The First Heretic

‘Yes,’ Argel Tal replied, seeing the reverence in her features. ‘We’re going home.’

NINE

Crimson King

The City of Grey Flowers

Blessed Lady

Colchis is a thirsty world.

Depending on the speaker, those words were voiced with a smile or a curse. But they remained true: the continents were raw with thirst, and the world itself was marked by memories.

At three times the size of Terra, with a fraction of the population, it took almost five standard years to turn once around its merciless sun. And it turned with great patience: a day lasting a Terran week, a week lasting a Terran month.

From orbit, its skin was a visage of unforgiving mountain ranges and auburn desert plains, veined by threading rivers. It was in dry lands like these that that humanity’s ancestors – the very first men and women on the world no longer called Earth – rose in lands that would become known as the cradle of civilisation.

Colchis was aboriginal in the same way. Mankind had been born in lands kin to those blanketing its surface, making Colchis an Earth that might have been, rather than the Terra that was.

Over the generations, civilisation had spread itself thin across the arid continents, with most cities clinging to the coasts. Each city-state maintained links to the others though sky trade and ocean freight, on a world where roads across the desert plains would be little more than folly.

Unlike much of the emergent Imperium, Colchis was unprotected by vast orbital weapon platforms. More tellingly, it also had little in the way of the industrious space stations responsible for feeding and refuelling parasitic expeditionary fleets in their crusades through the galaxy.

Colchis still bore scars of long-forgotten greatness – an age of wonders, ended in fire. In that sense, it was a future echo of what Khur had so recently become. The world’s surface was bruised dark by the bones of dead cities, fallen in unrecorded ages, never resettled. New cities rose elsewhere with the genesis of a simpler, quieter culture. The ancient ruins suggested a machine-driven empire once ruled Colchis, though little evidence ever came to light regarding its destruction. The lost kingdom’s legacy was evident even in orbit, where drifting, dead hulks – locked in orbits that would still take millennia to completely decay – marked the graves of interstellar shipyards.

Few Imperial fleets ventured near Colchis, and not merely because of its lack of resupply capacity. Rumours circulated, citing unreliable shipping lanes, and the disappearance of the 2,188th Expeditionary Fleet in a nearby region, added fuel to that particular fire. Colchis seemed a world focused upon looking inwards, even backwards, refusing to clear its skies of wreckage from the Dark Age of Technology, and resisting all Imperial edicts to establish new orbital bases. The planet’s one concession was to allow the Mechanicum of Mars access to those serene hulks, letting the tech-priests plunder whatever they desired.

And they’d done just that, with great enthusiasm, for great profit.

The region was not haunted. No Imperial commander would ever give voice to a laughable superstition, when such words were holdovers from a more indecorous age. Yet still Colchis saw scarce traffic, and its resistance to supplying the Great Crusade remained inviolate.

It was said this defiance could only have come from Lorgar, the Emperor’s Seventeenth Son, for no other authority would allow a planet to remain so curiously provincial. In the capital city, Vharadesh, a golden plaque was fixed to the immense doors leading into the Spire Temple of the Covenant. This tablet marked the primarch’s supposed words – words he’d never admitted, yet never denied, speaking to his father.

‘Take me from my home, and I will sail to the stars of your empire. I will serve as a son must serve. But let Colchis stand as I have shaped it: a planet of peace and prosperity.’

It was also said, by the few that witnessed such rare moments, that the primarch smiled each time he passed those words, and reached out to stroke his golden fingertips across the etched lettering.

Colchis was hardly devoid of technology. It enjoyed the benefits of Imperial life and culture, despite its master’s hesitance to supply materiel for the Emperor’s war. Auspices in the sky-traffic towers of Vharadesh tracked the activity in orbit, with scanner consoles lighting up at the sudden pulse of so many signals.

It had been many years since the Urizen returned home.

This time, there was someone waiting for him.