Thick rain fell, fit to drown the world, and the ground underfoot transformed into a stinking quagmire from which writhing shapes like grasping hands emerged. Wounded warriors were dragged down into the mud, struggling against their unseen attackers, but unable to resist being pulled under to their doom.
Prospero was breaking apart, the veil between worlds cracking, and the maddening gibbers and screams of the Great Ocean’s denizens drove men to their knees in terror. The assault on the senses was total, and Ahriman could barely keep his feet as hurricane-force winds battered the pyramid, tearing glass panes from its structure and breaking the silver and gold towers from its corners. Thunder banged in the midnight sky, and heaving earthquakes ripped ever-widening cracks in the ground, toppling what few structures of Tizca remained standing.
The epicentre of this destruction was Magnus and Russ, and Ahriman watched the two titans wrestle with the bitter enmity reserved only for those who had once called each other friend. Such a contest of arms was the most desperate thing Ahriman had ever seen. He wanted to rush forward and remind them of their former kinship, but to intervene in such a planet-shaking conflict would be suicide.
Ahriman had cautioned his warriors not to wield their powers for fear of the flesh change, but Magnus showed no such restraint and battered Leman Russ with fists wreathed in fire and lightning. Russ was a primarch and such powers as could shatter armies had little effect on him save to drive him to higher fits of rage.
Magnus drove his fist into Russ’ chest, the icy breastplate cracking open with a sound like planets colliding, and shards of ceramite stabbed the Wolf King’s heart. In return, Russ snapped Magnus’ arm back, and Ahriman heard it shatter into a thousand pieces. A blade of pure thought unsheathed from Magnus’ other arm, and he drove it deep into Russ’ chest through his shattered armour.
The blade burst from Russ’ back and the Wolf King loosed a deafening bellow of pain. A chorus of the wolves that were not wolves added their howls to that of their master. The two enormous lupine monsters that accompanied Russ leapt upon Magnus, fastening their jaws upon his legs. Magnus slammed his fist into the black wolf’s head, driving it to the ground with a strangled yelp, its skull surely shattered. With a bellow of anger, Magnus tore the white wolf from his leg with a thought and hurled it away over the heads of the milling army at Russ’ back.
Ahriman felt hands dragging him away as the howling winds and driving rain tore through the gates. He tried to shake them off as someone shouted his name. Hathor Maat and Amon pulled him away from the entrance as the vast mechanisms slowly began hauling the enormous gates closed.
“No!” he shouted, his words snatched away by the screaming winds. “We can’t!”
“We must!” shouted Hathor Maat, pointing towards the crashing waters separating the Space Wolves from the pyramid. Using the stocks of their bolters as paddles, the enemy had jury-rigged concave shards of roof debris to use as makeshift boats, and were surging over the waves towards the gateway. The water had returned to its natural state, frothed patches of liquefied flesh and bone scumming its surface the only reminder of the men who had died there. Hordes of Wulfen plunged into the water, entire packs pushing towards the pyramid with hundreds more right behind them.
Ahriman looked past the approaching monsters to see Magnus and Russ locked in battle high above the causeway, the furious horror of their struggle obscured by ethereal fire and bursts of lightning. A flare of black light erupted and Russ cried out in agony. His blade lashed out blindly and struck a fateful blow against his foe’s most dreaded weapon: his eye.
In an instant, the pyrotechnic cascade of light and fire was extinguished and a stunning silence swept outwards. All motion ceased, and the titans battling on the causeway were no more, each primarch now restored to his customary stature.
Ahriman cried out as he saw Magnus reel back from the Wolf King, one hand clutched to his eye as his shattered arm crackled with regenerative energies. As broken and bloodied as Leman Russ was, he was brawler enough to seize his opportunity. He barrelled into Magnus and gripped him around the waist like a wrestler, roaring as he lifted his brother’s body high above his head.
All eyes turned to Russ as he brought Magnus down across his knee, and the sound of the Crimson King’s back breaking tore through every warrior of the Thousand Sons’ heart.
Ahriman fell to his knees, dropping the Book of Magnus as sympathetic pain, like a white-hot spear, stabbed through him. No pain in the world was worse, for this blow could unmake a primarch, and such wounds were a death-strike a hundred times over to any mortal warrior. He knelt against the closing gateway as the Wulfen packs reached the shoreline alongside warriors led by a bloody-fanged captain with burned hair and an ice-bladed axe.
The Wolf King howled his triumph to the blackened heavens, and a rain of blood replaced the oil-black downpour as Prospero wept for her fallen son. Ahriman’s tears were bloody as Leman Russ dropped Magnus to the mud and brought the frostblade Mjalnar around to take the head of his defeated foe.
With the last of his strength, Magnus turned his head, and his ravaged eye found Ahriman.
This is my last gift to you.
Leman Russ’ blade swept down, but before its lethal edge struck, Magnus whispered unnatural syllables unknown to Man since he had first raised his guttural chants to the nameless gods of the sky. Magnus’ body underwent an instantaneous dissolution, its entire structure unmade with a word, and Ahriman gasped as vast and depthless power surged into his body.
It was too much for any mortal man to contain, but as it swept through him, he knew what he had to do.
Ahriman clasped his hands upon the jade scarab set in his breastplate, filling his mind with its every curve and nuance, its imperfections, the intricacies of its golden mounting and the exact dimensions of the black scarab worked into its substance.
He knew everything about that gem, and pictured the identical artefact on the chest of each warrior of the Thousand Sons. Even as he visualised them, the power in him spread to the entire Legion as Magnus gave the last of his strength to save his sons.
A terrific groaning shattered the stillness, like the spine of the world shearing out of true. The sound of madness tore through the mundane substance of reality as the dying breath of a god unleashed power of impossible magnitude.
The surface of Prospero twisted, and Ahriman felt a dreadful lurch of sickening vertigo. It felt like the bottom was falling out of the world, or like he was plunging down an endless shaft. The world vanished, replaced with the utter blackness at the end of the universe when all living things have been dust for billions of years.
It was not silent, this blackness, but filled with myriad howls, as though hunting packs of wolves stalked the unseen corners between worlds with them. Was there to be no escape from the Emperor’s war dogs?
With savage suddenness the impenetrable, lightless void was replaced with a swirling maelstrom of light and colour, blistering visions of hellish despair and unbridled ecstasy. Everything and nothing came in and out of the bond in moments, stretching out to infinity as the nightmare continued.
Ahriman felt his grip on sanity slipping, the fragile notions of reality that mortals cling to snapping one by one as his mind was bombarded with a billion images at once.