The First Heretic

Lorgar stopped his son’s words with a concerned glance.

‘You are snarling as you speak,’ the primarch said.

‘It is unintentional, sire.’

‘I know. Your voice is as divided as your soul. I can see the latter with my psychic sense – two faces stare out at me, four eyes and two smiles. None would ever know of it, save perhaps my brother Magnus. But to know the truth, one has only to listen. Mortal ears will know of your affliction, Argel Tal. You must learn to hide it better.’

The captain hesitated. ‘I was under the belief that I’d be destroyed after telling you all of this.’

‘That is a possibility, my son. But I would take no pleasure in seeing you dead.’

‘Will the Serrated Sun be purged from Legion records?’

Before speaking, Lorgar trickled fine, powdery sand onto the parchment, helping to dry the inked words he’d written thus far.

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Because where once three hundred warriors once stood loyal, now barely a hundred remain alive. Of the three companies, one remains whole. Deumos is dead, slain upon Cadia. A hundred of our brothers were stormlost, taken by the warp on the Shield of Scarus. And now my company returns to you broken and... changed.’

‘The Serrated Sun will always be a lesson for the Legion,’ said Lorgar, ‘no matter how the Pilgrimage ends. Some things must never be forgotten.’

Argel Tal took a breath. In the exhalation was a whispering sound. Something was laughing.

‘I do not wish to speak of Cadia, sire. You already know everything I know that transpired on the surface. The nights of discussions with Ingethel and the tribal elders. The comparisons of our star charts with their crude maps of the heavens. Their pictographs of the Eye of Terror, and how the Cadians’ images of the storm matched the empyrean from our scrolls of the Old Faith.’ Argel Tal laughed, and the sound lacked any humour. ‘As if we needed more evidence.’

Lorgar was watching him closely.

‘What, sire?’

‘The storm that blights this subsector. You called it the Eye of Terror.’

Argel Tal froze. ‘That... Yes. That’s what it will come to be called. When it opens wider across the void, when the trembling Imperium sees it as the galaxy’s own hell. A void-sailors’ dramatic name for the greatest mystery of the deep. It will be scrawled onto maps and digitally inscribed into stellar cartography databanks. Humanity will give it that name, as a child names its own simple fears.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Sire?’

‘Who is speaking to me now? That is not your voice.’