On the other side.
In the caves of Pyresotha.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it all!"
The Warmaster's roar echoed through the cavern.
He had no way of knowing that on Cadia, the Daemon Primarchs had suffered the same humiliation under the same tactics.
All Abaddon knew was that the rage churning in his chest was on the verge of incinerating what little remained of his reason.
He ran and cursed everything that could be cursed — those short-sighted, foolish Chaos Gods; those Daemon Primarchs with no sense of a covenant; that Erebus, who had vanished to gods-knew-where; and those accursed Custodians who had crawled out of whatever tomb had kept them.
Abaddon's massive frame had lost its former agility.
The black Terminator armour that had once proclaimed the supreme majesty of the Warmaster of Chaos was now a ruin. Bolt wounds, plasma burns, the jagged gashes left by power blades — the damage was layered upon damage, covering nearly every inch of his plate.
The Warmaster of Chaos cut a wretched, humiliated figure.
And around him, his Despoiler Marines fared no better as they scrambled in flight.
Once, they had slaughtered the Emperor's subjects across countless worlds. Their names alone had been synonyms for terror.
But now they fled like rabbits before hounds.
The Despoilers lacked the protection their master enjoyed — the surging Chaos energies that allowed Abaddon to shrug off barrages of fire, the same power that had let him take a powered fist to the face and survive, and the blessings of the Dark Gods that kept him breathing even under the upgraded weapons that had come out of the Promethean laboratories.
His warriors had none of that.
Bolt shells detonated among them, and every explosion claimed more lives. Armour fragments mingled with torn flesh and splattered across the cave walls, catching the light with a foul gleam. The bodyguard that had once moved in dense formation was now a straggling handful — barely a dozen still loyally following their master's footsteps.
And from behind, those golden figures closed the distance once more.
Diocletian, Tribune of the Adeptus Custodes, locked his burning gaze — wild with battle-hunger and deep, abiding hatred — upon his quarry.
He drew a breath, and bellowed.
His voice cut through the thunder of detonations and carried all the way to Abaddon's ears.
"Don't let our great enemy escape! The one in the black cloak — that's Abaddon!"
Damn it.
Abaddon swore inwardly.
He hesitated for a single heartbeat — then, without the faintest hesitation, he raised the Talon of Horus.
Five claw-blades swept in an arc and tore the conspicuous, priceless black cloak from his shoulders. The dark fabric drifted to the ground. He trampled it underfoot without a backward glance.
Then the voice came again.
"Take note, everyone! The one with the topknot — that's Abaddon!"
Abaddon: "————"
Damn it.
What had he just done?
Savage fury surged through him like magma.
It battered at his reason until he nearly wheeled around to charge back and tear that insufferable Custodian into shreds with the Talon and his daemon blade.
But what remained of his reason seized him and held.
He ground his teeth and forced his legs to keep moving forward.
Why is this tunnel so long?
He had not thought the cave nearly so vast when he had entered it. The winding passages seemed to have no end; every bend led into another stretch of darkness going nowhere he could name.
And around him, under the relentless bolt fire from behind, his Despoiler escort dwindled toward nothing.
More screams. And then there were only a scant few still following in his wake.
Almost there.
Almost there.
Light appeared at the far end of his vision.
The light of the Pandorax system's sun, spilling gently through the mouth of the cave, painting the edges of the rock in gold.
As the light grew closer, Abaddon's rage burned hotter rather than cooling.
That damned Erebus. He must have colluded with the False Emperor's lackeys, let them learn of his plans well in advance.
Abaddon felt like a fool. How had he allowed such catastrophically wrong judgement? What had Erebus poured into his ears to make him so utterly irrational?
The suspicion flared for a moment, but there was no time to pursue it.
That is the exit.
Once he was clear of this place, clear of whatever strange suppression field had been cast over it, the link between the Warp and reality would re-establish itself. And then he would be free —
He could deal with everything else once he was out.
Then Abaddon saw what was waiting for him.
His eyes went wide.
A figure stood in the light of the cave mouth.
The figure held a black sword. A length of iron chain ran from his wrist and was wound around the sword's grip.
