The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Albard wept to see strong thighs with well-defined quadriceps. His belly was flat and cut with abdominal muscles. His pectorals were the very epitome of sculpted perfection. He was a god among men, as perfect as the gilded statues of the Emperor’s sons that flanked the approach to the Sanctuary.

The years since his failed Becoming were wiped away and all that he could have been was revealed. This was what he should have been, this was what Raeven and Lyx had stolen from him.

This was what the Serpent Gods had offered Raeven and what he had selfishly thrown back in their faces. He would not make that mistake. Albard would live up to the promise of all he had been raised to expect. His would be a life of glory lived for the Serpent Gods.

What they offered was everything he had been denied.

The broken psyche that was Albard Devine had no chance against such blandishments and the force of his own ambitions.

‘I am yours...’ he whispered, and the lamprey-like mouths of the snake fronds fastened on his limbs once again. The pain of their teeth upon his perfect body was a welcome pain. He convulsed as the heady mix of daemonic elixirs coursed around his body. The sensation of bliss was unstoppable, matched only by his horror at the crippled thing he had once been.

Albard blinked and the interior of the pilot’s canopy was wiped from his sight.

The Stormlord’s warhorse rode towards the towering beast of black and white as it turned its killing fire on a host of brave foot knights making a last stand by a flame-belching crater where once had stood a mighty fortress.

‘Vajras!’ he bellowed. ‘Ride with me to victory!’

13

In the end, it wasn’t natural Cthonian ferocity or hot-as-hell-in-the-heart resilience that saved Aximand’s Sons of Horus. Nor was it any small-unit tactics of uncommon brilliance or heroic leadership from a charismatic officer.

In the end it was Titans that saved them.

Mourn-it-all had reaped a fearsome tally, its edge as sharp as the day the Warmaster had restored it. But a sharp sword and an arm to swing it weren’t enough. The Sons of Horus fought a desperate retreat through the maze of shattered blocks that was all that remained of the flanking wall, harried at every turn by vengeful Ultramarines.

Hundreds of warriors grappled and stabbed and shot one another in the fog of explosions and burning propellant. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn in the rubble. Random rounds cooked off and crackled in the flames. Mortal soldiers unlucky enough to be caught in the middle were killed within moments, crushed in the fray, hacked open or shredded in withering crossfire.

This was Legion war. Mortals had no place in it.

Bolter shells caromed off Aximand’s armour, swords gouged the bonded ceramite and explosions battered him with debris. All semblance of purpose and control among the combatants was eroded in the smoking, flame-lit nightmare. Even in the chaos, Aximand knew the Ultramarines held the upper hand. With every hacking sweep, every snatched pistol shot, the Sons of Horus were a step closer to defeat.

Aximand had killed seventeen Ultramarines.

An admirable ratio, but not without its cost.

Aximand’s right shoulder guard was gone, torn away by the heavy blast of an emplaced autocannon. The flesh beneath was burned black and every movement of the arm brought a hiss of pain to his lips. His plastron was cracked and the coolant pipes crossing underneath spewed chemicals down his legs in oily sheets. Regrown vertebrae protested at his sudden movements, the grafted bone not yet fully bedded in.

But the fight wasn’t lost.

For all their damned practical, for all that they held the upper hand, the Ultramarines couldn’t put the Sons of Horus to rout. Almost any other foe would have broken in the face of such a relentless killing machine of war, but the Sons of Horus were weaned on blood. They gave ground only in blood.

And that had earned them a reprieve.

Unimaginably powerful weapons discharged behind Aximand. The kind that would kill you without you even knowing it, the kind that would atomise every molecule of your body before the brain even registered the muzzle flash.

Now that weaponry was turned on the warriors of the XIII Legion.

A column of incandescent light erupted in the heart of the blue-armoured warriors. Plasma washed up like a geyser as the white heat of a blastgun turned its heat on the enemy infantry.

A one-armed Warhound climbed to the top of the rubble, its hull pitted with stubber impacts. Void shield haze clung to its ripped carapace like corposant, and oily blood streamed from its underside.

Bloodveil.