Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For him, time was a conditional concept, an abstract quantity measured not by the turning of cycles or the passage of celestial bodies, but only by the layers of dust on the lid of his stasis display. He was an exhibit. Perfect, but silent. Frozen in the flawless pose of a demigod, with ideal features and a body sculpted from living marble, he stood in the galleries of Solemnace, surrounded by the silence of millennia.

His jailer was Trazyn the Infinite, a Necron Overlord whose interest in galactic history bordered on obsession. Trazyn collected moments. A frozen-in-time skirmish between an Ultramarine captain and an Ork warboss. The last breath of a xenos poet. And him—the crown jewel of the collection, the unsurpassed creation of the fallen Apothecary Fabius Bile. The clone of the primarch Fulgrim.

He did not know his name. He did not know who he was. His consciousness, if it could be called that, was a calm, crystal-clear lake. In it were reflected the fleeting movements of the scarab custodians cleaning his temporal prison, and the rare visits of Trazyn himself. The Necron would stand before him for long periods, studying every line, every detail with the meticulousness of an antiquarian. The clone felt nothing. He was empty. A shell devoid of a ghost.

But one day, something changed. The silence in his mind trembled. It was not like a sound, more like a vibration, a barely perceptible resonance that passed through the very foundations of his being. It originated somewhere far away, beyond the gallery, beyond Solemnace itself, in the roaring chaos of the warp. It was a call.

At first faint, like a distant star on a moonless night, it grew stronger with each conditional cycle. The call carried no words or images. It was a pure, inexplicable pull, a feeling of incompleteness, as if a missing part of himself existed somewhere. The void within him, previously his natural state, began to ache. It turned into a hunger, a thirst that he could neither understand nor quench.

Trazyn noticed the change. His precise sensors detected microscopic fluctuations in the clone's biosignature, bursts of activity in neural networks that should have remained in eternal quiescence.

"Curious," rasped the overlord's vox-emitter as he stood before the display once more. "My greatest acquisition is dreaming. Awakening. Fabius has outdone himself. He created not just a perfect body, but a vessel capable of attracting the echo of a soul."

The clone could not answer, but the call within him grew louder. It became a silent scream to which every cell of his body responded. He longed to move, to take a step, but the stasis field held him tighter than any adamantium. This paralysis was torment. In his once-calm lake of a mind, a storm now raged.

And this storm, this internal resonance, accomplished the impossible. The stasis field, a technology honed over millions of years, failed. For a microsecond its coherence was disrupted, and that second was enough.

The world exploded with sensations. The air, still and sterile, touched his skin. Gravity, hitherto only a theoretical concept, fell upon his shoulders with all its weight. He took a ragged breath, and his lungs, which had never known air, burned. He fell to his knees, and the cold metal of the floor met his bare skin.

He was free.

Around him was semi-darkness, illuminated only by the soft light of the stasis displays in which other, less fortunate prisoners were frozen. In the distance, he heard scraping and clanking—alarmed Canoptek constructs were hurrying to the site of the breach.

He had no weapon, no armor, not even a name. But he had a purpose. Vague, instinctive, but all-consuming. To find the source of the call. To unite with it. To become whole.

He rose. His body, created for perfection in battle, instinctively assumed a warrior's stance. His eyes, violet and clear, scanned the gallery, noting escape routes, the location of enemies, weak points in the defense. Knowledge he had never possessed surfaced in his consciousness, like silt from the bottom of a disturbed lake. Tactics, strategy, the art of killing.

When the first Canoptek Spyder lunged at him, its many blades and optical sensors gleaming, the clone did not flinch. He stepped forward to meet it. His movement was fluid, inhumanly fast and deadly. He seized the mechanical creature by a manipulator, tore it off with a spray of power hydraulics, and plunged the sharp blade into the construct's optical node. The spyder convulsed and fell silent.

He was no longer just an exhibit. He had become a warrior.

The escape from Solemnace would have passed into legend, if anyone had been there to tell it. A lone, naked primarch, fighting his way through the endless halls of a living museum-tomb. He battled mechanical horrors, bypassed cunning traps, solved temporal puzzles that would have stumped any cryptek. He moved, guided only by that internal compass, that cry of a soul from the depths of the warp.

He managed to reach one of the countless hangars where Trazyn kept his captured ships. His choice fell on a sleek, swift Eldar raider, whose lines reminded him of something familiar, something beautiful. He did not know how to pilot it, but his hands fell to the control crystals of their own accord, his fingers instinctively brushing across the runes, awakening the ancient ship from its slumber.

Solemnace shuddered as the small craft burst from its bowels, punching through several decks and defensive fields. In its wake came Trazyn's curses, promises of eternal torment and a place in the most honorable, but also the most excruciating, diorama.

The clone did not hear him. He steered the ship through the web of reality, directing it into the very heart of the storm, into the boiling abyss that mortals called the Eye of Terror. The call had become deafening, an Ariadne's thread in the labyrinth of madness. It was leading him home. To a ship that had once been called the  Pride of the Emperor .

The Eye of Terror was a wound in the fabric of reality, and the journey through it was torture. The warp teemed with unbridled emotions, nightmares, and predatory entities. For any mortal, it would have been certain death, a descent into madness. But the clone was not mortal. His mind, created perfect and protected by the genetic heritage of a primarch, was a bastion of stability in this ocean of chaos.

The Eldar raider, a child of a much more subtle technology, glided through the ethereal currents like a fish in a stream, avoiding the most dangerous whirlpools and predators. The clone piloted it instinctively, his mind focused only on the call. It was getting closer, clearer. He could now distinguish notes in it—not sonic, but emotional. Longing. Regret. An endless, corrosive sorrow. And beneath it all, a faint, almost extinguished flame of purity and nobility.

He was flying towards a beacon of pain.

And finally, he saw it. The Pride of the Emperor no longer bore that name. Now it was called the Fulgent Agonist, and it drifted in a crimson nebula like the decaying corpse of a leviathan. The world-ship, once the pinnacle of Imperial shipbuilding, was now a grotesque sight. Its perfect proportions were distorted, with bone spires and quivering membranes of flesh growing from its hull. The viewports, like thousands of weeping eyes, oozed multicolored light, and from the weapon ports came not volleys of fire, but moans and ecstatic screams. This was not just a ship—it was a temple dedicated to pain and perverse pleasure, a living monument to the fall of the Third Legion.

To approach it was like sailing up to an island of lepers. The aura of depravity emanating from the ship was so dense it was palpable. It pressed on the mind, whispered obscene promises, tried to seduce, to find a crack in the soul and send its poisonous roots into it. The clone felt this pressure, but the emptiness within him served as his shield. There was nothing to seduce. His soul was a blank slate.

He docked the raider in the shadow of one of the bony growths, in a place where the ship's hull resembled a gaping wound. It was not difficult to get inside. The ship was alive, but its defensive systems had long since atrophied, replaced by other, more insidious traps—mental and spiritual.

The corridors of the  Agonist  were a nightmare made flesh and metal. The decks, once trod by legionaries in shining purple and gold armor, were now paved with moaning faces embedded in the biomechanical floor. The walls pulsed to an unholy rhythm, and the air was thick with the smell of spilled wine, exotic incense, and stale blood. From the ventilation grilles came not the hum of machinery, but a chorus of suffering and exulting voices, merging into a single, insane symphony.

This place was a living negation of everything he instinctively should have been. A negation of order, beauty, and discipline. Here reigned only excess, taken to the point of absurdity, of self-destruction. He saw the descendants of the Third Legion warriors. They bore little resemblance to Space Marines. Their armor was altered beyond recognition, adorned with obscene symbols and trophies. Some had become Noise Marines, their helmets transformed into gruesome vox-grilles that spewed a cacophony of destructive sound. Others were obsessed with the pursuit of physical sensation, their bodies covered in scars, piercings, and self-inflicted mutilations. They were lost souls, forever seeking new, ever-stronger stimuli to feel anything at all in their seared souls.

They did not notice him. He was invisible to them, a shadow gliding through this theater of the absurd. His emptiness, his absence of vice, made him a foreign element that their perverted senses could not perceive. He walked on, guided by the call that now emanated from the very heart of the ship. It led him to a place that had once been a sanctuary.

La Fenice. The primarch's private gallery.

The doors to the gallery had been torn from their hinges, but the hall itself was surprisingly intact, as if some force had protected it from complete desecration. But even here, the influence of Chaos was evident. The tapestries depicting the victories of the Great Crusade had rotted, and now one could discern scenes of monstrous orgies and bloody sacrifices. The sculptures, carved from lunar marble, wept tears of blood, their perfect features twisted into grimaces of pain and ecstasy. The air here was different—not thick with the stench of decay, but ringing with tension, with a concentrated despair trapped within four walls.

And in the center of the hall, in a place of honor, hung the portrait.

It was huge, painted with unsurpassed skill. It depicted the primarch in all his glory, in purple and gold armor, with a proud posture and a gaze fixed on the future. His fair hair fell to his shoulders, and in his violet eyes burned the fire of genius and ambition. This was Fulgrim. The Phoenician. The Illuminator. As he had been before the fall.

The clone drew closer. He looked at the portrait, and for the first time in his life, he felt something akin to recognition. He was not just seeing an image. He was seeing himself. Or rather, what he was supposed to have become. The call that had led him here came from this canvas. It was deafening, unbearable. The sorrow trapped in the brushstrokes was tearing itself out.

He reached out and touched the surface of the painting.

In that moment, the world vanished.

The touch was like a lightning strike. Not a physical one, but a spiritual one. The canvas beneath his fingers rippled like the surface of water, and in the next moment, his consciousness plunged into the abyss that lay hidden behind the layer of oil and canvas.

He found himself in a void, but it was not the sterile void of his former existence. This void was alive, filled with the echo of memories and emotions. Before him stood a figure woven from shimmering silver light. It was an exact copy of the primarch from the portrait, but it was tormented by an unquenchable sorrow. Every movement, every breath was imbued with the pain of loss. This was the part of Fulgrim's soul that had retained its nobility, the part that was horrified by what had been done and had been banished from the body by the demonic entity that had taken its place. It was a ghost, trapped in its own idealized memory.

 "You have come,"  a voice sounded, not in his ears, but directly in the clone's mind. The voice was as beautiful as the ringing of a silver bell, but tears trembled in it.

"I followed the call," the clone replied. His own voice sounded unfamiliar to him; he was speaking for the first time. "I do not know who I am."

 "You are me. My chance. My curse,"  the spirit replied.  "You are a vessel. Perfect and empty. And I am a memory, trapped in a cage of paint. I have seen everything. Everything he has done in my name. With my hands." 

The silver silhouette shuddered, and around them, in the void, scenes from the past began to come to life. These were not mere images. The clone lived them, felt them with every fiber of his newfound being.

Here he stands in a dazzlingly bright forge beneath the mountains of Terra. The heat scorches his skin, the air smells of incandescent metal and ozone. Beside him is a brother. Mighty, stern, with hands of living silver. Ferrus Manus, the Gorgon. They are separated by a chasm of character: one a refined aesthete, the other a pragmatic warrior. But in this moment, they are united by one thing—a passion for perfection, for the art of creation.

They made a wager—who could create the more perfect weapon. The clone felt Fulgrim's excitement, his desire not just to win, but to create a masterpiece. He felt the weight of the hammer in his hand, saw the pliant metal take shape under his blows. For days and nights they toiled side by side, exchanging rare, terse words of respect. It was a time of pure, untainted creation, a time of brotherhood forged not only by blood, but by a common cause.

"Behold, Ferrus," Fulgrim's voice said, full of pride. "This hammer will shatter worlds for the glory of the Allfather."

"And this blade," the Gorgon's hoarse voice replied, "will bring his light to the darkest corners of the galaxy."

The clone saw the moment they finished their work. Fulgrim had created for Ferrus the hammer  Forgebreaker , a weapon of incredible power and yet exquisite beauty. Ferrus, in turn, had forged for his brother the sword  Fireblade , a blade in which the sun itself seemed to burn. And in a moment of mutual admiration, they each declared the other's weapon the better, and they exchanged gifts as a sign of eternal friendship and respect. The clone felt the warmth of this friendship, the deep, almost romantic affection the Phoenician had for his stern brother. Ferrus was his anchor, his measure, the one whose directness and honesty kept him from drowning in his own self-admiration.

