THE HELM HAD belonged to his marshal. For many years, he had associated its knightly bearing with the man beneath. A rock of faith, and a warrior of righteous fury. A man he had admired, even loved. Now it filled him with loathing.
Siegred averted its gaze and gripped the bloody vertebrae protruding from the severed head within. With almost reverent care, he placed the head on a pile with dozens of others. Stripped of their helms, there was nothing to distinguish the faces of his brothers from the witches of the Grey Knights. False knights, all of them. Liars and hypocrites.
“How did it come to this?” he asked the mound of severed heads. “How did we lose our way so grievously?”
Around him, a loose circle of heretics armoured in blood and brass gathered, fingers twitching on the triggers of chainblades as the Black Templar knelt in the bloody mire of the battlefield. Siegred reached for his own chainsword, inverting it to rest his forehead on the pommel, still warm from recent use. Closing his eyes, he offered his final prayer.
“God-Emperor, hear my prayer. I swore a vow to suffer not the witch to live. My brothers swore it too - and they forsook it when not one of them raised arms against the coven of false knights that worked their witchcraft in this place.” A fury like nothing he had ever known gripped him at the memory of his brothers standing by as the Grey Knights hurled unclean energies from their minds at the red wave of horned daemons that surged ahead of the heretic astartes. The bloodletters were abominations, but honest ones at least. The epiphany had struck him, then, as the red wave broke and the Black Templars fought shoulder to shoulder with an army of witches. He forced his next words through gritted teeth. “False knights You created. What manner of god does that make You?”
He heard footsteps approach behind him. Perhaps one of the traitors had finally summoned the courage to face him. Siegred’s grip tightened around the haft of his blade as he made peace with his dead god.
“Did they teach you to do that?”
He turned at the voice. A warrior leaned on the hilt of an upturned greatsword with a flame-edged blade, a blasphemous rune leering out from the tilting shield on a pauldron displaying the aciarium of the Dark Angels in unfamiliar colours of blood on black.
“We raised monuments to worship Him,” Siegred replied. “It seems fitting to raise one last one to spite Him.”
“Why?”
Siegred considered this, and a heretical thought crossed his mind. He shrugged. “Do you not worship your gods in similar ways?”
The warrior shook his head. “Not us. Khorne doesn’t care. War is our worship, bloodshed our prayer. Skulls are monument enough without being heaped in a pile.”
There was an agreeable simplicity about that. No dogma, he thought, no catechisms or creeds. No shackles on the soul. “Nothing more?”
“Your False Emperor has many rules. The Lion did, too. It needn’t be so complicated.”
“How?”
The warrior offered his hand to the still-kneeling Templar, and Siegred had the sense that he was smiling beneath his helm. “Blood for the Blood God, brother, and skulls for the skull throne.”
