[You lifted yourself out of the rubble one piece at a time.]
[The power armour protested at every joint, the ceramite that remained telling you exactly how much ceramite had not remained, but the limbs moved and the medical system was still functional and you found your feet and stood. The ruins of the Temple of Bones surrounded you, open to the sky now, the Signus Prime clouds beginning to thin in a way that suggested the planet itself understood that what had been sustaining the worst of its atmosphere was gone.]
[Sanguinius was standing on the broken wall at the edge of the ruins.]
[His back was to you. The white wings were folded and still, the golden armour catching the deteriorating light of the battlefield, and his face, when you found the angle to see it, was carrying something that had no useful military application. Grief, maybe, or the particular expression of someone who had been shown the shape of a thing they had been dreading and had found that the shape was exactly as bad as they had imagined.]
[You took a breath of the ruined air and did not walk toward him.]
[Around you, the battlefield wound down in the way that battlefields eventually did: not with ceremony, but with the gradual accumulation of absence. The last Slaanesh daemons were rootless without the archdeamon's direction, and the Blood Angels found them and finished them, and each engagement was smaller than the last. You gripped the banner and the Blood Scythe and moved through what remained, the psychic flame of the Imperial blood reaching the Blood Angels who were still in the grip of the Thirst and pulling them back, one by one, until the last of it released and the flame guttered out entirely.]
[You watched the banner's fire die with something that was not quite relief and not quite loss.]
[The last Slaanesh succubus came apart under the Blood Scythe, and you straightened up, and the battlefield was quiet.]
[Above you, the thick clouds of Signus Prime parted in a long, slow split, and through the gap a streak of blood-red sunset light fell across the ruins and the dead, painting everything in a colour that was, under the circumstances, entirely appropriate. The Stormbird transports were already descending from the fleet, the angular shapes of the Sokar-pattern craft dropping toward the landing zones in formation, their hatches opening before they fully touched ground. Ordinary naval personnel streamed out alongside the Astartes apothecaries, moving among the fallen with the focused efficiency of people who had done this before and understood what was required of them.]
[Gene-seed extraction. Equipment recovery. The wounded assessed and carried to the transports, the dead catalogued and given what could be given in the field. The Terminator Honour Guard, who had taken the worst of it throughout the engagement, moved with the others despite their numbers being reduced to a fraction of what they had been, the survivors carrying their wounded brothers without waiting to be asked.]
[You climbed down from the rubble, your armour creaking, and a Blood Angel appeared at your elbow. Young face, the helmet under his arm, the Legion's features clear in his jaw and brow. He held out a water jug without speaking.]
[You took it. You rinsed your mouth and spat the blood-tinted water onto the ruins and nodded at him, and he looked at you the way someone looked at a person they had decided something about, and you saw him starting to drop to one knee.]
["Don't." You kept your voice easy. "I'm not worth the effort, and I'm still alive, so it's premature at minimum. Walk with me."]
[He blinked. He fell into step beside you instead, and the other Blood Angels nearby absorbed the shift without visible confusion, which told you something about how adaptable the sons of Sanguinius were.]
[You found Sanguinius among the wounded.]
[He had come down from the wall at some point while you were finishing the last of the daemons, and he moved along the rows of the injured with the deliberate attention of someone who was not performing care but enacting it, the golden form bending to each wounded son, the words he spoke too low to carry. Some of the ones he stopped at were going into the Dreadnought caskets, the wounds beyond what the apothecaries could restore, and those conversations were longer.]
["Sanguinius." You waited until he straightened before speaking. "I think we have enough quiet now to talk."]
[He turned. The grief was still in his face but it had settled into something that sat alongside function rather than displacing it.]
[He looked at the Blood Angels around you and raised one hand slightly. The honour guard and the attending Astartes gathered the wounded and moved toward the Stormbirds, the space clearing around you in less than a minute. The two of you were as alone as the battlefield allowed.]
["Thank you." His voice was even. "Without your arrival, the losses among my sons would have been considerably greater. The victory would still have come, but the cost of it would have been different." He held your gaze. "I am grateful to you personally, and I am grateful on behalf of my Legion."]
["I only did what the Primarch role required." The words came out straightforwardly, without the formal weight they might have carried in other contexts. You shifted your grip on the Blood Scythe and looked up at him. "Brother, tell me what you actually saw. How much of the Heresy did the psychic sight show you?"]
[Something in Sanguinius's expression acknowledged the directness without objecting to it.]
["I should correct a misunderstanding first." He spoke with the patience of someone accustomed to precision. "Psychic prophecy is not precise. It does not present events like written records. It presents impressions, feelings, visions that require interpretation, and interpretations can be wrong." He paused. "In the river of time, I saw you arriving. I saw the struggle and the dying among many brothers. I saw the outcome I will face."]