His entire body was encased in black armour, unadorned — no heraldry, no markings of rank, no laurels of victory. Nothing that might declare who he was or what he had done.
He looked nothing at all like a Space Marine was supposed to look. He was plain to the point of being a void.
The figure simply stood at the cave entrance, at rest.
The light of the Pandorax sun fell gently upon him, tracing a faint rim of gold along the edges of his dark armour.
It's you.
Even without a removed helm. Even in the most unremarkable ready stance imaginable.
Abaddon recognised him all the same.
"Sigismund you wretch!"
When he had seen Diocletian and Endymion — Tribunes who had returned from death — something in the deepest part of the Warmaster's mind had already half-formed this expectation.
And now that expectation stood before him in the flesh.
Sigismund regarded his ancient enemy with a calm gaze.
This was the one who had taken his life in the duel during the First Black Crusade.
Yet there was not so much as a ripple in his heart. He simply looked at Abaddon.
Without a word. Without a sound.
Abaddon, still in the shadows, came to a halt.
Both of them stood motionless, facing each other across the silence.
In that moment, Abaddon felt as though time had shed its meaning.
All the noise — the crack of bolt rounds behind him, the roars of the Custodians, the dying screams of the last Despoilers — receded like a tide, and there was only stillness.
A sense of honour, pure and overwhelming, surged up from the depths of his soul, alongside a hunger for battle he had not felt in a very long time. It was as though time had reversed — as though the years had rolled back to the days when he had still been something.
"Is that so. Yes. I see."
Abaddon murmured quietly.
Then he stepped forward.
This time he was not fleeing.
The former First Captain of the Luna Wolves moved with purpose, and the will to fight roared in his veins as it had not in centuries.
The rage that had been churning in his chest had burned itself into something clean — pure killing intent.
The Talon of Horus coiled in readiness. The daemon blade Drach'nyen sang a hungry note in the air.
There was no exchange of pleasantries. Of course there was no exchange of words.
What lay between them could not be settled with language.
These two warriors, whose names had been spoken together since the days of the Great Crusade, took their first heavy strides toward each other and crashed together with savage abandon.
Tremendous energy detonated at the point of impact, a shockwave blasting outward in all directions. Rubble and dust were hurled into the air, then torn to powder by the violence of two opposing forces.
The last of the Despoilers who had somehow survived to reach this point did not even manage a scream — they were simply unmade, shredded into fragments and blood-mist by the collision of those two forces.
But neither combatant noticed.
Horizontal cuts. Thrusts. Parries. Footwork. Evasions. Crushing overhand blows —
Their martial arts raged like a storm, blade-tracks and claw-tracks weaving a dizzying net of death through the air between them.
Every single blow was sufficient to kill any legendary Space Marine. Every exchange of metal on metal threw off blinding sparks and shockwaves.
The Warmaster of Chaos swung with feverish abandon, Chaos energy surging and boiling through his veins. The power made him feel as though he had been carried back to the past — to those glorious days of his youth, to what he had then believed to be the most honourable era in the galaxy.
On the high walls of the Palace of Terra, in the smoke of a hundred battlefields, that fire and will-to-war had always been his constant companion.
"HAHAHAHAHA! Kill! Kill! Kill! Come on then!"
Abaddon roared.
His topknot lashed in the buffeting winds of their exchange, the Chaos energies within him growing more savage by the instant. His eyes had begun to glow a deep, bloody crimson.
Limitless killing intent surged and crashed within the Warmaster's chest, transmuting into raw power — power that exceeded even what he had displayed against the Custodians moments before.
Daemon blade and Talon struck together, carrying a force that could move mountains, and drove hard into the black sword.
Sigismund was pushed back several steps.
"Do you see that? I won! I beat you!"
Abaddon laughed, the sound full of wild triumph and madness. "You're weaker than I am, Sigismund! Whatever power your new master gave you, it isn't greater than mine!"
The Emperor's Champion did not answer.
He only watched Abaddon with a calm gaze, still silent.
Those eyes held no anger. No frustration. No emotional reaction of any kind.
