"What are you?" Magnus asked.
"I'm the Gamer. And we'll have a lot of fun together, believe that."
"NOOOooooo...."
Gerhard reached forward and touched his head.
The talk with Magnus had been rather... violent and short. Gerhard knew what he wanted, and it wasn't something Magnus really wanted. Or rather, the shard of Magnus that Gerhard had grabbed before it was scattered through the Warp and across the galaxy.
What was better than turning a Daemon Primarch into a Primarch again? That was such an unbelievable morale boost that it had to be done, right?
Ehhhhh. Not really.
The Imperium knew Magnus as one of the worst traitors imaginable. The truth of what happened during the Horus Heresy, that Leman Russ attacked him because of a lie from Horus Lupercal, no longer mattered. Nor did it matter that he managed to punch one of Leman's hearts out.
Sure, Magnus fucked up big time when he disregarded the Emperor's order and destroyed humanity's chance to no longer need the Warp for travel, tying him to the Golden Throne...
What mattered was that even Gerhard couldn't just arrive on Terra with Magnus in tow and claim the big red baby was now on their side. The Imperium wasn't really big on 'forgiveness' and rational thinking. That had long died out.
So, what was he to do then? How to use this change of balance?
Well, Gerhard had a rather cruel but very appropriate solution. He was simply going to use Magnus and all the shards he could get his hands on as fuel to create a homunculus. To ensure this new version of Magnus is absolutely loyal, Gerhard will then create an artificial soul. That way, he can control him if the need arises, and he won't have to worry about good ol' Magnus fucking shit up again.
Besides, that way, Gerhard can change his appearance. A win-win situation.
"I don't know why you're so against this. You didn't want to be corrupted, did you? So be thankful."
Gerhard knew that what he had planned was very complicated and would take far too long to do just yet. So he stopped and placed Magnus' shard back into his inventory.
[Instant Dungeon: Escape]
The dungeon broke apart, and Gerhard reappeared on Luna. The fighting still went on around him, but the tide had noticeably turned in Imperial favour.
Guilliman stumbled to his feet, bruised and limping in his scorched, damaged armour. He saw Gerhard reappear, but his brother was gone. He doubted Magnus was dead, though he hoped he was. He didn't know exactly what had happened to Gerhard, but he was more sure than ever that it had something to do with his father.
From what he knew of Gerhard, and how he had come into the Warp to save the Terran Crusade, he knew he could handle it. He chose to trust the strange man whom he had come to see as his friend.
Guilliman looked around for Sylandri Veilwalker, but she had vanished as well. A quick radio check with his troops confirmed the rest of her group was gone too, with no explanation. If it was a trap, Guilliman couldn't figure out the angle, but at least Magnus was out of the picture.
Listening to his lieutenants' radio updates, he realised they had practically won the battle. Even while fighting his brother, Guilliman had kept track of the overall strategy and quickly pieced together what had happened.
Boosted by the sudden arrival of the Adeptus Custodes and Imperial Fists, their forces had pushed the Thousand Sons back. Although Magnus' immense power-up and the arrival of endless denizens of the Warp had turned the tide again, they fled behind Kairos Fateweaver, who had basically shit his feathers when he saw Gerhard.
Robotic enemy soldiers littered the area, now just empty suits of armour tangled in the wreckage. The demons Magnus had summoned were banished along. With orbital strikes and fighter jets taking out any fleeing traitors, the last of the enemy commanders gathered their remaining troops and made a slow, relentless push to the crater's edge.
They knew their leader was gone, but they didn't realise their escape route through the portal had been cut off. The surviving enemies tried to break out, and Guilliman stood right in their way.
Exhausted, Guilliman squared his shoulders and pushed through the pain. Limping in his sparking, dented armour, he headed for the crater's edge. His tactical display showed the enemy's escape route and his own troops attacking their flanks.
Despite taking heavy losses, the Thousand Sons still had numbers and had broken through the last of Cawl's crumbling defensive line. As Guilliman climbed the crater wall to face them, 12 Sisters of Silence dug themselves out of a pile of bodies behind him and ran to back him up. Alaya, the woman whom Gerhard had taken Magnus' glaive for, was among them.
