Mercifully, his mind hurled itself into unconsciousness lest it be blasted to psychosis by this unceasing barrage of sensation.
Ahriman floated into the darkness, lost in space and time.
This is the end.
But it was not the end.
Ahriman opened his eyes and found himself face down on a slab of jagged black rock. Every portion of his body was in pain, from his bruised and battered body to the very sinews of his mind. Flickering embers of light reflected on the gleaming obsidian ground and he groaned as he tried to piece together the last remnants of his memory.
Thunder boomed overhead and crackling lightning threw strobing shadows out before him. Though his body protested with searing pain, Ahriman pushed himself into a kneeling position and looked around to see what had become of Prospero.
His first thought was that the last work of Magnus had wrought a dreadful change upon their home world, but it soon penetrated his fractured mind that the sky was not that of Prospero. It boiled with storms of a million colours, jagged forks of light and fire dancing in crackling columns that reached from the ground to the clouds.
He knelt upon the lower slope of an outcrop of black rock overlooking a broken volcanic plain ruptured with smoking fissures and threaded with glowing streams of lava. Gnarled fists of rock thrust up from the plain, their peaks topped with crooked silver towers that stood in mocking imitation of the graceful spires of Tizca. The leather-bound Book of Magnus lay beside him, and he tucked it protectively under his arm.
Jagged mountain peaks soared into the shimmering sky that bellowed with peals of thunder. The sky hazed and shimmered like the most magnificent Mechanicum Borealis, but this was no side effect of centuries of pollution and industry. This was raw aether saturating the air and raging with oceanic tides of power.
Warriors of the Thousand Sons wandered aimlessly across the broken rockscape in their hundreds, stunned at the desolation they found themselves in. Quaking discharges rumbled beneath the ground, as though an endless series of underground tremors constantly reshaped the planet’s core.
Ahriman rose to his feet, surveying the nightmarish landscape of everlasting turmoil. A hunched figure shambled towards him, head down, and he recognised the battered form of Khaphed, one of the Lore-Keepers within the Corvidae library. In this hellish place, it was a blessed relief to see a familiar face.
“Khaphed? Is that you?” asked Ahriman, feeling his speech fill the air with potential for wonders and raptures, as though every breath was charged with power.
The warrior didn’t answer and Ahriman felt a dreadful force within Khaphed’s body. The Lore-Keeper’s head came up and Ahriman took a backward step as he saw the mutant growths that transformed Khaphed. Distended eyes pushed their way from every surface on the warrior’s face, such that there was no longer a mouth, nose or any other sense organ other than eyes.
Khaphed reached for him, his myriad eyes silently imploring him for help.
Ahriman thrust his hand towards Khaphed and unleashed a barrage of fire and lightning into the Lore-Keeper’s body. Such powers were the provenance of the Raptora and Pavoni, but they leapt from Ahriman’s fingers as naturally as though he had been trained by those cults since birth.
Khaphed’s charred body collapsed and shattered into ashen fragments as it hit the ground.
Horrified, Ahriman ran down the slopes to rejoin the rest of his warriors.
HE FOUND HATHOR Maat, Amon and Sobek quickly enough, but it soon became clear that the Lore-Keeper of the Corvidae was not the only member of the Legion to have succumbed to the flesh change. Dozens more required to be put down, until at last all that remained appeared to be free of mutation.
All told, twelve hundred and forty-two warriors had survived the razing of Prospero.
“Where are we?” asked Sobek, raising the most obvious question.
No one had an answer, and for long days and nights, though it was impossible to gauge the passage of time since everyone’s armour chrono had failed, the Thousand Sons explored the hideous desolation that was their new home.
The silver towers were discovered not to be parodies of those that had been raised on Tizca, but those selfsame towers, broken and twisted by the strange alchemy that had brought them to this place. Beyond these relics of their lost home world, there was nothing to shed any light on the nature of the place.
No power of the Corvidae or any other cult could fathom its location or any hint of how they had come to be deposited upon its blasted surface.
All that changed on the day the Obsidian Tower rose from the depths.
IT BEGAN WITH yet another earthquake, a common enough occurrence that no one paid any mind at first. A sullen mood had fallen upon the Thousand Sons, which was wholly expected, for what manner of man would not keenly feel the loss of his home, father and brothers?
But this earthquake did not simply fade away after splitting yet another fissure in the endless volcanic plain while sealing another shut. Cracks spread from the centre of the plain in a radial pattern and a black diamond, like a thrusting basalt speartip, exploded upwards.
It rose into the sky, pushing higher and higher and growing wider and wider with every passing moment until a new mountain had been birthed. Towering and steep-sided, it rose higher than Olympus Mons and the Mountain of Aghoru combined. Broken rocks tumbled from its impossible height, falling from its angular sides to craft a fringe comprising shattered Cyclopean stone and titanic blocks of strange angles and impossible perspectives.
When the rain of dust and debris had ended, the Thousand Sons gathered at the base of this stupendous creation, knowing that nothing natural could have created so magnificent an edifice. Glowing fire arced from the distant mountain’s peak and a shimmering blue light suffused its entirety, as though lightning filled its tunnels like blood in a circulatory system.
A bright shape descended from the mountaintop, a wavering and indistinct form wreathed in the light of stars and the power of infinite possibility. Brilliant wings of shimmering aetheric fire unfolded from the figure’s back, and the Thousand Sons fell to their knees as their father’s light spread over them.
Magnus landed softly before his sons and they stared in amazement as his light illuminated the bleak darkness of the world. This was no corporeal shell of a subtle body as worn by the primarch when he had walked among them. This was a body of light that could exist beyond the confines of the Great Ocean. Magnus had sacrificed the flesh that had contained his essence, and in so doing had ascended to a more evolved form, one free from the constraints of mortality and the limits of reality.
“My sons,” said Magnus with weary resignation, “welcome to the Planet of the Sorcerers.”
Time has passed.
Centuries or days, who can know?
It may be both and neither at the same time.
I cannot say how long has passed since we first came here, for I have come to appreciate that such concepts are an irrelevance here. All I know is that things have become immeasurably worse since the Obsidian Tower first reared its ugly immensity from the earth. Some say we could not have guessed that this world would have worked its evil upon us. I say: How could wenot have known?
Hathor Maat fears it the worst, but I confess I too suffer the nightmarish dread that one day I will become less than nothing, a devolved creature with nothing left of the man I once was. Some even embrace their new forms, believing them to be marks of favour.