[The mechanical device descended from the broken ceiling and the chains trailing from it were already moving with purpose before it fully entered the space below.]
[You saw what it was holding in the same moment Sanguinius did.]
[Tagas. The name surfaced from the simulation's fragmentary memory with the particular clarity that important things sometimes had: company commander of the 111th Company of the Blood Angels Legion, killed in action during the Great Crusade, honoured by his brothers with a planet named in his memory. He had been dead. He was not dead now in any definition that the word comfortably covered. Most of his head remained. His other limbs did not. What was left of him was kept at the specific threshold between life and death that made him useful to the device, and he was screaming, continuously, in a register that had moved past sound into something closer to psychic transmission.]
[From the mangled body, pale red aura bled outward without stopping, drawn out by the device's workings and dispersed in threads that drifted across the temple and through its walls and found the Blood Angels still fighting outside, and found the ones who had recovered inside, and fed the Thirst in all of them simultaneously.]
[The source. You were looking at the source.]
[You understood the architecture of it in an instant: the Word Bearers had built this, a Dark Apostle's construct using the remnants of a Blood Angels captain as its mechanism, and its only purpose was to sustain the genetic flaw across the entire battlefield indefinitely, or until Sanguinius broke under the weight of watching his sons destroy themselves and each other. The Chaos gods did not need Ka'Bandha to win here. They just needed enough time.]
[Sanguinius saw it too.]
["What have you done to him?"]
[The wings spread again, the controlled fury in them not controlled anymore, and he drove the Spear of Telesto into the Keeper of Secrets before the archdeamon had finished the opening words of her offer. The blade went through the chest and kept going, pinning her to the temple wall, and whatever she had planned to say to corrupt him with the sight of Tagas came out instead as a scream.]
[You came through the entrance behind the last of the Blood Angels you had brought with you, the burning banner on your shoulder, the Blood Scythe in your hand, and you took in the scene in a single sweep: Sanguinius and the Keeper of Secrets against the far wall, the mechanical device descending from above, Tagas at its centre, the chains still moving.]
["Blood Angels! That device! Destroy it!"]
[You pulled the Heart of the Furnace from your hip and squeezed the trigger.]
[The plasma balls converged on the mechanical construct alongside the bolt shells from fifteen Blood Angels firing simultaneously. The brass-and-crystal housing took the first impacts without yielding and took the second volley the same way, but on the third the crystal elements began to fracture, the resonance frequencies working against the structure that contained them.]
["No!" The Keeper of Secrets's voice tore through the noise of gunfire, the composed seduction of it finally abandoned. "Angel of Baal! And you, wolf cub who should never have come here! You have destroyed everything!"]
[She was still pinned to the wall by the spear. Her limbs that remained moved regardless, flailing against the stone, the truncated ones leaving marks.]
["Sanguinius!" The composure reassembled itself into something more urgent, the archdeamon's remaining eyes finding the Primarch. "Do you think this ends here? Unless you walk the path your brother Horus walks, unless you stand on the winning side, your sons will pay a price you cannot bear to name!"]
[Sanguinius had raised the Crimson Blade.]
[He paused.]
[It was a fraction of a second. Less. The pause of a father hearing his children threatened by something that had studied him long enough to know exactly where to apply the weight. The Blade did not complete its arc.]
[You were already moving.]
[The burning banner came off your shoulder armour and your hand found the pole and you drove it like a lance directly into the Keeper of Secrets's chest, past the spear that had already passed through her, through the ruined torso, into the wall behind her.]
[The psychic flame found her the way it found all Chaos.]
["Sooner or later I will see you kneeling before my master," she started, and the sinister smile that had been forming froze completely, and the scream that followed was brief.]
[The ashes dispersed before they reached the floor.]
[You pulled the banner free and turned to Sanguinius.]
["Brother." The word came out without planning. You had not intended to call him that. It was accurate. "Do not listen to a single word they speak. Every promise and every threat is the same instrument. They are not trying to inform you. They are trying to move you."]
[He looked at you for a moment. Then he nodded, slow and complete.]
[Behind you, the mechanical construct finally gave way under the sustained fire, the crystal housing shattering along every plane simultaneously, the brass framework losing coherence and beginning to collapse. The construct hit the temple floor in multiple pieces, the impact shaking the bone-work in the walls, dust falling from the ceiling in sheets.]
[The pale red aura streaming from Tagas's body stopped.]
[The screaming stopped.]
[What remained of the company commander finally, mercifully, ceased.]
[And then the chaos psionic energy that had been contained in the construct released all at once.]
[The nearest Blood Angels were swept off their feet, the wave of raw Warp energy moving outward from the wreckage in a ring. One of them, close enough to be inside the device's collapse radius, was caught in the discharge differently from the others. The designation came through the simulation's memory as it happened: Melos. The psionic energy found him and found the remnants of Tagas in the same moment, and the two things merged in the way that Chaos energy merged things, completely and without asking permission.]
[Sanguinius spread his wings and was already in motion.]
[Too late.]
[The thing that assembled itself from Melos and Tagas and the discharge energy of the collapsed construct was not either of them anymore. It was something that had no stable form, burning and boiling at its edges, the crimson colour of it deeper than any natural red, the psionic fluctuations coming off it hitting the air like pressure. Every Blood Angel in the temple who saw it, even inside the banner's suppression radius, felt the Thirst activate instantly and completely. Not gradually. All at once.]
["Don't look at it!" Your voice cracked with the force of the shout. "Turn away! All of you, turn away now!"]
[You charged toward it with the burning banner raised, the only thing you had that might hold it back, and in your peripheral vision you saw Sanguinius do the same from the other direction.]
[The Crimson Angel's shape shifted.]
[Toward Sanguinius. The indistinct head moved toward him, and for a moment you thought it recognised him, or recognised the bond, or was trying to communicate something that the form it had taken made impossible to transmit.]
[Then it erupted.]
[The psionic discharge came without warning, the full pressure of everything the Crimson Angel carried releasing in a single pulse that hit you like a wall. You were airborne. The banner left your hand. The Blood Scythe left your other hand. You hit a structural pillar at speed, your armour taking the impact and transmitting what the armour could not absorb, and you felt the damage register somewhere distant through the psionic ringing in your skull.]
[Around you, the Blood Angels were down. All of them. Pressed flat against the temple floor by the force of the discharge, armour groaning, unable to move.]
[Sanguinius had his wings around himself, the white feathers scorched at the edges, the shockwave having driven him back even with the wings' protection. He was standing. Barely.]
[The ceiling of the Temple of Bones went outward in every direction at once.]
[The upper structure of the building simply ceased to be structured, the bone-work and stone and whatever the Chaos architects had used as their binding agent all separating and flying away from the point directly above the Crimson Angel. Debris rained across the city ruins outside. A subspace rift opened in the space the ceiling had occupied, quiet and dark, the specific quality of a door that opened onto somewhere much larger than the room it was in.]
[The Crimson Angel grew its wings.]
[Enormous, the same crimson as its body, spreading to the full width of the now-open sky above the ruined temple. It spread them and it rose, and it flew into the subspace rift without looking back at anything it was leaving behind, and the rift closed behind it, and the temple was open to the sky of Signus Prime.]
[The silence that followed was the silence of a space that had been very loud for a long time and had suddenly stopped.]
[You lay against the base of the pillar and looked up at the open sky and breathed.]
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