Sanguinius

Context: As they face off in the Webway, Vulkan, primarch of the Salamanders, exchanges barbed words with Magnus, lord of the Thousand Sons. Magnus, over and over, tries to justify and excuse everything he has done, tries to paint his cause as just, and Vulkan just isn't having any of it. A few bits have been emboldened for emphasis.
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In his dreams, his brother still looked like his brother. The landscape around them was a volcanic nightmare – a realm of black skies and boiling earth; a dragon’s delight. The two brothers took counsel together in psychic silence, the two of them facing one another here in the arena of the unreal.
His brother was the one to bring them both here each time. And if it wasn’t his brother’s will, then it was the whim of the things with their talons around his brother’s heart. Vulkan no longer believed there was a difference.
When he saw his reflection in a pool of volcanic glass, he appeared the way he felt: weary to the point of ruination – a fact he could mask easily enough in the Throne Room, yet had no hope of hiding here. In this place, he appeared as a dragon on the edge of decrepitude. His scales no longer shimmered with an emerald lustre; instead they were faded to flawed jade. His eyes, which had been searing red, were tight and dull with torment. Even the fire within him was down to an ember, a guttering flicker of warmth.
His brother, the Sorcerer, descended slowly in a haze of purifying light. The light warmed the Dragon. It quickened his blood and reknit the throbbing internal breaches inside his body. It promised true healing, if he would only stop resisting it.
‘I hate seeing you like this,’ his brother said. Compassion shone in the Sorcerer’s one eye. ‘It needn’t be this way, brother.’
‘You are not my brother.’ The Dragon grunted as he shifted his pained form. Even his bones ached. They sent pulses of cold through the meat of his muscles.
‘You still deny me,’ the Sorcerer said, the words rich with regret. ‘Do I not bring you here, to Nocturne, to ease your spirit?’
The Dragon managed a laugh, though it tasted of dust instead of fire. ‘This is not Nocturne,’ he said. ‘The stars hang where they should in the sky, yet they shine wrong in the black. The chemical processes of the rocks are exact, yet the stone feels wrong to the touch. This is Nocturne through the eyes of someone that has seen my home world but never understood it. Someone that never loved it.’
The Dragon, despite his throbbing joints, bared his fragile fangs in a tired smile. ‘Someone,’ he added, ‘or something.’
The Sorcerer went to one knee, the very image of unthreatening reverence. His voice, trembling with emotion, scarcely rose above a whisper. ‘I am still me, brother. I speak only the truth.’
The Dragon sighed another ashy breath. ‘The truth, if it even matters in dreams, is that my brother died long ago. You are not Magnus. You are an impossible god’s idea of Magnus.’
Laughter echoed all around them. The laughter of a thousand mocking voices, delighted at a joke only one of the brothers could ever understand. The Dragon crawled back from the chorus of mad mirth. All while the Sorcerer stood in silence, radiating compassion, radiating patience and understanding.
‘How can you not hear that laughter?’ the Dragon asked him. ‘You are mocked, mocked without end, by the god you pretend you do not pray to.’
‘There is no laughter,’ said Magnus the Red. ‘I hear nothing but your lies, Vulkan.’
The Dragon gave a weary smile with a mouthful of cracked fangs. ‘Enough. Enough of you, and enough of the thing animating you. Leave me be.’
‘Let me in,’ countered the Sorcerer. ‘This is only the beginning of your pain, brother. I’ve foreseen far greater agony in your future, agony even you cannot endure. But that pain will end with the mercy I bring. In place of devastation, I offer you enlightenment.’
The Dragon dared not turn his back on his one-eyed brother, even here in dreams. He withdrew slowly, crawling over the rocks, his slitted gaze never leaving the Sorcerer.
‘Let me in,’ Magnus said again. ‘How much strength does father have left? How much time remains in His performative defiance? An hour? A day? The sky above the ash cloud seethes with the gods’ arrival. The Khan is finished. Guilliman is still lost in the endless black. Angron bathes the Palatine Ring in Imperial blood, and soon he will break Sanguinius. Fate sings of all of this, Vulkan. I will reach the webway portal. I will break father’s barrier. In a million futures, I already have. Don’t make me break you with it.’
The Dragon gave a growl. ‘I am not sure I can be broken.’
‘You can die, Vulkan. You can be unmade. Everything of mortal origin can be unwoven with the lullaby of obliteration. Please don’t make me be the one to end you.’
‘Does this fate of yours sing of that, too?’
Magnus smiled. ‘It grieves me to admit it, brother, but yes. To oppose me is to suffer annihilation. I wish it were not so. And it need not be so.’
The Dragon managed to return the smile. He was too weary to be amused, but the Sorcerer’s insistencies still kindled something like mirth deep within.
‘Of the many failures in our family,’ the Dragon said through clenched teeth, ‘you stand exalted above the rest of us, wrapped so comfortably in your delusions. At least the others have the courage to face up to what they’ve become. Only you, Magnus… Only you still – still – cannot see who you really are.’
The Dragon kept crawling, slowly retreating. The sky fractured with knives of laughter. The illusion before him broke apart.
Magnus was gone. Or, rather, Magnus was finally there. The Sorcerer was no longer Vulkan’s brother; he was a towering monstrosity, a beast of cloven hooves and with a crown of fire, a monster with wings that shed mother-of-pearl feathers. The Dragon stared at this thing, this thing of mutation and mutilation, this thing that stank of all the lies it didn’t know it had devoured.
‘There you are.’ The Dragon breathed the words, feeling the fire awaken inside, tasting the smoke running between his sore teeth. ‘There you are, brother.’