The memory dissolved, replaced by another.

He is on board the  Pride of the Emperor , but it is a very different ship. Clean, majestic, filled with light and art. His legionaries, the Emperor's Children, stand before him. Their armor shines, and their faces are full of devotion and admiration. They were the epitome of perfection, the legion that the Emperor himself had granted the right to bear the Palatine Aquila on their armor. He felt a love for them, for each of his sons, a pride in their achievements. They were the best, and he was leading them to glory.

But then the light began to fade. A new picture. A world called Laeran. A xenos temple dedicated to pleasure. And in the center of the temple, a sword. Elegant, seductive, it lay on a pedestal and seemed to sing to him, promising even greater perfection. The clone felt Fulgrim's hand reach for the sword, despite an inner voice screaming of danger. He felt the cold of the hilt, and with it, a poison entered the primarch's soul.

The memories flooded in, one more terrible than the last.

The whisper of the sword, corrupting, distorting the very concept of perfection. It turned the pursuit of the ideal into a chase for excess. Discipline was replaced by indulgence, art by decadence, and brotherly love by jealousy and egoism.

A conversation with Ferrus. He tries to sway his brother to the side of the Warmaster, to the side of Horus. The clone felt Fulgrim's shame, mixed with the arrogance the blade instilled in him. He saw the anger and disappointment in the Gorgon's eyes. A furious duel in which Ferrus shatters  Fireblade , once a symbol of their friendship. The pain of that blow was not physical, but spiritual.

And then... Isstvan V.

A wasteland covered in black sand and ash. The air is thick with the smell of blood and promethium. The clone saw it all through Fulgrim's eyes. He saw the loyalist legions caught in a trap. He saw the Iron Hands, his brother Ferrus, fighting with the fury of a berserker.

 "I didn't want to!"  the silver spirit screamed in the void, and his scream was an echo of Fulgrim's own despair in that fateful moment.  "The blade... the daemon... it controlled me!" 

The clone felt it. Felt the struggle within the primarch. His own will, trying to stop his hand, to deflect the blow. But his body no longer belonged to him. It belonged to the daemon that lived in the sword. He felt an unnatural force guiding his hand, and the unstoppable triumph of the creature that had been unleashed.

The blow.

The blade of the daemon sword met the neck of Ferrus Manus. The clone saw the life fade from the eyes of his brother, his best friend. He felt the Gorgon's head separate from his body. And in that moment, in that moment of absolute betrayal and horror, he felt a wave of perverse, unholy ecstasy that the daemon experienced.

That emotion, alien and abhorrent, almost shattered the clone's mind.

And then came the pain. Not the daemon's pain. Fulgrim's own pain. The realization. The all-consuming, crushing grief of having killed the one he loved most in the world. This grief was so great that the primarch's soul shattered. The daemon, seizing the moment, consumed his essence, took his body, and that fragment of his soul in which honor, nobility, and love for his brother still remained was cast out, locked away in the portrait—an eternal reminder of who he had been and what he had lost.

The memories continued. The ascension to daemon prince. The endless atrocities and orgies in the name of Slaanesh. The transformation of his sons, his perfect Emperor's Children, into monsters crazed by the pursuit of sensation. And somewhere in the depths of the daemon's twisted consciousness, as in a nightmare, Fulgrim saw it all.

The last memory was a blinding flash. Another brother. Blue armor. Roboute Guilliman. He saw the duel, but now through the eyes of the daemon, reveling in every moment. Four arms, a serpentine body. He saw his poisoned blade slide across the throat of the Lord of Ultramar, finding the weak spot left by another traitor. He felt the triumph of having brought down another of those who had remained true to the light of their Father.

When the visions ended, the clone was once again standing in the desecrated gallery. But he was no longer the same. The emptiness inside him was filled. Filled to the brim with another's life, another's triumphs, and, most terrible of all, another's guilt.

He was no longer a nameless clone. He was Fulgrim.

But not the Fulgrim who had become a daemon prince. And not even the noble primarch he had been before the fall. He was something new. He was a soul that had been given a second chance, a second body. And that soul was poisoned by remorse.

 "Now you are me,"  the voice whispered in his head. The silver ghost from the painting dissolved, merging with him.  "Carry this burden. Atone for our sins." 

He looked at his hands. The perfect hands of a primarch. The hands that had created masterpieces. The hands that had killed a brother. He fell to his knees, and from his chest tore the first, truly his own sound. It was not a cry of rage or pain.

It was a moan of absolute, boundless grief.

He mourned for Ferrus. He mourned for his sons. He mourned for himself. He mourned for the dream that had been lost, and the galaxy they had condemned to ten thousand years of suffering.

He remained in the gallery for several days, kneeling motionless before the desecrated portrait. Time no longer held any meaning for him. It was filled with a procession of ghosts from the past, the voices of the dead, and the weight of sins that were now his own. He was Fulgrim, but a penitent Fulgrim. A Fulgrim whose soul cried out from the torment his demonic doppelgänger delighted in inflicting on others.

He knew he had to leave. To remain on this ship, in this floating temple to his own shame, was unbearable torture. Every groan that echoed from the corridors was an accusation. Every symbol of Slaanesh carved into the walls seared his newfound soul.

He rose. His movements were filled not with his former empty grace, but with a heavy, somber resolve. He walked through the gallery, not looking at the defaced works of art, and emerged into the pulsating corridors of the ship.

Now the Emperor's Children noticed him. They stopped, their eyes, clouded by drugs and excess, trying to focus on his figure. They saw before them their primarch—but a different one. He lacked the predatory, capricious fire they were used to. This Fulgrim was cold and distant, like a faraway star. In his violet eyes they saw not the promise of ecstasy, but an abyss of sorrow.

Several Noise Marines blocked his path, their sonic weapons humming, ready to unleash a symphony of destruction.

"Father?" one of them rasped, his voice distorted by a vox-grille. "You have... changed. Where is your divine ecstasy? Where is the song of pleasure?"

Fulgrim looked at them, at what his once-perfect warriors had become. And instead of anger, he felt only an all-consuming pity.

"The song is over, my son," he answered quietly. "Only the lament remains."

He did not fight them. He simply walked past, and the aura of his grief was so strong, so alien to this place, that they parted before him, unable to bear its purity and pain.

He returned to his raider, and no one dared to stop him. He left the  Fulgent Agonist , leaving behind a living monument to his fall, and plunged once more into the insane currents of the Eye of Terror.

But now he had a purpose. Not just an instinctive pull, but a conscious mission. Atonement. But how does one atone for genocide? How does one atone for fratricide and galactic-scale betrayal?

The answer was unclear, the path shrouded in mist. He knew only one thing: he could not hide. He could not simply disappear. The sins he carried were too great.

For several weeks, he flew along the fringes of the Eye of Terror, gathering information. His innate abilities for tactics and strategy, sharpened by the memories of a thousand battles, allowed him to glean the necessary information from the chaotic stream of warp transmissions, from the interrogations of random renegades and daemonic spawn that crossed his path.

He learned of how the galaxy had changed over ten millennia. Of the ceaseless war, of the superstitious, decaying Imperium that was but a pale, grotesque shadow of what his Father had built. He learned of the Great Rift, the Cicatrix Maledictum, that had torn the galaxy in two, and of the darkness that was gathering over humanity.

And one day, intercepting an encrypted astropathic message intended for a Black Legion fortress, he learned something that made him freeze.

Roboute Guilliman. His brother. The one whom he, or rather, his demonic copy, had mortally wounded thousands of years ago, had returned. He was alive. And he was leading a new Great Crusade, the Indomitus Crusade, trying to bring light back to the dying galaxy.

At the name of Guilliman, all the memories—both light and dark—flooded back with new force. He remembered their arguments about tactics and statecraft. Guilliman, pragmatic and methodical, and he, Fulgrim, a proponent of inspiration and perfection of form. They had often disagreed, but always with respect.

And then he remembered the icy horror in his brother's eyes as the poisoned blade plunged into his throat. He remembered the triumph of the daemon, reveling in the fall of one of the most steadfast and noble sons of the Emperor.

Guilliman... Alive.

For the Imperium, it was hope. A guiding light in the darkness.

For Fulgrim, it was a sign. This was his path.

Atonement could not be found in solitude. It could not be earned by hiding in the shadows. Perhaps it could not be earned at all. But he had to try.

And the first step on that path lay in confronting the past. In confronting the one who was a living witness to his most terrible crime after the murder of Ferrus. He had to stand trial before his brother.

Even if that trial meant only a swift and painless death from the Emperor's flaming sword, which, as the transmissions said, was now wielded by the Avenging Son.

He turned the raider around. His course no longer lay through the chaos of the warp. His course lay towards the light of the stars of the Imperium. To Ultramar. To Roboute Guilliman.

"Brother," he whispered in the silence of the command deck, and in that word sounded both hope and terror. "I am coming."

The catalyst was set in motion. A figure who could change the fate of the galaxy had begun his journey. The clone who had become a soul, the shadow seeking the light, the traitor yearning for forgiveness. His journey was just beginning, and it promised to be far more agonizing than any battle he had ever fought. This was a war with himself, with his own legacy, and its outcome was unknown.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Fulgrim’s cell was not a dungeon in the traditional sense. The Ultramarines did not stoop to such squalor. It was a sterile, functional chamber in the heart of the Fortress of Hera, buried deep beneath the earth. The walls were polished grey plast-steel, utterly devoid of ornamentation. The light was flat and shadowless, seeming to emanate from the very air. There was no furniture, save for a simple bench carved from the same material as the walls. This was a cage built not for punishment, but for isolation and observation. It was perfect in its utility. An irony he would have savored, once.

He spent the cycles in stillness. He did not sleep or eat; he only breathed, a slow and measured rhythm. Dozens of hidden sensors tracked his every twitch, every heartbeat, every wave of neural activity. Beyond the adamantium door, warriors of the Victrix Guard kept an unceasing vigil—silent, blue-clad giants whose hatred for what he had become was a palpable force, even through the armored bulkhead.

For Fulgrim, this was not penance. It was a necessary state. The silence and the emptiness were a crucible in which he could master the hurricane of another’s memories. He relived every triumph and every sin, not as a participant, but as an analyst—a surgeon dissecting his own festering soul. He studied his own fall with the cold detachment of a scholar, searching for the precise moment, the single fracture in the foundation that led to the collapse of the entire edifice.

He found it. It had been there from the beginning. Not in the daemon-blade, not in Horus’s whispers. The blade was merely a catalyst. The flaw was his own pride, born of the deepest well of insecurity. The terror of imperfection had driven him to chase an ideal with such obsession that he would accept any gift, any aid, to achieve it. Slaanesh had not seduced him. Slaanesh had merely offered him that which he already craved, but in its most perverse and absolute form.

The realization brought no comfort. Only a cold, crystalline bitterness.

Guilliman would come. Not often, once every few cycles. The visits were brief, clinical. He never entered the cell, standing just beyond the threshold, flanked by his guard. He asked questions—about the command structures of the Traitor Legions, the current state of the warp, the nature of daemon worlds.

Fulgrim answered. Precise. Terse. Automatic. He provided tactical schematics, economic reports on the resources of worlds within the Eye of Terror, psychological profiles of Chaos warlords. The mind, created for governance and analysis, worked flawlessly. He was the perfect informant.

Guilliman listened, his face a mask of stone. He cross-referenced the data with intelligence reports. It all aligned. More than that, Fulgrim provided context, explained the motivations that remained an enigma to Imperial analysts.

"Why does Abaddon still tolerate Lucius the Eternal?" Guilliman asked during one such visit. "Lucius is an uncontrollable element, an egomaniac whose only loyalty is to his own depraved pleasures. He is a liability to any organized campaign."

"Because Abaddon is a pragmatist, and Lucius is a perfect weapon of terror," Fulgrim replied, his eyes fixed on the floor. "The Despoiler uses him as a scalpel, aimed at worlds where panic, not conquest, is the goal. As long as Lucius kills the Imperium’s subjects, Abaddon cares little for how many allies he butchers in the process. Besides, Lucius is a symbol. Living proof that Slaanesh's blessing confers a kind of immortality. That is potent propaganda for new recruits."

