Chapter 173 - The Chemosian Phoenix Reborn Through Nirvana
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The flame giant said nothing. He turned his head toward Kaelen and gave a slight nod.
Kaelen understood.
No more words were needed. The giant opened his mouth wide. Flames erupted across every inch of him, a proof of rage that had no ceiling. His steel arms brought the massive hammer around and he charged straight at the fallen serpent-demon.
Cullen, who had been sent flying earlier, scrambled back to Kaelen's side. Guilt sat heavy in his chest. He had failed again. Against Magnus. And just now against Fulgrim.
He had not protected his friend.
But the Son of the Lion didn't have the luxury of wallowing. He knelt beside the Phoenician's body and, following Kaelen's instructions, lifted him up.
"I hope this works."
The clone Fulgrim's self-sacrifice had made something click. The card the System had given him, maybe it was never meant for Kaelen at all.
[Sacrifice] represents selfless giving.
Through pure selflessness, it would hold a mirror to the fallen Fulgrim's twisted desires and reveal the ugliness and emptiness rotting underneath.
Kaelen placed the golden tarot card carefully on the Primarch's chest.
"Perfection is a process. It is the fruit on the highest branch."
"Now — pluck that fruit, Fulgrim."
"You are a clone. Flawed in essence. Not perfect. But you are without blemish."
The last words left his lips quietly. The card answered. Golden light bloomed from it and folded the Phoenician inside.
And when shadows blurred the edges of the world around him,
An indomitable will filled Fulgrim's spirit.
He understood that he was dead. He had no regrets.
Time stretched. Slowed.
He felt himself arrive somewhere else entirely.
A beam of golden, magnificent light appeared. From its center, a figure emerged, clad in ornate gilded armor, wreathed in radiance.
A majestic, towering giant.
The same one buried deep in the oldest chambers of Fulgrim's memory.
His lips moved and formed nothing. For a long moment, he could not speak.
Was this real?
A torrent of emotions and thoughts surged through him. Tears filled his eyes.
"Is it you? Father?"
The golden giant said nothing. Like a father who has watched a child grow into who they were always meant to be, He nodded, and extended one great hand.
Trembling, Fulgrim reached out and took it.
The moment he did, he watched his own body come apart. Flesh. Bone. Hair. Armor. Every piece of him dissolved into the wind.
He didn't care. It didn't matter. That crude, battered vessel had long since stopped being important.
[Phoenix of Chemos]
[Nirvana Reborn]
[My Divine Weapon]
[Purge All Darkness]
The words left the giant's mouth and became something else, flames and sweeping lengths of deep purple silk, wrapping around what remained of Fulgrim, coiling around him layer by layer until they sealed into a shell.
A small, dark-purple snake squeezed out through a crack in the shell. Struggling. Hissing. It was the last thread of Slaanesh's corruption, the final drop of poison still clinging to the deepest corner of the Primarch's soul.
The flames touched it and it screamed, twisting its tiny body, desperate to flee.
The giant reached down and seized it in one hand. His fingers closed. The thing was refined into nothing, not even ash left behind.
[Now, awaken. My proud and perfect son.]
A crack split the shell.
Then another, and another, branching out from the first, spreading across the cocoon in a dense web that covered every inch.
The fragments began to fall. Each one caught the air and became a burning phantom phoenix, circling the shell, crying out, blazing.
Then, at the center of it all, a figure in purple-gold battle armor slowly rose to his feet. White wings, pure as untouched snow, spread wide at his back.
For Kaelen and Cullen in the waking world, none of this took longer than three heartbeats.
The golden light swallowed the Phoenician's remains whole, then detonated outward in a storm that swept the entire battlefield. The shockwave carried gold radiance and purple flame in every direction. Kaelen and Cullen should have been thrown clear off their feet, but just before the ground left them, two hands reached out from the heart of the light. Strong. Gentle. Catching them both.
When the brilliance faded, they looked up.
It was like standing before something as perfect as the Great Angel Sanguinius himself.
No.
Not perfect.
Because his beauty wasn't the kind of divine, untouchable holiness you couldn't look at directly. It wasn't the beauty that reminded you how small you were.
It was the kind that made you want to be better. The kind that felt like a hand reaching out instead of a light shining down.
He would make mistakes. He would fail.
And not one of those failures would ever break him. Every stumble was just fuel.
"Fulgrim — is that you?"