Then, just before their duel in the Webway ends, we have this exchange:

Magnus was down on one knee, his wings broken, his face a cracked portrait.
‘No more, Vulkan.’ He dribbled the words through a crushed jaw. ‘No more.’
Vulkan circled the downed creature, red eyes narrowed for even the merest movement. The daemonic blood on his hammer steamed with the smell of a funeral pyre. He didn’t trust his brother’s vulnerability, and he saw his caution reflected at him in Magnus’ blood-webbed eye.
‘I sense the energies you have wrought,’ said Vulkan. ‘Thinner, weaker, but still curling in the air around us. You are still attacking father.’
He expected Magnus to laugh. Instead, the sorcerer sighed.
‘You deal with forces you do not comprehend. Killing me may let the Emperor breathe easier, but it will not free Him from the Golden Throne.’
Vulkan’s tone was ice and iron. ‘Nevertheless, you die.’
‘So finish it.’ Magnus hunched over, lowering his head for the executioner’s blow. ‘Save the Emperor. Let ignorance triumph over truth.’
Vulkan hesitated.
‘Can you afford to wait any longer, little dragon?’ Magnus slowly raised his head, and in his gaze was the mockery Vulkan had been expecting. ‘Where is your urgency now? Where is all that righteousness?’
Knowing it was a trap, knowing he had no choice but to spring it, Vulkan raised his hammer. As it fell, the world turned.
It wasn’t blackness, this time. He saw planets turning in the deep night, beautiful no matter their colours or surface conditions, beautiful for their infinite complexity. Vulkan never looked at a planet and saw territory, cities or resources. He saw a geological jewel, a sphere formed by astrophysical law and the geo-mathematical processes that bound it all together. Each world was unique, shaped just so. He believed there was beauty in that.
He drifted through space, descending to one world until it was a plateau beneath him of hazy blue atmosphere and immense wilderness. He knew it at once.
‘Prospero,’ said Magnus, by his side.
His brother wasn’t a daemon. Magnus was the man he’d been long ago: red of skin, darkened further by the sun, clad in a toga of white silk. He smelled of ink, fine parchment and lies.
‘I thought we could speak,’ the sorcerer said. ‘One last time.’
Vulkan tensed, preparing to–
‘No, brother.’ Magnus showed his pale red palms, bare of any weapon. ‘No time is passing. In the Labyrinth of the Old Ones, our hands are around each other’s throats, with death yet to be decided. Here, we exist between heartbeats.’
Vulkan stared into his brother’s remaining eye. ‘I believe you,’ he said.
Magnus gave a tired smile. ‘It has been a long time since I heard those words.’
Prospero turned beneath them. Vulkan gazed at the wild lands of the vast Pangean continent, and the distant silver pinprick of Tizca, the world’s only city.
‘Speak, then.’
‘And you will listen?’
Vulkan nodded.
‘Very well. This is what I would have you understand, brother. The Imperium is the lie we tell ourselves, to make sense of a reality we fear to face. We tell each other that it is necessary. That we do what must be done. That whatever might replace it would be worse. But look at all we do not say. Father is a tyrant, and you, out of all of us, should have seen that first. The Imperium is built on the lies of a would-be god and the violence of His crusade. What benevolent monarch instigates a crusade?
‘Under the Emperor, we have perpetuated a holy war that has sucked worlds dry of resources and cost billions upon billions of lives. We have spent life like meaningless currency, all because one man said we must. How many cultures have we annihilated, Vulkan? How many have we assimilated and robbed of their vitality, replacing innovation with conformity? How much knowledge have we destroyed because father decided no one was allowed to learn it?’
Vulkan considered this. The planet rolled on, sedate and slow despite its relative astronomical speed. He realised he wasn’t wounded here. He wore his armour, but it was pristine, not the scraps of torn ceramite left to him on the bridge.
‘This is how it got to you, isn’t it?’ Vulkan knew the answer even as he asked the question. ‘The creature that gouged its way inside your soul and laid its eggs there. The thing that pulls on your strings. Did it promise you knowledge? Did it paint the Emperor as the death of enlightenment?’
Magnus’ expression answered for him. Long red hair fell to frame his face, and the sorcerer brushed it back from his cheeks.
‘The Imperial Truth is a lie. The empire we built cannot be reformed, only overthrown. From violence it was born, and in violence it must end. Don’t you see? Once the board is swept clean, we can start again with our eyes open, aware of the truths of the universe.’
‘You make this sound like a principled stand,’ said Vulkan. ‘As if all you have done, all Horus has done, could ever be justified.’
Magnus turned to him sharply. ‘I? What do I have to justify? Each time I was attacked, I defended myself. Each time they tried to silence me, I made sure to speak out. The Imperium lavished punishments upon my Legion, draping its hypocrisy over us as a funeral shroud. We fought back.’
Vulkan met Magnus’ gaze, seeing the ironclad surety there. This was futile, he knew it, yet the words came forth anyway.
‘Look at the horrors your side has unleashed upon Terra. The massacres, the mutations. Magnus, you are taking part in the extinction of your species… You cannot truly think you have done nothing wrong. Even you, brother. Even you, in your arrogance, cannot believe this is justified.’
‘Necessity justifies all. And this is necessary. Without this primeval force, without this Chaos, there will be stagnation. Ignorance instead of illumination. Existence instead of life. I did not write the laws of our universe, brother. I take no joy in the truth of reality. But I won’t hide from it.’
Vulkan looked at him as if he spoke in another tongue. ‘Necessary, you say.’ Magnus nodded, and Vulkan continued, ‘Necessary according to whom? The alien god that exalted you and now demands you commit genocide?’
Magnus clenched his teeth, and the world turned…
…but not far. It turned to reveal Tizca, City of Light, metropolis of white pyramids and silver spires. The city was aflame beneath them, burning from the raining hellfire of an Imperial fleet. The golden vessels of the Emperor’s chosen. The sleek black hunting ships of the Silent Sisters. The many, many warships in the storm-cloud grey of the Space Wolves.
‘The Razing of Prospero.’ There was murder in Magnus’ eye. Murder and sorrow. ‘Bear witness to our brother Russ, bringing death to my home world and all its people. Tell me, Vulkan, would you have reacted with temperance to this, had it been the destruction of Nocturne?’
Vulkan didn’t need to stare at the orbital bombardment. He’d read the reports, he’d seen the picts and the footage and spoken to many of the Custodians that took part in the ground assault. Nothing unfolding here was a revelation he wished to experience twice.
‘Russ was lied to by Horus, deceived into attacking.’
‘I know. It changes nothing.’
‘But it should. You, who value truth so highly, willingly align yourself with the one that engineered Prospero’s death. And when the Space Wolves fleet arrived in your sky, what did you do, Magnus? Did you try to enlighten Russ? Did you use your power to prevent the assault? Or did your belief in your own persecution leave you assuming the worst of the Emperor’s intentions? All witness accounts say you languished in your tower, welcoming the destruction as your penance, until you decided to fight in the final hours, when it was far too late to stop the massacre.’
Vulkan gestured to the destruction raining from the upper atmosphere: lance strikes, drop pods, the slower trails of gunships making their descent. ‘Why would the Emperor order you and your entire Legion dead? Did you not stop to wonder at the scale of this misunderstanding?’
Magnus laughed at the questions, the sound wet and bitter. He gestured away from the burning city, and the world turned, falling away.
They were in the webway again, but no longer upon the lost bridge. They drifted through the oval tunnels, following angles that hurt the human eye. Always ahead of them, an avatar of fire blazed through the tunnels, shattering the wraithbone membranes without heed, blind and deaf to the horde of daemons surging into the webway in its wake.
‘I did this,’ said Magnus. ‘I thought He wished to punish me for ruining His Great Work.’ For a moment, Magnus paused, gazing at the host of Neverborn darkening the tunnels, as if seeing them for the first time.