12 out of all those who had arrived. That was a bad score. Still, it was far better than it would have been if Gerhard hadn't taken ground control and saved them again and again.
The remaining Thousand Sons were a few hundred yards away, marching directly toward him. They moved in a tight circle, their armoured troops facing outward in perfect synchronisation. Allied forces surrounded them, with infantry and damaged tanks firing relentlessly into the retreating enemy. More enemy soldiers fell every second, but with their commanders safely protected at the centre, their momentum was hard to stop.
Guilliman decided they weren't going any further. He was about to broadcast orders for all allied troops to charge the Thousand Sons from every direction, using all remaining vehicles for cover fire, when Gerhard arrived at his side.
"Gerhard? How are you feeling?" Guilliman asked.
Gerhard smiled hearing the question and reached out to touch the Primarch's massive arm.
[Burning Spirit Principle]
A wave of energy flooded Guilliman's tired, broken body, healing him back to peak condition.
"You are quite something. What happened?"
"I'll tell you when we meet your father. But for now, allow me to end this farce."
Gerhard's demeanour changed suddenly. His left eye began to shine golden, and psychic energy burst from it like electrical discharges. He rose into the air and concentrated on the new power he now held.
[Mana bullet: Bolter] x100
Thousands of Mana Bolter rounds appeared around him, but didn't shoot forward. Instead, they crackled and shone with a golden sheen. They began to rotate and grew hotter. If there had been an atmosphere here, they would have ignited the air.
[Presence lock] + [Time weave] + [Amplify]
...
[Doom]
All the supercharged Mana-Psionic bolter rounds shot through the void, disappeared, then reappeared in front of every cursed enemy at once.
B---BBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM
...
[Level up]
Finally, the battle was over.
The last of the enemy troops were entirely wiped out. The swirling moon dust settled as the explosions stopped.
Saint Celestine and her Geminae rushed forward, pushing through everyone, and suddenly knelt before Gerhard. Tears in her eyes, she felt the intimate connection to Gerhard and who he was now.
"My lo--"
Gerhard tuned her out as she plunged into endless praise. Some of those declarations couldn't be put to paper, as they were a bit much. Needless to say, Gerhard had found a loyal believer and follower in Celestine.
That was at least something, because Voldus and his Grey Knights looked at him with both immense shock and wariness. They were understandably conflicted about what to feel. Gerhard held his presence back as much as possible, but these were superhumans created from the Emperor's own genome.
They could feel it as well.
Gerhard suddenly turned to the side. Guilliman looked at him questioningly.
"What is it?"
"It seems we have guests."
.
.
The Days of Blindness.
That's what historians would later call it.
It was the time when the humanity on Terra saw nothing and heard nothing. They were as alone as before the Emperor delivered them, separated from their grand Imperium and cast adrift on the abyss.
It was a time of terror. All laws were suspended, even those of time and space. They would later discover that all worlds experienced the same horrific isolation, but its duration varied wildly. Some reported mere days of blindness; others, months.
For all Tieron knew, many systems were still in that terrible grip of nothingness.
Alexei Lev Tieron was the Chancellor of the Senatorum Imperialis on Terra. Though not a High Lord, the position made Tieron extremely powerful, and he gained significant influence over his eighty-year tenure as Chancellor. Tieron was a key political player in pushing to dissolve the Edict of Restraint that kept the Adeptus Custodes bound to Terra.
It was funny how quickly things could change, and how fast the high and mighty on Terra realised they were in no way immune to what the rest of the galaxy experienced.
The Warp caused it, of course. Everything it touched became insane, and the old boundaries flexed and broke around it. They then discovered how prescient the old seers' warnings were, as their numerous sins finally caught up with them.
On Terra, at its source, the blindness will last just over a month. That meant thirty-three days of fear and violence overlooked all the time by their new skies of blood-red.
The rioting had already become uncontrollable, spreading like wildfire and fuelled by false guides. The entire planet was placed under martial law, and every available member of the Astra Militarum was pressed into immediate action.
