The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

How the Emperor had first conceived this inconceivable project was a similar mystery, but the Mechanicum’s greatest minds had followed the many hundreds of pages in each exacting schemata nevertheless. In reverence of his vision, a new caste of tech-priest had risen unseen by Terran and Martian eyes alike: the Adnector Concillium, the Unifiers.

And they had done it. They had bound Terran steel and Martian iron to avenues of senseless, unnatural materials previously shaped by long-dead, long-forgotten alien overlords. They had unified physical machinery with the psychically resonant matter of another dimension, and rebuilt the heart of an alien city.

The Impossible City was a gateway to the webway beyond. At its borders, the web began: thousands of capillary tunnels and great thoroughfares worming through the ancient alien network, leading to other worlds and regions in the galaxy. Every junction, every tunnel, every bridge, every passage leading out of the city – whether too small for anything but a lone human or vast enough for a Battle Titan – was held secure by entrenched Mechanicum thrall-warriors, Oblivion Knights of the Sisters of Silence and the Emperor’s own Custodians.

Calastar was not made up of roads and sectors as the human mind would contextualise urban order, but was formed into winding pathways across plateaus and rises, all leading to apex structures of presumably great import. Each bridge spanned a stretch of infinite abyss. The Mechanicum’s seers had reported that anyone falling from the bridges of Calastar would die of old age before reaching the bottom. Looking down into the nothingness, one could easily believe it.

A great spire rose highest of all in this district, the long promenades on the rising approach to it lined with eroded statues of what were initially believed to be eldar heroes.

‘Gods,’ Diocletian had said half a decade before, bluntly correcting the Mechanicum overseer responsible for the initial scouting probes. A hololithic map had cast flickering half-light across his features at the time. ‘I have studied their profane and foolish lore. These are not merely statues of heroes. Many of them are depictions of the aliens’ false gods.’

And so it was named the Godspire. Tribune Endymion and the Soulless Queen now used it as a command centre.

The approach was once a scene of stunning, if alien, beauty. An eldar traveller in the time of that star-spanning empire’s glory would have made a long, sloping ascent through gardens of luminescent singing crystals, across arcing bridges that curved over the bottomless void between tier platforms, before standing at the gates that led into the tower at the city’s heart. Now the crystal formations were melted remains on their floating pedestals, many supporting the weight of automated Tarantula gun batteries. Most of the bridges were broken, their spans long since fallen into the nothingness below the Impossible City. The courtyard’s once-open expanses housed a bustling hive of Mechanicum arming stations, supply depots, prefab barracks and landing pads.

In the cathedral, Ra levelled his gaze at the statue of the alien goddess-maiden once more. A filthy creature, forever staring with her slanted eyes. Who was she to judge the species that fought this new war in the ruins of her city? Her time, and the time of her people, was over. The eldar had been weighed by the implacable whims of the universe, and they had been found wanting.

His spear began its singing spin – the first blow shattered her reaching hand, sending sundered wraithbone clattering against the floor; the second cleaved through the goddess’ neck, toppling her hooded head to the floor with an echoing ring. A great crack lightning-bolted across her pale features from forehead to throat. Her severed neck steamed from the vicious kiss of the spear’s power field.

‘A fit of temper?’ came a gentle voice from the temple’s entrance.

Ra turned slowly, irritated that he’d not sensed his visitors’ approach. Truly, his humours were more unbalanced than he had realised if it was so easy to enter his presence undetected.

A woman and a girl. He hadn’t expected them so soon.

‘Not quite,’ he admitted. ‘I disliked how the alien stared at me.’ He braced himself as they took the last few steps, resisting a hissed intake of breath at the pressure squeezing its cold fingers inside his skull. ‘Commander,’ Ra greeted the first figure, and ‘Melpomanei,’ he greeted the second.

The commander of the Silent Sisterhood had come accompanied by her aide – a girl-child of nine or ten years, her head shaved bare and marked with aquila tattoos, clad in a simple adept’s robe of white, and beribboned with trailing parchments listing observances and rites that Ra had no desire to know of.