‘But how was I to know? He refused to tell me of His grand plan. If He had told me…’
Vulkan resisted the urge to spit at the sudden foul taste on his tongue. ‘Again, you see the worst in all others, absolving yourself of blame. Why did you need to know of the Great Work? You were warned not to toy with the warp. We all were. But you couldn’t resist. You believed that you knew more, that you knew best. And why is it that you alone lament being kept unapprised of father’s plans? Why is Sanguinius not enraged that he never knew of the Webway Project? Why am I not enraged that I was kept ignorant of it? Why did you need to know?’
Magnus’ eye gleamed with the reflection of the burning icon ahead. His former self, years before, racing to warn the Emperor of Horus’ betrayal. Reducing the webway to unsanctified rubble with his passing.
‘Had I known the truth, I would never have… done what I did. Father should have told me.’
Vulkan laughed, unable to believe what he was hearing. ‘How could father have predicted you would defy His one command? Not only did you use the warp against His orders, you fuelled your psychic warning with human sacrifice. How could any of us have known you were capable of such barbarity?’
Magnus exhaled slowly, his hands clutching the folds of his toga. He spoke a word of power, and the world turned.
They were in the Throne Room. The blazing avatar had incarnated before the scientists and techno-magicians of the Emperor’s secret work. It had forced the webway portal open, making it radiate wounded light. Already, it grew dark with the silhouettes of daemons as they drew near.
The Custodians present – precious few of them, for how could they have anticipated the sudden death of the Emperor’s dream? – opened fire on the image of ghostly flame. It ignored their paltry defiance, and it ignored the explosions its arrival had birthed across the great laboratory. It hovered before the Emperor, like some spectre of religious revelation from the ancient tomes, when such things were believed by credulous men.
‘I had to warn Him,’ said Magnus, watching the scene.
‘No,’ Vulkan said gently. ‘You believed you had to warn Him. You believed as you always believe – that you knew best, that you had to act, that you alone knew what had to be done. And never once did you think, through all this destruction, that there was something deceiving you.’
The sorcerer glared at him. ‘Why do you speak to me as if I were a lowly pawn in this game of regicide? The Warmaster and the Emperor both know I am the most valuable piece on the board.’
Vulkan was unmoved by the sorcerer’s words, and by the cataclysm playing out before him. His tone was patient, as it had been in the days before the war.
‘Vanity is what leads you, Magnus. You choke on arrogance, unable to see you are the architect of your own downfall. All the others, all of Horus’ broken monsters, at least they can see the bars of their cages. Even Horus, driven out of his mind to serve as a hive for the Pantheon, knows in his soul’s core that he has lost control. You are the only one that still believes he is free.’
In silence, Magnus shook his head. The world turned with the motion.
They remained in the Throne Room, but the great machines were over­loaded and black, slain by esoteric forces, and the industry of the laboratory was replaced by the militancy of a garrison presence. It was no longer a place of vision – it was a barracks. And it was closer to Now. This was how the Throne Room had looked when Vulkan had last been here.
Vulkan and Magnus were present at this point in the recent past, as well as drifting through it in their current incarnations. They watched themselves at the foot of the Golden Throne: Vulkan implacable but for the regret lining his features; Magnus manifest as a being of light, shimmering in and out of the layers of reality perceptible to the human eye.
‘Here,’ said the Magnus of Now, watching the Magnus of Then. ‘Here is where I made my choice. You saw the Emperor make His final offer to me. You heard Him promise me a new Legion, if I would only forsake Horus and come back to you all. A matter of mere weeks ago, brother. Will you tell me you’ve forgotten it?’
Vulkan sighed. He seemed suddenly weary.
‘That is not what transpired here, Magnus. The last unstained shard of your soul burst into the Throne Room and begged to be saved. With a heavy heart, father refused you. That is what I saw. That is what happened.’
Magnus’ laughter was blunt, practically a derisive bark. ‘And you say I’m the one who has been deceived?’
Vulkan was too tired to rise to the bait. He met derision with solemnity.
‘This thing that runs through you, this chaotic force you proclaim as freedom, is not a disease to be caught on contact. It is the layer of emotion behind reality, a poison that has achieved near sentience. It makes its prey into willing victims in their own damnation. You are riven by it, Magnus. Hollowed out by it.
‘And it was already in your Legion, in your sons’ blood and genetic code, in the form of the Flesh Change. And when you dealt with the Pantheon, believing you had cured your children, all you really achieved was a deepening of the taint, hiding it from sight, delaying the inevitable. This thing, this force, cannot be cured, Magnus. You cannot pray it away once the rot sets in. Once you are on the Path… your fate is sealed.’
‘Wait, Vulkan. Wait. How can this be? How do you know all of this?’
In the silence that reigned in the wake of those words, the Throne Room began to fade. Golden mist hazed its way around them, revealing patches of wraithbone architecture.
Vulkan was relentless, his voice growing firmer. ‘How could the Emperor ever trust you now? Why would He offer you a new Legion, let alone a place at His side? You dreamed up your own redemption, just to give yourself something to rage against. Because you need to feel as though you are the one choosing, not having the choices made for you. The creature that exalted you will never let you see the chains that bind you to its will.’
The mist was everywhere, thickening. Magnus felt the change upon him, and beneath the sensation of power was a pull, a wrenching, the sensation of a trillion filaments woven into the cells of his body, dragging at him.
‘How…?’ Magnus asked, barely above a breath. Where the mist touched him, his flesh was darkening, swelling. The shadows of ragged wings loomed above his shoulders. ‘How do you know all of this?’
Vulkan remained in place, saying nothing, doing nothing.
‘Who are you?’ demanded Magnus.
The world turned, and this time it wasn’t moved by Magnus’ will.
The first strike of the hammer pounded Magnus to the wraithbone ground, a magma flow of ectoplasm running from his riven skull. The second cracked the bones of one wing, splintering the spine and shoulder blade beneath. The third eradicated the daemon’s right hand, rendering it into dissolving paste.
Breathless, standing over the paralysed remnant of his mutated brother, Vulkan raised his hammer. In the same moment, Magnus somehow lifted his head. The sorcerer stared past Vulkan, over his executioner’s shoulder. Either he saw nothing, or he saw without the use of his eye, which was a burst fruit of a thing, turned to leaking pulp in its shattered socket.
‘Wait,’ the daemon wheezed, the word ruined by the graveyard of his teeth. ‘Father. Wait.’
Father is far from here, Vulkan almost said, wondering what visions were conjured in his brother’s dying mind. But he saw the fear on Magnus’ face, imprinted with the lines of regret. It was enough to make him hesitate.
I don’t have to do this.
But he did. Not just because it would free the Emperor from the sorcerer’s assault, not just because thousands were dying in front of the Eternity Gate, but because this was how the Archenemy drilled inside a heart and soul. The creatures sank their tendrils into a person’s hesitations, cracking them open to become doubts. They caressed along the edges of someone’s virtues, heightening them, souring them into flaws.
They would do the same with Vulkan’s mercy. Mercy was how the Pantheon would welcome him, and how he would begin to do their will. He would trust someone that breathed deceit. He would spare the life of a man that must die.
And he would feel righteous, as his nine traitorous brothers felt righteous, deaf to the laughter of the gods as he moved to their etheric melodies. Like his brothers, he would believe it was his own virtue guiding his hand.