[His gaze moved to the Stormbirds in the middle distance, the transports rising slowly with their cargo of wounded.]
[You took a breath.]
["Then let me be straightforward with you about the rest of it. Now that I'm here, there are things that can still be changed. If we work together, if we protect you from what's coming..."]
["Young man."]
[The hand he raised to stop you was not dismissive. It was the gesture of someone cutting off a line of thought before it went somewhere that would require more pain to walk back from.]
["You still do not fully understand." His voice was gentle and it was immovable. "What I face is something I must face as the Emperor's son. It is not something you can prevent by arriving early or fighting harder." He looked at you directly. "Do you understand what happens to the entire human empire if Father falls in the battle against Horus?"]
["The Emperor doesn't fall permanently," you said. "He's immortal. His psychic power is stellar in magnitude. Even at his worst, even badly wounded, he would recover in time. If the cost of Horus's defeat is Terra for a period, that's a recoverable loss. As long as the Emperor himself survives..."]
["You are very young." The words were not unkind. "You have not spent much time with Father. You do not know him well enough yet." He waited a moment, choosing what came next carefully. "Do you believe that the man who built the human empire, who created everything we are and everything we fight for, would willingly abandon the people who believe in him? The ones who fight and die for him every day across ten thousand worlds?"]
[You opened your mouth.]
[You did not answer.]
["I think you already have your answer," Sanguinius said quietly. "The Emperor would not abandon them. I would not abandon my sons. And you, whatever you are and wherever you came from, you are here instead of somewhere safer, which means you would not abandon your people either. This is what we are. It is also the most painful part of what we are."]
[He turned slightly, looking at the sky where the clouds were still parting.]
["Your arrival has demonstrated one thing with clarity." He spoke without looking at you. "There are events in the river of time that happen regardless. They are bound. They occur because everything leading to them has already occurred, in ways too numerous and too deep to unwind." A pause. "If meeting me truly alters my future, then why are you still standing here? You were sent from a point downstream. If the river changes course, the tributary that fed your existence might not exist in the same form."]
[The question landed in the silence between you and did not leave it.]
[You had considered the mechanics of the simulator without ever fully tracing this particular thread, and now that you followed it, the end of it was cold. If Sanguinius survived what was prophesied, the Emperor would not take the Golden Throne from catastrophic injury. If the Emperor did not take the Golden Throne, the state religion would not emerge, and the faith of billions accumulated across millennia would not converge. The God-Emperor of the later age would not exist in the same form. The golden blood that ran in your veins in this moment might not have the same origin.]
[If none of those things happened, then the version of you standing here might not have come from the same source.]
[And yet here you were. Still standing. The armour still broken around you. The blood still real on the banner fabric.]
[Perhaps you were, as Sanguinius had said at the church, a ripple in the long river. Present, genuine, touching things, and ultimately carrying less weight than the river itself.]
[The despair that came with that thought was not quiet. It pressed against the inside of your ribs and made the battlefield feel smaller than it was.]
["You do not need to carry that." Sanguinius's voice was close. You had not heard him move. "And you do not need to despair."]
[His hand came down on your shattered shoulder armour with the particular solidity of something that knew its own weight. The impact of it moved through the damaged ceramite and registered as the physical reality of another person, present and certain, in a way that the philosophical weight of the previous minutes had not been.]
["Listen to me." His voice was low and it was very clear. "Our battlefield, mine and my brothers', is here. It is now, in this age, in these wars. This is where we fight." The deep eyes found yours. "But your battlefield is not here. It was never here. Your hopes and your wars and the things you are meant to do exist in the future, not the past. You did not come here to change the course of the river. You came here because the river brought you, and now the river will take you forward again."]
[Something that had been contracting in your chest since Sanguinius asked his question began, slowly, to loosen.]
["I understand." The words came out quietly and they were true. You straightened up inside the broken armour, and the straightening felt like a deliberate thing. "I'll keep fighting. Whatever comes next."]
[Sanguinius looked at you for a moment with something that was not quite a smile and was not quite the grief from before. Something between them, or after them both.]
["Good." He nodded once. "Now. What do we do next?"]
[You looked at him, uncertain whether the question was a test or a genuine handoff.]
[He shook his head slightly, the golden hair moving, and his gaze lifted past your shoulder toward the sky.]
[The last of the thick clouds of Signus Prime were separating, the deep blue of what passed for clear sky on this world opening above the ruined battlefield, the blood-red sunset light thinning toward something cooler and more honest.]
[He was looking at something specific.]
[You turned to follow his eyes.]