The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

He whispered the word against the wailing sirens. Lightning arced in panicked flashes between overloading generators, killing men, women and other machines with impunity. His presence was a violation, a profane corruption of the most sacred ground, yet the burden of confusion paralysed him. Weakness flooded his flame-wreathed form as it never had before in his demigod’s lifespan.

The cavern before him was only a laboratory in the most poetic sense. He looked with flaming eyes upon the inside of a god’s mind, where a cityscape of machinery and snarled utopia of cables reflected the synapses and sections of a human brain. At the core was a throne of gold, once coldly serene, now spitting acetylene sparks bright enough to sear even eyes made of fire.

He felt the heat of pursuit behind him, the ripples of the warp’s billion predators spilling into the latticework of tunnels in his wrathful wake. They came in a laughing, howling horde, inexorable as any flood, inevitable as the rolling slide of lava.

And he knew, then, what he had done.

He had led them here. The only being powerful enough to breach the final barriers around the Imperial Dungeon had carved a path and paved a way for them. The warning he had come to give faded from his lips.

The sirens. The sirens howled on and on. Warriors of the Ten Thousand, clad in gold and ringing their king, shouted and fired skywards. Their incendiary rounds dissolved within his towering form, their rage coming to nothing. Even the Custodians didn’t know him. He knew each of them by name – there was Constantin Valdor, there was Ra Endymion, there was Amon Tauromachian – yet they levelled their spears at him and opened fire. Good men, men with philosophical souls and unbreakable loyalty, seeking to destroy him.

His father stood at the heart of the storm, looking up at him, looking up at the burning herald of humanity’s end. Every other soul in the chamber – the menials and workers and scientists not already aflame or fleeing the cascade of klaxons – stared up with their king. The fiery form was the last thing many of them saw, for its violent luminescence stole their sight forever after.

The Emperor looked upon him – His son, His creation – with eyes that had seen countless suns and civilisations die.

‘Magnus,’ He said.

‘Father,’ breathed the avatar of burning misery in reply.

Part One Magnus’ Folly

One The first murder / Thirst / Hunger

1

Two men cry out in a forgotten age. The roar of the slayer harmonises with the scream of the slain. In this earliest epoch, when humankind still fears spirits of fire and prays to false gods for the sun to rise, the murder of a brother is the darkest of deeds.

Blood marks the man’s face, just as it marks the spear in his clenched fists and the rocks beneath his brother’s body. The wound gouts and sprays – the man tastes the red wine of his brother’s veins, feeling the blood’s heat where it lands on his bearded skin, tasting of metals yet undiscovered and seas yet unseen. As the hot salt of spilt life burns his tongue, the man knows with impossible clarity:

He is the first.

Mankind – in all its myriad forms on the thousandfold path from wretched lizard-thing to warm-blooded mammal – has always fought to survive. Even as hunched ape-creatures and brutish proto-men, it waged insignificant and miserable wars upon itself with fists and teeth and rocks.

Yet this man is the first. Not the first to hate, nor even the first to kill. He is the first to take life in cold blood. He is the first to murder.

His dying brother’s thrashing hand reaches for him, raking dirty nails across his sweating skin. Seeking mercy or vengeance? The man doesn’t know, and in his rage he doesn’t care. He drives the wooden spear deeper into the yielding hardness of meat and against the scrape of bone. Still he screams, still he roars.

The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.

To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.

2

Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.

On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloud-burst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.

And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.