Context: As the Siege of Terra nears its final hours, the defenders--what's left of them--have fallen back to the Eternity Gate for a final stand. If the Gate falls, the Palace falls and Terra along with it. Knowing this, Sanguinius of the Blood Angels gives a speech to the exhausted defenders. It's so stirring that even Arkhan Land, a cynic among cynics and no fan at all of the primarchs (in fact he views them as abominations) is a little moved.
One of the best speeches since Grimaldus at Helsreach, in my opinion.

Sanguinius’ words carried across the kilometres of elevated wall, brought to distant ears on the clicking, ticking, crackling speakers of servo-skulls and Mechanicus drones. Soldiers clustered around their data-slates to bear witness to the primarch’s proclamation. The hundred thousand defenders of the Delphic Battlement, drawn from all across the burning Imperium, listened to the words of the Great Angel. All of them could see him, even if they were far from his sight and forced to rely on a hololithic reflection. All of them could hear him, even if his words purred through the crackling mouth of a floating probe.
Land had expected a speech dripping with demagogic inspiration. He’d find it tawdry, but knew most of the human defenders – many of whom responded far more positively to the primarchs than the Mechanicus did – would find great value in such a display.
But that was not what he, nor any of them, received.
‘I do not want to be here,’ Sanguinius told them. ‘I do not want this present, and I want the future that follows even less. We stand against our own brothers and sisters, with our backs to the Eternity Gate, and this is not a battle we can win. If you have ever wondered how you will die, now you know. If you have ever wondered where your body will lie, now you know. You will be killed on the last wall between hope and horror. Your body will lie here, unburied, staring up at a poisoned sky.
‘Once the Sanctum falls, Terra falls with it. And I tell you – we cannot hold this wall. You can see it yourselves – they are too many, we are too few. We may last a week, if we do the impossible. More likely we will all be dead in three days. Perhaps my words surprise you. Or frighten you. But I will not lie. Not to you, not to you who have come through two hundred days of dread only to find yourselves here.
‘I have looked into your faces and seen what this war has cost all of you. I have followed the flow of battles that each of you have survived, to stand here on the final battlement. I see everything you have endured, those stories written in the light of your eyes. Now the Warmaster offers you the lie of life, promising a mercy his forces are incapable of showing, if we will abandon this last wall. And it falls to me, here and now, to tell you to stand against him one more time. To give everything you have, even your lives, if it will hold this rampart for another day, another hour, another second. That is what the moment demands of me, is it not? That I beg you to make one last sacrifice?’
Sanguinius swooped closer to the battlement, casting his sword to the stone. It clattered there, in a loose cluster of Blood Angels, none of whom made any attempt to pick it up. Land stared at it for a long moment, then watched as the primarch whirled in the sky to face the wall once more, showing his bare hands to the gathered thousands.
‘No.’ Sanguinius fairly breathed the word.
His wings beat hard, holding him aloft. He stared into the silence that met his disavowal, and he shook his head to punctuate the syllable with adamance.
‘No. I will not ask it of you. You have already given everything. You have already done everything asked of you a hundred times and more. You have suffered through a war of unimaginable darkness, one that has demanded more from you than any soldier in the history of our species has been forced to give. The fact you still live, that you still fight… I cannot conceive of the courage and resilience it requires for you to face this dawn and look to the horizon with a rifle in your hands.’
Land could hear Army soldiers shuffling; he saw them glancing at each other. None of them spoke. All of them held rapt to the primarch’s words.
‘Where Horus has offered only lies, I will offer you truth. Those of you that wish to run… Run. Leave this place. Not in shame at a duty undone, not in surrender to the traitor’s forces, but with honour. Go with my gratitude, for you have already given everything asked of you. What right do I – does anyone – have to demand more? From you, who have endured harrowing beyond account, horror beyond measure?
‘If you wish to fall back into the Sanctum Imperialis and spend the last hours of life with your children, then do so. Know that you go not only with my blessing, but with my envy.
‘If you wish to leave the wall and take your chances in the wasteland before the battle begins, then – in the Emperor’s name – you have earned the right to try. Go swiftly, and carry with you the pride that you have already given a hero’s share in a war that none of us wanted but were forced to fight.
‘And if you wish for the truth, I will give it to you gladly, for you have earned that, too. It shames me to admit, but I would abandon this wall if I could. The primarch in me, the supposed demigod half of my heart, craves life with a ferocity that shames me. If I bowed to that instinct, I would take to the sky and never look back. But I cannot. I am half-human. And the human in me demands that I stay.’
Sanguinius turned, looking over his shoulder at the retreating emissary. Daughter of Torment was a quarter of the way to her lines now. When he looked at the wall once again, all could see the resolve in his eyes.
‘There are legends about me, I hear them whispered among you every day, that I know the moment of my own death. The stories say this gives me courage, that I feel no fear because I know I cannot yet be slain. Here is the truth of that tale.
‘That prophesied death is coming. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. I know not the When or the How, only that I feel fate’s breath on the back of my neck. I do not remain here out of immortality’s courage. I remain here because, if I am to die, I choose this death. I choose to die with my back to the last door. I choose to give my life to buy another hour, or a minute, or even a single second of grace to those who cannot be here fighting with me. I choose to die here because I do not believe I have yet given all I can.
‘Someone must stand and fight, and if I have but one choice left, I will make it now. I will stand. I will fight. I will hold this wall, knowing that the Thirteenth Legion makes for Terra with all speed, and if they cannot bring salvation, they will bring retribution. Whether I am alone or whether a hundred thousand of you are by my side, when the Warmaster’s horde descends upon this wall, they will find me waiting for them with a blade in hand. Not because I can win, but because it is right. I do not know what delusion grips those out there, who were once our brothers and sisters. But I know it is right to oppose them.’
Silence drifted over the Delphic Battlement, but only for a moment. Sanguinius swept his arm across the wall, taking in the defenders. Thousands of holo-ghosts of his image did the very same thing.
‘I have spoken enough. You need hear no more of my fears and confessions. All that remains is for me to ask… Will you run?’
At first, in the face of the Great Angel’s honesty, there was no answer.
