'All my life I wanted to be like him,' said Fulgrim.

'As did we all, my brother,' said Horus. 'It pains me to say these things to you, but they must be said, for a time of war is coming, nothing can prevent that, and I need my closest brothers beside me when the time comes to purge our Legions of those who will not follow us.'

Fulgrim looked up through tear-rimmed eyes and said, 'You are wrong, Horus. You must be wrong. How could an imperfect being have wrought the likes of us?'

'Us?' said Horus. 'We are but the instruments of his will to achieve dominance of the galaxy before his ascension. When the wars are over, we will be cast aside, for we are flawed creations, fashioned from the wide womb of uncreated night. Even before our births, the Emperor cast us aside when he could have saved us. You remember the nightmare of Chemos, the wasteland it was when you fell to its blasted hinterlands? The pain you suffered there, the pain we all suffered on the planets where we grew to manhood? All of that could have been avoided. He could have stopped it all, but he cared so little for us that he simply let it happen. I saw it happen, my brother, I saw it all.'

'How?' gasped Fulgrim. 'How could you have seen such things?'

'In my near death state I was granted an epiphany of hindsight,' said Horus. 'Whether I saw the past or simply had my earliest memories unlocked I do not know, but what I experienced was as real to me as you are.'

The grey meat of Fulgrim's brain was filling fit to burst as he sought to process all that Horus was telling him.

'Even in my moments of blackest doubt, all that sustained me was the utter certainty of my ultimate achievement of perfection,' said Fulgrim. 'The Emperor was the shining paragon of that dream's attainment, and to have that taken away from me…'

'Doubt is not a pleasant condition,' nodded Horus, 'but certainty is absurd when it is built on a lie.'

Fulgrim felt his mind reel that he even entertained the possibility that Horus could be right, his words unravelling all that he had ever been and all he had ever hoped to achieve. His past was gone, destroyed to feed his father's lie, and all that was left to him was his future.

'The Emperor is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh,' said Horus. 'To him we are tools to be used until blunted and then cast aside. Why else would he leave us and the Crusade to retreat to his dungeons beneath Terra? His apotheosis is already underway and it is up to us to stop it.'

'I dreamed of one day being like him,' whispered Fulgrim, 'of standing at his shoulder and feeling his pride and love for me.'

Horus stepped forward, kneeling before him and taking his hands. 'All men dream, Fulgrim, but not all men dream equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. For men like us, the dreamers of the day, our dreams are ones of hope, of improvement, of change. Perhaps we were once simply weapons, warriors who knew nothing beyond the art of death, but we have grown, my brother! We are so much more than that now, but the Emperor does not see it. Fie would abandon his greatest achievements to the darkness of a hostile universe. I know this for a fact, Fulgrim, for I did not simply receive this wisdom, I discovered it for myself after a journey that no one could take for me or spare me.'

'I cannot hear this, Horus,' cried Fulgrim, surging to his feet as his flesh threw off the paralysis that had thus far held him immobile. He marched towards the mural of the Emperor and shouted. 'You have no idea what you are asking me to do!'

'On the contrary,' replied Horus, rising to follow him. 'I know exactly what I am asking you to do. I am asking you to stand with me to defend our birthright. This galaxy is ours by right of conquest and blood, but it is to be given away to grubby politicians and clerks. I know you have seen this, and it must make your blood boil as it does mine. Where were those civilians when it was our warriors dying by the thousand? Where were they when we crossed the span of the galaxy to bring illumination to the lost fragments of humanity? I'll tell you where! They huddled in their dark and dusty halls, and penned diatribes like this!'

Horus reached down to his desk, snatched up a handful of papers and thrust them into Fulgrim's hands.

'What are these?' he asked.

'Lies,' said Horus. 'They call it the Lectitio Divinitatus, and it is spreading through the fleets like a virus. It is a cult that deifies the Emperor and openly worships him as a god! Can you believe it? After all we have done to bring the light of science and reason to these pathetic mortals, they invent a false god and turn to him for guidance.'

'A god?'

'Aye, Fulgrim, a god,' said Horus, his anger spilling out in a surge of violence. The Warmaster roared and hammered his fist into the mural, his gauntlet smashing the painted face of the Emperor to shards of cracked stone. Ruptured blocks fell from the wall to crash upon the metal deck, and Fulgrim released the papers he held, watching them flutter to the floor amid the ruin of the mural.

Fulgrim cried out as his world shattered into shards as fragmented as the rubble of the mural, his love for the Emperor torn from his breast and held up for the dirty, useless thing it was.

Horus came to him and cupped his face in his hands, staring into his eyes with an intensity that was almost fanatical.

'I need you, my brother,' pleaded Horus. 'I cannot do this without you, but you must do nothing against your conscience. My brother, my phoenix, my hope, wing your way through the darkness and defy fortune's spite. Revive from the ashes and rise!'

Fulgrim met his brother's stare. 'What would you have me do?'

EIGHTEEN

Deep Orbital

Excision

Separate Ways

The flight deck of Deep Orbital DS191 was a tangled mess of twisted metal and flames. The greenskins had occupied the orbiting defence platform for some time, and their unique brand of engineering had already begun to take root. Great idols of fanged iron behemoths squatted amid piles of wreckage, and machines that looked like crude fighter planes lay scattered and broken throughout the deck.

Solomon took cover from the chattering hail of gunfire spraying from the rude barricade that had been thrown together, ''constructed'' was too elegant a word for what the greenskins had built, at the end of the flight deck.

Hundreds of roaring aliens had fired randomly, or waved enormous cleavers at the thirty warriors of the Second when they landed on the flight deck from their Thunderhawks. As part of the Emperor's Children's assault, missiles had punched holes through the hull of the orbital with the intent of explosively decompressing the flight deck and allowing Solomon's Astartes to make an uncontested boarding at this supposedly unoccupied section.

The plan had proceeded without any problems until the tide of wreckage had plugged the holes and hundreds of bellowing, fang-toothed greenskin brutes had charged from the shattered wreckage of their fighters and bombers to attack with mindless ferocity. Wild gunfire ripped through the flight deck. Corkscrewing rockets burst amongst the Astartes, and crude powder charges exploded as hurled grenades burst among the charging Emperor's Children.

'Whoever said that the greenskins were primitive obviously never had to fight them,' shouted Gaius Caphen, as another greasy explosion of flame and black smoke erupted nearby, hurling spars of twisted metal into the air.

Solomon had to agree, having fought the greenskin savages on many occasions. It seemed as though there was no star system throughout the galaxy that had not been infested by the vermin of the greenskins.