Lucius.
During the Great Crusade, he had been a captain of the Emperor's Children's 13th Company, and the distinction the title carried had been genuinely earned. His swordsmanship was of the order that produces a specific kind of reputation: not the reputation of someone who wins through attrition or tactical calculation, but of someone whose opponents recognize, during the engagement itself, that they are fighting a practitioner of a different magnitude. It drew admiration from the warriors around him. It also drew something else.
The jealousy and vanity that had always lived in Lucius were not things he chose. They were structural features of his character, load-bearing elements that supported everything else, and the blind hunger for victory and recognition that they fed grew alongside his ability until neither could be contained by anything normal life offered. That hunger eventually found something willing to feed it without limit.
Slaanesh found Lucius, or Lucius found Slaanesh, and the result was what stood in the chamber now.
His combat effectiveness among Slaanesh's Chosen was not exceptional by the standards of that company. But Slaanesh's particular sense of humor, expressed in what it chose to give its most devoted servants, had made Lucius into something that transcended combat effectiveness as a relevant metric.
The curse was well-documented in certain classified Inquisitorial records: any being that killed Lucius and allowed itself even a moment of satisfaction at the fact would find that satisfaction to be the purchase price for something it had not agreed to buy. The transformation was not immediate. It was patient and thorough, and it ended with a new Lucius and a memory of having once been someone else.
Thirteen Astartes came through the entrance of the ancient hall in a tight combat formation, their boltguns already cycling, the targeting solutions in their helmet systems already resolving on the large purple-red figure in the center of the chamber.
Nolan raised one vibranium palm.
The Ten Rings responded simultaneously, detaching from his forearm and distributing themselves in the air above the group in a configuration that communicated, without ambiguity, that the order behind them was not a suggestion.
The Astartes stopped.
"This engagement is not yours," Nolan said, without turning from Lucius. "That is not a question of capability. It is a question of what happens to any warrior who kills this particular enemy."
He let that information settle for a moment.
"You have other work. Continue deeper into the Ark of Omen. Plant the melta bombs at the structural points we identified. Find the other scattered brothers and Reditus. When the charges are set and ready, give me the maximum detonation window you can manage." He paused. "If I have not reached you before the window closes, do not wait. Teleport out."
Voices came back through the command channel immediately.
"Primarch, we won't leave you..."
"Fight to the death for the Lord Primarch, we will not..."
"My Lord..."
The Ten Rings moved slightly, the configuration shifting in a way that suggested the order had been given and the conversation about the order was now also concluded. Nolan reached down and drove the handle of the warscythe into the metal floor with enough force to leave it standing without support. With his other hand he reached back and secured Forgebreaker across the power backpack.
"I am the Primarch," he said. "The Emperor does not permit me to fall to something like this. And if I find myself in a desperate position, I have methods available that I have not used yet." A brief pause. "Go. Now."
The Astartes went.
The magnetic boot impacts diminished through the entrance and became inaudible, and the hall was left with two figures in it.
Lucius had not moved during any of this.
He stood in the center of the chamber watching Nolan's management of the departure with the posture of someone attending a performance they find genuinely entertaining, the tentacle tongue working slowly behind the skinless teeth, the Laeran Blade angled toward the floor in a carry position that was relaxed in a way that was clearly calculated to read as relaxed. The faces in his armor's ceramite seemed to track the room independently, which was possibly an optical effect of the ambient light.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk." The resonant voice moved easily through the chamber's acoustic geometry. "How touching. And how interesting that our Lord Primarch apparently already knew something about my particular gift."
He took one slow step. Then another.
"I suppose I should feel honored that you sent your brothers away on my account. But I admit I find myself slightly disappointed." He tilted the blood-red face. "I had been imagining what it might look like, in some future engagement, if a son of the twenty-second Primarch stepped forward to introduce himself and the face he was wearing happened to be mine. That would have been something worth anticipating."
The tongue extended and retracted.
"Still. The alternatives have their own appeal. Perhaps our Lord Primarch himself will provide the occasion that his brothers were denied."
Nolan's breathing was audible inside the skull helmet. He was aware of it in the way he was aware of everything inside the armor's monitored environment, and he did not attempt to modify it, because what he was feeling was not something that required suppression right now. He was angry. That was accurate. He was angry in the specific way that he got angry when something he could not argue with had already happened and the only available response was to put everything into what came next.
He did not answer Lucius.
He reached across his body with one vibranium hand and gripped the blade of the warscythe.
The warscythe was sharp enough that the grip itself was the cut. He drew the hand back across the blade deliberately, and the vibranium shell parted at the palm, and pale golden blood came through the gap in a quantity that confirmed what Primarch physiology contained. It fell across the warscythe's blade in slow, luminous drops.
The blade caught fire.
Not an accelerant fire, not a mechanical ignition. The golden psychic flames that rose from the contact of Primarch blood with the warscythe's surface came from somewhere else entirely, rising in a color that the chamber's reddish ambient light made no impression on, burning with an energy that was not thermal. The warscythe in Nolan's closing grip became something that the room's atmosphere responded to: the air around the blade moving, the shadows in the hall pulling slightly back from the radius of the light it produced.
Lucius's expression changed.
Something crossed the blood-red skinless face that was not amusement. Something that recognized the fire and knew what it recognized.
The Lash of Torment snapped outward simultaneously with the Laeran Blade, both weapons moving at the speed of a Chaos Champion who had been refining the particular mechanics of killing for ten thousand years, and Lucius was already closing the distance when his weapons were in motion.
Nolan pulled the warscythe from the floor and ran to meet him.
The collision of a Primarch at full charge and a Chaos Champion at full extension produced a shockwave that found every surface in the hall simultaneously, the metal walls flexing outward from the point of impact and the floor deforming in a ring around where their first exchange of force resolved.
The warscythe's psychic-flame blade came around Lucius's guard and found the back of his power armor's upper chassis, the blade driving through ceramite and the faces worked into it and into the corrupted flesh beneath. Where the golden fire made contact with Chaos-touched biology, it did not simply cut. It burned from the inside, the psychic energy propagating through the tissue in a way that regular fire has no analogy for.
Lucius screamed.
It was not a sound designed to communicate distress. It was the involuntary kind, the sound that escapes before the will has a chance to intervene, the pure output of a nervous system that has just been informed of what psychic fire from Emperor's blood does to a Chosen of Slaanesh.
The Laeran Blade came around in the same moment, driving for the eyepiece of Nolan's skull helmet at an angle that ten thousand years of killing had identified as the correct one.
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