Corporal Mashrajeir of the 91st Industani Drop Troops didn’t know what to say. Reason and duty warred within him, in a way known to any soldier facing the grimmest odds. He could live. He could leave, and live. His regiment wasn’t made for this kind of fighting anyway. They were guerrillas, drop troops, trained for point insertion. He’d been on the ground for this whole damn war. What use was a grav-trooper on a rampart? What use was high-atmosphere jump training when all he had now was a lasrifle and a bayonet?
But he was making excuses, justifying, and he knew it. Mash had the training and the experience to overcome these doubts, to push them back and summon focus in their stead. Besides, there was nowhere to run. Not really. Tactically, it made sense to hold here. If he was going to die, best he sell his life where it would matter most.
‘No,’ he called to the primarch. And he wasn’t the first, but he was one of them. His voice cut out from the silence in the very first wave of denials. He wouldn’t leave the wall. He wouldn’t run. ‘No!’
Skitarii didn’t celebrate birthdays. Magna-Delta-8V8 was no exception to this, though her macroclade – the series of platoons and structured hierarchies that defined not only her military position but also her entire social existence – had a tradition of honouring the anniversaries of a soldier’s first combat. Due to the constant casualties and replenishment in a macroclade deployed to a theatre of conflict, it meant these acknowledgements were frequent, minor things. The exact axiom translated poorly from skit-code into any variant of Gothic, but the meaning was more or less, ‘Every day is someone’s anniversary.’ The custom usually involved the exchange of gifts, often repeatedly re-gifted within a regiment, since skitarii were permitted so few possessions of their own.
Today was Magna-Delta-8V8’s combat anniversary. Only hers, out of those that remained, because so few of them were left.
It didn’t matter that the avatar of the Omnissiah Himself was at work in the fortress behind her. It didn’t matter that the horde on the horizon outnumbered and outgunned them an incalculable number of times over. These would have been considerations, of course, on any other day, and she would have stood and fought according to the binharic diktat of duty. Today, though, these concerns were irrelevant.
There was no chance she would run on her battle anniversary. Temptation had teased even her strip-mined brain, of course. She was partially human and wholly mortal. But what sealed the decision in sacred steel was when three of her surviving clade-kin came to her in the minutes before the Ninth’s speech. They bore gifts.
Benevola-919-55 had given her a pebble from the slopes of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mother Mars.
Jurispruda-Garnet-12 had given her a translator dataslug, to replace the one she’d lost herself, months before.
Kane-Gamma-A67 had given her a fistful of loose ammunition in lieu of any personal effects. He had nothing else to give.
Magna-Delta-8V8 felt the weight of these gifts, these precious and ­talismanic gestures, in the folds of her cloak as she listened to the Ninth Primarch speak. And when the Ninth asked the last question, she was ready with her answer.
She couldn’t vocalise it, at least not in Gothic, but her defiant shriek of skit-code was much of a muchness.
Lorelei Kelvyr wasn’t supposed to be here. If she’d been able to summon the strength to laugh, she’d have surely cut loose with a raw bark of nasty, sarcastic amusement now.
She’d been press-ganged, of course. Before the war’s opening bombard­ments, they’d dragged her from a life sentence in the cold tunnel-guts of the Sevastopol Mining Spire, and she’d honestly believed it would be easy to get out of ever getting sent to the line. Frankly, she’d not been able to believe her luck. Serving twenty years in the resource-starved mines for crimes she hadn’t committed, that her own family had forced her to take the fall for, and suddenly she was dragged back into the sunlight, handed a knife and a rifle, and posted far from the prying eyes of her prison overseers. Fortune smiled at last, and it had a lot to make up for.
But that had been, what… a year ago now.
It wasn’t that she’d never been able to escape. Quite the opposite. She’d escaped easily – and more than once. The first time, she’d made a break for it with several others – and one of her companions had killed a sentry on their way out of the temporary barracks. They left the poor sentry in a strangled heap, in a service locker, and fled only to find themselves lost in the palatial chaos of the Trans-Europan mag-rail nexus.
Disappearing into the crowds had been easy, choosing the right train to stow away on had been an exercise in frustration. Every route, every single one, was transferring troops to one future war front or another. And so her first escape attempt saw her leaving not only her regiment but the entire sector, only to end up a thousand kilometres away, disembarking in a crowd of troops, immediately subsumed into this new regiment. The Legiones Astartes officers at the end of the line refused all her entreaties; as far as they were concerned, she was there, she was with the regiment, and with them she’d stay.
Her next escape attempt had been painfully tantalising. After several weeks within her second regiment, she’d managed to fall in with a group of believers in the new faith (frankly, she didn’t think cult was too strong a word for them) and listening to them prattle about the God-Emperor was both nauseating and uncomfortably inspiring. She knew everything they were saying was desperate nonsense, but if it had been true… Well, they believed in a beautiful idea, sure enough. Never had she so wished for a religion to be real.
This new association had allowed her a chance to slip along to their underground prayer gatherings, which in turn had let her make contact with an Administratum liaison attending the sermons, who had been easy enough to convince into having her reassigned. All it took was professing visions of faith in the God-Emperor, and he believed her touched by divinity. Lorelei was reasonably certain he’d fallen for it anyway.
If it had succeeded, it would’ve elevated her to some position of pathetically minor authority overseeing the mono-tasks of servitors in a warehouse somewhere… if only her deployment orders hadn’t come through ahead of her transfer. She’d been waiting, down to the last moments on the mag-rail platform, casting about in the shrinking hope that her transferral notation would come through before she was finally forced, at the threat of a baton beating, to board the train.
Supposedly, the Warmaster’s fleet would reach Terra soon. She was running out of time.
Lorelei had escaped again, three nights later. She had no regrets at all about abandoning her second regiment, and in the weeks after she tore loose, she managed to lie low in the crud-shanties clustered at the base of Praxia Hivespire. There she lived in a ramshackle lean-to abandoned by its previous inhabitants: likely they were press-ganged into service themselves. She’d scavenged up the basics of survival for several weeks that time, living like a homeless queen alongside a few other deserters. But food was scarce to begin with and only got scarcer; soon enough they’d turned on each other, and it was time to bleed or leave. At first, Lorelei made sure she wasn’t the one bleeding by cutting deals with the right brutes, but she’d hoarded too much, was too good at scavenging; soon she became a victim of her own success. The scum ganged up against her and came for her with chains and scrap-daggers.
