[The void battle above Signus Prime was already decided.]
[Seen from above, the traitor fleet had broken apart. Most of the defected ships were either burning wreckage or surrounded by Imperial Navy escorts, cut off and held, unable to affect the outcome any further. The Imperial Navy had won the space above the planet, but the planet itself was another question entirely.]
[The Gloriana-class battleship climbed back into stable orbit, escorted by hundreds of Fury-class starfighters forming a loose protective shell around the flagship as it found its position. Below, the atmosphere of Signus Prime waited.]
[Three drop pods launched from the lower deck of the Red Tear in rapid sequence, each one tumbling into the atmospheric entry angle and then falling, trailing fire, accelerating toward the surface with the patient inevitability of things built for exactly this.]
[Boom.]
[The impact threw rubble and debris outward in a wide radius. The hatch blew clear, the explosive bolts doing their work in a fraction of a second, and you were moving before the debris had finished landing.]
[The iron halo above your power pack. The red helmet sealed. The Blood Scythe in your grip. You cleared the pod in four strides and turned to take in the ground.]
[Behind you, the fifteen Blood Angel veterans from the Red Tear spilled out of the drop pods and converged into a loose formation, weapons up, heads scanning.]
[You stood still and let your visor do its work.]
[This had been a city. The architecture was still technically present: walls, foundations, the skeletal suggestion of streets running between structures that had lost everything above their lower courses. But a city implies inhabitants, and what covered the streets now was not life. Mortal bones lay in every direction, black-stained, scattered or arranged, some of them consumed past recognition and some of them arranged with the deliberate care that Chaos daemons bring to the concept of decoration. The bones formed a continuous carpet across the ground, stretching away into the haze in every direction.]
[Between the streets, burning. More than twenty Mastodon heavy carriers and a number of Storm Eagle assault boats were down on the wrecked ground, the fires from their fuel systems still feeding on themselves, thick black smoke bending in the wind. Around each vehicle, within several dozen metres in every direction, Blood Angels. The mangled bodies of Blood Angels.]
[The spent shell casings. The Legion's battle banner, torn through in three places and stained dark, still upright on its pole.]
[All of it told you what had just happened here before you arrived.]
[And then you heard it: low, sinister laughter rolling through the ruins from somewhere ahead, and underneath it, answering it, the battle roars of Blood Angels. Not ordered. Not tactical. Raw, furious, the sound of warriors who had stopped calculating and started consuming.]
[You knew what that meant before you understood it consciously.]
["Too late," you said quietly inside your helmet. "Is Sanguinius already down?"]
[You turned to issue orders to the veterans behind you.]
[And stopped.]
[They were wrong. All of them. You could see it even through their armour: a pale red energy seeping in from the air around them, thin strands of it finding the gaps in the ceramite, disappearing inside. The breathing through their helmet vox had changed, heavier and more ragged. Their hands had tightened on their weapons without any command being given. The hunger you could sense radiating from them was not metaphorical.]
[The Black Rage. The Red Thirst. Whatever Sanguinius's gene-sons called it, the Khorne daemon Ka'Bandha had triggered it deliberately, using the Primarch's suffering as the ignition point. The more the Blood Angels felt Sanguinius's pain through their psychic bond with him, the more the genetic flaw took hold. And the more it took hold, the more they became exactly what Chaos needed them to be: a Legion that would destroy itself from the inside, and call it honour.]
[You stepped back fast, putting distance between yourself and the veterans, the Blood Scythe rising in a guard position. When a Blood Angel crossed fully into the Thirst, reason left. They would attack whatever was closest. Ally, enemy, the distinction ceased to exist. They would feed until the hunger faded or the body was destroyed, whichever came first.]
[You hit the battle banner on your way back.]
[It rocked on its pole and a drop of thick blood, already dried to near-black, shook loose from the torn fabric and struck your visor. You stood there for a moment, looking at the smear of it on the inside of your vision.]
[And then the idea arrived. Insane. Completely insane. But you were standing on a daemon world in M31 holding a Necron warscythe while fifteen Blood Angels lost their minds around you, so the bar for insane had already been substantially revised.]
[You looked at the ceramite of your palm.]
["I wonder," you said to no one, "whether the Emperor's blood in me is enough to suppress Chaos psionic contamination at this scale."]
[You brought the Blood Scythe's edge down across your palm without further deliberation.]
[The cut was clean and deep. The blood that welled up from it caught the light wrong, too bright, too gold, viscous in a way that ordinary blood was not. It dripped down from the broken ceramite and hit the ground and kept glowing faintly even after it landed.]
[You grabbed the battle banner off its pole with your bleeding hand and dragged it through your palm, once, twice, smearing the gold-red across the tattered fabric in long strokes until the cloth was soaked through with it.]
[You straightened and looked at what you were holding.]
["The Emperor exists now in this moment," you said quietly, your voice carrying only inside your own helmet. "And he will exist in ten thousand years as the God-Emperor, enthroned and eternal, a presence that even the Chaos gods cannot ignore. Whatever form he takes, whatever he becomes, that power is real. It is real now."]
[The Emperor's blood on the banner began to burn.]
[Not with fire, exactly. With psychic flame, faint and pale and tenacious, the kind of burning that does not consume what it touches but instead inhabits it. The banner glowed, gold bleeding through the red of it, and the light it cast was not the light of the fires burning around you.]
[The veterans had drawn their close-combat weapons. They were turning toward you. Their breathing through the vox was the breathing of animals.]
[You raised the burning banner in your left hand.]
[The Blood Scythe in your right, the green light of its edge steady and cold against the gold of the banner.]
[You looked at them. Fifteen Blood Angels on the edge of the Rage, tipping forward into it, the abyss opening under their feet.]
[You filled your lungs.]
["FOR THE EMPEROR!"]