The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Prologue The Herald

‘Father.’

He whispered the word against the wailing sirens. Lightning arced in panicked flashes between overloading generators, killing men, women and other machines with impunity. His presence was a violation, a profane corruption of the most sacred ground, yet the burden of confusion paralysed him. Weakness flooded his flame-wreathed form as it never had before in his demigod’s lifespan.

The cavern before him was only a laboratory in the most poetic sense. He looked with flaming eyes upon the inside of a god’s mind, where a cityscape of machinery and snarled utopia of cables reflected the synapses and sections of a human brain. At the core was a throne of gold, once coldly serene, now spitting acetylene sparks bright enough to sear even eyes made of fire.

He felt the heat of pursuit behind him, the ripples of the warp’s billion predators spilling into the latticework of tunnels in his wrathful wake. They came in a laughing, howling horde, inexorable as any flood, inevitable as the rolling slide of lava.

And he knew, then, what he had done.

He had led them here. The only being powerful enough to breach the final barriers around the Imperial Dungeon had carved a path and paved a way for them. The warning he had come to give faded from his lips.

The sirens. The sirens howled on and on. Warriors of the Ten Thousand, clad in gold and ringing their king, shouted and fired skywards. Their incendiary rounds dissolved within his towering form, their rage coming to nothing. Even the Custodians didn’t know him. He knew each of them by name – there was Constantin Valdor, there was Ra Endymion, there was Amon Tauromachian – yet they levelled their spears at him and opened fire. Good men, men with philosophical souls and unbreakable loyalty, seeking to destroy him.

His father stood at the heart of the storm, looking up at him, looking up at the burning herald of humanity’s end. Every other soul in the chamber – the menials and workers and scientists not already aflame or fleeing the cascade of klaxons – stared up with their king. The fiery form was the last thing many of them saw, for its violent luminescence stole their sight forever after.

The Emperor looked upon him – His son, His creation – with eyes that had seen countless suns and civilisations die.

‘Magnus,’ He said.

‘Father,’ breathed the avatar of burning misery in reply.