So farewell, Praxia. Farewell, crud-shanty house.
After that, well, desperation had set in. She did the one and only thing in her life she was ashamed of. Someone had died so she might live.
What followed was a period of pretending to be a Munitorum scribe, though was it really pretence when she’d been damn good at the craft? She’d actually done the work, which in her eyes made her a legitimate contender for the trade. It’d been protracted, achingly dull stuff, but easy for all that: following regiments around, taking stock of supplies, and so on and so on, unto tedious infinity. Her ident documents were even legitimate, though that was largely because they weren’t hers – they’d belonged to the woman she’d killed in order to take her place in the endless grind of Imperial bureaucracy.
A slice of dumb misfortune saw her busted by an otherwise useless administrator-captain, and for no reason beyond a simple mistake in calculations. She was supposed to be savant-grade, was she not? Why, yes, it said so on her documentation. How could she make a mistake like this? Why were her resource projections skewing so wide of the actualities?
She’d considered bribing him, which was a laugh because she had nothing to bribe him with, and she’d even considered killing him, which was twice the joke, since this was no scrawny, nutrition-stunted tallier of accounts, this was a retired Army soldier twice her weight and backed up by the crude strength of a bionic arm. Besides, she was in the thick of it then, deep in the coggy bowels of the Munitorum’s processes, and even sneezing would leave a paper trail.
She ran, literally fleeing into the night, hiding in a nameless slum town in the shadows of yet another beautiful spire. If they caught her, they’d execute her.
It took no time at all for her to be press-ganged in another wave of mandatory recruitment, and her protests availed her nothing. Practically everyone on the planet not serving in an essential position was recruited into the Imperial Army, and so Lorelei was discharged and assigned to her third regiment, temporarily barracked and gearing up to be sent to yet another sector, where they’d inevitably reinforce the other conscripts already stationed there.
Her crime and previous desertions went uncovered – so there was that, at least.
She was seemingly destined to fight in the war, though. Against all efforts to the contrary. That was it. She was being sent to fight in the line.
And for a time, she had. For months. Months of starvation and privation, months of blinking smoke from her eyes and standing in trenches next to men and women that shat themselves at night to keep warm, and pretending she was better than them, that they belonged there and she didn’t, while she grew more gaunt, more sour, day by blood-soaked day. Months of night-fighting and seeing her platoonmates eviscerated and crucified and burst open with bolter fire and carved apart with chainswords. Months and months of what everyone else was also going through. Being pawns in the Astartes’ war.
And now, after everything, now this. The Great Angel himself… saying she could run.
‘Lor,’ said the soldier next to her. ‘You alright?’
Her squad, all seven of them still alive, were huddled together in a scrimmage that reeked of sweat and crap and charred earth, watching the flickering hololith projected from Sergeant Gathis’ vambrace.
Lorelei felt tears on her face. Was she all right? Oh, yeah. She was great. Just wonderful. She wasn’t the only one showing emotion, either. It wasn’t weeping, exactly. It was a slow leak of emotion too weary to really be called weeping.
‘My name’s not Lorelei,’ she said, cuffing the tears from her cheeks. She had no idea why she was crying. It was like she’d been punctured, and now it was just trickling out of her. ‘It’s actually Daenika.’
Her squad were looking at her now.
‘Lorelei Kelvyr was just some Munitorum menial. I killed her months ago. Took her name. I hate that I did it. I wish I hadn’t.’
She looked up, meeting their eyes. To a soul, they regarded her with depleted acceptance. No anger. No disgust. No judgement at all. Not after all they’d been through as a unit.
‘I was trying to get out of the war,’ she told them. ‘I didn’t want to fight in the line. This was before I met all of you. You’re not even my first regiment. This is just the only one I couldn’t escape from. Throne, I’m so tired. We can finally run, finally leave all this shit behind us, and I’m so. Bloody. Tired.’
Her exhausted tears gave way to laughter. Weak laughter, and weary, but true.
‘We’re not running, Lor,’ Sergeant Gathis said gently. On his vambrace, Lord Sanguinius had finished speaking. The primarch asked his last question, and already the shouts of ‘No! No!’ rang out across the Delphic Battlement. It was getting hard to speak over it.
‘I know,’ she called back over the yelling. ‘Neither am I.’
Daenika and her squadmates added their voices to the chorus.
It would be a poor joke indeed to say that no one wanted to leave the wall in the wake of the primarch’s words. Many wished to run. More than a few came close, but there were as many reasons to stay as there were defenders upon the wall. Every soul there fused some combination of anger, guilt and shame, cobbling them together to make a piecemeal courage the way people always do in their bleakest moments.
Some stayed out of duty. Others out of hope, deluded or otherwise, that reinforcements may yet reach them. Some stayed only because the resolve of those around them shamed them into staying. Some stayed because Sanguinius was right – they’d already given everything, and they had nothing worthwhile left to lose. Their lives were formalities by that point, a matter of biological habit, while the war had worn them down to hollow shells devoid of everything that had defined their lives. Some stayed because they were sick of running, and after two hundred days of defensive withdrawals, this was it, this was the last battle, and they would hold the wall out of tired spite.
Land would wonder, years later, if anyone truly did try to run. Surely some did. Were they restrained by companions or shot in the back by their officers? Were they allowed to quit the wall unopposed, as the Ninth had promised? It seemed likely (statistically certain, in fact) that this was the case, but each time he turned his goggles back towards the Royal Ascension, leading up to the Eternity Gate… the Gate stood open, disgorging a stream of soldiers and materiel. No one seemed to be going against the flow to venture inside. Nor did he see anyone making their way down from the wall to take their chances in the wasteland.
Perhaps if Land and the men and women like him – precious few though they are, in any era – had a firmer understanding of the human condition, it wouldn’t have been such a surprise that so many stayed when there was a choice to flee.
No! cried the defenders of the wall. They rejected the primarch’s offer with a gestalt sound of vocal thunder.
No! No! No!
Land didn’t shout with the others. He wasn’t one for the theatrics of yelled defiance. Still… still, there was something rather primal in the way the tumult washed over him. At one point he caught himself drawing in a shaky breath, almost joining his voice to the others. He resisted, naturally. What an embarrassing loss of decorum it would be, to join in.