Guilliman nodded, processing.
"And the daemon… the one that wears your face. Where is it? What is it doing?"

At this, Fulgrim looked up at his brother for the first time in an age.
"It is not ‘doing’. It is ‘creating’. It is composing its own defiled saga. Your return has wounded its pride. The fact that you survived its ‘perfect strike’ is a personal affront. It does not seek a military victory over you, Roboute. That is too simple, too… crude. It wants to break your spirit. It will strike at what you build. Your garden worlds, your model colonies. It will turn beauty to hideousness, order to chaos. It wants you to watch your legacy rot while it still lives. Do not look for it on the grand war fronts. Look for it where art and culture flourish. That is where it will strike next."

After that conversation, Guilliman did not return for ten cycles.

***

Roboute Guilliman sat in his solar, awash in the glow of dataslates and the rustle of vellum scrolls. The vast window overlooked Macragge by night, but the primarch saw nothing of the city’s lights. He saw only reports. Thousands of them. The supply logistics for Fleet Primus. Reinforcement requests from the Charadon Sector. Inquisition communiques on cult activity in sub-sector Agrippina. A plea from the Adeptus Mechanicus for noospheric data from beyond the Great Rift.

The burden was unendurable. He was not merely a warlord; he was the regent, quartermaster, diplomat, and judge for half a galaxy. His mind, capable of calculating the outcomes of a thousand simultaneous battles, was drowning in a quagmire of bureaucracy. The Imperium was not dying from the wounds inflicted by its enemies, but from its own monstrous, suffocating weight.

His thoughts returned, again and again, to the prisoner in the dungeon. To his frightening lucidity. To his words about the daemon. Rage simmered within him, cold and hard. Rage at the brother who betrayed them all. But which brother? The thing that had rotted in the grip of Chaos? Or the noble, fragile idealist whose pride had led them to this ruin? He did not know. The schism in his own mind was maddening. He wanted to hate the creature in the cell, but his pragmatic mind saw it only as… a resource. An invaluable and lethal one.

Finally, he made a decision.

The door to Fulgrim's cell opened. This time, Guilliman stepped inside. Behind him, attendants brought a simple table and two chairs. Then, a servitor wheeled in a terminal connected to an isolated cogitator-net within the Fortress of Hera.

"Stand," Guilliman commanded.

Fulgrim rose.

"I am weary of our question-and-answer sessions," Guilliman said, placing a thick dataslate on the table. "Words are cheap. I want to see you work."

Displayed on the slate was the supply chain for the Indomitus Crusade, specifically the wing operating in the Orpheus system. Dozens of fleets, hundreds of Astra Militarum regiments, Titan Legions, and Knightly Houses. All of it required an uninterrupted flow of fuel, munitions, food, and reinforcements. And the system was failing. Ships sat idle, awaiting refueling. Munitions were delivered to the wrong front. Entire regiments were cut off by bureaucratic snarls and pirate raids. The system was too complex, too ponderous. A score of Departmento Munitorum logisticians had wrestled with it for months, only deepening the chaos.

"Here is the problem," Guilliman said, pointing to the red zones on the map. "Supply convoys are thirty-seven percent behind schedule. Every cycle of delay costs us thousands of lives and dozens of light-years of territory. My administrators propose increasing the number of convoys and strengthening their escorts. A primitive solution that will only stretch our resources thinner."

He looked Fulgrim dead in the eye. "You always prided yourself on seeing… elegant solutions. You saved Chemos not with brute force, but with optimization. Prove that some sliver of that administrator remains. Solve it. You have access to all data pertaining to this sector, and this sector alone. Any attempt to interface with another network will result in the terminal's immediate destruction. And yours. You have three cycles."

Guilliman turned and left, leaving Fulgrim alone with the table, the terminal, and the impossible task. This was more than a test. It was a challenge thrown at the ghost of a dead past.

Fulgrim approached the terminal. He did not sit. He stood, his fingers—forged to hold a painter's brush or a sword's hilt—hovering over the keys. Then they moved.

He did not rest for three cycles. The Victrix Guard, watching through a one-way visor, saw only his back and the inhuman speed of his fingers. He did not merely study the data; he seemed to inhale it. Streams of numbers, shipping manifests, casualty reports, astrogation charts—they flowed into his consciousness, and from their chaos, he forged a new structure.

At the end of the third cycle, he stepped back from the terminal. On the screen remained a perfectly constructed, multi-layered schematic.

When Guilliman entered, Fulgrim gestured silently toward it.

Roboute stepped forward and began to read. At first, his face was skeptical. Then, his brows rose. He was looking not at a corrected plan, but at a work of art.

Fulgrim hadn't increased the convoys; he had rerouted them entirely, using little-known gravity wells to shorten their transits. He reallocated materiel, establishing mobile depots in abandoned space stations, allowing fleets to rearm without returning to rear-echelon worlds. He analyzed pirate tactics and pinpointed their staging grounds, proposing a series of surgical, pre-emptive strikes with just three destroyers, which would free up dozens of cruisers from escort duty. He had even factored in variables like regimental morale, suggesting routing shipments not only of munitions but also of personal letters and high-quality foodstuffs from agri-worlds to bolster the soldiers’ spirits.

And the master stroke: his solution did not cut supply times by the target thirty-seven percent, but by fifty-two. And in doing so, it freed up nearly fifteen percent of the fleet assets for direct combat operations.

It was not merely a solution. It was brilliant. Elegant. Perfect.

Guilliman was silent for a long time, staring at the screen. Two warring feelings battled within him. The satisfaction of a strategist witnessing a flawless plan. And a deep, nauseating disgust. This mind, this genius—it was part of what had brought the galaxy to ruin. And now he was forced to use it.

"Your plan will be implemented," he said at last, not looking at Fulgrim. "Do not think this changes anything. You are still a prisoner. And still a traitor."

He walked out, never hearing the quiet reply Fulgrim spoke to the empty cell.

"I know."

***

The test shifted the dynamic. Guilliman began to visit more often. He brought with him not just questions, but problems. Problems his own strategos could not solve, or solved too slowly, too inefficiently. Frontline breakthroughs, hive world insurrections, diplomatic impasses with the Adeptus Astartes or the Mechanicus.

They would sit opposite one another at the table in the sterile cell, a surreal parody of their councils in a lost age. Two brothers, two intellects of profound genius, poring over maps and plans. Only one was the saviour of the Imperium, and the other its greatest betrayer.

Their conversations began to stray beyond tactics.

"You have seen what they have made of the Imperium," Fulgrim said one day, scrolling through a report of a religious festival on a shrine world that had devolved into a mass riot. "They worship the Emperor as a god. They worship *us*. They burn men for the crime of daring to think. It is a parody. A grotesque."

"It is what has allowed humanity to survive ten thousand years," Guilliman countered coldly. "Faith is a shield against despair and the horrors of the warp. It may not be the Imperium we designed, but it has endured."

"Endured?" For the first time, a flicker of passion entered Fulgrim’s voice, sharp and cold as a shard of ice. "It festers from within, Roboute. It chokes on superstition and ignorance. You try to treat the symptoms, deploying fleets and armies, but the sickness is in the soul. And the irony? We, the traitors, had more of a hand in creating this than anyone. Our fall gave birth to this cult. Our sin became their gospel. They worship the Emperor because they fear us."

Guilliman's fists clenched. "You have no right to speak of this. You who cast aside illumination for the whispers of the warp."

"I cast them aside because I sought perfection and was too weak to resist the allure of a shortcut," Fulgrim clipped back. "I have paid for that error. I am still paying. But that does not change the fact that the Imperial Truth has been supplanted by the Imperial Cult. And that cult is as far from the Emperor's vision as the doctrines of Chaos. You are attempting to resurrect an empire of reason and progress, yet you stand as the leader of a theocracy that burns scholars as heretics. Do you not see the contradiction?"

Guilliman saw it. Every day. It was his deepest pain, his insoluble dilemma. But to hear it from *him*…

"I do what I must," he ground out. "I work with what I have."

"No," Fulgrim said softly. "You work with what is *left*. And there is less of it with every passing day. You are a dam holding back an ocean of darkness. But a dam cannot stand against the tide forever. You must change the tide itself."

With every such talk, Guilliman felt the ice in his own soul begin to fracture. He came to the cell to exploit a resource, but he left having spoken with… a brother. He saw in the prisoner not some clone or soul-fragment. He saw the Fulgrim with whom he had debated philosophies of governance. The Fulgrim who could discourse on art for hours, then design a flawless planetary assault schema. He saw the genius, the passion, the sophistication… and the same old, deep-seated insecurity hidden behind a mask of arrogance. And it was unbearable. Hating the daemon was simple. Hating the monster that killed Ferrus and maimed him was natural. But how could he hate the man who sat before him, analyzing his own damnation with merciless honesty and offering the very help he so desperately needed?

The anger had not vanished. But now it was directed not only at Fulgrim. It was directed at fate, at Chaos, at himself—for being forced to sit here and rely on the shadow of the man he should have executed without a moment's hesitation.

***

Months passed. Fulgrim became a secret, unofficial member of Guilliman’s general staff. No one, save perhaps Calgar and Tigurius, knew. To everyone else, the sudden efficiency and elegance of new strategies were merely products of the Lord Commander's own genius. Guilliman hated the deception, but the alternative was unthinkable.

He sat alone in his solar, gazing at a hololithic map of the galaxy. The Great Rift yawned across it like a wound that would not heal. Red runes marked active war zones, and there were too many. He was alone. The Lion had returned but moved in shadows. Vulkan, Corax, Russ—all lost. Dorn was dead. Sanguinius… the memory was still a physical pain.

He was alone. But now… he wasn't.

The thought was heretical, yet it persisted. He wasn't alone. Down below, in the cell, was another primarch. Fallen, broken, a shadow of himself—but a primarch. With a mind that was his equal. With knowledge and talents that were unique.

What if…

Guilliman closed his eyes, playing out the possibilities. To present Fulgrim to the Imperium now would be suicide. It would ignite a civil war. The Inquisition, the Ecclesiarchy, the conservative Astartes Chapters—they would all rise against him. He would be branded a traitor, tainted by Chaos.

But… what if it were done correctly? Not as a pardon. But as a demonstration.

First, the results. Dozens of victories, engineered by his invisible counselor. Hundreds of rescued worlds. Thousands of battles won. He would need proof. Incontrovertible evidence that this… tool… was effective.

Then, the symbol. Present him not as a forgiven brother, but as a penitent. A living weapon, torn from the hands of Chaos and turned against it. A symbol that even from the deepest darkness, there was a way back. Not to glory, not to power, but to service. To redemption through sacrifice. It could be an unimaginably potent message for an Imperium drowning in despair. Hope. A commodity more scarce than ships or bolter shells.

And then… Fulgrim himself. He would have to earn his place. Not in a throne room, but on the field of battle. In the most dangerous sectors of the front. He would have to bleed for the Imperium, to prove his loyalty not with words, but with deeds.

It was a monstrous gamble. The risk was colossal. But the reward… the reward could change the course of the war. A second primarch. Active, loyal, a genius. He would be the ace that no one even knew was in the deck.

Guilliman stood. He knew what he had to do.

He descended to the cell. Fulgrim was at the terminal as always, optimizing the defense grid for the Veridian system.

"Stand," Guilliman said. His voice was calm, but it held a new resolve.

Fulgrim turned.

"Your confinement ends," Guilliman declared. "I am giving you a chance. Not for forgiveness. Not for redemption. But to be more than a ghost in a cage."

He activated a hololithic map on the table. At its center burned a system overrun by Chaos forces. It was not merely a military target. It was a temple world, once a jewel of the sector, now the personal demesne of a champion of Slaanesh. The planet groaned in agony, its populace twisted into living works of art composed of flesh and suffering.

"The creature that wears your face," Guilliman continued, "prides itself on its ‘masterpieces.’ It appreciates symbolism. To see its creations unmade, its prize world liberated—that would be a deeply personal insult. I am sending a strike force. Small. Elite. And you will go with them."

