The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

The spear in his hands, gifted to him by the Emperor, cast slashing silver reflections against the cathedral’s walls. Its blade showed the scratches and scrapes of endless use with the perfection of ceaseless repair. He ran his fingertips along the flat visage of his own reflection in its mirrored surface, seeing the unmasked image he so rarely presented to the world.

Unease prickled at his flesh beneath the gold war-plate. He felt the weariness of the last five years clinging to him, the way cold wind slows the bones. Exhaustion wasn’t alien to the warriors of the Ten Thousand – their strength lay in enduring pain and weariness, not banishing it – but he felt as he had in his initiate days, when the trials had seen him drained of blood by the Emperor’s vitafurtam machines before subjecting him to the rigours of Custodian training.

Disgusted with himself at his failure of focus, Ra resumed the sparring briefly interrupted by the Emperor. His spear spun and whirled, singing its bladed song in the cold air. He lashed out with fist, boot and elbow, losing himself in the harmony of emptying his mind of all else.

Ra moved before the altar, forcing his muscles through the motions of the Fifty Forms, seeking the absolute focus that came through the alignment of body and mind. He shut out his surroundings, paying no heed to the pillared cathedral or the great altar, banishing the sound of his snarling armour joints and the thudding of his boots on the cracked wraithbone floor.

Soon he was perspiring freely, rivulets of sweat painting his dark features, following the lines of his cheekbones and the tattoos that snaked from his temples to the edges of his mouth. His spear whistled and whined, cutting the misty air. Its high-pitched slicing passage joined the melody of his heaving breaths.

Midway through the Third Form, the whirling spear slipped in his grip. The hesitation was miniscule, a fractional shift of the haft in his clutches, invisible to the observing eye. Ra clenched his teeth, leaning harder into the movements, chasing the elusive serenity.

He thought back to the Emperor’s words, spoken in the memory dream of where the Master of Mankind had first risen among the fields and mud huts. Words of promise, of responsibility. The necessary command of humanity, to bring about law and progress.

He thought of his own words to Diocletian and Kaeria before sending them to the surface. Scarcely one in ten of the Ten Thousand remain here.

He thought of–

The spear slipped a second time. Ra tightened his grip before the blade could fall from his hands, but the damage was done.

He stilled in his movements, breathing heavily. The stone alien maiden still stared down at him, imploring without meaning. He turned from her, looking up through the shattered dome ceiling.

With no sun there was no day. With no sky there was no night. The Impossible City – none of its defenders used the eldar name except in amused derision – stretched on for kilometres in every direction. In every direction: to look to the east and the west was to see a cityscape of winding streets and crumbling towers rising at unbelievable angles, as though the ground curved in the shape of an unimaginably vast conduit. To look directly up was to see yet more districts of the ancient wraithbone city, kilometres distant and difficult to perceive through the realm’s haze of mist. Those tall towers of smoothly curving alien architecture reached down just as the spires on the ground reached up. In truth, once a traveller approached the city there was no way of knowing where the true ground was; gravity was unchanged no matter where one walked. None of the Mechanicum’s instruments could explain the phenomena, but precious few Martian instruments had worked reliably in this realm since first entering it years before.

It was here that the primarch Magnus had led an ocean of daemons in his wake, in his quest to warn the Emperor of Horus’ treachery. And it was here, with the naivety of a proud and wayward god-child, that Magnus had set a sword to the throat of the Emperor’s dreams. The catacombs of Calastar led directly to the Imperial Dungeon. If the Impossible City fell, Terra fell with it.

No one knew what cataclysm had ravaged Calastar in epochs past. Whatever had driven the eldar from the Impossible City was a mystery that the Imperial vanguard had no capacity to solve. Much of Calastar’s core was a labyrinth of Mechanicum-born sections bolted into place, bridging the divide between the Imperial Dungeon and the dead hub-city itself, great spans of tunnels, bridges and channels forged by the blood, sweat and oil of countless priests in the Mechanicum’s sacred red.