I'm not really a SM collecter and know very little about how to play them, but I've realized I have a small for force through model tradings and combo boxes. I have:
1x primaries lieutenant 10x infiltrators (Phobos KT box) 5x assault intercessors (plan to paint death co) 10x tactical marines( plan to paint death co)
I also plan to get mephiston. Can I do anything with this list or is there a better list I can make with the models I have?
++ Patrol Detachment 0CP (Imperium - Adeptus Astartes - Blood Angels) [33 PL, 2CP, 500pts] ++

• Configuration +

Chapter Selector: Blood Angels
Battle Size [3CP]: 1. Combat Patrol (0-50 Total PL / 0-500 Points)
Detachment Command Cost
Game Type: Open

• HQ +

Chief Librarian Mephiston (Primaris) [7 PL, 125pts]: 1. Speed of the Primarch, 2. Unleash Rage, 4. Blood Boil, 6. Wings of Sanguinius, Warlord
Death Company Primaris Lieutenant [6 PL, -1CP, 70pts]: 5. Gift of Foresight, Death Company Lieutenant, Icon of The Angel, Stratagem: Hero of the Chapter . Neo-volkite pistol, Master-crafted power sword and Storm Shield

• Troops +

Infiltrator Squad [6 PL, 100pts] . 4x Infiltrator: 4x Bolt pistol, 4x Frag & Krak grenades, 4x Marksman bolt carbine . Infiltrator Sergeant

• Elites +

Death Company Intercessors [6 PL, 90pts]: Astartes Grenade Launcher . 5x Death Company Intercessor: 5x Frag & Krak grenades . Heavy bolt pistol and Astartes chainsword
Death Company Marines [8 PL, 115pts]: Jump Pack . 5x Death Company Marine w/ chainsword and bolt pistol: 5x Astartes Chainsword, 5x Bolt pistol, 5x Frag & Krak grenades
++ Total: [33 PL, 2CP, 500pts] ++
Created with BattleScribe (https://battlescribe.net)

So, anyone here familiar with Warhammer 40k? As the lore states, the Chaos Gods scattered the Primarchs during their infancy. Suppose they somehow end up being scatterd to the SRW OG multiverse (including Shadow Mirror) during their infancy, what kind of lives would they have growing up, which factions do you think they will end up joining later on, and what kind of mecha would they have? For example, here are some of my choices for the factions:

