Lorgar.
The Aurelian, the Urizen.
he girl pushed this card onto the game table, simultaneously overlaying the final corner of the Chaos Eight-Pointed Star upon it.
Chaos fell-energy, known as Indeterminate Warp, flooded Lorgar's body, transforming him into a Daemon Primarch of this realm—a twisted entity proclaiming the domain of the unknowable.
Lorgar unleashed a joyful yet manic laugh. Colors bled from his skin like the shimmering radiance atop a slick oil film, coiling around the mace in his hands as he brought it crashing down toward the Roboute Guilliman standing before Alexander.
Guilliman looked at the Lorgar before him. The Lorgar of now was indeed difficult to comprehend; his body was unstable, his posture like a thin mist. As he swung the mace at Guilliman, the weapon seemed to strike from millions of different directions simultaneously.
Guilliman swung the brilliant Sword of the Emperor. The flames were like a midday sun, the searing fire howling like a storm. A radiant arc collided with Lorgar's mace, red sparks flying everywhere—but Lorgar's hammerhead seemed to exist in another dimension entirely. It passed through the blazing Sword of the Emperor and slammed directly into Guilliman's chest. A howling force field exploded against him; the eerie colors, seemingly born from the hand of the most maddened painter, began to corrode the Armor of Fate.
At this moment, Guilliman was profoundly grateful for Cawl's craftsmanship. Under such a terrifying blow, the Armor of Fate remained unbroken. Over the past century, Cawl had been relentlessly studying twenty-second-century technology. For instance, the previously mentioned Belisarius Metal was born from the study of twenty-second-century materials. Every time Cawl made a new technical discovery, he utilized it upon the Armor of Fate. After a hundred years of continuous refinement, the Armor of Fate, in Guilliman's eyes, had even surpassed the Emperor's own Armor of Reason from the old days.
Guilliman retreated slightly to put distance between himself and Lorgar. He truly could not fathom how Lorgar had bypassed the Sword of the Emperor to strike him. Roboute Guilliman observed Lorgar with intense caution.
"You are still resisting the truth."
Lorgar pulled back his warhammer, his gaze toward Guilliman full of pity. "You attempt to use reason to understand truth. No—truth is the unknowable. Only through madness, only through abandon, can one truly merge with the tide of truth."
"Your logic cannot define me, so you cannot defeat me."
Iron boots tore through the snow as the two diametrically opposed Primarchs clashed again. The iridescent mace shifted in countless ways before Guilliman's eyes. He felt as though he had drunk dozens of cartloads of Fenrisian ale; hallucinations began to dance before him. But this time, Guilliman did not choose to dodge. Since dodging and parrying were impossible, he decided to take the blow directly with his body.
Guilliman had observed earlier: though the reason was unclear, Lorgar's attacks could pass through the Sword of the Emperor, but they could not pass through the Armor of Fate.
BOOM!!!!
A jolt of pain shot through Guilliman's shoulder. He lowered his center of mass and took Lorgar's mace head-on. As he had expected, Lorgar's bizarre mace failed to pass through the Armor of Fate.
"Cawl said this armor concentrates all his knowledge, all his reason. It is not just made of metal, plasteel, and cabling; everything he knows is inside this armor."
"Your 'unknowable truth' has failed to pierce the armor shaped by the wisdom of what humanity knows."
Guilliman tightened his grip on the Sword of the Emperor.
Lorgar let out a roar of near-fury.
Guilliman had inadvertently discovered a truth.
Malevolent Artifice and Indeterminate Warp; gnoseology and agnosticism. These were two completely opposite domains. Belisarius-Dora-Cawl had hammered all of his inspiration, talent, and technology into the Armor of Fate. The power of Malevolent Artifice was thus inscribed within it; this power armor was naturally antithetical to Lorgar's mace.
The Sword of the Emperor surged, sweeping across Lorgar's body.
But no damage was dealt. Lorgar, like a phantasmal shadow, passed through the blade.
"The primitive man hears a terrifying sound from the darkness outside his cave. In terror, he waves his spear at the dark. But can he hurt the darkness? Can he hurt an unknowable enemy?"
Lorgar mocked Guilliman. "The unknowable is the invincible. A man cannot harm that which he cannot perceive."
