Chapter 216: Calas Typhon
In the predetermined timeline, Calas Typhon would eventually become known as Typhus, host of the Destroyer Hive and favored servant of Nurgle.
Typhon had been the first uncorrupted human Mortarion encountered after he escaped from Barbarus, and his counsel proved instrumental in turning the Primarch against his adoptive father. Few held greater sway over Mortarion's heart.
Typhon possessed psychic gifts he had long concealed. Mortarion's disdain for psykers was well known, so Typhon had learned to hide his talents entirely, even as he quietly enlisted other psykers into the Fourteenth Legion's ranks and taught them to master their abilities in secret.
In the early Great Crusade, Typhon distinguished himself through exceptional service, earning the Primarch's genuine regard.
All of that changed upon his meeting with Erebus.
Through forbidden knowledge, Typhon learned of the Chaos Gods' existence. Upon Barbarus, he heard their whispers calling, and he chose to answer.
What began as the Heresy would become his grand game: a masterwork of deception wherein he would turn Mortarion's own paranoia as a weapon, convincing him that the Navigators were all agents of the cursed Navis Nobilitas.
The purge of the Death Guard's Navigator caste would follow inevitably. Typhon would then offer himself as a replacement, a position that would place him perfectly to strand the fleet in the warp's embrace, where plague and suffering would at last break the Primarch's resistance.
But this was the predetermined timeline.
Now was different.
Raven understood this truth with absolute conviction: one could not assume the traitors of one age would necessarily betray another.
The Heresy itself had emerged from countless factors, and rash judgment born of foreknowledge risked transforming prophecy into self-fulfilling doom.
Better to forestall corruption than punish it in retrospect.
"You possess psychic powers?" Raven's question carried curiosity rather than accusation.
Mortarion's head turned, surprise flickering across features accustomed to command. He had known nothing of this.
Typhon hesitated, then recognized the futility of deception before one who could divine such truths so effortlessly. A lie would damage his standing with both Primarch and advisor, and an investigation would expose him regardless.
"Yes," he admitted. "I have concealed the ability and studied its disciplines in secret."
"How did I never perceive this?" Mortarion's tone held an edge of betrayal.
"You abhor psykers," Typhon replied carefully. "I feared your displeasure."
Mortarion was about to respond, but Raven raised his wing hand, stopping him.
"This is no cause for concern. The Imperium is now moving toward establishing a formal psychic order, a necessary evolution if we are to meet threats across the multiversal frontier."
"Should you command psykers within the Death Guard, you might establish a Librarius of your own. The wars ahead will demand it. Other universes hold powers that modest ballistic weapons cannot counter alone."
"When the Fourteenth Legion is inevitably deployed beyond this realm, such abilities may prove decisive."
The Primarch considered this. He had walked other worlds; he understood the terrible hierarchy of might that existed beyond the Emperor's light. To ignore such advantages would be folly.
"In future, you will conceal nothing of importance from me," Mortarion said at last. "I am not the narrow mind you imagine."
"I have erred, Father," Typhon replied.
Raven, observing the crisis averted, felt quiet satisfaction. In the predetermined timeline, Typhon had been Mortarion's doom.
Yet loyalty and shared trials had bound them since Barbarus, roots too deep to sever over mere witchcraft alone. To fracture them now over hidden talents was to invite greater wolves into the fold.
The Contamination Source, ever patient and ever circling beyond the veil, awaited only the most minor wound through which to press its hunger.
Typhon did not linger much longer. He gathered the Death Guard's senior officers and departed to coordinate the assault against the Hrud, leaving the Primarch and his advisor to their discourse on empires and futures.
Mortarion and Raven spoke of more consequential matters.
The Emperor's reign would not simply endure; it would expand across infinite heavens.
The Primarchs, those demigods of old, would one day stand as independent sovereigns.
The dual throne Raven shared with the Emperor would eventually become something greater: a philosophy, a beacon to guide human civilization through the infinite dark.
