[SPEAKER_00]: There is a city that does not exist, and within it, at a writing desk one smoothed by long years of use, an old man sat down to remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: The city was Tisca, though no map would name it so anymore, and no on a sky had looked down upon it in a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been torn up by the roots from the world of its birth 10,000 years ago, and carried away through
[SPEAKER_00]: and set down at last upon the demon world, the galaxy had learned to call sotearius, the planet of the sorcerers.
[SPEAKER_00]: There it had hung ever since, adrift upon the slow tides of the sea of souls, like a lantern, floating upon black and bottomless water.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the old man was stubborn in the way of old men, and to him the city would always be tisker.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even here, even now, even with the wrongness of the warp pressing soft and patient against the glass,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was night, or what passed for night, in a place where the heavens were a thing of shifting colour.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had drawn the heavy curtains against that sky long ago, for he had never grown easy with looking too long into it, and he had lit instead the amber lamps that stood along his desk.
[SPEAKER_00]: The warm kind, the sort that pulled their light in soft golden circles, and did not glare.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had always loved that light.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not interrogate a room.
[SPEAKER_00]: It let the shadows keep their dignity and let an old scholar sit within it and feel for a little while that the universe was a smaller and a kinder thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: then he knew in his heart it truly to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chamber was quiet around him, and warm against the deep chill that always seeped up from the ancient stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had pulled his robe close and fastened it high at the throat to keep that cold at bay, and at his elbow, a cup of something hot, sent up a thin ribbon of steam that curled and wandered in the lamplight.
[SPEAKER_00]: A dark and bitter
[SPEAKER_00]: Kept alive across the centuries, the way so much else had been kept alive in this place, by will and by memory, and by refusing to let the last of it go.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrapped his thin hands around the cup and breathed the warmth of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a moment, he only sat, listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was the dry whisper of parchment beneath his palm.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were the small settling sounds that old stone makes when it believes no one is listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And far off, almost too faint to catch, there was the great slow man of the libraries breathing in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that gathered knowledge, they had carried out of the fire, kept safe forever now in this strange harbor beyond the edge of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The air smelled of old paper and older leather, of dust, and of the ghost of incense that had soaked into these walls across more years than he cared to number.
[SPEAKER_00]: And beneath it all, faint as a half remembered name,
[SPEAKER_00]: a request had come to him, and that was why he had taken up his pen at all, for he did not write often in these latter days.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the legions librarians, one of the inheritors, the keepers of the old arts, born long after the world the old man mourned had already turned to ash, desired an account of the burning of prospero.
[SPEAKER_00]: not the cold version, not the after-action reckonings with their tallyes of tonnage and time, nor the official histories with their careful silences and their convenient forgettings, but a true account, a personal one, from someone who had been there, from someone who remembered, and there were so very few of them left who could say that they remembered.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer with each passing century, it seemed to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was one of the last to it walk the streets of Tisca in honest daylight, who had known the city of light when it still caught fire at dawn without burning, who had loved it as a living place and not as a relic preserved against the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: the task had fallen to him, then, almost by default, because the others who might have told it were gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because he could not bear the thought of the telling, falling to someone who had only ever read of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood, settling deeper into his chair, that what he meant to set down was not a battle report.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had read enough of those to last the unnaturally long span of his years, and he had found the more wanting, for they recorded everything, except the only things that had ever mattered.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, what he meant to write was a remembrance.
[SPEAKER_00]: A morning perhaps, set
[SPEAKER_00]: and he resolved as the steam rose and the lamps burned low and gold that he would tell it true.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it, even the parts that shamed him, even the parts that shamed his master and his legion and his world.