He looked Fulgrim dead in the eyes, and there was no warmth in his gaze, no pardon. Only the cold calculus of a grand strategist.

"You will not wear the colors any of the orders. You will not be granted a blade of honor. You will be given standard-issue power armor, grey and unmarked, and a common power sword. You will be a prisoner on a suicide mission. You will be subordinate to the strike force commander, an Astartes Captain. Your role is to provide tactical support and analyze enemy strategy on the ground. You are our frontline consultant. And should you take one step out of line, should I have a moment’s doubt as to your loyalty, the Captain will have orders to detonate a melta-charge affixed to your power pack. Do you understand me?"

Fulgrim stared at the map. At the world in its agony. He saw not just a military objective. He saw an opportunity. The first opportunity in ten thousand years to strike a real blow against the very evil he had helped to unleash.

He slowly raised his eyes to meet Guilliman's. In his violet gaze there was no fear, no joy. Only the shadow of an infinite weariness, and the flicker of a new, grim purpose.

"I understand," he said. "Brother."

Guilliman flinched at the word. He wanted to object, to order him never to call him that again. But he remained silent. Because in the pragmatic depths of his soul, he knew Fulgrim was right. However he denied it, however he hated it, this broken, penitent ghost in grey armor was still his brother. And their shared, tragic story was far from over. It was merely beginning a new, more dangerous, and unpredictable chapter.

Chapter Text

The ritual of arming had always been a sacrament to the Third Legion. It was the prelude to the art of war, a symphony of clicking servos, the hiss of hermetic seals, and the low thrum of power cables. Apothecaries and servitors moved with the precise grace of a ballet corps, wedding ceramite and plasteel to the warrior’s flesh, transmuting him into a demigod of war. Each piece of the armor was a masterpiece, embellished with filigree, polished to a mirror sheen, and bearing the history of triumphs upon its surfaces.

Now, there was nothing.

The arming chamber they brought Fulgrim to was an exercise in brutalist utility. Bare metal walls sweated under the dim, antiseptic light. In place of squires stood silent, crimson-robed tech-adepts, their visages hidden behind masks of brass and copper, their movements devoid of grace, dictated only by logic and efficiency.

The armor that awaited him on its frame was the very embodiment of this philosophy. Power armor, Mark X Tacticus, but stripped of all Legionary markings. It was painted a flat, unforgiving gray—the color of unprimed canvas, of cooling ash after a conflagration. The pauldrons bore no aquila, no symbol of a Chapter. Nothing. This was armor as an absence. Armor as a negation.

Fulgrim stood motionless as the mechanodendrites of the tech-adepts offered up and secured each plate. He felt the familiar weight settle on his shoulders, the cold kiss of metal against his skin at the points of neural connection. He remembered his first armor. And his last—the Glistening Aegis, a marvel of gilded auramite and inset jewels, a work of art as lethal as it was beautiful. This gray carapace was its antithesis. It was not a mantle of glory, but the hair shirt of a penitent.

The adepts worked in silence, their augmetic eyes scanning biometric data, fitting the armor with micron-precise adjustments. They did not meet his gaze. To them, he was merely an object, a component in an equation. When the final plate of the helmet locked into place, the world dissolved into tactical greens and ambers. His breath began to cycle through the vox-grille, even and unheard.

One of the adepts approached from behind. In its manipulator claw was a small, rune-etched disk. With a dry click, it was affixed to the armor’s power pack. A melta-charge. A short leash.

Then, he was handed a weapon. An Indomitus-pattern power sword. Perfectly balanced, efficient, mass-produced. No name. No history. A simple tool. Fulgrim accepted it. The hilt settled into his palm as naturally as a painter's brush. He weighed it. He could have forged a blade a thousand times its superior, one with a soul, with character. But he was given this. Impersonal, like his armor. Like his new role.

When it was done, Guilliman entered the chamber. He was not in armor, only a simple, dark blue uniform of the Lord Commander. He circled Fulgrim in silence, inspecting the tech-adepts’ work. His face was impassive.

“It fits,” he stated. It was not a question.

“It will serve,” Fulgrim replied, his voice through the vox-grille now flat, stripped of all timbre.

“Your commander on this mission is Captain Phaeron Valerius. To him and his men, you will be known as ‘Consultant Omicron.’ Your identity is a secret of the highest classification. Your knowledge is a resource. Your life is collateral for the mission’s success. You speak only when questioned. You do only as commanded. Any deviation, any initiative not approved by Captain Valerius, will be considered an act of betrayal. The charge will be activated.”

Fulgrim gave a silent nod. The words were unnecessary. He understood the rules of this game better than anyone. He had once set such rules himself.

“Come,” Guilliman said. “You are to meet your… overseers.”

The tactical chamber they entered was a vast amphitheater, a hololithic map of the galaxy hanging like a captured star at its center. It was cold and quiet. At one of the consoles stood a Primaris Space Marine. His armor was immaculate white, with joints of purple and pauldrons trimmed in gold. On his right shoulder was the stylized fist of a progenitor Chapter. And on his left…

Fulgrim froze. He could not look away from the left pauldron. On a field of blinding white was a stark, angular sigil. The helmeted head of a warrior, crowned with spikes like sun rays or feathers, framed by shattered wings. A phoenix. And beside it, a single, eight-pointed star. The Star of Terra.

His breath hitched for a fraction of a second. It was so precise, so deliberately cruel, that he almost felt a sense of admiration for his brother’s pragmatic sadism. The colors of his Legion. The symbol he himself had chosen—the Phoenician. Even the star was a whisper of Chemos’s crest.

Guilliman was watching him, his eyes cold steel. He was waiting for a reaction—for rage, for despair, for a scream. But Fulgrim denied him the satisfaction. He merely, slowly, moved his gaze to the Space Marine.

The warrior turned. He was a Primaris, taller and broader than an Astartes of old. The face beneath the helm, which he promptly removed, was severe and aristocratic, with what might have been called classical features. An iron discipline was etched into his every line.

“Lord Commander,” he said, a fist to his breastplate. His voice was a deep, steady baritone.

“Captain Valerius,” Guilliman nodded. “Allow me to present Consultant Omicron. He is a specialist in the tactics and psychology of the enemy you are about to face. He possesses… unique experience. His knowledge is at your disposal. His life is in your hands.”

Valerius looked at Fulgrim. His gaze was long and appraising. He saw a gray giant who dwarfed even his own Primaris frame. He could feel an aura of power, contained like a coiled spring. But he did not see an Astartes. There was no sense of brotherhood, none of the familiar aura of righteous fury. Only cold, and a vast, echoing emptiness.

“My Chapter is honored, my lord,” Valerius replied. “We will justify your faith. The ‘Consultant’ will be utilized to maximum effect.”

Guilliman made the barest of gestures, an introduction for the Captain’s Chapter.

“Captain Valerius of the Sons of the Phoenix.”

There it was again, the blow. The name. Sons of the Phoenix. Guilliman had said it so casually, as if naming any one of a hundred other Chapters. But for Fulgrim, it was a death sentence. Here they are, a voice whispered in his soul. This is what your sons could have been. Not the warped monsters chasing depraved sensation, not the mad composers playing symphonies of death. But these. Clean. Disciplined. Perfect.

He remembered his children. Fabius, the brilliant scientist turned architect of flesh. Lucius, the unmatched swordsman turned immortal fiend. Eidolon, the thunderous Lord Commander, now a shrieking vessel of obsession. The pain was not sharp, but a dull, grinding ache, like an old wound pried open with a rusted blade.

This is my fault. All of it, my fault.

“Consultant?” Valerius’s voice brought him back.

Fulgrim focused his gaze.

“Yes, Captain. I am ready.”

Guilliman expanded the tactical map before them, focusing on the Telios System. At its heart was a world designated Lyra-Stentor V.

“Your target,” he began, “is Lyra-Stentor V. Once a garden world, famed for its academies of art and flawless architecture. It is now the personal fiefdom of a daemonic entity calling itself the Maestro of Agonies, one of the favored lieutenants of…” he paused, “…the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim. He has made the planet his workshop. Living sculptures, sonic tortures he calls music, rivers flowing with chemicals that induce ecstasy and madness. It is a bastion of Slaanesh that poisons the entire sub-sector.”

Valerius listened, his features hardening into stone.

“A frontal assault would cost us millions of lives and a full fleet. The planet is shielded not only by orbital stations but by a psychic field of suffering that drives unshielded minds insane upon approach. The task is impossible for a standard battle group.”

“Which is why you will not be a standard group,” Guilliman said. “Your strike cruiser, the Regenerate Flame, will approach the system under the cover of a warp anomaly. You will execute a precision strike. Your target is not the planet, but the Maestro himself. The ‘Consultant’ will provide you with all necessary intelligence on his fortress, his habits, and his psychological vulnerabilities. You are the scalpel that will excise the tumor. Without him, his cult will collapse. The planet can be purged later.”

“Understood, my lord. A decapitation strike,” Valerius nodded. He glanced again at Fulgrim, and a silent question hung in his eyes: How do you know all this?

“Consultant, your thoughts?” he asked, turning to the gray giant.

Fulgrim stepped toward the hololith. His gauntleted hand, gray and anonymous, swept over the shimmering surface.

“The Maestro, formerly Lord Halak of my… of the Third Legion,” Fulgrim began, his voice mechanically smooth. “He was a mediocre tactician, but a brilliant artist. His primary weakness is vanity. He will not believe you would dare to attack him directly. He expects a grand battle, an opera of fire and death that he can conduct. He is not prepared for a quiet knife in the back.”

He indicated the planet’s pole, where an eternal psycho-vortex raged.

“Orbital defenses are weakest here. They rely on the natural phenomenon. But that is the path you will take. Your target is not the main palace-fortress; that is a lure for fools. Your destination is his private studio, the Crystalline Lament. It is located in a canyon beneath the polar ice cap. It is there he creates his major… works. And it is there he will be during the orbital diversion your cruiser will stage. He will want to enjoy the spectacle from the best seat.”

Valerius and Guilliman exchanged a glance. The intelligence was so precise, so intimate, it was unnerving.

“We will factor this in,” the captain said curtly. He turned to Guilliman. “We are prepared to depart, Lord Commander. The Sons of the Phoenix will not fail you.”

Guilliman nodded.

“I know. Go. And may the light of the Emperor guide you.”

After the captain departed, Guilliman looked at Fulgrim one last time.

“This is your chance,” he said, his voice so low that none but the two of them could hear. “Not merely to survive. But to begin. Do not waste it. And do not betray me. Again.”

He turned and strode away, leaving Fulgrim alone in the center of the cold hall. Before him hung the map of a defiled world. Behind him waited a ship whose very name and heraldry were a constant, burning reproach. And ahead lay a battle. His first battle in ten thousand years on the right side of the war.

The journey to the Telios system was a void of several weeks. For Fulgrim, it was a period of absolute isolation. He was not confined to a standard brig, but to an armored section of the cargo hold, repurposed into a temporary oubliette. Four walls of sheer adamantium, a shimmering power field for a door, and four auto-turrets that watched him in silence from the corners. He was valuable cargo. And a dangerous one.

Yet even from here, he could feel the ship. He heard the thrum of the plasma reactors, felt the slight vibration of the hull during maneuvers, caught the distant hymns chanted by servitors in the ship’s chapel. And he could feel its occupants. The Sons of the Phoenix.

Their presence was pervasive. The crisp rhythm of their boots in the passageways, the echoes of their training exercises in the firing cages, the terse and formal commands that carried over the ship-wide vox. There was no excess in them. No bravado, no performative zeal. Only a cold efficiency, honed to perfection. They were less like warriors and more like surgeons, preparing for a complex operation.

It was torment. In every sound, every manifestation of their discipline, he saw a ghost of his own long-lost Legion. This is what they had been at the start. Proud, purposeful, striving for the ideal in every detail. Before he, their father, had led them down a path that corrupted the pursuit of perfection into the worship of excess.

He studied them. Through the sensors in his cell, he was granted access to the public shipboard network. He read their combat doctrines. Officially, as successors of the Imperial Fists, their creed was based on resilience and defense. But between the lines, Fulgrim saw something else. An emphasis on swift, decisive strikes. The use of flanking maneuvers. A preference for elegant, tactically complex solutions over brute force. This was not the legacy of Dorn. This was his legacy. Distorted, refracted through the prism of ten millennia, but unmistakably his.

