The primarch of the Word Bearers had fallen. His armour, once red and engraved with scripture, was an ashen husk of charred plate. Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didnât rise from his knees. He didnât lift his head. He did nothing at all.
âHeâs dead.â Ellas spoke softly.
âFire again.â Delantyr breathed the words. âFire again.â
âYou bled the core,â Kei replied. âWeâre plasma-starved.â
âFire the suppressing tracers. Three bursts.â
Ardentorâs anti-infantry bolters spat their tracer fire at the prone primarch. The first burst chewed glass, spraying fragments everywhere. The second two punched home in the scorched armour, blasting the fallen Emperorâs son onto his back â a vessel of cooked, punctured meat.
âWe just killed a primarch.â Kei swallowed. âWe just killed a primarch.â
Delantyrâs grin showed almost every tooth he had. âCrush him. Leave them nothing to bury.â
Ardentor walked. Its backwards-jointed legs hammered down on the steaming, downsloping glass, breaking it underfoot as it staggered down into the crater. When it reached the primarchâs body, Ellas raised the right claw-foot, and steered both control levers to slam the limb back down.
The Warhound shook, unbalanced with one leg in the air. Great gears in the war machineâs knee and hip protested with rough, mechanical coughs.
âGet the leg down,â Delantyr ordered. âFinish it.â
Ellas gave the control levers another wrenching shove. âSomethingâs obstructing us.â
Kei lifted his targeting visor again, looking out of the Warhoundâs left eye-windshield. He took a slow breath, and glanced back at his princeps.
âMy princeps? The World Eaters in the ruins⊠Theyâre cheering.â
The bleeding demigod had torn his way through the ground, giving voice to his resurrection with a bellow nothing short of ursine. Gore sheeted him, painting him in dark, rich red wetness. He threw his axes away, ruined and never to be wielded again, and breathed freedom into his lungs. It smelled of melted glass and felt like sunburn.
âLorgar.â He spat blood as he said the name, rising to his feet at last.
The Word Bearer lifted a scalded hand, not for aid, but in warning. Angron had no time to lift his mutilated brother, sprawled at his feet. The sun went dark, as dark as night falling in an instant.
He turned, raising his arms, and took a god-machineâs weight on his shoulders.
Every muscle in his body locked tighter than the iron trying to crush him. Drool stringed through his metal teeth, skinned knuckles white as he defied the will of a Titan. He gave a bearâs roar as the foot lowered another half-metre. Sinews crackled in his shoulders. His broken boots skidded back on the patch of unglassed rock; something cracked in his spine, something else cracked in his left knee. The compression of his bones sounded like twigs breaking underfoot, which was a vivid burst of imagination he didnât appreciate.
But he could hear his men cheering. He could hear them howling as they killed, and crying his name.
He blinked to clear away his sweatâs greasy sting, and dug his boots into the ground. With a smile slitting across his broken-angel face, he shifted his slipping, blood-slick grip on the Titanâs clawed foot, and started pushing back.
âLorgar.â Angron spoke in something that wasnât quite a growl and wasnât quite a laugh. âGet up. I canât hold this forever.'
~Betrayer, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden