The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

The gold woman with the dead eyes draws nearer, and – for the very first time Skoia can remember – the spirits fall silent.

No, not just silent. Banished. Gone.

‘Leave me alone,’ the girl manages to say. ‘Please. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

The older woman says nothing.

Skoia breathes raggedly in the silence left by the spirits’ absence, staring up into the ice of the woman’s corpse-eyes.

‘I see nothing inside you,’ she murmurs through trembling lips. ‘You have no soul.’

Five Bringer of Sorrow / Refugees / Requisition

1

Zephon’s hands betrayed him, as they betrayed him every day. The metal fingers lifted from the hair strings of the antique harp, their shuddering subsiding as he ceased focusing on them.

Zephon was familiar with the science behind this malfunction, having memorised the reports on the various failures of biology/technology linkage taking place where his stumped arms met his bionic limbs at both elbows. The pathways of nerve and muscle were poor at conducting the information from his brain. A common enough failure of fusion surgery when dealing with crude implants grafted to the human form, but to his knowledge he was one of the only living Space Marines to suffer such complete augmetic rejection.

That was why he was here, of course. He knew it, even if his brothers had been too compassionate to call it exile. You couldn’t fight in a Legion, let alone lead a strike force, if you couldn’t pull a trigger or wield a blade.

And so he had come, willingly to all outward perception, to Terra. He’d accepted his exile, pretending it was an accolade, as part of the Crusader Host. He stood with the other representatives of each Space Marine Legion, garrisoned on the Throneworld and charged to speak for their brothers.

In Hoc Officio Gloriam, read the words on the Preceptory’s basalt declaration plaques. There is honour in this duty.

A dubious honour at best, Zephon knew. Especially now that the Throneworld no longer trusted the eighteen Legions. He was one of only two Blood Angels present in the thirty-strong monastic ambassadorship that the Crusader Host represented. Of the other warriors, even his Legion-brother Marcus, he saw no sign. He had retreated from the hollow duties of the Preceptory, content no more to work through the unreliable lists of the dead and record their names. With the galaxy burning, no reports reaching Terra were anything close to reliable. Of his Legion and primarch, there was no word at all. Was he to painstakingly etch the name of every single Blood Angel into the bronze funeral slabs in the Halls of the Fallen?

Madness. Worse than madness. Futility.

Sanguinius lived. The Legion lived.

So he had retreated to his personal chambers, where other work awaited him.

It was a truth known to relatively few souls that many of the most beautiful works of art in the entire Imperium – indeed, in the span of human history – were displayed only in the bowels of Blood Angels warships and frontier fortresses. Stained-glass windows that would never see the flare of true sunlight; statues of metaphorical gods and demigods at war with creatures of legend and myth; paintings wrought with forgotten and rediscovered techniques rendered in agonising detail, going unseen amid orchestral compositions of instruments that would never be played for human ears.

The warriors of the IX Legion didn’t strive in the same way as the soldier-artisans of the III. The Emperor’s Children sculpted, painted, composed to achieve perfection. They crafted great works to bring about something superior to anything shaped by lesser hands. In the act of creation, they exalted themselves above others.

This external, proud focus was anathema to Zephon and many of his brothers. The creation of art in song, in prose, in stone, was to reflect on the nature of humanity; a step forwards in understanding the distance between mankind and their Legion-evolved guardians. Like all of the Legions, the Blood Angels were born and shaped for battle, with rolls of honour a match for any other, with valour beyond question. But away from the eyes of their cousin Legions, they celebrated a culture of enlightenment: a quest not merely to understand the nature of man, but to understand their distance from the root species they were destined to fight and die for.