In truth, Lorgar was starting to break a sweat. Fortunately, the Dark King was dead and the Emperor was silent. This sword contained only the Emperor's boundless psychic energy and no longer possessed the power to erode the domain of Ruin. Otherwise, that extreme hatred itself could have harmed or even killed Lorgar.
A man cannot harm that which he cannot perceive.
Guilliman moved his body as lightly as possible, trying to evade Lorgar's hallucinatory attacks, but he failed every time. The mace, wreathed in nauseating colors, slammed into the Armor of Fate again and again. Guilliman could feel the machine spirit of the armor roaring. To resist Lorgar's mace, the Armor of Fate operated with increasing violence, and its machine spirit manifested so vividly in Guilliman's perception. The spirit felt like a reincarnation of Cawl's own soul... No!
"Cawl?" Guilliman hesitated, addressing the machine spirit.
The spirit of the Armor of Fate went silent for a moment. On the corneal display in the corner of Guilliman's eye, a line of text flashed past: Correction: This unit is not Archmagos Belisarius-Dora-Cawl. This unit is an automated machine spirit system based on Cawl's thought patterns...
This was absolutely Cawl!
Guilliman instantly understood what Cawl had done. Cawl had copied a portion of his own mind and integrated it directly into the armor's control system to act as its machine spirit. It was only because previous combat hadn't been intense enough that the machine spirit had been operating in power-saving mode, hidden from Guilliman's sight.
To put it politely, Cawl did this to collect as much combat data as possible for future improvements.
To put it bluntly, Cawl was monitoring Guilliman—one could even say he was studying Guilliman... Had he used this data to copy a thought-model of Guilliman himself?
"Cawl!" Guilliman growled.
The machine spirit hidden in the armor quickly understood what Guilliman wanted to know: The attacks from the hostile entity Lorgar are not merely physical. The physical laws at the points of impact have been eroded and disordered. Many functions are gradually failing. The multiple redundant systems designed by Archmagos Belisarius-Dora-Cawl are currently acting as replacements.
However, My Lord, if this continues, the Armor of Fate will inevitably collapse and disintegrate.
Guilliman's face was grim. He could clearly sense the armor losing functionality piece by piece. The problem was that Lorgar's attacks on him were guaranteed to hit, while his attacks on Lorgar were useless.
No, My Lord. You have indeed caused damage to Lorgar before.
On Guilliman's corneal display, a video clip appeared. It was the scene on the Honor of Macragge where he had nearly killed Lorgar in one strike...
The Armor of Fate had a recording function?!
Cawl, what on earth are you doing?
How can you record this?
What if you recorded something that shouldn't be recorded...
Guilliman's eye twitched. But he didn't understand what he had done at that moment, let alone how to replicate that feeling. That "surfacing" seemed to be a mere coincidence...
Could he harm Lorgar without relying on the power of that other "self"?
What was it that harmed Lorgar then?
"It was hatred." A voice, sounding exactly like Guilliman's own, spoke. The Guilliman shrouded in shadow, wearing the eight-fold crown, flashed past him.
Hatred. Hatred. Hatred...
Guilliman chewed on the word. Yes, hatred...
Guilliman slammed his foot into the snow, gripped the Sword of the Emperor with both hands, and swung a sharp arc.
Lorgar mockingly dismissed Guilliman's futile resistance, swinging his mace. Blood. Scalding blood erupted from Lorgar's chest. The Sword of the Emperor hacked into Lorgar's torso. Had Lorgar not reacted fast enough, that strike would have nearly cleaved him in two.
"Amatura."
Guilliman whispered, as if reciting the name of the dead.
"Hm?" Lorgar faltered.
"Do you remember, Lorgar?"
Guilliman's voice carried a heavy weight of hatred. "Macragge is the heart of Ultramar, but Amatura was its marrow. It was a prosperous world where billions of warriors were trained, where hundreds of ships were forged, pumping out blood like marrow to nourish my Ultramar."
"And you destroyed her. You cruelly violated that prosperous world. Your lapdogs even killed one of my finest sons there—my Orfeo, my Regent on Amatura."
"...Actually, Angron did that," Lorgar said in a small voice.
He felt it. Something was beginning to fill the Sword of the Emperor, making up for the void left by the disappearance of the Dark King's power. Hatred. It wasn't the hatred of a Dark King; it was the hatred of Ultramar.
"One hundred worlds! Lorgar! One hundred worlds!"
Guilliman roared. He had always suppressed himself, letting reason fill his body and burying emotional things like hatred and rage deep in his heart.