[SPEAKER_00]: For there is no honest grief that flinches from the truth and he had carried this grief too long and too faithfully to dishonor it now with anything but the whole
[SPEAKER_00]: So the old man drew his robe a little tighter and took one long sip of the hot and bitter draft and bent his head over the waiting page.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he began, as all such tellings must begin, a very long time ago upon a world that loved the thing the rest of the galaxy had taught itself to fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were worlds beyond counting in those days, and upon very nearly all of them, the gift was held to be a curse, so that a child born with eyes that saw too far, or with hands that could summon fire, without flint, or spark, or with a voice that could speak softly into the minds of others without ever once parting its lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: was a child already half condemned, for the people of such worlds had long since decided what must be done with these things, and they gathered their stones and lit their torches and spoke the old hard words about witches and devils, the words that frightened folk in every age have spoken to make their fear sound like wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the child was cast out, or drowned, or given to the flames, and the world told itself afterward that it was the safer for the killing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was never so on prospero, and I would have you understand this before all else, for everything that came after, grew from this one gentle and unlikely route.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prospero did not fear the gift you see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prospero loved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A child born with the sight was not dragged toward the pyre upon my world, but was lifted up instead and named among the blessed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Given over to the keeping of the scholars, to be taught and cherished and made wise.
[SPEAKER_00]: For we held it as the truest of our truths, that those who could perceive the deeper currents, running beneath the surface of things, were not monsters at all, but the natural shepherds of their kin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it came to pass that our leaders were drawn from among our most gifted minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: and those gifted minds were turned not toward conquest or war, as they were on so many other worlds, but toward the long work of learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder whether you can even imagine such a thing now, here in this latent suspicious age of ours, with so much ash on the wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: A whole world that looked upon the very thing the galaxy feared above all others, and chose against all the
[SPEAKER_00]: and we built Tisca to hold that love, and we called it the city of light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its great pyramids rose in tears of silver and glass along the coast, and when the morning sun came across the water and struck them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of the city seemed to take fire without ever burning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lights spilling from fire to silver spire, until a man standing in the streets below could no longer say with any certainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where the stone ended and the radiance began.
[SPEAKER_00]: I walked those streets myself, long ago, when I was young and the world was whole.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the libraries I remember best of all, those endless quiet galleries of gathered knowledge drawn from a thousand worlds and more, whole so vast and so deep that a scholar might lose himself happily within them for the whole length of his life and never once turned to the same page twice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And beneath the city, deeper still, their lay the reflecting caves, where the crystal grew slowly in the dark, and held the light within itself, the way that memory holds the past, perfectly, and without forgetting, and forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We believed in those days that we were raising up something that would endure for ten thousand years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was into this world, on a certain night, that the heavens themselves let fall a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: His gestation capsule descended out of the dark and came at last to rest among us, and the scholars who found him could not have known.
[SPEAKER_00]: for there was no way under heaven that they might have known, that this foundling was the son of the Emperor of mankind himself, scattered far across the void by powers that we had not yet gained the wisdom to fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew only that here before them lay a child of plain and astonishing promise, and so they did with him precisely what Prospero had always done with such children.
[SPEAKER_00]: they gathered him in, they gave him a name, and they began to teach him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The name they gave him was Magnus, and he was red of hair and red of skin, and there has never in all the long ages been another like him, neither before nor since.
[SPEAKER_00]: He learned more swiftly than his tutors could find ways to teach him, so that within a few short years, the pupil had outpaced the master.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then in time had outpaste every master, until there remained no living soul upon all of Prospero, with anything left to teach him.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he had already wandered far beyond the furthest country that the wisest of us had ever so much as dreamed of reaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old coats of the sorcerers who had ruled the city through their long and bickering rivalries for generation upon
[SPEAKER_00]: found themselves at last, almost without ever marking the moment of it, turning their eyes toward this red giant for their guidance, and he gave it to them gladly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He drew the quarreling groups together into one, and he set aside the small old jellacies that had divided us for so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he turned all that scattered and squandered brilliance toward a single shining purpose, which was to make of prospero the greatest seat of knowledge that the galaxy had ever known.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a while, a brief and golden while, that was the very thing we were.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then his true father came at last to find him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with the Emperor, there came also the rest of Magnus' gene sons, the warriors of the 15th Legion, who bore the name the thousand sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is sorrow folded into that name, sorrow that those outside our world never understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: for it was never meant as a boast, but rather as a kind of wound worn openly.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the legion had been dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: A deep floor lay within their very making, a slow curse that we came to call the flesh change, and it took proud in noble warriors and unmade them into mindless and ruined things, melting away the mind in the form alike, until nothing was left, but a horror
[SPEAKER_00]: The numbers had dwindled and dwindled across the years, until scarcely a thousand of them yet remains standing, a thousand sons, and no more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: With their stricken brothers lay down in stasis against the day of a cure that fewer among them any longer dare to believe would ever come.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Magnus found that cure.
