[The banner transformed in the air.]
[You had thrown a tattered battle flag. What arrived at Ka'Bandha was something else: the psychic flame on the Imperial blood surging upward as the fabric left your hand, the fire condensing rather than spreading, the torn cloth and its golden-soaked threads pulling into a coherent shape as the Emperor's blood found the form that the moment required. A spear. A golden burning spear, trailing fire through the air of Signus Prime.]
[It hit the bone whip first and the whip parted around it.]
[Then it hit Ka'Bandha.]
[The sound he made was not the sound of a Great Daemon performing anguish for effect. It was involuntary, the noise torn out of something that had spent ten thousand years being the thing that made other things scream. The burning banner had embedded itself deep in his chest, and the psychic flame of the Emperor's blood was doing what it did to all Chaos, from the inside now rather than the outside.]
[Ka'Bandha reached up with the claw bound in heavy chains and took hold of the banner. Pulled it out. His flesh closed behind it in the way daemon flesh did, but it did not close clean. The mark stayed. Something had been left in there that even his regeneration was working against.]
[He was still holding the banner when his other claw released the blood-red axe.]
[It was not aimed. It was a grenade thrown by something that had stopped calculating. The axe tumbled through the air toward you at a speed that made aimed evasion academic, and you were already moving, the shattered power armour responding to your commands with the grinding protest of ceramite that had absorbed more than it was rated for.]
[You cleared the axe's path by less than a metre.]
[And then the purple energy arrived.]
[Slaanesh. Of course Slaanesh. Ka'Bandha had not come to Signus Prime alone, and the temple behind the battlefield had been disgorging daemons since before you arrived, and somewhere in that press of daemon bodies there was a psyker or a focus or simply enough Slaanesh presence that the desire to end this particular irritant had found expression in Warp energy wrapping around your limbs and your armour and the ground beneath your feet and fixing all of them to one point in space.]
[You could not move. The axe was still in the air. You watched it come.]
[The psyker explosion hit from the direction of the ruined church at the edge of the battlefield.]
[Not one psyker. Dozens of them, simultaneously, the combined output of the Blood Angels' Librarians spending themselves in a single coordinated burst, and what that burst produced was enough to disrupt every working of Chaos energy within its radius. The Slaanesh binding dissolved. The axe continued past you, the trajectory altered by the shockwave, and buried itself in the bone-carpet thirty metres behind where you were standing.]
[And from the sky above the church, rising through the dust and the psychic discharge, came Sanguinius.]
[You had read accounts. You had absorbed records. None of them were adequate preparation for the actual thing.]
[Three metres and more of him, the golden power armour catching even the wrong light of Signus Prime and making something worthwhile of it, the pure white wings spreading as he cleared the church roof and angled upward and then down toward Ka'Bandha. His face was what the accounts said it was: handsome, cold, carrying the particular expression of something that had already decided.]
[The golden spear left his hand on a flat trajectory.]
[It hit Ka'Bandha's axe on the arc of the weapon's return swing, the collision point directly between the axe and where you were standing, and the impact drove the axe into the ground with a concussive force that propagated outward through the bone-carpet and knocked you and everything else nearby off its feet. The Slaanesh binding dissolved in the shockwave. You were down, then up, your hands finding the golden spear where it had embedded in the ground at the impact point.]
[You pulled it free. It was warm. You held it alongside the Blood Scythe and looked up at Ka'Bandha and did not look away.]
["For the Emperor!"]
[Ka'Bandha was still carrying the wound from the banner. He was still missing most of one wing. He looked at you with the pure, simple fury of something that had been humiliated and had not finished the response, and he charged.]
[He did not reach you.]
[Sanguinius came down from the sky like a judgement, all his mass and speed focused into the blade of the Spear of Telesto as it drove into Ka'Bandha's chest. Not the banner's wound. A new one. Deeper. The Crimson Blade followed in a sequence of strikes that had the quality of something trained for this specific purpose over a very long time, each blow finding the places that the previous one had opened, working through Ka'Bandha's regeneration faster than it could close.]
[Ka'Bandha raised his axe with the arm that still functioned fully. Sanguinius was already past the angle where it could reach him.]
["Crimson daemon." Sanguinius's voice was not raised. It did not need to be. "If you truly come from the place that humanity calls Hell, then carry this message back with you: it was Sanguinius, son of the Emperor of Mankind, who returned you there."]
[The Crimson Blade came up one final time.]
["No. I am not finished—"]
[Ka'Bandha's head left his body and the roar cut off mid-syllable. The severed head tumbled upward, then down, the momentum of the cut carrying it away from the body as the enormous blood-red form collapsed and the stone around the impact point cracked from the weight of it falling. The body began to dissolve, the Warp reclaiming the material it had lent, and within moments what had been the most feared of Khorne's daemon servants on this battlefield was a fading stain on the ruins of Signus Prime.]
[You breathed out.]
[The weapons dropped from your hands without a decision being made about it, the golden spear and the Blood Scythe hitting the bone-carpet and leaving shallow impressions. Your armour was reporting things you did not have the focus to process yet. You stood in the debris of the fight and let the air move through your lungs for a moment and did not think about anything in particular.]
["Young man." The voice came from behind and above you, unhurried. "Now is not the time to lower your guard."]
[You turned.]
[Sanguinius had landed. The wings settled against his back as he walked toward you, each step deliberate and even, the golden armour unmarked by the battle in the way that Primarch armour sometimes was and sometimes wasn't. His face, up close, was exactly what the accounts said it was and also nothing like what any account could actually convey. The star-deep eyes found you and stayed.]
[You opened your mouth.]
["I am..."]
["I know who you are," Sanguinius said. "And I know why you have come." Something moved behind those eyes, not surprise, not welcome exactly, but recognition. "Psychic prophecy showed me my ultimate fate. In the same vision, it showed me your arrival." He paused. "Your presence here is a ripple in the long river of time. There are things you cannot change, even now. I think you already know which things those are."]
[You did know. You had known since Signus Prime appeared in the navigation data aboard the Red Tear. You had come anyway.]
["Besides." His gaze moved past you to the battlefield. "This is not the moment for that conversation."]
[You turned to follow his look.]
[The Temple of Bones was still standing, and from its doorways and the gaps in its bone-built walls, more Slaanesh daemons were emerging. Not in the volume of the initial assault, but in enough numbers that the Blood Angels who had recovered their sanity were already facing a renewed engagement, and the ones still in the grip of the Thirst were at risk of being pulled back under.]
[You shook your head once, hard, the short grey hair moving. You picked up the Blood Scythe. The burning banner was dying, the Imperial blood soaked into it nearly exhausted by everything it had done, but it was still producing something, the psychic flame reduced to a guttering remnant but not gone.]
[You drew the Blood Scythe across your palm again. The cut opened clean. The golden blood welled up and you pressed it into the banner's fabric with your hand, feeding what was left of it.]
[You did not look at Sanguinius as you spoke.]
["Come on, then." You tossed him the golden spear without turning around, and heard the sound of him catching it behind you. "Let's send them home."]
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