He only watched.
And then Abaddon understood.
His laughter ceased.
A profound and ice-cold dread seized his heart without warning.
That chill climbed his spine from its base, and he could not stop himself from looking up.
Without his noticing when it had happened, out beyond the cave mouth, in the clear sky of Pyresotha, the vast hull of the Hand of Retribution had appeared.
The silhouette of the Gloriana-class Battleship blotted out the sun and cast an enormous shadow across the ground below.
And in Abaddon's pupils, an energy beam was rising in the macro-cannon arrays of that great vessel — bright enough to burn his eyes.
No.
This is impossible.
Orbital bombardment?
How would they dare?
Wait —
Abaddon's thoughts came quickly.
If he had guessed correctly — if the Imperials had truly been able to sever the link between the Warp and reality — then in the time since he had entered the cave, with the efficiency of the Ultramarines Chapter Master, it stood to reason that the Chaotic ritual had already been shut down and ended outright.
Of course.
From the very beginning, all of this was planned.
But there was one final question.
Abaddon tore his gaze away and looked at Sigismund before him in shock. His blood-red eyes bored into the face concealed behind that helm, and he asked, word by word:
"Why? Why would it come to this?"
At last, Sigismund spoke.
His voice was exactly as Abaddon remembered — cold, flat, carrying not the faintest inflection of feeling.
As though the figure before him were not the enemy with whom he had been entangled for half a lifetime, but an insignificant insect. An error that needed correcting.
"Your entire existence has been nothing but a mistake."
Sigismund said it plainly.
"In the past, the mistake you forged with your own hands brought your wretched father to ruin. In the present, the Black Crusades you have launched again and again have been utterly without meaning. And the words you speak so loudly, the beliefs you claim to uphold — they are nothing but a performance you put on to deceive yourself."
His voice paused.
For the first time, something came through in that calm, level tone.
Judgement.
"I am only here to correct, with my own hands, a mistake I failed to correct before. Nothing more. This is not a duel. This is a reckoning."
"Heh — hahahahahaha!"
Abaddon could not help but laugh. Then it became wild, deafening, unhinged laughter.
The sound bounced and rang off the cave walls, carrying with it something impossible to name precisely.
And in the instant the beam of light descended, he summoned the last of his strength, threw his head back, and stared directly into that consuming white radiance with wide-open eyes.
The light filled Abaddon's sight and swallowed everything.
In that moment, as Abaddon raised his eyes to the white torrent pouring down from the macro-cannons of the Hand of Retribution, he remembered the instant he had left the Luna Wolves' homeworld of Cthonia behind, stepped aboard the Vengeful Spirit, and first laid eyes on his gene-father.
And then the Great Crusade. Ullanor. Davin. Isstvan III. Isstvan V. The Siege of Terra. The Eye of Terror —
Countless images flowed past before him.
Ten thousand years of war. Ten thousand years of ambition. Ten thousand years of hatred and obsession. All of it rose like a tide.
Abaddon closed his eyes, and the images slid past one by one — so vivid that he thought for a moment he had fallen into some psychic illusion.
Then, after a brief stillness, he understood.
Ah.
So this is what they call your life flashing before your eyes.
The vast light faded.
Before Sigismund, there was nothing now but an enormous crater.
The edges of the rock had been fused by plasma energy into smooth, glassy curves, reflecting a dull gleam in the lingering heat. As a main battery strike from the Hand of Retribution, the shot had been precise beyond comprehension. But a macro-cannon rebuilt with reality-altering modifications was not to be understood by ordinary standards — a strike of such terrible, concentrated power was entirely within its means.
The air was thick with the scorched smell of ionisation.
Every Chaos presence that had entered the cave with Abaddon — every Despoiler Marine, every elite warrior of the Black Legion, and the Warmaster himself — had been swallowed utterly by that white light, leaving nothing behind.
Sigismund stood at the rim of the crater and looked down, in silence, at the scorched void below.
"This is only a beginning."
He said it quietly, his black sword sliding slowly back into its scabbard. His voice drifted through the empty cavern in fading echoes.
"The war to end all wars —"