Heralds of the Siege by Rob Sanders

Author:Rob Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2018-09-18T11:46:28+00:00

THE SOUL, SEVERED

Chris Wraight

For every Legion whose fate it was to fight in the Great Siege, there came the Day of the Turn, when all other campaigns were suspended and all internal feuds put aside. On that day, on the Day of the Turn, the road to Terra was made clear at last.

There were those, such as Dorn’s Imperial Fists, who had never wavered from their task, and whose part in the galactic drama had been written long before they themselves became aware of it. There were others, the scions of the Warmaster himself, who had never been anywhere but at the forefront, driving the shock wave of assault closer and closer, world by world, towards the prize they coveted with obsessive determination. And, finally, there were those whose way had been made crooked, halted by the vague malice of the warp or driven into blind alleys by the ambition of the damned, and for whom the turn would come late.

But every Legion, sooner or later, had their day, the dawn of which set their faces heavenward. Then the void drives were kindled, then the final arming was made. In the dark centuries to come, as the suns cooled and the old weapons rusted, they would look back, those who had survived, and tell one another: ‘That was when we cast our dice into the maw of eternity. That was when there was no way back, for good or ill, and we knew we would not turn aside until the spires of the Palace stood before us.’

For most, the decision was made by their primarch, if he lived, and the legionaries would fall in behind that command just as they had been created to do.

But there were those whose sire was slain, or driven into madness, or simply absent, taken from them by the eddies of the ether.

And for much of the III Legion, the Children of the Emperor who had once been immaculate, there had been no word from Fulgrim since the hidden betrayal on Iydris, and that delayed their turn towards the Throneworld. They had always been a proud communion of souls.

So it was that as the Warmaster’s black gaze began to shift towards what would one day become known as the Great Slaughter at Beta-Garmon, two praetors of the fractured III were circling the toxic globe of Horvia, their lacquered warships at high-orbital anchor. When the Lord Commander Primus Eidolon – called the Soul-Severed by those who both revered and loathed him – first beheld that world from the void, he laughed.

‘Has it been made for us by our new gods?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Did they fashion it from nothing, to be our glorious tomb?’

His vexillary, the Orchestrator Lecus Phodion, gurgled into a swollen vox-distorter. ‘Slaves,’ he murmured. ‘Slaves.’

‘Yes,’ said Eidolon. ‘But not yet. One obstacle remains.’

The bridge of the Proudheart, many-tiered and magnificent, was burnished with gold and jasper and chrysolyte. Lamps burned inside iron cages, throwing writhing shadows across polished stone. Eyeless and earless mortals

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