[Warhammer 40K - The Horus Heresy 41] - The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Author:Aaron Dembski-Bowden [Aaron Dembski-Bowden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military Fiction, Science Fiction, Warhammer 40K
ISBN: 9781785720864
Published: 2016-10-05T10:32:26+00:00

THIRTEEN

What has happened before

The use of glory

Prophecy and foresight

Ra opened his eyes to absolute blackness. A darkness deep enough to penetrate the senses, filling his eye sockets like pools of spilled oil. He waited for his perceptions to align. There was no fear. He knew the sensation of his master’s summons.

Remorse sat within his heart, this time. The ambush at the Ossuary still tore at him, its questions presenting no easy answers.

We were so close.

No answer came from the Emperor—if his king had even heard.

Soon, there was light. Faint. Fractured. Tormentingly distant. Light manifesting in pinpricks, the iota-eyes of faraway suns. They speckled the void in a milky rash, glinting, winking, each one staring with a light that took a brief eternity to reach Ra’s senses.

He was without form and shape. He merely existed in the void, a presence above a world cradled in the infinite black, a war-eaten planet bathed by the fusion glare of its insignificant yellow sun.

‘Terra,’ he said, without mouth, breath, teeth or tongue.

+Terra.+ The Emperor’s voice thrummed through his skull. Disembodied, as eternal as any star. +Mere centuries ago, in the thrall of the Unification Wars. Warlords and archpriestesses and magician-kings and clan chiefs fight over the harrowed territory of a broken world. My Thunder Legion marches to war against them. Against all of them.+

‘It grieves me not to have fought at your side in those days, my king.’

+Your loyalty is noted, yet your grief is irrelevant.+

‘Why am I here?’ Ra thought and spoke at once. No discernible separation existed between what was in his mind and what he vocalised into the void.

+Because I will it.+

It was the only answer he required, but he had hoped for more. Whatever purpose this illumination served was, so far, beyond Ra’s guesswork.

With a wrenching lurch, the stars spun. Light bent and folded. The infinite blackness at once welcomed and rejected him, embracing his presence but defying his senses as he sought to process the speed at which he flew through the void. Nebulae bloomed before him, around him, as thick to the eyes as the poison gas clouds of forbidden weaponry, yet perfectly dark to all other senses. Worlds turned around god’s-eye stars, some seared beneath the fat blue heat of swollen suns, some left cold on the outermost edges of the stellar ballet, travelling almost in exile among the frozen rocks that tumbled through deep and lifeless space.

So many of these globular jewels were not jewels at all, as unsuited as they were to cradling human life. For all of the terraforming pushed upon the galaxy’s scattered worlds during the wonderworking of the Dark Age of Technology, an infinity of planets still revolved in the savage, storm-wracked, gaseous serenity that rendered human habitation impossible.

The true gems were just as varied in shade and hue. The alkali ochre of desert land predominated, planed smooth by the industry of colonisation or shattered in great chasm-rents by tectonic unrest. Oceanic worlds were turbulent sapphires and aquamarines swallowing sunlight beneath their

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