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

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"Stand, my sons."

"There is much to be said between us. I know this. But now is not the time. Evacuate the wounded. The main force withdraws from the surface of Dragonwood."

Lion paused, then added:

"This is not a request. It is my order. I command you to withdraw to a safe distance."

Beside him, Sanguinius raised an eyebrow.

Azrael and the other Dark Angels hesitated, then obeyed.

"Your will, my lord!"

The Blood Angels and Dark Angels began pulling off the surface in succession. Around the two primarchs, only their honor guards remained: the Sanguinary Guard under Dante, the Absolved Angels, and a contingent of Deathwing. Azrael stayed as well.

Lion did not speak to him. He and Sanguinius had stepped aside and were conferring in low voices.

Azrael suppressed the urge to approach the primarch and went to find Dante instead.

"Lord Dante — how did you find the Lion?"

"The primarchs located Lord Lion on a world called Blacksable." Dante said. "The fleet under Lord Lupercal, I mean. They found him using coordinates provided by a Mister Kaelen."

He glanced toward the black-armored Absolved Angels standing nearby.

"These warriors were all absolved by Lord Lion. Beyond that, I know little."

The meaning behind those words was plain enough: the secrets of the Dark Angels were not his to pry into.

Azrael understood perfectly. He had no complaint with that. Asmodai, had he been present, would have been another matter.

The Supreme Grand Master already knew who these black-armored warriors were. The Fallen. The ones they had hunted across millennia. If the Lion had absolved them, he was not in a position to object.

Of course, he'll have plenty of black-armored veterans at his side.

Heh. Not only will he take them in, he'll call them sons with his own mouth. I'd wager when he wakes, he won't care for you at all. You're strangers to him.

The Lord of the Night's words. Konrad Curze's ugly little joke, still echoing in his ears.

It left him restless. Irritable.

But the feeling burned off quickly. Lion and Sanguinius finished their discussion and settled on a course of action.

To better understand the current state of the Dark Angels Chapter, Lion invited Azrael to walk beside him. The Supreme Grand Master accepted, and the honor he felt at that was not something he tried to conceal.

What followed left all of them startled, Azrael most of all. The Lion simply reached out and opened a path from nothing: a forest trail wreathed in drifting mist, dense with hanging vines. No incantation, no device.

They followed the two primarchs through.

Lion and Azrael talked as they walked.

The Lion drew out everything Azrael knew about the Chapter's present condition. The hunt for the Fallen. How veterans like Zabriel and the others had grown increasingly consumed by it. How the obsession had hollowed out something that had once been discipline and made it into something uglier.

It angered him. His Dark Angels had been the exemplar of reason and efficiency among all the Legions. Now they were something else entirely.

But the fault, he acknowledged, was ultimately his own.

As they spoke, Azrael found his earlier fears quietly dissolving. This was not the primarch Konrad Curze had mocked, cold, indifferent, ready to cut the Chapter loose and move on. This was something else. A true knight. Humility where Azrael had expected judgment. Candor where he had feared condemnation.

It steadied him in ways he hadn't expected to need steadying.

Then they arrived.

The depths of Dragonwood.

The location of the Dissonance Engine, the fusion of the Ouroboros and the Plagueheart, two vile things made into one worse thing.

The pressure hit them the moment they entered its presence. Not pain, exactly. Something heavier. A weight against the mind and chest that made breathing feel like an act of will. The construct simply radiated wrongness, and it did not discriminate.

Even the primarchs felt it.

Dante noticed the anomaly first. He was watching Sanguinius when it happened.

The light was wrong.

It had always been there, Sanguinius carried his own soft radiance, the gentle white luminescence that was simply part of what he was. But this was not that. This was gold. Blazing and total and utterly impossible to look at directly, and it was getting brighter with every passing second.

Something else was inside the Angel. Something far older.

Dante and the Sanguinary Guard stood frozen in horror.

Lion turned, careful and quiet.

"Brother? What's happened to you?"

Sanguinius turned to face him. The eyes that met Lion's were filled entirely with golden light, and when they locked onto his, the world stopped.

It simply stopped. The honor guards went still mid-breath, mid-step, mid-heartbeat, sealed like insects in amber. Only Lion moved. Only Lion and the thing wearing Sanguinius's body.

The Lion held still for a long moment.

He looked into those golden eyes and he did not see Sanguinius. He saw a throne. He saw ten thousand years. He saw the face of the being who had reached into the dark and pulled him into existence and told him what he was for.

"...Father?"

His voice came out barely above a whisper.

"It is I, Lion." The Emperor of Mankind spoke through Sanguinius's mouth. "I know you have many questions. About Horus, among other things."

Sanguinius, the Emperor, turned and walked toward the Dissonance Engine.

He observed it through his son's eyes. He reached out with his son's hand and laid it against the cold metal surface, fingers tracing it slowly, deliberately.

Then he exhaled. A long breath, weighted with something ancient and complex.

"Had I possessed this back then — how different things might have been."

Lion went still. "What is the purpose of this construct, Father? My Tuchulcha Engine yearns to be reunited with it."

The Emperor looked at him.

Calm. Deep. Those golden eyes holding something that had seen the full length of human history and had not been made gentle by it.

"The true purpose of the Great Crusade," the Emperor said, "was always to sever humanity from the Warp entirely. To free our species from its influence, permanently. When I created you, I built into you the means to achieve that. A piece of the mechanism."

"You mean the Mantle of the Forest?" Lion's brow furrowed. "What connection does that have to your plan?"

"The Aeldari, Lion. You know where they go when they disappear. You know where they come from when they appear. The Webway."

He paused. When he continued, his voice carried something rare. A bitterness that was almost honesty.

"Beneath the Golden Throne there is a passage. A connection to the Webway network. Had I opened it, humanity would never have needed the Warp again — no travel through that poisoned sea, no exposure to those filthy things that live in it. We would have been free of the Empyrean forever." A beat. "If only not for Magnus's folly."

A laugh came out of Sanguinius's throat. Not Sanguinius's laugh. The Emperor's.

Short. Bitter. Old.

"Though after so long, it hardly matters to say it now. It has already failed."

Lion said nothing.

He was thinking. His silences were never empty, they were where he did his work, turning each piece of information over, testing it, placing it against what he already knew.

That the Emperor had come in person. That he had chosen this moment, this construct, this meeting. The importance of the Dissonance Engine required no further argument.

"I will bring it back to Holy Terra," Lion said. His voice had the quality of stone laid into a foundation.

Sanguinius smiled.

The Emperor smiled.

The smile held something that had waited ten thousand years to be felt, a gratification so deep it had almost no weight left to it, worn smooth by the waiting. And beneath it, unmistakable: the pride of a father looking at his son. Open. Unguarded.

"I have no doubt of that, my son."

He tilted his head, a small, unhurried gesture.

"Is there anything you want? Any reward?"

Lion's answer came the same way it always had. No pause. No calculation. The same answer he had always given, across every test and every victory and every loss, going back to the beginning.

From Caliban, ten thousand years ago. To Dragonwood, ten thousand years later.

"Loyalty is its own reward, Father."

The golden light in Sanguinius's eyes trembled. Just slightly. Just once.

The Emperor said nothing more.

Some things did not need to be said aloud.

➤ Next: The Webway Tunnel Boring Machine, Hope of the Human Imperium

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