Kaelen stared, jaw loose. That face was something else entirely. He'd never quite understood what people meant when they said someone could devastate anyone regardless of preference, not until the Great Angel. Now here stood the second.
The twin jewels of the Imperium's looks, alright.
The Phoenician answered with a smile. He set the two of them gently on the ground.
Then he turned toward the battlefield. A metal giant wreathed in flame was locked in combat with the fallen serpent-demon. Fulgrim didn't rush to help. Instead he spread his wings and went to his wounded brother first.
Curze.
Seeing his brother reborn, Curze went still with disbelief. He tried to say something. Fulgrim didn't let him. He reached out and pressed a hand gently against Curze's chestplate.
The toxins drained away under the light he radiated, driven out without ceremony.
As the last of the poison left, the color in Curze's face shifted. He was still pale — that was always how he'd looked, but the gray death-pallor was gone. He looked like someone who might actually survive the next hour.
"Rest here a while, Curze." Fulgrim's voice was quiet and steady, the tone of someone coaxing a child back to sleep after a nightmare. "Then watch me win."
Curze stared at him.
The Fulgrim of the Great Crusade. The one who had always brought him along, always taught him, always stayed by his side in the moments when the darkness inside Curze felt like it would swallow everything. The one who, when all the other brothers had called him a monster, had chosen to hold him instead.
That person was really here.
The Night Haunter lost focus for a moment. Then, leaning on Sevatar, he pulled himself slowly upright. The corner of his mouth bent into something stiff and real.
"I have no doubt of it."
The Phoenician turned away. His longsword rang a clear, clean note as it moved in his grip. He spread his wings and launched skyward.
White feathers traced a perfect arc through the air. Then his entire form dropped, a purple-gold meteor falling on a battlefield that had stopped breathing.
Every head turned. The Imperial warriors roared. And Fulgrim's own fallen Phoenix Guard, in that one instant, felt something cold work its way down into their bones.
The flame giant was losing.
The fallen Fulgrim was the Daemon Primarch who had killed Ferrus 10,000 years ago, and he hadn't forgotten how. Four arms worked like four independent weapons, striking from every angle simultaneously, relentless and precise. Ferrus had two metal arms and a single warhammer. Ferocious and fearless as he was, the speed and the angles were wearing him down.
The fallen serpent-demon's tail coiled around Ferrus's left leg. One savage yank. The flame giant hit the ground. All four arms came up at once, blades raised high, that ruinous grin spreading wide as the strikes drove toward Ferrus's throat.
Simple objective. Kill him again.
A boot hit the fallen Fulgrim's face.
It hit with everything. That vicious grin got kicked straight back down his throat. He flew like a snapped kite string, crashed through a cluster of rocks, and went under. Only the tip of his serpentine tail stuck out from the rubble, twitching weakly.
When the Daemon Primarch clawed his way free, there was a clear boot-print seared across the face he'd always been so proud of. It burned. It was a humiliation worse than any wound he had ever taken.
He looked up.
His pupils shrank.
The clone he had personally run through, the one who should have been cold and dead, was standing beside Ferrus with a sword in hand.
The light of the Phoenix of Chemos and the fire of the Medusan Gorgon blazed behind them, woven together, lit at the end of the world.
10,000 years ago, these two had fought side by side, and nothing had been able to stop them.
10,000 years later, they were standing together again.
"You—" Something cracked in the fallen serpent-demon's voice. For the first time there was trembling in it. Fury and jealousy and something that might have been grief. "You should be dead. You were supposed to be dead. How are you standing next to him?!"
"I did die."
The Phoenician said it calmly.
"And because I died, I can finally see exactly how pathetic you are."
He tilted his head slightly toward Ferrus. One look passed between them. Everything that could have been said, 10,000 years of it, compressed into a single moment of perfect understanding.
Ferrus said nothing. He raised his burning warhammer. Flame roared from the joints of his metal arms.
The Phoenician spread his wings. Purple-gold light poured from every plate of his armor.
Hammer and sword. Fire and light. Iron and feather. Like the twin wings of fate opening at the same time.
"Come, brother."
The Phoenician's voice was quiet. No hatred in it. Only the kind of calm that sits on the other side of every old wound, every old wrong.
"Let us end this mistake that has lasted 10,000 years."
"I WILL KILL YOU!"
The fallen serpent-demon's roar shook the air. The loyal Primarchs answered it with a battle cry in the Emperor's name. Both sides threw themselves at each other.
➤ Next: Though Not Perfect, Already Without Flaw
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