The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Despite its agony, the Red Angel laughed, the sound dousing the last flames in the firepit. ‘You seek clarity where none exists, Warmaster. The Empyreal Realm offers no easy definitions, no comprehension and no solidity for mortals. It is an ever-shifting maelstrom of power and vitality. What you seek I cannot give you.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me how I can follow my father. Tell me of the Obsidian Way that leads to the House of Eyes, the Brass Citadel, the Eternal City and the Arbours of Entropy.’

The Red Angel bared its teeth at Ger Gerradon in a blast of fury. The chains binding its arms creaked. The links stretched.

‘You betray your own kind, Tormaggedon! You name what should not be named!’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Horus Lupercal is and always was my master, I serve him now. But even I don’t know the things you know.’

‘The Obsidian Way is forbidden to mortals,’ said the Red Angel.

‘Forbidden doesn’t mean impossible,’ said Horus.

‘Just because the faithless Forethinker walked the road of bones does not mean you can follow Him,’ hissed the Red Angel. ‘You are not Him, you can never be Him. You are His bastard son, the aborted get of what He was and will one day be.’

Horus twisted his talons deeper, feeling only a hollow space of scorched organs and ashen flesh within.

‘You cannot end me, mortal!’ cried the daemon. ‘I am a thing of Chaos Eternal, a reaper of blood and souls. I will endure any torments you can devise.’

‘Perhaps you can, but I didn’t devise these torments,’ said Horus, nodding towards the flayed-skin book. ‘Your kind did.’

Horus spoke words of power and the Red Angel screamed as the spreading black veins thickened and stretched. Smoke streamed from its limbs, coming not from its fires, but the dissolution of its very essence.

‘I have your attention now?’ asked Horus, clenching a taloned fist within the Red Angel’s body. ‘I can tear your flames apart and consign every scrap of you to oblivion. Think on that when you next speak.’

The Red Angel sagged against its chains.

‘Speak,’ it hissed. ‘Speak and I will answer.’

‘The Obsidian Way,’ said Horus. ‘How can it be breached?’

‘As with all things,’ snarled the daemon. ‘In blood.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Horus.

The Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel

The Red Angel fell slack in its chains and Horus withdrew the crackling claw from the daemon’s body. Slithering black ichor dripped from the blades and squirmed into the earth around the firepit like burrower worms.

‘Did you get what you needed?’ asked Gerradon.

Horus nodded slowly, flexing his talons. ‘I believe I did, Ger, yes. Though I can’t help thinking I should have got it from you.’

Gerradon shifted uncomfortably, perhaps understanding that being summoned to Lupercal’s war tent was not the honour he might have imagined.

‘I don’t follow, my lord.’

‘Yes you do,’ said Horus. ‘As I understand it, you are brother to the Red Angel. You are both children of Erebus, one birthed on a world of blood, the other on a world of fire.’

‘As in the mortal world, there are hierarchies among the neverborn,’ said Gerradon. ‘To my lasting regret, a being wrought on a daemon world by a dark prince of the warp is more exalted than one raised by a mortal.’

‘Even a mortal as powerful as Erebus?’

‘Erebus is a deluded whelp,’ spat Gerradon. ‘He believes himself anointed, but all he did was open a door.’

‘And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?’ said Horus, circling Gerradon and letting his talon blades scrape across the Luperci’s armour. ‘You can’t come into our world unless we let you. All the schemes, all the temptations and promises of power, it’s all to get into our world. You need us more than we need you.’

Gerradon squared his shoulders, defiant now.

‘Keep telling yourself that.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me what it knew?’

‘I told you why.’

‘No, you spun a plausible lie,’ said Horus. ‘Now tell me the real answer or I’ll get to the really interesting couplets in that book of horrors.’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Very well. It was a rival. Now it’s not.’

Horus sheathed his talons, satisfied with Gerradon’s answer. He turned from the daemon-things and approached Noctua, who’d stood as immobile as a statue throughout this process of daemonic interrogation.