Cawl, he thought. That arch-magos heretek. He truly did it. He used our gene-seed. And Roboute… Roboute knows. And he is using it.

Captain Valerius visited him each cycle. The meetings were conducted in utter silence, broken only by the hum of the power field. The captain never sat. He would stand before the shimmering barrier, study his prisoner-consultant, and ask his questions.

“The enemy employs sonic weaponry. What are its parameters and vulnerabilities?”

“They are of two types,” Fulgrim answered from his bench, never rising. “The Sonic Blaster fires focused waves of dissonant energy that shred not just matter but the synaptic connections in the brain. Standard helmet baffling is useless. You will need stasis grenades. The momentary temporal field disrupts the sound wave, creating an opening for a counter-attack. The second, the Blastmaster, is less precise but has an area-of-effect. Its weakness is its recharge cycle. After a volley, you will have between four and six seconds.”

“The Maestro’s psychic defenses. How powerful?”

“His strength is not in a direct mental assault. He is no psyker on the level of Ahriman. His power is in seduction. He will broadcast images and sensations through the warp. Pride, triumph, perfection. He will find your insecurity, your secret weakness, and offer a way to soothe it. Your Librarians must erect not a wall, but a filter. To block his whispers is useless; they will seep through. But they can be distorted, turned into white noise.”

“The Maestro’s personal guard. What are they?”

“The elite. Warriors who have undergone thousands of augmentations and self-mutilations. They feel no pain, only ecstasy. Their speed is unnatural. Do not attempt to parry their blows; evade them. Their blades are coated in neurotoxins that induce hallucinations. Their aim is not to kill you quickly, but to turn your death into a performance. Their primary weakness: they are artists. They will pose after a successful strike, savoring the moment. In that instant, they are vulnerable. Do not grant them that second. Press your attack without mercy or pause.”

Valerius listened, absorbing every word. He cross-referenced the information with tactical codices and intelligence reports. And every time, the ‘consultant’s’ words were not just accurate; they provided the nuance, the small detail that separates victory from defeat. He did not understand how this being could know all this, but he was a son of Dorn (or so he believed), and pragmatism was in his blood. He would use this resource to its fullest.

But with each visit, something else grew in him. A deep-seated unease. This ‘Omicron’ was too calm, too… prescient. His analysis was devoid of emotion, yet within its depths, Valerius could feel a monstrous weight of knowledge and experience. Who is he? A fallen Inquisitor? A renegade from some secret order? No explanation seemed to fit.

The Regenerate Flame exited the warp at the very edge of the Telios system, veiled by a nebula of dust and gas. Lyra-Stentor V hung in the void like a bruised jewel, shimmering with sick, poisonous colors. Even at this distance, their Librarians could feel the tide of psychic filth emanating from it.

The diversion began. Several squadrons of drone-piloted Fury interceptors and servitor-crewed bombers screamed towards the planet from the opposite vector, feigning an assault on the main orbital dock. As Fulgrim had predicted, the defenses reacted with bombastic predictability. Interceptor craft swarmed into orbit, weapons platforms turned to face the threat, and a terrible, dissonant music began to fill the aether—the battle hymn of the Maestro’s legions.

At that moment, shielded by the chaos, a single craft launched from the Regenerate Flame. A Storm Speartype assault lander, painted the flat black of the void, slipped silently towards the planet’s pole. Onboard were two squads of Veteran Intercessors, a squad of Aggressors, an Apothecary, a Librarian, and Captain Valerius. And Fulgrim.

He sat in the deployment bay, strapped into a crash couch, his gray armor a stark void against the white of the Sons of the Phoenix. The Space Marines around him were silent, their faces hidden by their helms. They checked their weapons, whispering litanies of hate. They ignored him, but his presence was a palpable thing, a zone of cold in the hot, cramped space.

The descent through the polar vortex was hell. The craft bucked and shuddered as psychic shrieks battered the hull like physical blows. The Chapter’s Librarian, Brother Kaelan, stood in the center of the bay, his force stave humming, weaving a cocoon of mental silence around them. But even through his warding, scraps of whispers broke through—promises of glory, of power, of forbidden knowledge. Fulgrim heard them, but to him, they were just an irritating noise. He had heard it all before, from the most skilled seducer of them all.

They landed hard in a deep ravine, hidden beneath kilometers of ice. The assault ramp lowered, and a blast of frigid air, mingled with a strange, cloying sweetness, filled the bay.

“Disembark,” Valerius commanded. “Delta formation. Consultant, you’re in the center, with me. Any deviation will be met with immediate termination.”

They stepped out into a new world. It was not an ice cave. The canyon walls were lined not with frost, but with crystalline growths that pulsed with a soft, violet light. The air was warm, filled with a quiet, melodic music that seemed to emanate from the crystals themselves. It was… beautiful. And that beauty was sickening.

“Psycho-resonant crystals,” Fulgrim’s voice murmured over the vox. “They broadcast his will. Do not listen to the music. Focus on the beat of your own hearts.”

They moved forward, bolters ready. Soon, they saw the first of the ‘artworks.’ Figures, frozen within the larger crystals. Humans, xenos, even a few Space Marines from long-lost Chapters. Their bodies were twisted into unnatural, yet graceful poses. On their faces were frozen masks of ultimate terror and transcendent ecstasy.

“Do not look,” Valerius clipped. “Press on.”

But it was impossible not to see. It was blasphemy elevated to art. The Sons of the Phoenix, raised on ideals of purity and form, fought to contain their rage. This was a personal insult.

And then, the enemy appeared.

They flowed from the shadows between the crystals. Slaaneshi Daemonettes, lithe and lethal, their claws clicking in time with the ambient music. And behind them, the Noise Marines. Their armor was warped, painted in garish, clashing colors. Pipes and horns grew from their pauldrons, and in their hands, they held their hideous sonic weapons.

The first volley of cacophony hit them. A wave of pure, dissonant sound slammed into the Astartes line. One of the Intercessors was hurled backwards, his armor cracking, blood erupting from under his helm. Librarian Kaelan shouted a word of power, and a kine-shield flared into existence around them, but it shimmered and buckled under the assault.

“Stasis grenades! Center group!” Fulgrim snarled over a private vox channel to Valerius.

The captain, without hesitation, relayed the command. Several grenades arced toward the Noise Marines. For an instant, the world froze. The sound wave vanished, its ripples caught in stasis. The music cut out.

“Attack!” Valerius roared.

The battle began. The Sons of the Phoenix opened fire. Bolter rounds tore through Daemonette flesh, leaving behind only puffs of pink vapor. The Aggressors strode forward, spewing torrents of flame from their gauntlets.

And Fulgrim moved.

He was not a raging berserker, nor an elegant duelist. He was death, clad in gray. His movements were economical, surgically precise. He did not dance. He killed. The power sword in his hand described short, brutal arcs. Each blow found a weakness—the joint of a Noise Marine’s armor, the neck of a Daemonette. He moved through the battle like an icebreaker through a frozen sea, leaving only stillness and silence in his wake.

He saw the disfigured faces of his former legionaries beneath their helms. He saw the defiled sigil of his own Legion on their armor. And he felt no pity, no hesitation. Only a cold, cleansing rage. The fury of a surgeon excising a cancer. He protected the Sons of the Phoenix, guarding their flanks, intercepting blows they never saw coming. He was not their battle-brother. He was their wardog, their chained monster.

They smashed through the first line of defense, leaving a ruin of broken bodies behind them. Ahead, at the end of the crystalline canyon, a vast structure carved from a single, massive crystal loomed into view. The Crystalline Lament. The Maestro’s studio.

It was then that the Maestro realized his performance had been interrupted.

The music in the canyon changed. It grew louder, more furious. And from the gates of the Crystalline Lament, the artist’s personal guard emerged. A dozen warriors in purple and gold armor, each a masterpiece of torture and augmentation. They were led by a giant whose armor was adorned with living, moaning faces. The Maestro of Agonies himself.

“Such a bold intrusion!” his voice boomed from his vox, a mix of delight and irritation. “Such audacity! Have you come to be part of my latest masterwork? I shall call it ‘The Agony of the Righteous’.”

He took in the white armor of the Sons of the Phoenix.

“White, purple, and gold… Such familiar colors. And that sigil… a phoenix. How utterly tasteless! My father, our great Phoenician, would have you burned for such blasphemy!”

Then his gaze fell upon the gray figure in the center of their formation. The figure that was taller, broader than the rest. Whose every movement was painfully, impossibly familiar.

“And you,” he said, tilting his head. “In you, I feel… an echo. A very old, and very powerful echo. Step forward. Let the artist have a better look at you.”

Fulgrim stepped forward, raising his nameless sword. He reached up and removed his helmet.

The world held its breath. The music stopped. Even the Sons of the Phoenix behind him froze, their weapons half-raised.

Before them was the face of their long-lost, accursed primogenitor. The same aristocratic perfection, the same violet eyes. But the fire of Slaanesh was gone. In its place was only an glacial emptiness and a sorrow as deep as the Great Night itself.

The Maestro of Agonies recoiled. His arrogance bled away, replaced by stunned disbelief, and then, by a dawning horror.

“Impossible…” he whispered. “You are…”

“I am the reckoning for your sins,” Fulgrim said, and his own voice, raw and un-voxed, carried down the canyon like a funeral bell. “Your performance is over.”

The silence that followed the revelation was thicker and colder than the surrounding ice. It lasted only a moment, but an eternity was contained within it. For Captain Valerius and his warriors, the world had fractured. The icon they were taught to hate, the living symbol of betrayal, stood before them in the gray armor of their ally. Data-augurs in their helmets screamed, trying to reconcile the image with ten millennia of doctrine, and returned cascades of cognitive dissonance errors. They stood frozen, their hands gripping their weapons, paralyzed not by fear, but by the absolute impossibility of the moment.

The Maestro of Agonies, Halak, was the first to recover. His reaction was not terror, but a consuming, blasphemous rage. His faith—his entire existence, built upon the worship of the fallen primarch's image—had been spat upon. The creature before him was a negation of his god.

"LIAR!" His vox-amplified voice was a distorted shriek that tore at the ear. "DECEIVER! A TRICK OF TZEENTCH! AN ILLUSION! My father is ecstasy itself, a symphony of exquisite pain! And you… you are empty! You have no music! You are SILENCE! HERETIC!"

He brandished his power-whip, a multi-lashed scourge tipped with vibrating, singing blades, and with his scream, his personal guard—the Perfect—surged forward. They moved with inhuman speed, their charge a lethal ballet.

In that same instant, Captain Valerius made a decision. His mind, honed by hundreds of battles, cast aside the theological shock and focused on tactics. The Lord Commander’s order was clear: the Consultant was a tool. The tool was at the point of the spear. And the tool had just provoked the enemy.

“Sons of the Phoenix!” he roared into the vox, his voice breaking the spell that held his warriors. “Firing line! Contain the guard! Do not let them envelop the center! Librarian, shield on me and Omicron!”

The world exploded into motion and sound. The Intercessors stepped forward, their white armor gleaming in the violet light, and a hurricane of bolter fire tore into the advancing Perfect. Mass-reactive shells chewed through ornate armor, erupting in fountains of purple gore and ceramite shards. But the Maestro’s guard were impossibly swift. They dodged and weaved between the explosions, their movements fluid and unpredictable. One, armed with twin power-rapiers, closed with the Astartes line. His blades became a silver fan. A Son of the Phoenix tried to parry with his combat knife, but a rapier flowed around his guard, punched through the joint of his arm, and buried itself deep in his chest. The Astartes fell with a choked gasp, his white armor instantly stained crimson.

“They are artists!” The echo of Fulgrim’s counsel, cold and detached as if observing a training exercise, flashed through the captain's mind. “Do not grant them the time to pose!”

And he showed them how.