[SPEAKER_00]: By means that he never shared, not even with us who loved him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He reached out into the dark and stayed the curse, and woke his sleeping brothers from their long death, that was not death, and so made the broken legion whole again.
[SPEAKER_00]: You may well imagine the gratitude of such sons, you may imagine their love.
[SPEAKER_00]: For here was a father who had reached down into the very pit and drawn his children back from the edge of oblivion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what, I ask you, would such sons not afterwards do for such a father?
[SPEAKER_00]: What warning, however grave, would they not turn from an ignore, if only he should ask it of them?
[SPEAKER_00]: For the Emperor had indeed warned him, when the father in the sun were first reunited, the master of mankind looked deep into magnets, and saw their both his magnificence and his hunger together, and he counseled caution, and he showed his son something of the true nature of the warp.
[SPEAKER_00]: that dark and shoreless sea from which all our gifts were drawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he asked him gently enough to step back from its waters.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Magnus bowed his great head and made his solemn promises and did not mean a single word of any of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the seed of it all, though we did not see it then, for we saw only a golden age laid out before us, a world of light, a legion healed and made home, a beloved primarque who cherished knowledge as dearly as we ourselves cherished it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did not understand, not yet, that the very thing which made us beautiful was the same thing that would in the end destroy us, nor that there is a kind of thirst in the world, which can never be slaked, but only deepens the more that it is given to drink, and that our wisest and most gifted son had already begun, quietly and without a sound, to drown within
[SPEAKER_00]: We were so very proud of what we knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: It never once occurred to us to ask what it might one day cost us to have known it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you must understand that Magnus was never alone in his love of the gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: For there were others among the pre-marks, his brothers, who had also looked upon the psychically gifted among their warriors, and seen in them not a danger to be purged, but a treasure to be kept.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a number of the legions such gifts arose often enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it seemed to these brothers a waste and a cruelty to cast aside a warrior of worth for the simple crime of having been born, seeing further than his fellows.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, with my master Magnus foremost among them, and most ardent of all, they made a place within the legions for such men, and they called it the Liberarias, and the warriors who belong to it, they named Liberarians.
[SPEAKER_00]: and these became the keepers, and the shepherds of the gift within the ranks of the space marines, that the power might be used for the good of the Imperium, and turned away from doing it any harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Emperor, when he was asked, allowed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it seemed to him a wise enough way to bring some order to a thing that would otherwise break out wild, and unwatched among his sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a time the librarians prove their worth a hundred times over, loyal and steadfast, and they won the trust and the welcome of many.
[SPEAKER_00]: But not of all, there were brothers among the primax who could not bring themselves to look upon such warriors with anything but suspicion, and chief among these stood Lehman rass of the space wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: who had been raised upon the cold, deathworld of Fenrus, where every soul bond with the gift was feared as a witch, and dealt with as witches are dealt with on hard worlds.
[SPEAKER_00]: To Ras, a librarian, was no better than a warlock dressed in finer robes, and he said so plainly, for he was never a man to soften a thing he believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was more Tarion of the Death Guard, who had grown up beneath the cruelty of sorcerous tyrants, and hated all such arts with a deep and personal loathing, and who accused Magnus openly and bitterly, of dabbling in the very evils that more Tarion had spent his life learning to despise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was Corvus Corracks of the Ravenguard, who would not so much as set his legion in the field, beside the thousand sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it warns that a quarrel grew up among the sons of the Emperor over this single question, and it festered, and it would not be suathed, until at the last it grew too great and too bitter, to be left to settle itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the Emperor summoned them all to Nikkaya.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was meant to be a reckoning, a great council where the matter might be argued out fully and judged once and for all, and to it came the primax and the high Lords of every order of the Imperium, gathered in their thousands within a vast and ancient amphitheater.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Emperor himself presided over the whole of it, seated high upon his throne above them, and there, before all the assembled might and wisdom of mankind, my master Magnus was put upon his trial.
