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 didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.
‘He’s dead.’ Ellas spoke softly.
‘Fire again.’ Delantyr breathed the words. ‘Fire again.’
‘You bled the core,’ Kei replied. ‘We’re plasma-starved.’
‘Fire the suppressing tracers. Three bursts.’
Ardentor’s 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 Emperor’s son onto his back – a vessel of cooked, punctured meat.
‘We just killed a primarch.’ Kei swallowed. ‘We just killed a primarch.’
Delantyr’s grin showed almost every tooth he had. ‘Crush him. Leave them nothing to bury.’
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 primarch’s 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 machine’s knee and hip protested with rough, mechanical coughs.
‘Get the leg down,’ Delantyr ordered. ‘Finish it.’
Ellas gave the control levers another wrenching shove. ‘Something’s obstructing us.’
Kei lifted his targeting visor again, looking out of the Warhound’s left eye-windshield. He took a slow breath, and glanced back at his princeps.
‘My princeps? The World Eaters in the ruins… They’re cheering.’
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.
‘Lorgar.’ 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-machine’s 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 bear’s 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 didn’t 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 sweat’s 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 Titan’s clawed foot, and started pushing back.
‘Lorgar.’ Angron spoke in something that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘Get up. I can’t hold this forever.'
~Betrayer, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
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