Fulgrim did not charge the Maestro. He took a single step to the side, allowing two of the Perfect who were rushing him to pass. Their intent was to tie him up, to allow their master to deliver the finishing blow. As they sped past, his power sword, which had been hanging motionless, came alive. It was not a grand, sweeping arc. It was a short, almost imperceptible flick to the right, then to the left. Two precise thrusts. The first slipped under the rib plate of one of the Perfect and found his heart. The second punched through the unarmored joint beneath the other's helm, severing power conduits and his spinal column. Both warriors ran a few more steps on pure momentum before collapsing lifelessly to the crystal floor. No scream, no death throes. Just quiet, efficient death.

He did not pause to admire his work. He moved into the heart of the melee, his gray armor the center of a storm. He did not move like his fallen sons. There was no ecstasy, no dance in his motions. Only a terrifying, mathematically certain precision. He was entropy made manifest, a force that did not create, but simply unmade the complex into its component parts.

One of the Perfect swung a massive power-halberd at him, a weapon that could cleave a dreadnought. Fulgrim did not dodge or block. He stepped inside the swing, his sword scoring the halberd’s haft, shearing off the warrior's fingers and gauntlet. As the enemy paused in a moment of shocked disarmament, Fulgrim backhanded him with the pommel of his sword, a blow of such force that the helmet’s visor cracked and the warrior’s head snapped back. A final, follow-up thrust to the throat finished it. Fast. Ruthless. Devoid of emotion.

Seeing this, the Sons of the Phoenix adapted. Their initial shock was replaced by a grim resolve. They stopped trying to meet the enemy one-on-one. They enacted the doctrines of their supposed primogenitor, Dorn, but with a grace Dorn himself would never have countenanced. They formed a mobile, circular defense—a fortress of blades. Bolters and power swords worked in concert. They covered each other’s backs, intercepted attacks meant for a brother, and laid down interlocking fields of fire. They were a perfect machine.

The Aggressors pushed forward, their heavy armor shaking the ground. They didn't try to match the duelist’s speed. They simply created walls of purifying fire. Promethium roared from their gauntlets, turning sections of the canyon into furnaces, forcing the Perfect to break off their elegant charges.

Librarian Kaelan stood at their center, his eyes burning with blue fire. He did not attack. He was the shield. The Maestro’s psychic assaults, waves of temptation and despair, broke against his mental defenses like water against rock. He was the anchor of reality in this sea of madness.

Meanwhile, the duel between primarch and pretender had truly begun.

The Maestro of Agonies, Halak, was a master of his craft. His power-whip was not merely a weapon but an extension of his perverted will. It sang and coiled, lashing out in impossible arcs. Each of its singing blades attacked from a different angle, seeking a chink in the gray giant’s armor. He danced around Fulgrim, his armor iridescent, his vox broadcasting not curses but arias dedicated to pain and pleasure.

“Watch, impostor! Watch and learn!” he sang. “This is true perfection! Not your dreary pragmatism, but passion! The dance of the blade! The music of agony!”

The whip fell upon Fulgrim. One blade aimed for his head, another for his legs, a third tried to entangle his sword arm. Any other warrior, even a Space Marine captain, would have been flayed to ribbons in a heartbeat.

But Fulgrim stood like a cliff against a storm. He made no attempt to dodge. His power sword moved with an absolute economy of motion. A short parry to his left deflected the blade aimed at his helm. A slight turn of the wrist sent the second scraping harmlessly past his leg. A quick beat-parry knocked the third aside. His defense was absolute. Impenetrable. He was not dancing. He was simply… there. A wall against which Halak’s intricate art broke and fell apart.

“You are still! You are dead inside!” the Maestro shrieked, his attacks growing more frenzied, more chaotic. His vanity could not bear that his ‘art’ was having no effect. “Where is your fire? Where is the Phoenician’s passion?!”

“You mistake hysteria for passion, Halak,” Fulgrim’s voice replied, as cold as the polar ice. “You betrayed perfection for excess. You traded mastery for posturing.”

With those words, Fulgrim advanced. He took a single step forward. It was enough to shatter the Maestro’s rhythm. Halak, used to circling a static target, was forced to backpedal. The whip lashed out, trying to maintain distance, but Fulgrim ignored it. He walked forward, and his sword, which had moved only to defend, now began to attack.

He did not strike at Halak. He struck at the whip. The sword’s power field met the energy nodes on the flexible metal. There was a deafening crackle and a shower of sparks. Three of the whip’s twelve blades went limp and silent.

“No! My instrument!” the Maestro wailed.

Fulgrim took another step. Another strike. Four more blades were severed. Now the Maestro’s weapon was a pathetic parody of its former self. Halak tried to leap back in a panic, but his feet tangled in the damaged tendrils of his own whip. For one brief, humiliating moment, he lost his balance.

It was enough.

Fulgrim did not deliver a beautiful, cinematic killing blow. He did not aim for the head or the heart. He did what was most efficient. He slammed his sword, flat-side first, into the Maestro’s knee joint. There was a sickening crunch of ceramite and bone. The champion of Slaanesh collapsed onto one knee with a scream, the posture of a performer awaiting applause twisted into that of a supplicant.

Fulgrim loomed over him. His face was impassive. He raised his sword, not to strike, but simply to hold it, allowing Halak to see his own reflection in the polished steel.

“You were one of my sons,” Fulgrim said, and for the first time, an emotion entered his voice. A vast, bottomless sorrow. “I gave you everything. Strength, beauty, the drive for perfection. And this is what you made of it. A caricature. Loud, and empty.”

“Curse you, impostor…” Halak hissed, trying to rise.

“I am already cursed,” Fulgrim replied.

And he struck. The sword plunged into Halak’s chest, just above his primary heart, angled to puncture both lungs and rupture the power pack on his back. There was no explosion, no fountain of gore. Just the hiss of escaping air and the dimming of the light in the Maestro's eyes. His music had ended on a false note.

The instant their master fell, the remaining Perfect froze. The psychic link that fueled them had been severed. Their ecstatic rage was replaced with animalistic terror. The Sons of the Phoenix, wasting not a second, exploited the opening. Short, precise bolter bursts cut down the last of the guard.

And then, silence fell again.

It was heavier this time. The air was thick with the scent of ozone, blood, and burnt flesh. The violet crystals, their master’s will gone, began to fade.

The surviving Sons of the Phoenix, their white armor spattered with purple gore, slowly lowered their weapons. They stood surrounded by the bodies of their foes. The mission was complete. The tumor was excised.

And they were all looking at one being. At the gray figure standing over the corpse of the fallen Chaos champion.

Fulgrim slowly drew his sword from Halak’s chest and wiped it clean on the dead warrior’s cloak. Then he turned to face them. His face was still bare. The face of a primarch. The face of a traitor. The face of their savior.

Captain Valerius stepped forward. His warriors tensed, their hands falling back to their weapons. He stopped a few meters from Fulgrim. He looked into those sorrowful, violet eyes, and his mind refused to process it. Ten thousand years of propaganda, of litanies of hate, of sacred scripture, screamed that this was the Arch-Enemy. But his own eyes had seen a warrior who fought beside them, protected them, and led them to victory.

“In the name of the Emperor and the Lord Commander…” Valerius’s voice was hoarse; he struggled for the words. “What are you?”

Fulgrim looked at him. He saw not just a captain. He saw a son. Not of his blood, but of his spirit. He saw the purity, the discipline, that he himself had lost. And he knew he had no right to burden this warrior with his truth. Not here. Not now.

He silently raised his gray helmet and fitted it over his head. The impassive mask concealed his face once more. The connection was severed.

“I am Consultant Omicron,” he said through the vox, his voice once again mechanical and flat. “The objective is complete, Captain. The enemy champion is eliminated. I suggest we proceed to the extraction point.”

He turned and, without looking back, began walking towards their assault lander, his heavy footfalls echoing in the quieting, crystalline canyon. He was a tool again. A weapon in a gray shell. A ghost.

Captain Valerius watched him go. He did not give the order to fire. He did not detonate the melta-charge. His hand rested on the grip of his plasma pistol, but he could not bring himself to raise it. He was a warrior of Ultramar in spirit, if not by gene. He followed orders. The order was to use the consultant and terminate him upon betrayal. There had been no betrayal. There had only been an impossible, unthinkable truth.

“Apothecary, see to the wounded! Recover the gene-seed of our fallen!” he commanded, his voice regaining its steel. “The rest of you, secure the perimeter! Prepare for evac!”

But as he turned from his warriors, his eyes were drawn once more to the retreating gray figure. He replayed the battle in his mind. The economy of movement. The lethal precision. The cold, merciless efficiency. And those words... the sorrow of a father for his wayward sons.

He pulled out his data-slate and activated a secure channel to a single recipient. The Lord Commander of the Imperium. His report would be short.

“Target eliminated. Mission complete. But, my lord… we need to talk. Immediately.”

Chapter Text

The journey back to the Resurgent Flame was made in an oppressive, almost palpable silence. The thrum of the assault boat’s engines seemed unnaturally loud, a vulgar intrusion upon the stillness that had settled between the warriors. The Sons of the Phoenix moved with the same flawless efficiency as before: securing the wounded, reloading their weapons, checking sensor readings. But something in their bearing had changed.

Gone was the cold confidence of professionals executing a task. In its place was the tense, guarded focus of men who found themselves in a room with a predator—tamed, perhaps, but still lethally dangerous.

They did not look towards the grey figure. They moved around him, leaving an empty space in his vicinity, as if he were an object radiating lethal energies. They perceived him not as an ally, but as an anomaly, a glitch in the sacred code of their reality.

Fulgrim sat in his designated seat, his helmet resting on his knees. He paid no mind to the aura of fear and mistrust emanating from his temporary allies. He was lost within himself, within the echoes of the battle just ended. He did not see merely vanquished foes. He saw faces.

The face of Halak, contorted in a death-rattle agony, so unlike the face of the gifted, ambitious Centurion he had once been aboard the Pride of the Emperor. He remembered praising the man for his subtle understanding of acoustic harmony in architecture. Now, that harmony had become a cacophony of pain. He saw others, those his blade had cut down with such swift efficiency. In their broken, augmented features, he searched in vain for the glimmers of the noble warriors who had once sworn fealty to him, those whose names he knew by heart.

This was not grief for fallen comrades. Those comrades had died long ago, on the day he raised his blade in that cursed temple. What he felt now was the bitter, caustic regret of a physician forced to amputate a gangrenous limb, knowing he himself had been the source of the infection. He was not killing his sons. He was performing a euthanasia, ending their suffering and their shame. And the thought sickened him.

Each defeated enemy was not a triumph, but another entry in the endless ledger of his crimes. He had been their father. He was meant to lead them to the light, but instead, he had led them into the darkest, most foul of all possible nights.

And amidst this quiet, internal agony, his mind—the mind of a strategist and a primarch—worked with ice-cold clarity.

He knew that not all of Halak’s warriors had perished. A few Noise Marines on the far perimeter, those who had avoided the main thrust of the assault, had seen everything. They had seen his face. They had heard his voice. By now, they were likely fleeing, scrambling to save their pathetic lives. They would reach the nearest transmitter. They would send a message. And that message, full of terror, bewilderment, and heretical awe, would eventually reach its ultimate destination. It would land on the desk—or whatever he used now—of his daemonic double. Or was he the original?

And that was good.

It simplified everything. Until this moment, the daemon who bore his name had believed himself to be the one and only. Unique. Unsurpassed. He had reveled in his status, his singular role in the Great Game. The news that his perfect copy, untainted by Chaos, existed somewhere in the Imperium—and was fighting for Guilliman, no less—would not be merely unpleasant. It would be a personal, profound affront. It was a blow to his pride, to his very sense of self. And a wounded, enraged opponent is an opponent who makes mistakes. He knew himself well, after all. It was a dagger to his impossibly inflated ego.

Daemon-Fulgrim would cease playing his subtle, perverse games. He would abandon his decadent raids and his creation of “masterpieces” from pain. Now, he would have a true, personal objective. An obsession. To find and destroy the “imposter,” to wipe this insult from the face of the galaxy. He would become predictable. He would hunt him. He would throw all his resources into the search.

