'I am sensing a certain reluctance on your part to relax, my lord,' said Fabius, the cold light gleaming from the multiple scalpel blades he held poised above Eidolon.

Eidolon's face twisted in anger. 'Are you surprised, Apothecary? You are about to cut my throat open and implant an organ the purpose of which you still haven't told me.'

'It is a modified tracheal implant that will bond with your vocal chords and should allow you to produce a nerve paralysing shriek similar to that employed by certain warrior breeds of the Laer.'

'You are implanting me with xenos organs?' asked Eidolon, horrified.

'Not as such,' said Fabius with a toothy grin, 'though there are strands taken from the alien genome I chose to mesh with Astartes gene-seed mutated under controlled conditions. Essentially, I will be adding a new organ to your makeup, one that you will be able to trigger at will in battle.'

'No!' cried Eidolon. 'I do not wish this, not if it requires xenos filth to be implanted in me.'

Fabius shook his head. 'I am afraid it is too late to back out now, my lord. Fulgrim has authorised my work and you demanded that I work on you upon your return. What was it you wanted? Oh, yes, to be my greatest success, faster, stronger and more deadly than ever before.'

'Not like this, Apothecary!' shouted Eidolon. 'Cease what you are doing now!'

'I can't do that, Eidolon,' said Fabius, matter-of-factly. 'The soporifics are rendering you immobile and the samples I am to implant will not survive if they are not grafted to a host body. Why struggle? You'll feel so much better when I'm finished.'

'I will kill you!' snapped Eidolon. Fabius smiled as he saw the lord commander attempt to free himself. Such efforts were wasted, for the drugs being pumped around his system, and the metal restraints, held him fast to the table.

'No, Eidolon,' said Fabius. 'You won't kill me, for I will deliver on my promise to you. You will be more deadly than ever before. You should also remember that a warrior's life is a dangerous life, and that you will be under my knife many more times before this crusade reaches its climax, so do you really want to threaten me? Let the drugs take you, and when you wake you will be the model for how our beloved Legion is to take the next evolutionary leap forward!' Fabius smiled and the scalpels descended.

Even before they reached the ruin on the other side of the valley, Solomon could tell that it was not a ruin after all, its structure intact and showing no signs of having been part of a larger building. However, having no better idea of what the unusual structure was, Solomon decided that ''ruin'' was as good a word for it as any.

Shaped like the upper half of a bow stave, the curving structure reached to around twelve metres in height, its base set into an oval platform formed from the same smooth, porcelain-like substance as the ruin itself. The arch it described was graceful and alien, though it displayed none of the disturbingly excessive qualities of the Laer architecture.

In fact, thought Solomon, it was beautiful in its own way.

Once again, the Astartes spread out to surround their leaders as they approached the alien ruin. Solomon felt a curious apprehension at the sight of the structure, for it did not look like a building that had been abandoned for millennia.

For one thing, its surface was unblemished by so much as a single stain, moss or weathering, and the smooth stones that dotted its surface gleamed as though freshly polished.

'What is it?' asked Marius.

'I don't know,' replied Solomon, 'a marker perhaps?'

'A marker for what?'

'A boundary, maybe?' suggested Saul Tarvitz to general nods. 'But between whom?'

Solomon turned to see what Fulgrim made of it, and was shocked to see tears running down his primarch's face. Julius stood next to the primarch, his own face also streaked with tears. He looked around to see what his fellow captain's made of this, seeing that they were similarly stunned to see such a sight.

'My lord?' said Solomon. 'Is… is something the matter?'

Fulgrim shook his head and said, 'No, my son. Do not be alarmed, for I do not weep out of pain or anguish, but for beauty.'

'For beauty?'

'Yes, for beauty,' said Fulgrim, turning and extending his arms to encompass the wondrous landscape around them. 'This world is incomparable to anything we have thus far seen in our travels, is it not? Where else have we seen marvels laid out before us with such perfection? Nothing of this world is wanting and, were such things possible, I would believe that such a place could not come about by accident.'

Solomon followed his primarch's gaze, seeing the same natural marvels laid out before him, but unable to feel as moved as his commander. Julius nodded in time with Fulgrim's words, but of the four captains present, he alone appeared to have been affected in the same manner as the primarch.

Perhaps Marius had been correct to insist on the wearing of helmets, for surely there must be some undetected agent within the planet's atmosphere that had affected them so. But any agent capable of affecting a primarch would have long since affected him.

'My lord, perhaps we should return to the Pride of the Emperor,' he suggested.

'In time,' nodded Fulgrim. 'I wish to remain a little longer, for we shall not return here. We will enter the planet in our records and move on, leaving it untouched, for to despoil a place such as this would be a crime.'

'My lord,' said Solomon. 'Move on?'

'Indeed, my son,' smiled Fulgrim. 'We shall take our leave of this place and never return.'

'But you have already designated this world as Twenty-Eight Four,' Solomon pointed out. 'It is a world of the Emperor and is subject to Imperial laws given to us by him to uphold without equivocation. To abandon it without leaving armed forces to impose compliance and defend it against enemies is contrary to our mission amongst the stars.'

Fulgrim rounded on Solomon and said, 'I know our mission, Captain Demeter. You should not presume that I do not.'

'No, my lord, but the fact remains that to leave this world unoccupied would be contrary to the word of the Emperor.'

'And you have spoken with the Emperor on this?' snapped Fulgrim, and Solomon felt his objections withering under the intensity of the primarch's gaze. 'You claim to know his will better than one of his sons? I stood with the Emperor and Horus on the surface of Altaneum as its inhabitants destroyed the planet's ice caps and flooded their world beneath the oceans to destroy natural beauty that had taken billions of years to form, rather than allow us to take it from them. The Emperor told me that we must not make such mistakes again, for the galaxy will be worthless if we win it as a wasteland.'

'The Lord Fulgrim is correct,' said Julius. 'We should leave this place.'

Solomon felt his resolve harden in the face of Julius's support of the primarch, for he heard the tone of the sycophant in his friend's words.

'I agree with Captain Demeter,' added Saul Tarvitz, and Solomon had never been so glad to hear another's voice. 'A planet's beauty should have no bearing on whether or not we render it compliant.'

'Whether you agree or not is irrelevant,' growled Marius. 'Lord Fulgrim has spoken and we must obey his will. That is our chain of command.'

Julius nodded, but Solomon couldn't believe how easily they were going along with what was tantamount to disobeying the word of the Emperor.

Over the course of the next two weeks, the 28th Expedition came upon another five worlds of a similar nature to Twenty-Eight Four, but each time, the fleet moved on without claiming it in the name of the Emperor. Solomon Demeter's frustration grew daily at the expedition's apparent unwillingness to enforce the Emperor's will upon these empty worlds, and no one other than he and Saul Tarvitz appeared to find it unusual to find such paradisiacal worlds unoccupied.