But at this moment, facing Lorgar, Guilliman chose to release it all.
"Did you think I forgot? You once killed a hundred of my worlds! I can hear the wailing of those worlds, the agony of every soul upon them—I still remember!"
Guilliman surged forward. The flames of the Sword of the Emperor had never been so bright. Its fuel was no longer just the psychic energy left by the Emperor, but Guilliman's own hatred.
"Tykhe!" He called out the name of a dead world.
A blade-mark appeared on Lorgar's left arm, blood seeping through.
"Don't do this..." Lorgar let out a piteous cry of pure terror.
"Zephath!"
"Bormina!"
"Konor!"
Three more sharp flashes of the blade fell. Three streaks of blood sprayed across Lorgar's face.
"You're mad!" Lorgar screamed. He swung his mace at Guilliman. Guilliman didn't even try to dodge. He understood that these attacks couldn't be evaded, so he met them head-on, trading wound for wound with Lorgar.
"Hafrun!"
"Triple Worlds!"
"Calas!"
"Quark-Hama!"
"Ithaka!!"
With each of Guilliman's roars, the hatred stored deep in his heart was unleashed. The Sword of the Emperor let out a battle-cry, its brilliant flames nearly tearing through Lorgar's skin.
Lorgar was bathed in blood. He screamed and roared, his mace slamming into one of Guilliman's arms. Once, twice, three times. A piteous sound erupted from the Armor of Fate; physical laws were eroded, and the arm lost all function. Those thick, oily colors began to seep into Guilliman's flesh.
Agony pulsed from his arm; Guilliman felt every cell screaming. But his movements didn't falter for a single second. The more he accepted the hatred in his heart, the more he abandoned reason, the more he felt as though countless figures were standing beside him. He saw it: he saw the hives of Hafrun toppling under orbital bombardment; he saw a young mother, her lower body torn apart by rebar, yet her hands still tightly clutching her child, weeping and pleading for someone to save her baby.
He saw the rice fields of Quark-Hama burning against the fire, an elderly farmer's face dyed orange-yellow by the flames as he held his bedridden wife tight, vanishing into the fire together. He saw the abandoned ruins of Ithaka, where celestial fire fell from the clouds and the last surviving warrior sat alone on the rubble, waiting for the final moment.
They had never left. The pain, the sorrow, the death—those ghosts had never left. They were inside Guilliman. The past, present, and future of Ultramar were all within him. Why had he only realized this now?
"Lorgar! Look at me!"
Guilliman gripped the Sword of the Emperor with one hand and held it high. The searing flames illuminated his face, revealing the faint, hard-to-detect black lines beneath his skin. Those were Calth-marks. The scalding void radiation had left its mark on everyone who experienced the Battle of Calth—even Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch, had them. This had once baffled the apothecaries: why did the Primarch bear scars that would not heal?
Why were there Calth-marks?
"Do you see, Lorgar?!"
"I am Ultramar itself!"
"I am the Avenging Son descended!"
"I am the Calth-mark itself!"
"I am the souls you cruelly slaughtered, destined to have my revenge upon you!"
"CALTH!!"
Blood flowed. A storm of Ruin appeared upon Guilliman. A storm of order, blue and gold, roared into full flame. The blade fell like the celestial fire that once destroyed Calth. Lorgar's face was split open; crimson blood flowed down, revealing stark white bone. Lorgar screamed, swinging his warhammer and slamming it into Guilliman's chest. Overburdened, the Armor of Fate finally shattered. Lorgar swung again, hitting Guilliman's flesh directly. Once, twice, three times. But Guilliman did not flinch; he simply raised the Sword of the Emperor once more. "CALTH!!"
"CALTH!!!"
"CALTH!!!!"
The roar swept through the flames. Hatred burned white-hot. The Sword of the Emperor fell again. Lorgar's skull shattered under the blade, brain matter spraying out as half his face was sliced away.
Lorgar unleashed the sharpest shriek he could imagine, squeezing every ounce of strength from his body to slam his mace into Guilliman's chest.
And Guilliman raised the Sword of the Emperor for the third and final time. All the ghosts who died at Calth, who died in the Shadow Crusade, who died at the hands of the Word Bearers, gripped the sword together with him. "Before I was the Emperor's son, I was their son first. It was their hatred that birthed me."
"Lorgar, do you see? I am the Avenging Son."