The First Heretic

It was Xaphen who spoke most of his dreams, while Argel Tal remained next to silent. The Chaplain would speak with a fevered cast in his voice, as if harsh whispers could pierce the walls of my humble chamber and reach the primarch halfway across the galaxy.

He spoke of Lorgar walking the surface of worlds where the oceans were formed from boiling blood, and the skies stood dark under heavenly cities of clanking black steel. He told me of an entire Legion in the crimson of the Gal Vorbak, waging war before the gates of a golden palace.

Most tellingly of all, he described world after world dying under the tainted touch of alien claws. He swore that this was the Imperium’s demise – a godless empire reaved clean by inhuman tides. Only faith would save mankind from fate’s promises. Only worship of the Great Powers nestling within the warp.

Perhaps these were the lessons Lorgar was seeing for himself, while his sons returned to spread the word among the other fleets.

Cadia burned, just as we’d all known it would. The tribes were destroyed by Argel Tal’s own command, and the world left in silence, ready to be seeded with colonists in the future. He never once asked me to forgive him for it, just as he never asked me to console him over the murder of Vendatha.

I love him above all others, not only for saving my life, but for the fact he stains his soul with such blackness, yet masks his guilt and shame so completely. He has never broken, despite carrying the secrets and sins that will damn or save our entire species.

I believe the only mistake he ever made was in allowing himself to grow closer to the Custodes leader, Aquillon.

But then, it was just like Argel Tal to endure such penance. He became a brother to the one man he knew he must eventually betray.

Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,

by Cyrene Valantion

Part Three

CRIMSON

Forty years later

TWENTY

Three Talents

A New Crusade

The Crimson Lord

Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.

Three talents. That’s all it took.

And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.

Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.

The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.