[You did not stop to confirm the banner was working. You were already moving.]
[The thruster nozzles at the rear of your power pack fired at full output, pushing you forward into a sprint that closed the distance to the nearest veterans in under a second. You swept the burning banner through the pale red aura hanging in the air around them, and the psychic flame on the fabric met the Chaos contamination and the contamination lost. You watched it happen through your visor: the aura thinning, breaking apart, the veterans' postures changing as reason returned to them, the weapons lowering.]
["Primarch. We were just..."]
["No time." You were already angling away, your magnetic boots finding the ground past the first veteran. "Weapons up. Follow me. Now."]
[You did not look back to see if they obeyed. You could hear them behind you within three strides: ceramite on bone-carpet, the sound of fifteen Astartes choosing to trust a stranger who was carrying a golden fire into the dark.]
[The bone-city passed around you as you ran. The carpet of remains underfoot was uneven, skulls and ribcages and long bones all compressed together by the weight of whatever had walked across them before you arrived, and your magnetic boots found purchase regardless. Ahead, the sound of the battle clarified with every metre of distance closed: bolt shells detonating, chainblades shrieking against hellblades, the bass roar of something enormous and furious that you recognised without wanting to.]
[You came over a low rise of rubble and saw it.]
[The Temple of Bones.]
[Every surface of it was covered in human remains, mortared into the walls as deliberately as brick, the architecture of a structure whose builders had decided that the most honest building material was what Chaos left behind. Around its base, the battle had been ongoing long enough that the ground was indistinguishable from the city around it: more bones, more shell casings, more Blood Angels dead alongside the things that had killed them.]
[And the living: hundreds of Blood Angels locked in close combat against Khorne bloodletters with their gaping jaws and hellblades, against Slaanesh succubi and Seekers on their mounts, against vampires with blades that trailed smoke. The sounds of all of it layered into something that was almost musical in its horror, bolt and chainblade and the screaming of daemons burning as they died.]
[And the ones who had crossed over entirely: Blood Angels without helmets, without weapons, fighting with their hands and their teeth, the Thirst running so deep that the distinction between enemy and ally had ceased to matter to them. They fed on whatever was in reach.]
[Above the temple, wings spread, looking down with the satisfaction of something that had planned this and was watching it complete: Ka'Bandha. Khorne's great daemon, his crimson bulk dwarfing anything on the ground below him, surveying the corruption of a Legion with the patience of something that had destroyed Legions before.]
[Your banner caught his attention the moment you crested the rubble ridge.]
[The psychic flame on the Imperial blood was visible across the battlefield, a golden light in a place that had deliberately excluded all such things, and it moved through the chaos like a beacon. The nearest Blood Angels, the ones still coherent enough to register it, turned toward it. You watched the Thirst release them one by one as the banner's light reached them, watched them come back to themselves with the particular confusion of people who have been somewhere very dark and are not entirely sure how they got out. They began pulling back toward your position, reforming around the point of light you were carrying.]
[The daemons came for the banner instead.]
[A wave of vampires broke from the melee and turned toward you, hellblades raised. Behind you, the veterans opened fire, bolt shells tracking through the press and detonating inside the daemon forms. You went forward into the gap their fire opened, the Blood Scythe sweeping in long horizontal arcs, and the green-lit necrodermis edge passed through hellblade and daemon flesh alike with the same indifference.]
[You swung the banner once into a cluster of succubi pressing from the left. The psychic flame touched them and they burned from the inside, screaming in registers that had nothing to do with sound, the Chaos energy in them reacting to the Emperor's blood the way any corruption reacts to something genuinely opposed to it: catastrophically.]
[You drove deeper. The Blood Angels you were recovering fell in behind you, adding their fire and blades to what you were doing, the formation expanding as more of them came back from the edge. The battlefield was shifting. Not quickly, not safely, but shifting.]
[Then the shadow fell across you.]
[Your instincts moved you before your mind did, a hard step left, the banner swinging out to clear a knot of succubi from your immediate space. The ground behind where you had been standing exploded upward in a concussion of rubble and bone fragments as something immense landed.]
[The axe was the size of a Dreadnought's arm. It had buried itself half a metre into the compacted bone-carpet where you had been standing.]
["You again, little wolf cub." Ka'Bandha's voice was not loud. It did not need to be. The size of the thing that produced it made volume irrelevant. He ripped the axe clear of the ground without apparent effort and straightened, fleshy wings spreading behind him, his crimson body blocking the sky. "The Blood God's favour toward you has not cooled my own grievance. You understand this."]
[He pointed the bone whip at your helmet. The crimson flames on it moved in ways fire was not supposed to move.]
["Submit to my lord now, or die here. These are your choices."]
[You looked up at him. Full height, he was a significant distance above you. His axe was significantly larger than your entire body. The whip was burning.]
["Ka'Bandha," you said. "You are one of the most feared daemons in the Warp. You have toppled Primarchs and broken Legions. And yet." You shifted your weight, adjusting your stance, the banner in your left hand and the Blood Scythe in your right. "You cannot finish a threat in under thirty words."]
[He stared at you.]
[You stared back.]
["Die!"]
[The bone whip came first, uncoiling toward you with the speed of something that had ended Astartes careers, the crimson flames wrapping outward as it extended. It closed around your power armour and the grip locked, ceramite cracking under the pressure as Ka'Bandha's massive arm hauled back.]
[At the same moment, the blood-red axe descended.]
[Toward your head.]
[Directly.]
[Fast.]
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