The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Salicar beheaded a pair of mortals bearing a heavy bolter and kicked another with a demolition charge in the chest. The man’s ribs shattered and he flew back through the air. The charge he’d carried detonated and tore the sponson from a nearby battle tank. It slewed around and exploded a moment later.

Salicar knelt as the shock wave washed over him.

He rose to his feet and pushed on, his honour guard finally catching up with him. They had discarded their shields. Defence was now irrelevant, attack was all that mattered.

The bladed formations of the Blood Angels converged to form a single spear thrust right through the centre of the enemy. Perhaps a quarter of Salicar’s warriors were dead. Sheer weight of fire had done what the enemy’s individual prowess could not. They fled before his wetted blade. Gunshots smacked his arms and legs.

His visor display flickered with warnings, but he cared nothing for them. He was to die this day, and no warning would change that.

Drazen Acorah now fought at his side, his axe blades gleaming red and wet. His lieutenant saw him and gave a curt nod. All that could be spared in the fight’s fury. Salicar returned the gesture as he saw a hellish fire silhouette the mortals before him.

Acorah cried out and dropped to his knees, the axe falling from his grip. The press of bodies closed on him, knives and rifles and swords stabbing for him. Salicar thrust and cut, keeping the rabble back. A shot smacked into his back, a heavier round. He staggered. Another clipped his helmet and he fell to one knee.

He reached out and gripped Acorah’s shoulder guard.

‘Stand, brother!’ he ordered.

Acorah looked up.

Crackling lines of power hazed his helmet, and the lenses shone with inner light. A blood-red radiance of arterial wonder.

‘It’s here!’ cried Acorah. ‘Throne save us, it’s here!’

Salicar sprang to his feet as a towering fury surged through him, a killing rage like nothing he had ever known.

No, that wasn’t true.

He had known this once before.

Months before in the Kushite jungle. A red mist of unimaginable hatred and rage, the unbridled anger of a million souls. Every hostile thought and primal impulse given free rein.

Salicar gasped, an exhalation of feral savagery.

A figure moved through the flames before him, a warrior of transhuman scale. Its armour was blackened red and wreathed in fire.

Worse, it was armoured as he was. Wreathed by flames that seared the eye, the winged blood drop on its shoulder guard was unmistakable.

Whatever this thing was, it had once been a Blood Angel.

Chains dragged behind it and it hovered a full metre above the bloody ground. Its face was a scorched horror of eternally burning meat, fire-blackened and pulled tight in a rictus grin of horrified anger. In one hand it carried a severed head, that of Warden Agana Serkan.

‘Behold our kin,’ it said, and Salicar felt his ears bleed within his helm.

The mortals gathered around him fell to their knees. No longer seeking him dead, but supplicating themselves to the monstrous hellspawn. Salicar wanted to murder every one of them. Not fight them, not kill them, but slaughter them. He wanted to bathe in their blood, to strip himself of armour and slather his naked flesh with their entrails.

Their hearts he would devour. From their bones he would suck the marrow. Their eyes would be sweet, their blood ambrosia. Salicar’s every civilised move was stripped away as he saw himself drowning in the blood of his kills, each skull taken paving the way for his immortality.

‘This is what you all want, Vitus,’ said the fallen angel, reaching out to him. ‘Accept it. Your brothers have already drunk from the bloody chalice I offered them on Signus. They now slay in my name. They slake their thirst for blood without remorse. I know you felt the echoes of that moment in your own slaughters, Vitus. Feel no guilt for that, embrace the killer angel within. Join your brothers. Join me.’

Salicar felt a presence beside him and reluctantly averted his gaze from the daemon-thing. Drazen Acorah stood at his side, one hand holding his axe before him like a talisman.

‘I name you warp spawn!’ cried Acorah, the witch-light within his helm spreading over his body to envelop the blades of his axe.

‘I am the Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel!’ cried the fire-wreathed abomination as a pair of flaming swords erupted from its gauntlets. ‘Bow down before me!’