Regiments that were still being raised for deployment to Cadia and Armageddon were recalled from their orbital musters and sent into the chaotic hive-zones. Instead of engaging xenos or heretics, they were forced to open fire on their own kind, who were storming supply bunkers and ransacking cathedrals for gold.
33 days seemed such a short time, set against the span of years before and after, but in truth it felt like an eternity. Tieron had barely slept during the period, and only staved off mania due to heavy self-dosing of narcotics.
On Terra, no matter what station you held, the air fizzed with cursed energies, making true rest or thought impossible. Every glance seemed to disclose fresh terrors in the dark. Tieron usually woke after short half-hour slumbers, crying out and clutching his sweat-dank sheets.
Once, while shaving, he looked in the mirror and saw a leering daemon-face staring back at him, and he had to shatter the glass to get rid of it. Another night he nearly choked on his own nightmares of being skinned alive by laughing butchers in winged helms, and it took Jek, his aide-de-camp and closest person, to calm him down and stop him chewing his own tongue off.
Yes, Anna-Murza Jek shared his bed.
He hoped that no one would judge them harshly for their actions; they had not given in to base lust but had been brought together by a sense of need. Jek was the only person he fully trusted, and he believed she felt the same about him. Without her, he was certain he would have lost his mind already.
They were neophytes again in the face of that maelstrom, stripped of their offices and pretensions, reduced to what they always really were. They held on to each other like children during a thunderstorm.
That was an apt description, he thought.
"I should be able to shake free of it," Tieron told her, lying in the dark.
"The worst will pass," she said, though she didn't sound at all certain.
He chewed his lip nervously. The shadows in his chamber seemed unnaturally black, as if they would suddenly slither up onto the bed and strangle him.
"I was so sure," he said.
"Sure of what?"
"The Council. I was so sure the Legio would be remade, and I would be its architect, and then all would be well."
"There was never a guarantee."
But he remembered what Valoris told him. Trajann Valoris was the 17th and current Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes, and Tieron thought he was the conduit for His will. Tieron came to believe it too. What else explained his extraordinary certainty in a life where certainty was always absent?
Such hubris.
"Perhaps He no longer even lives," Tieron murmured.
"Hush!" Jek chided urgently, sitting up and pressing her finger to his mouth. "Do not even think it."
Once, he found the notion absurd. The Emperor? Dead? He wouldn't even utter it in private, wary of the Ordo Hereticus's listening devices. But now, he felt indifferent to spies and inquisitors. Everything was undone, and the greatest terror had already been unleashed.
He rose from his bed. It was still early, several hours before dawn, but the sickly red glow that had become permanent leaked through the drapes and across his chamber. He padded to the pulse-shower cubicle and washed away the worst of the night sweat from his skin. Under the harsh lights, he noticed his complexion looked pastier and flabbier than ever, and his cheeks hung from his bones like rags.
By the time he returned to get dressed, Jek had fallen asleep again. He watched her for a moment; she was so much younger. Perhaps that made it harder for her. He had already seen too much hope drain away over the years—she deserved to live long enough to see better times.
He knew he could not linger. Despite his fatigue and illness, they were busier than ever. The Council was feverishly active, passing resolution after resolution.
Martians were crawling through the depths of the Throne and the conduits of the Astronomican, prying, testing, and trying everything they could to restore the sacred beacon.
The Astronomican. The light that acted like a galactic lighthouse and allowed Warp travel. After the Great Rift opened and the Warpstorms started on Terra, it stopped and plunged most of the Imperium into darkness.
Tieron guessed for some time that the Martians were charlatans in many ways, dabbling in things they no longer understood, and their hapless tinkering only reinforced that view.
When he looked Oud Oudia Raskian, the Fabricator-General of Mars, in the eye... or rather, what passed for his eyes, he detected a real fear there: not of death or pain, but of being discovered.
He was afraid of being found out as ignorant and deluded concerning machinery and mechanics, which secrets they so jealously guarded as their own. No one was allowed to have it, but they themselves didn't understand it either.
And it came at the worst possible time.
Once Tieron made himself as respectable as possible, he left his bedchamber and limped to the audience rooms. He needed to know, to see, to get away in some form. And he hoped to find it.