And he, Fulgrim the Penitent, would be waiting. He and Roboute. Now they could do more than just react to the blows of Chaos. They could set a trap. He had just painted a giant target on his own back, and in doing so, had turned himself into the perfect lure. It was a cold, merciless calculation. And the price of that calculation was the agony he felt as he recalled the faces of those he had just slain. Such was his path to redemption—a path paved with the corpses of his own wayward children.

When the assault boat docked with the Resurgent Flame, an honor guard was there to meet them. But the honors were not for him. Captain Valerius disembarked first, and his warriors carried out the bodies of their fallen brothers, shrouded in white. Fulgrim was escorted out last, under the guard of two veterans with activated power swords. He was led back to his adamantium cell in the hold. The door slid shut; the power field hissed to life. He was alone. He sat on the cold bench and put his helmet back on. Consultant Omicron was back in his place. The performance was over.

Several hours later, the power field deactivated. Captain Valerius stood in the doorway. He was alone. His armor had been cleansed of blood, but scratches and dents remained on the white ceramite—testaments to the fury of the battle. He stepped inside.

“The turrets are offline,” he said, his voice level. “The vox-channel is secure. We are alone.”

Fulgrim did not move. “You are violating the Lord Commander’s orders, Captain.”

“I am fulfilling them,” Valerius countered. “My orders are to utilize you with maximum efficiency. To do that, I must understand who—or what—I am dealing with. The official reports no longer suffice.”

He stopped before Fulgrim, looking down at the seated giant.

“I have seen pict-recordings from the time of the Great Crusade. From the Chapter’s secret archives. I have compared your face to the historical files. The match is one hundred percent. I analyzed your combat doctrine. It corresponds to no known Astartes codex. It is a fusion of the elegance of the Legio Custodes and the ruthless efficiency of the Legiones Astartes’ Third Legion, as described in the forbidden chronicles. I heard your conversation with Halak. Explain yourself.”

Fulgrim slowly raised his head. He looked at the captain through the visor of his helmet. He saw before him a perfect warrior. The embodiment of everything he had once striven for. And he saw in him the same thirst for truth that had once been his own undoing.

“Truth is a dangerous knowledge, Captain. It can shatter the faith upon which your world is built.”

“My faith is built on duty and honor, not blind dogma,” Valerius retorted. “I saw you fight. I saw you protect my brothers. And I saw the face of an Arch-Traitor. The two images are incompatible. My mind demands an answer.”

A long pause followed. Fulgrim weighed his words. He could not tell him everything. That would be a betrayal of Guilliman. But he could no longer remain silent. This warrior, this Son of the Phoenix, had earned at least a shadow of the truth.

“What I was died on the sands of Isstvan V,” he said at last, his voice quiet, devoid of its mechanical flatness. “The thing that wears my name now is a monster that stole my shell. I am but an echo. A fragment, given a second chance to fix what I broke. I do not seek forgiveness. I do not seek glory. I am a weapon in the Lord Commander’s hands. A weapon aimed at my own dark reflection. That is all you need to know.”

Valerius listened without interruption. His face was a mask, but Fulgrim could feel the storm raging within the captain.

“An echo…” he repeated. “Are you speaking of a soul?”

“I am speaking of guilt,” Fulgrim replied. “Of guilt that has been given flesh.”

Valerius nodded, as if accepting this explanation, though it raised more questions than it answered. “The Lord Commander has received my report. He has ordered us to return to Macragge at full speed. He wishes to see you.”

“I suspected as much.”

“There is something else,” the captain said. “My warriors… they are confused. They saw what I saw. They are loyal to their orders, but their faith has been shaken. They do not know how to regard you.”

“Let them regard me as a necessary evil, Captain. It will be the closest to the truth.” Fulgrim stood. He now towered over the Primaris Marine, his grey shadow falling across Valerius’s white armor. “Your duty is to ensure they hold their tongues. The truth of my existence is a weapon Lord Guilliman will deploy in his own time. Not a second sooner.”

“My men know how to keep a secret,” Valerius said with emphasis. He rendered a salute—not as a subordinate, but as an equal warrior acknowledging another—and departed, leaving Fulgrim once more in solitude.

Roboute Guilliman stood before the immense observation screen in his solarium. It displayed no maps or tactical schematics. Only the calm, hypnotic rotation of the planet Macragge. He had just finished his conversation with Captain Valerius. An encrypted, multi-layered vox-channel that was impossible to intercept. He had listened to the dry, factual mission report. And then, to Valerius’s personal addendum—halting, and filled with shock and disbelief.

When the transmission ended, Guilliman did not move. His face was a mask of marble. But within him, a glacial storm was raging.

He had succeeded. The plan had worked even better than he had anticipated. The dangerous shrine-world was neutralized with minimal losses. The valuable asset, Consultant Omicron, had proven his loyalty and his incredible effectiveness in combat. The strategic victory was total and unequivocal.

But the price…

He had not foreseen Fulgrim removing his helmet. That gesture, that single act of self-revelation, changed everything. It had turned a sterile tactical operation into a personal drama. It had let the ghost out of its cage and shown it to the world, even if that world consisted of only two dozen Space Marines. Guilliman felt a stab of fury. It was an unsanctioned initiative. A breach of protocol. He should have ordered Valerius to activate the melta-charge immediately.

But he hadn’t.

Because his anger was drowned in a cold wave of pragmatism. Fulgrim was right. His calculation, which he would undoubtedly present upon his arrival, was flawless. By revealing himself, he had dealt the enemy not just a physical blow, but a psychological one. He had sown chaos and doubt in the ranks of Slaanesh’s followers. And he had turned himself into a lure, forcing his daemonic twin to react. It was brilliant. And it was pure Fulgrim—audacious, theatrical, and lethally effective.

Guilliman clenched his fists. That was what infuriated him most. He was being proven, again and again, that the creature in his dungeons was not just a talking artifact. It was his brother. With his genius. With his arrogance. With his ability to make risky, yet brilliant decisions. And he, Roboute Guilliman, Lord Commander of the Imperium, was becoming more and more dependent on him.

He was alone. He carried the weight of a dying galaxy on his shoulders. And fate had handed him this assistant. The shadow of the one who was a primary cause of that agony. The irony was so cruel it felt like a jest from one of the Chaos Gods themselves.

You are using him, Roboute. But how long can you control him? Where is the line at which your weapon turns in your hand and strikes you? He asked himself this question every day.

He turned from the window and walked to his desk. A single object lay upon it. A hololithic projector, displaying a magnified image of the shoulder guard of the Sons of the Phoenix Chapter. He himself had approved their heraldry. It had been his own small, cruel jest. A reminder to the prisoner of what his sons could have been.

But now, that jest had taken on a new, ominous meaning. What was he to do with this Chapter now? With warriors who had seen the face of their cursed genetic primogenitor? He couldn't simply eliminate them. They were heroes, flawless warriors. But they were carriers of a most dangerous secret.

He slowly reached out and deactivated the projector. The symbol of the phoenix vanished.

No. He would not eliminate them. He would make them part of his new, even riskier plan. Captain Valerius and his men would become the keepers of this secret. They would become the “Consultant’s” personal guard. His jailers and his brothers-in-arms. They would be the only ones in the galaxy who knew the truth. Their loyalty would be tested to its absolute limit. And if they endured, they would become the most unique unit in the entire Imperium. A Chapter that serves a living traitor primarch for the salvation of the Imperium. The contradiction was glaring, almost heretical. But in this dark age, straight paths no longer led to victory.

He voxed Marneus Calgar.

“Marneus, prepare the Strategium. Not my private study. And not the dungeon. The Hall. Maximum security. When the Resurgent Flame arrives, have the ‘Consultant’ brought there. And bring Captain Valerius. It is time to change the rules of the game.”

The return to Macragge was entirely different. Fulgrim was not led under guard through empty corridors. He was met personally by the Victrix Guard, led by Cato Sicarius himself. Their helmeted faces were unreadable, but there was no hostility in their formation. Only a stern, official wariness. He was escorted not to the dungeons, but to the upper levels of the Fortress of Hera. To the Hall of the Strategium.

It was a vast chamber, its walls living hololithic maps. In the center stood a round table capable of seating two dozen warlords. But now, only two chairs were present. In one of them sat Roboute Guilliman. He was in his working robes, without armor or weapons, but his presence filled the entire hall. Captain Valerius already stood by the wall, his posture perfectly straight, but Fulgrim could sense his tension.

“Leave us,” Guilliman commanded Sicarius. The Champion of Ultramar hesitated for a mere second before obeying. The heavy door sealed shut, cutting the three of them off from the rest of the world.

“Remove your helmet,” Guilliman said. It was not an order. It was a request.

Fulgrim complied. He placed the grey helm on the table. The light of the hall reflected in his violet eyes.

“Your operation had… unforeseen consequences,” Guilliman began, his voice level but with a hidden edge of steel. “You violated a direct order to act with stealth and to not take initiative. You revealed yourself. Explain.”

“It was a tactical necessity,” Fulgrim replied just as calmly. “Halak was a vainglorious artist, not a soldier. His strength was in his aura, his belief in his own superiority and the divine status of his master. To break his will, one had to break his faith. The sight of my face did precisely that. It turned a self-assured champion into a doubting, raging hysteric. It cut the combat time in half and saved the lives of at least four of Captain Valerius’s warriors.”

He shifted his gaze to the captain, who stood motionless.

“Furthermore, it has initiated a chain of events that now works in our favor. The knowledge of my existence is a poison I have injected into the enemy’s bloodstream. Now, the creature that bears my name will act irrationally. He will hunt me. And we will be ready.”

Guilliman listened, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

“Your calculation is sound. Your logic is impeccable. But that does not change the fact that you acted against my will. You jeopardized the entire operation. And you have created a problem in the form of the Captain and his men.”

“On the contrary,” Fulgrim countered. “I have given you something you did not have. Witnesses. Flawless heroes whose report will not be questioned when the time comes. Captain Valerius and his Sons of the Phoenix are no longer just a Chapter. They are your first apostles. The first to see that redemption is possible. The first who will carry this message.”

At these words, Valerius flinched.

Guilliman rose and walked to the immense map of the galaxy. He stared at the Great Rift.

“Redemption… You speak of such things so lightly. You have not earned redemption. None of you have.”

“I know,” Fulgrim said quietly. “And I do not seek it. I seek only the chance to serve. The chance to die a useful death.”

Guilliman turned sharply. A blue fire blazed in his eyes.

“Oh, I will give you that chance. I will give you more chances to die usefully than you could ever imagine. Your little gambit on Lyra-Stentor has accelerated my plans. We cannot wait now. The daemon knows about you. He will come. And not alone. He will bring his entire damned legion. He will launch an invasion on a scale Ultramar has not seen since the Tyrannic Wars.”

He strode to the table and leaned on it, looking Fulgrim directly in the eye.

“Your imprisonment is over. The games of being a ‘consultant’ are over, too. From this day forward, you are my Shadow General. Captain Valerius and his Chapter are transferred to your unofficial command. They will be your sword and your shield. You will operate in the shadows, striking where the enemy least expects it. You will become ghosts hunting other ghosts. You will be granted access to strategic data. You will be provided with a workshop and all necessary resources.”

He pointed at the hololithic projector he himself had recently switched off.

“You will forge new weapons for yourself, and for them. New armor. You will return to what you once were—a master artificer. You will make the Sons of the Phoenix into the perfect hunters of the spawn of Slaanesh. You will train them to fight as only you can. You will turn my cruel jest into their greatest strength.”

He straightened up.

“This is no longer a test. This is war. Your personal war, inside of mine. I am giving you the freedom to act. But know this. You are still my prisoner. Not of walls, but of my trust. And should you betray it again, I will not send a captain with a melta-charge for you. I will come myself. With our Father’s sword. And I will burn to the ground everything you have managed to build.”

Fulgrim looked at his brother. He saw not just the Lord Commander. He saw the very same boy with whom he had argued over tactics at a regicide board. The one who was always too direct, but whose will was harder than any adamantium. And for the first time in ten thousand years, he felt more than just guilt. He felt a shadow of hope.

“I will not fail you, Roboute,” he said. It was not a vow, nor a promise. It was a statement of fact. “I have nothing left but this mission.”