• Jaghatai Khan - Shura, Steel Dragon Squadron
• Angron - Shadow Mirror, Shura
• Lion El'Jonson - Fury, Earth Federation Army
• Magnus the Red - La Gias (Kingdom of Langran). Alternatively, he could serve as a second guardian/father figure to the Kobayashi sisters.
• Roboute Guilliman - Earth Federation Government, Earth Federation Army, United Colony Corps
• Alpharius and Omegon - The School, Earth Federation Army and United Colony Corps (one twin in each group)
• Leman Russ - Shura, Steel Dragon Squadron
• Lorgar - Balmarians, La Gias (Kingdom of Langran)
• Perturabo - EOTI Institute, any of the major mecha manufacturers (Tesla Leicht, Mao Industries, etc.)
• Ferrus Manus - EOTI Institute, any of the major mecha manufacturers (Tesla Leicht, Mao Industries, etc.)
• Rogal Dorn - Earth Federation Army, United Colony Corps
• Mortarion - Shadow Mirror, Divine Crusaders
• Konrad Curze - Zuvorg, Divine Crusaders
• Horus Lupercal - Earth Federation Government, Balmarians, Divine Crusaders, Steel Dragon Squadron
• Sanguinius - Earth Federation Government, Steel Dragon Squadron
• Vulkan - Earth Federation Government, Steel Dragon Squadron
• Fulgrim - The School, Steel Dragon Squadron, Divine Crusaders
• Corvus Corax - Zuvorg, Divine Crusaders, Balmarians

If guilliman was with dorn from the start of the siege of Terra instead of the Khan or sanguinius would it play out similar? I feel like them working together would mean Horus never even made it as far as Terra.

For me it’s twofold, sigmarines are awful and sanguinius should never come back.

I used to play blood Angels in 6th/7th and with that have some units like sanguinary priests, chaplains, and Sanguinary Guard I’m looking to sprinkle into my 30k army for cost and looks.
I’m looking at maybe use the Sanguinary guard as assault marine Sgts in artificer armor or use them as dawn breaker cohort? What do you as fellow sons of Sanguinius think about this?

If you had to boil down the best and most important of the series this far to 5 or 6 books which would they be? Exclude the end and the death because I'm going to read everything from that book on as they are released.
I recently picked up books one and two of the horus heresy and would only like to grab about six more. I'd like to learn why everybody hates lorgar, I'd like to read about magnus doing nothing wrong and why people love sanguinius so much.
Thank you for your recommendations

So I need help, I’m new to Warhammer and learning to build an army so please give me suggestions BLOOD ANGEL STARTER
Army Faction: Imperium

- Game Mode: Eternal War - Army Size: Combat Patrol - Regimental Doctrines: 

PATROL DETACHMENT

- Faction: Adeptus Astartes - Sub-faction: Blood Angels 

HQ
Librarian in Phobos Armour (110) - Warlord - Chapter Command upgrade: Chief Librarian - Traits: Blood Angels: Speed of the Primarch - Psychic Powers: Blood Boil, Shield of Sanguinius, Blood Lance - Relics: Digital Weapons (Blood Angels)
Primaris Lieutenant (70) - Neo-volkite pistol, Master-crafted power sword, Storm shield - Death Company upgrade: Death Company Lieutenant - Traits: Roll for 1 random trait(s) - Stratagems: Hero of the Chapter
Troops
Intercessor Squad (180) - 7x Intercessor - 1x Intercessor Sergeant: Astartes chainsword, Plasma pistol - 2x Intercessor: Astartes grenade launcher
Elites
Death Company Marines (115) - 1x Death Company Marine - 3x Death Company Marine: Boltgun - 1x Death Company Marine: Power sword, Plasma pistol
Stratagems

- Hero of the Chapter (1CP) 

Total Command Points: 3/5
Reinforcement Points: 25
Total Points: 475/500

I just watched a short on YouTube about Lion El'Johnson (stupid fucking name, btw), and his role for the Emperor in Warhammer. Which got me thinking. Each Primarch was created to have a specific role, but what were they? For some, it's easy to tell or has already been explained; others, not so.
Lion - the Emperor's exterminator (his doomsday weapon, hence why DA have the oldest and strongest tech)
Sanguinius - the Emperor's artist (BA bringing the culture of the Imperium to the galaxy)
Russ - the Emperor's executioner (the SW acting as his police)
Horus - the Emperor's general (he's the most charismatic of all his sons, all his brothers liked him and the SoH worked well with all the other legions)
Robute - the Emperor's quartermaster
Dorn - the Emperor's engineer
Vulkan - the Emperor's craftsman
Curze - the Emperor's justice (the terror tactics designed to "encourage" people to obey Imperial law)
Alpharius/Omegon - the Emperor's spies
Fulgrim - the Emperor's inspiration (the idea of dedication and perfection)
It's the others I struggle to think about. Arguably, Magnus was the embodiment of knowledge but he was a psyker and the Emperor had banned this (one of the reasons Magnus was sanctioned by Russ). Lorgar could be the embodiment of faith, except the Emperor didn't want to be worshipped. And with the Emperor very firmly the sole ruler of mankind and his word absolute law, the idea of a wild and free, question everything Jagatai seems a little at odds with his father.
Any suggestions?

To all (relevant) person(s)
As of this moment at the order of Primarch Sanguinius, a new Minor Ordo has been created. This Ordo will be henceforth called the Ordo Auditus.
The Ordo Auditus is meant to carry out thorough inspections of the Imperium’s massive bureaucracy and make sure that everything is under control. For the most part, this will be making sure that supplies and tithes are delivered and received on time and in some cases, (such as Chapter Master Powgrs’ current debacle with him not receiving a paycheck during his entire career as a Space Marine) paychecks.
This is entirely necessary for the daily running of the Imperium of Man. I swear.
May the Golden Throne guide you,
Arkenze van Haal

Warhammer 40k

Chaos
Abaddon the Despoiler
Ahzek Ahriman
Angron
Chaos
Cherubael
Fulgrim
Horus Lupercal
Kharn the Betrayer
Khorne
Konrad Curze
Lorgar
Magnus the Red
Mortarion
Nurgle
Perturabo
The Prisoner from the Emerald Cave
Skarbrand
Imperium
Corvus Corax
Emperor of Mankind
Execution Force
The God-Emperor of Mankind (Note: There's two of these?)
The Legion of the Damned
Leman Russ
Garviel Loken
Mephiston
Jaghatai Khan
Ragnar Blackmane
Roboute Guilliman
Rogal Dorn
Sanguinius
Shield Captain Valerian
Tempestus Scions
Vulkan
Xenos
C'Tan
Eldrad Ulthran
Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka
Kaela Mensha Khaine
Trazyn the Infinite
Warhammer Fantasy
Kroq-Gar and Grymloq