.

Guilliman told them plainly and loudly that he was not a god, and he could not bless them.

They did not hear him.

They kowtowed and wept and pleaded, staking every last fragment of hope on the blue giant standing before them.

Kaelen glanced over at the Phoenician.

"Lord Fulgrim," he said. "This one's yours."

Fulgrim looked at him, genuinely puzzled, and pointed at himself.

"What can I do for these people? If there were enemies trying to kill them, I could put a blade between them. But this—"

"You just need to walk into the crowd. You're carrying Sanguinius's feather. That means you've got some measure of anti-Warp properties baked in. It should push back the disease."

Half-convinced and half-skeptical, Fulgrim let Kaelen talk him into it. He crossed to Guilliman and quietly passed along the suggestion.

Guilliman considered it for a moment and decided it was sound. He had pressing business elsewhere, a fallen brother somewhere on this planet who owed him a very thorough beating, and if someone else could keep these refugees from losing hope in the meantime, so much the better.

The Phoenician stepped into the crowd.

It began almost immediately. A faint golden light started to emanate from him.

It was not blinding. It was soft and steady, like afternoon sunlight in early spring, but it carried something that no ordinary light possessed.

Wherever it touched, the dark green blotches on infected skin began to recede. Swollen joints eased back toward their natural shape. Even the thick rot-stench hanging over the garden gave way, replaced by something clean and sharp, like cool air after rain.

Fulgrim moved through the gathered mortals to their center. The smile on his face carried a divine quality that was almost the equal of the Great Angel's, and beneath it something warm and genuine. He soothed their fear. He drove out the plague that had been grinding them down.

Every mortal in the garden stopped thinking about Guilliman.

They crowded around the Phoenician and dropped to their knees, hymns breaking from their cracked and weeping lips.

Another son of the God-Emperor had come to save them.

They did not know the name Fulgrim. They did not know who this being of impossible beauty was. It did not matter. The light had reached them, and the pain had eased, and that was everything.

Guilliman exhaled. He gave the Ultramarines on site a brief order to keep the Phoenician protected, then signalled to Kaelen and the others to follow him toward the palace plaza.

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"I still can't make sense of what we primarchs actually are."

Guilliman said it as they walked, his tone carrying a thread of genuine puzzlement.

"Earlier in this campaign, I made contact with plague-infected civilians. The plague receded when they saw me. But when I left, it came back. Fulgrim's effect seems to hold better than mine. Is that the feather? Some property my angelic brother's feather brings to him?"

Kaelen shook his head.

"It's not just the feather. Honestly, I've noticed none of you are willing to admit what you actually are."

"What are we?"

"Demigods." Kaelen didn't dress it up. "Unique creations of the Emperor, and every one of you has a profound connection to the Warp. That Eldar farseer told me privately, he called you a 'young god.'"

Guilliman shook his head.

"I am a primarch. Nothing more."

"Primarch is a title, my lord. An outer layer." Kaelen lowered his voice slightly. "The essence underneath — you and your brothers — that's something else entirely. You remember when we sat with that Eldar farseer and the conversation drifted to gods? He said it plainly. Gods exist. In the Warp and in realspace both. But the ways they come into being aren't all the same."

"Why are you bringing this up now?"

"Because what I just had Lord Fulgrim do was an experiment."

"What experiment?"

"Using mortal faith to fill in the gaps of a cloned primarch's soul." Kaelen paused a beat. "Something close to: making a god."

It was an idea the Eldar farseer Nathas had planted.

The farseer had said that humanity had once had mortal gods, figures who became focal points for belief. Belief accumulated into faith, and faith coalesced into something real, like a consciousness taking shape within the Warp.

When Kaelen first heard that, he'd thought immediately of the Tau Empire's goddess T'au'va. A Warp entity grown directly from collective faith.

The Clone Phoenician had shaken off the corruption for now, but his soul was still thin. The soul fragment pulled from a parallel world could point the way, it couldn't actually fill a full primarch soul's absence. The gap was too large.

So Kaelen's solution was faith. Let Fulgrim draw from the belief of mortals. Let that belief be the material from which a new essence was cast.

Whether that would eventually draw the Emperor's notice, well. That was a problem for later. Kaelen couldn't afford to let it stop him.

The Imperial Truth had been dead and buried for a long time. This was the age of faith, whether the Imperium wanted it or not. The gods with stronger worshippers were stronger gods. Stronger gods gave their followers real advantages in whatever this great game of pantheons had become.

It was a new race. If the Imperium refused to run it, something else would win.

Ten thousand years ago, if Guilliman had heard any of this from Kaelen, he would have argued back with cold fury, it violated everything the Imperial Truth stood for, and he would have said so at length and volume.

The Lord of Ultramar walking beside Kaelen now only let out a quiet sigh.

He was a realist. He always had been.

If this was what gave the Imperium of Man a fighting chance, then Kaelen could do it.

➤ Next: Priest, Saint, Chess Piece

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