After Fulgrim was escorted from the Strategium, leaving them alone, Captain Valerius remained motionless, his gaze fixed on the empty chair the ‘consultant’ had just occupied. The silence in the hall was crushing, filled with unspoken questions. Guilliman returned to his seat at the table. He looked weary, as if the weight of the decisions just made was a physical burden upon his shoulders.

“Sit, Captain,” Guilliman said, gesturing to the chair opposite him. His voice was quiet, stripped of its command tone. It was not an order, but an invitation.

Valerius moved with mechanical precision. He sat, his back ramrod straight, his hands resting on his knees. He was the epitome of Ultramarine discipline, a bastion of calm. But Guilliman, with his primarch’s perception, saw the subtle signs of the tempest within the warrior: the tightening of the jaw muscles, the fractional dilation of his pupils, the way his fingers unconsciously gripped the ceramite of his armor.

“You have questions,” Guilliman stated. He had no intention of circling the issue. The time for that was past.

“Yes, Lord Commander,” Valerius’s voice was steady, but there was a grating of restrained emotion beneath it. “The being… the one you called Consultant Omicron… I saw him. We all did. It cannot be… what it appears to be. It must be some kind of ruse. A clone. A psychic projection…”

“It is not a ruse,” Guilliman interrupted, his gaze heavy and direct. “The being you saw is a clone of the primarch Fulgrim, yes. A perfect body, created by Fabius Bile. But his mind, his soul… or what remains of it… is genuine. It is a shard of my brother’s soul from before his fall. By some impossible means, it has been joined to that body. The warp spawns strange things, Captain. Sometimes, even flickers of hope.”

Valerius processed this information slowly. His world, built on clear dogma and unshakeable truths, was cracking at the foundations. The fallen primarchs were daemons, monsters, absolute evil. Concepts like “a shard of a soul” or “a second chance” were not applicable to them. It was heresy. But he was hearing this heresy from the lips of the Lord Commander himself, the Regent of the Imperium.

“You… trust him?” he forced out. It was the paramount question.

“‘Trust’ is the wrong word,” Guilliman replied, leaning back in his chair. “I trust the sensor readings that detect no taint of Chaos within him. I trust the findings of my Librarians, who see in him only a chasm of remorse. I trust the facts: his counsel has saved entire systems, and his actions on Lyra-Stentor V prevented greater losses. I use him, Captain, as the most valuable and dangerous of resources. My personal trust is irrelevant. Only the results matter.”

He paused, allowing Valerius time to absorb this.

“Now, to you. And your Chapter. Officially, you are successors of the Imperial Fists, created during the Ultima Founding. It is a convenient and noble legacy.”

Guilliman looked Valerius directly in the eye.

“It is a lie.”

The Captain did not flinch, but the tension in his frame became almost physically palpable. “Lord Commander?”

“When Belisarius Cawl created you, the first Primaris, he acted under my direct orders: to use only the stable and proven gene-seed of the loyalist legions. Mostly, my own.” A faint, mirthless smile touched Guilliman’s lips. “But Cawl is Cawl. He is a scientist driven by the thirst for knowledge, not a soldier bound by orders. He always considered my caution to be excessive. He believed the genetic material of all eighteen primarchs was a legacy that could not be squandered. In secret, he conducted experiments. He attempted to purify the gene-seed of the fallen, to correct the flaws, to remove the predisposition to corruption. Most of his attempts ended… poorly. But some…”

He paused again, letting the truth slowly seep into the captain’s consciousness.

“You and your brothers, Captain. The Sons of the Phoenix Chapter. You are not heirs of Dorn. Your fortitude is a product of training and doctrine. But your true nature, your subconscious drive for perfection, your instinctual aptitude for swift, elegant maneuvers, your innate sense of aesthetics that you suppress with harsh discipline… it all comes from another source. Your gene-seed was created from the genetic stock of the Third Legion. Of Fulgrim.”

Silence. In the vast Hall of the Strategium, the very air seemed to stand still. Valerius sat motionless, a statue of white marble. His mind, accustomed to logic and order, collided with an absolute paradox. He. His brothers. Heroes of the Imperium. They were sons of the Arch-Traitor. Their flesh was forged from the same material as the Noise Marines, the Daemonettes, and the other horrors they destroyed with contempt. His entire life, his entire identity, built on the legacy of Rogal Dorn, on fortitude and unyielding strength, was crumbling to dust. He felt the ground give way beneath him.

“Why?” he whispered. It was all he could manage.

“Because Cawl is an arrogant genius who believes he can fix any mistake,” Guilliman answered. “And because I… decided to give his experiment a chance. I saw potential in your Chapter. I gave you a name and colors that were a constant rebuke to him, and a test for you. I wanted to see what would triumph: nature or nurture. The genes of a traitor or the discipline of loyalists. And you, Captain, you and your brothers have exceeded all my expectations. You have proven that the sins of the fathers need not be the destiny of the sons.”

Guilliman leaned forward, his voice growing quieter, but heavier with meaning.

“Do you understand what this means, Valerius? Officially, genetically, the being you saw is your primarch-father. The other one, the daemon, is as well. You are in a unique, unthinkable position. You are the bridge between the past and the future. Between betrayal and redemption.”

Valerius slowly raised his gaze. The shock in his eyes was gone. It had been replaced by a cold, crystalline fury—directed not at Guilliman, but at fate itself. He was a warrior. And warriors do not break under such blows. They adapt.

“What do you want from us, Lord Commander?”

Guilliman gave a nod of satisfaction. This captain was exactly who he thought he was. A rock.

“What I told him. Your Chapter is relieved of all current duties. You are transferred to his complete, but secret, command. He will be your mentor, your teacher. He will instruct you in ways you will not find in any Codex Astartes. He will teach you to understand the enemy, because the enemy is his own twisted reflection. He will forge you into the perfect weapon for hunting the servants of Slaanesh. You will become his shadow army. His blade.”

“And his jailers,” Valerius finished for him, his voice now firm.

“And his jailers,” Guilliman confirmed. “You will be the only ones who know the truth. You will carry this burden. It will be harder than any battle you have ever fought. Many of your brothers may not withstand it. They may break. Or they may rebel. Your duty as their commander is to guide them through this. To explain. To convince. To compel. Because the success of your mission now determines not just victory in a single system. It may well determine the outcome of the entire war.”

He stood, signaling the end of the conversation.

“You have a choice, Captain. You can refuse. I would understand. In that event, your Chapter will be disbanded, its warriors integrated into other Ultramarine successor chapters with a full mind-wipe. The secret will be kept. But the Imperium will have lost a unique opportunity. Or… you can accept this burden. This cross. And become something more than just another Chapter of Space Marines. You can become legends. Or you can become heretics, burned on the pyre of history. The choice is yours.”

Valerius rose as well. He looked at Guilliman, not as a subordinate to a commander, but as a man who had just been handed the fate of the galaxy, wrapped in barbed wire. He thought of his brothers. Of the fallen on Lyra-Stentor V. Of white armor spattered with blood. Of the grey figure who had guarded their backs. Of his duty. Of his honor.

“The choice was made the moment we were created, Lord Commander,” he said at last, and his voice held neither doubt nor fear. Only a cold acceptance. “We did not choose our origins. But we choose whom we serve. The Sons of the Phoenix will serve the Imperium. And we will obey your command. We will… accept this burden.”

Fulgrim was not housed in a cell. He was allocated an entire sector in one of the deepest, most secure manufactorums of the Fortress of Hera. It was a vast, echoing space that smelled of machine oil, ozone, and hot metal. Cogitators, spectral analyzers, auto-forges, and assembly lines capable of working adamantium and ceramite lined the walls. It was a workshop that could bring any engineering dream, no matter how audacious, to life. A place where, in a past life, he would have spent thousands of blissful hours creating masterpieces. Now, it was his new cage. A gilded one, but a cage nonetheless.

He did not begin work immediately. For the first few cycles, he simply walked through the enormous workshop, touching the cold metal of the machines, breathing in the familiar scents. He remembered. He remembered the forges beneath the mountains of Terra, where he had labored side-by-side with Ferrus. He could almost feel the heat, the weight of the hammer in his hand, could see the laughter in his stern brother’s eyes as he appraised his work. The pain of these memories was sharp, but he did not push it away. He absorbed it. It was his fuel. A reminder of what he had lost, and what he now fought for.

Then, he began to work.

He did not start by creating something new from scratch. He began by improving what already existed. He summoned techno-adepts and servitors, giving them clear, concise commands. He demanded they deliver standard patterns of Mark X armor and all the wargear used by the Sons of the Phoenix.

When the equipment arrived, he sealed himself in his workshop, alone. What followed was not merely labor. It was a ritual. A sacrament. He disassembled every component down to the last screw, studied every schematic, every power conduit. His superhuman mind saw not just parts. He saw flows of energy, vectors of stress, points of weakness, and hidden potential. He was not an engineer. He was an artist who saw the soul of the machine.

His fingers, which had so recently held a power sword, now manipulated the finest of instruments with surgical precision, resoldering micro-circuits, calibrating targeting lenses. He worked without rest or sleep. The sounds of his workshop—the whirring of servos, the hiss of plasma cutters, the hum of anti-grav lifts—became his only music.

He began with the armor. The standard Primaris plate was excellent, but it was universal. Fulgrim was making it specialized. He reinforced the sound dampening in the helmets, weaving threads of psycho-resistive alloys into the ceramite. He altered the structure of the leg servos, sacrificing a fraction of maximum strength for superior speed and stealth. He added capacitors to the jump pack reactors, allowing for a short, monstrous burst of energy for a lightning-fast dash or evasion. He wasn't rebuilding the armor. He was tuning it, like a rare and precious violin.

Next, he turned to the weaponry. In his hands, bolters became tools of surgical precision. He replaced the standard optics with multi-spectral scopes capable of not only seeing in infrared or ultraviolet, but also of detecting warp emanations, highlighting daemonic entities even through solid walls. He refined the ammunition, adding micro-capsules of sanctified silver and special chemical agents that, upon detonation, disrupted the coherence of immaterial beings.

He was not just creating weapons. He was creating antibodies. Every invention, every improvement, was a direct answer to the tactics and abilities of the servants of Slaanesh. He knew his enemy intimately, for that enemy was his own reflection, taken to its horrifying extreme.

When Captain Valerius first came to him, accompanied by his lieutenants to receive their initial instructions, Fulgrim did not lecture them. He silently pointed to two racks. On one hung a standard suit of Primaris armor. On the other, his modified version.

“The difference is not merely in specifications,” he said, his voice echoing through the workshop. “It is in philosophy. The standard armor is designed to withstand a blow. This one is designed to evade it. The standard weapon is made to kill. This is made to annihilate. The enemy you face is fast, graceful, and deadly. You must become faster, more graceful, and deadlier. You will not break their lines with brute force. You will dance around them, delivering a thousand shallow cuts until they bleed out. You will be shadows, not a wall.”

The lieutenants stared at him with a mixture of disbelief and veiled awe. This doctrine was alien to everything they had been taught. This was not the way of the Imperial Fists.

“We are not dancers. We are fortress-builders,” one of them, Lieutenant Gallius, a grim veteran with a scarred cheek, objected.

Fulgrim turned to him. “Fortresses fall, Lieutenant, if the enemy finds a single undefended passage. Your old tactics were superlative against Orks or Tyranids. But against my… against the Emperor’s Children… they are an invitation to slaughter. They will find your one weakness, your one vainglorious desire, your one prideful thought… and turn it into a gaping hole in your defense. You must become fluid as water and swift as the wind. Or you will be shattered like fragile porcelain.”

He walked to a table and picked up a power sword he had just finished refining. The blade was slimmer and more elegant than the standard pattern.
“I will teach you. Not just to fight. But to understand your enemy. To predict his movements. To use his own pride against him. Training begins tomorrow at dawn. And I promise you, it will be harder than any battle you have ever fought. Those who survive will become perfect hunters. The rest… were not good enough. Perfection or death. There is no other path.”

He ignited the sword. The blade flared with a steady, white light. There was no fury in it. Only the cold, sharp beauty of purpose. The Sons of the Phoenix looked upon him. Upon their new, impossible, terrifying teacher. Upon their father. And they understood that their old lives had ended forever. Their true birth by fire had begun.