Those heroes who opened pathways between worlds would wield genuine authority, not mere ceremony and exaggerated titles.
Raven spoke these truths deliberately, weaving reassurance into each word.
The Emperor would not purge his Astartes children. Instead, their disciplines would deepen and their power increase. Humanity's ascension was not the work of a moment, but of ages.
In the secondary command chamber, Typhon stood at the strategic cogitator, surrounded by the legion's highest officers.
Above them, the primary bridge sprawled over, a vast cathedral of command where the Captain's podium rose amid banks of servo-choirs, all ringed with grand hololithic displays that rendered the Gorgis system in terrible clarity.
The enemy fleet appeared the moment human vessels breached the system's perimeter. The Hrud materialized with their chitinous swarms and unleashed their assault.
The Hrud fleet defied conventional classification, a grotesque agglomeration of fungal-plated matter and chronal energies, vessels that seemed to exist partially outside standard spacetime.
They carved holes through the fabric of reality itself, stepping between moments as lesser beings stepped between rooms. Their entropy beams lashed out with devastating effect.
Ships caught in that withering radiance suffered impossible fates. Matter itself fractured across temporal boundaries, separated by years or centuries depending on the distortion's intensity. Crew sections would suddenly age into dust while others reverted to callow youth.
The results were uniformly catastrophic, entire vessel sections collapsing as their internal chronology tore itself apart, explosions blooming like dreadful flowers across the void.
"Temporal weapons are prepared and standing by," the Tech-Priest reported, her voice steady despite the carnage blooming across the holo-display.
The Time Erasers, salvaged from the Marvel universe's own temporal guardians and repurposed by Imperium technocrates for multiple purposes, represented humanity's answer.
Where the Hrud dug through moments in time, these weapons would erase them, banishing targets to the End of Time itself. Even the memory of their existence would perish.
"Grant these xenos Emperor's mercy," Typhon commanded. "Fire the temporal beams. Let them be unmade."
Emerald light lanced out. Hrud warships vanished as though erased by some cosmic hand, leaving not even wreckage. The alien fleet scattered, routed from their planned course.
But the Hrud did not retreat.
Instead, they fractured their remaining vessels and began forcing their way through Imperial hull breaches, flooding into the corridors of the Indomitable itself. What they could not accomplish through open warfare, they would resolve through intimate brutality.
They moved through time as easily as through corridors, striking with temporal blades that aged flesh to brittle parchment.
Human crewmen fell by the dozens, their screams cut short as their bodies decayed across entire lifetimes in seconds. White-haired corpses lay scattered in dress uniforms grown threadbare with the weight of centuries; none had actually lived.
Typhon himself descended into the maelstrom.
A Hrud materialized from a fold in spacetime, its double-bladed temporal saber carving reality itself.
Around it, time congealed like amber, Astartes warriors struggling as though dragging through viscous fluid, their movements fractional and pained while external observers watched them move in slow nightmare.
The Death Guard Champion felt the distortion before he saw the creature, a wrongness in the air's composition, light bending toward the violet end of the spectrum. His Gene-seed elevated him beyond such petty limitations.
He drew his longsword and pushed his transhuman physiology into overdrive.
The Hrud lunged, its presence only visible by the ripples in spacetime it carved. Typhon's blade answered with terrible speed, meeting invisible flesh and tearing through it.
Death broke the creature's entropic field.
What was revealed was an abomination: broad features dominated by enormous black orbs, ichorous secretions weeping from every orifice, mandibles twitching with continuous distress. Its hairless hide was slick with mucus, its expression utterly alien, its eyes suffused with an agony no transhuman could fathom.
A foul-smelling robe draped its form, articulated armor clinging to limbs engineered for geometries that hurt to contemplate.
Typhon cast the filthy corpse aside and advanced on to the next enemy.
Death Guard and armed crew fought in terrible concert, driving the incursion back, reclaiming their vessel section by blood-soaked section.
[End of Chapter]
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