[With Ka'Bandha gone, the battlefield changed.]
[Not immediately, not cleanly, but in the way that a fire changes when its largest fuel source is removed: the centre of it collapses, and the edges keep burning on their own momentum, but the direction has shifted. The Khorne bloodletters and the vampires felt their patron's champion's absence in whatever way daemons felt such things, and they died faster for it, the Blood Angels' chainblades and bolt shells finding targets that were no longer fighting at full ferocity. Within minutes the Khorne presence on the battlefield had thinned to nothing.]
[The Slaanesh daemons were another matter. They had more numbers here, and they did not mourn Ka'Bandha.]
[You moved across the battlefield with the burning banner, and the pattern that emerged was clear and frustrating in equal measure: wherever the Imperial blood's psychic flame reached, the Blood Angels in its radius came back to themselves. Wherever you moved away from, the recovery began to reverse. The banner's suppression was real and it worked, and its effective range was not large enough to hold a battlefield this size. You could save the ones directly around you. The ones two hundred metres away were sliding back under.]
[You found Sanguinius at the forward edge of the fight, working through the Slaanesh press with the particular efficiency of something that did not need to calculate each individual engagement because the outcomes were not in question for him. You reached him between one swing and the next and explained it in as few words as possible: the Thirst was being sustained by a source, the banner could suppress it locally but not globally, the source needed to end.]
[He listened. He understood. He turned.]
[The call went out across the battlefield, through the Blood Angels' command network and through the psychic bond that existed between Sanguinius and his sons, the summons that pulled both the coherent and the barely-coherent toward a single vector. Some came running. Some came at a staggering walk, the Thirst still fighting them, the banner's proximity gradually winning as they closed distance. The formation that assembled around you and Sanguinius was ragged and it was bloodied and it pointed itself at the Temple of Bones.]
[You advanced together.]
[The banner cut a lane through the Slaanesh daemons the way fire cuts through undergrowth, the psychic flame touching them and the corruption in them reacting catastrophically. The Blood Scythe handled what the banner could not reach. Sanguinius handled everything else. The daemon blood was thick in the air by the time you reached the temple steps, coating the bone-paved staircase in additional layers that your boots found purchase on regardless.]
[Behind you, the Slaanesh daemons on the battlefield began receiving new orders. You felt the shift before you saw it: the daemons that had been engaged with the Blood Angels across the field disengaged simultaneously and turned toward your rear. Not a retreat. A siege. The archdeacon inside the temple was pulling everything toward the entrance, trying to close the trap behind you.]
[You were almost at the entrance when you saw them.]
[Grey-white power armour. The particular grey-white that was not any other Legion's colour, marked with script running across every visible surface, prayers and litanies carved into the ceramite as though the words were structural reinforcement. Twenty Astartes, standing at the temple entrance with bolters raised.]
[Twenty Legions. Only one that did this to their armour.]
["Word Bearers!" The roar came out of you before the thought completed. "Traitors!"]
[You were already at full sprint.]
[The bolters opened. You brought the Blood Scythe up in a continuous arc, the necrodermis edge finding the shells in their flight and splitting them before detonation, the technique requiring a reaction speed that you could feel Khorne's blessing sustaining in the background, the god of blood finding the violence here entirely to his taste. A handful of shells got through and hit your shoulder armour and the ceramite shed the outermost layer and you did not slow down.]
[The Slaanesh succubi between you and the Word Bearers were a temporary obstacle. You hit them at full speed with your shoulder and the ones who did not scatter fast enough were scattered by force, and then you were through them and into the Word Bearers and the Blood Scythe was working.]
[The green-lit edge went through power armour and the Word Bearers wearing it in the same motion, one exchange, then another. They were Astartes and they fought like Astartes and none of it was sufficient. Three of them were gone before the rest had fully registered that you were among them, and the ones who tried to reorient their bolters found that you were not staying in one place long enough for the aim to resolve.]
[Behind you, Sanguinius had already cleared the temple entrance.]
[The sound of it carried: stained glass going out in multiple panels simultaneously, structural stone fracturing, and underneath all of it the sounds of the Slaanesh daemons inside discovering the difference between a locked door and one that had been removed entirely. You finished the last of the Word Bearers and followed him in.]
[The interior of the Temple of Bones was vast and wrong.]
[The architecture followed rules that had nothing to do with the requirements of a building intended to hold people: proportions that served no structural purpose, angles that the eye refused to follow to their endpoints, decorative elements that were not decorative in any sense that the word usually implied. The bone-work that covered the exterior was only the beginning of what covered every surface inside. The light came from sources that were not fire and not electricity and that cast shadows in directions that did not correspond to the objects producing them.]
[At the far end of the temple, between the ruined pews and the altar that had been built from something that was not stone, she was waiting.]
[Keeper of Secrets. The title did not fully prepare you for the reality of it. She was tall, taller than any Astartes, the muscular purple-fleshed body carrying both power and the studied aesthetics of a creature that had spent immeasurable time perfecting the appearance of power. The long narrow blades in her slender arms had an elegance to them that was deliberate. The gold ornaments moved when there was no wind to move them. Her face was the face of a creature that understood exactly what beauty was and had decided to make it useful.]
["Sanguinius." Her voice was designed. Every element of it. "You have come all this way for your sons. Does that loyalty not grow exhausting? They carry their flaw regardless of what you sacrifice for them." The blades came up slowly. "Join us. Dedicate yourself, and the flaw ends. Your sons would be free."]
[Sanguinius said nothing. His wings folded. The Spear of Telesto came up in his grip.]
[The Keeper of Secrets raised one narrow blade and pointed it upward.]
[Above the dilapidated ceiling, something moved.]
[The mechanical device dropped through the ceiling as though the stone and bone above it were incidental, brass and crystal mixed in a construction that was too large to have been assembled inside the temple and that filled the upper third of the interior space as it descended, trailing chains that were already moving, already reaching.]