[SPEAKER_00]: For that, in the end, is what the council of Nicaria truly was, however it was dressed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the trial of Magnus the Red,
[SPEAKER_00]: Mortarian rose and made his accusations, naming Magnus a sorcerer and a dablar in the forbidden, and Magnus rose in his turn to answer them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how he must have spoken my master, with that great voice and that great mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He defended the librarians and recounted the good they had done, and the lives they had saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he made an argument that to my mind has never truly been answered to this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he reminded them all that the Imperium already leaned upon the gifted at every hour of every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: That without the astropaths, there could be no word carried between the stars.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the whole of the Imperium, would force Silent and Blind, and that without the navigators, no ship could cross the warp at all, and every fleet would found her in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were already a civilization built upon the gift, he told them.
[SPEAKER_00]: To condemn it now, was to condemn the very foundations we all stood upon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, I have always thought, a true thing he said, and a wise one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it did not save him,
[SPEAKER_00]: For as the council went on, the evidence of his own continued practice came creeping out, little by little, until it could no longer be hidden, and the emperor's patience, which had been great, came at last to its end, and he passed his judgment, and it was a hard one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The libraries was to be disbanded throughout all the legions,
[SPEAKER_00]: the use of sorcery and psychic power by the space marines was forbidden outright.
[SPEAKER_00]: Save only for the astropaths and the navigators whom the imperium could not live without.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every librarian was to lay down his gift and return in silence to the ordinary battle line of his brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the place of the librarians, the council raised up a new kind of warrior
[SPEAKER_00]: whose task it would be to guard the purity of his legions' faith, and keep his brothers true to the Emperor's word.
[SPEAKER_00]: That alone would have been grief enough, but it was the Emperor's parting word to his son that I have never been able to forget, though I heard it only later, and second hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it has the cold weight of prophecy upon it now that I look back.
[SPEAKER_00]: He warned Magnus before them all, that should he ever again treat with the powers of the warp, then destruction would be visited upon him, and his legions very name would be struck from the records of the Imperium for all time to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same doom, it was whispered, that had already swallowed two of the lost brothers, whose names we are no longer permitted to speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Magnus went home to Prospero, with that warning ringing in his ears, and he was bitter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he was bitter, for he believed in his heart that he had been wronged, that his father had failed to understand him, that a great injustice had been done to him before the eyes of all his brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in his bitterness, he resolved quietly, and in secret, that he would not obey.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gathered his most trusted sorcerers close about him and bound them to him, and together they agreed that they would go on as before, hidden now, careful now but unbroken, that they would keep their studies and their arts alive in the dark, whatever their father had decreed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought I am sure that he was being faithful to something higher.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the saddest part of all.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never once believed himself a traitor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we come to the turning of it all, and I find that even now, after so many long years, I cannot tell this part without sorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: For everything here might so easily have gone another way, and did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: far from Prospero upon a world called Daven.
[SPEAKER_00]: The warmaster Horus lay grievously wounded, and in the hidden places of that world, there were those who took his wounded soul and carried it into the warp, and there the ruinous powers worked upon him and turned him, so that he who had been the brightest and most beloved of all the Emperor's sons,
[SPEAKER_00]: gave himself over to darkness, and to the long ambition of overthrowing his own father.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of this was known.
[SPEAKER_00]: None could have known it.
[SPEAKER_00]: None that is, save one.
[SPEAKER_00]: For my master Magnus, sitting in meditation upon distant prospero, looked out into the warp with his single-seeing eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there he saw it, the bargain Horus had struck to save his own life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The betrayal that was coming, the great and terrible civil war that would soon set brother against brother and drown the galaxy in the blood of its own defenders.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw the deaths of brothers he laughed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw the whole vast shape of the catastrophe before it had yet broken, only one thing the vision without from him, and that was his own fate, which remained dark to him to the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine if you can, the weight that settled upon him then.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had seen the doom of everything, and he was the only soul in all the imperian who knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you have done in his place?
[SPEAKER_00]: I have asked myself that question across more years than I cared to count, and I confess I do not know the answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: For Magnus did the thing that any loving son might do.
[SPEAKER_00]: He resolved to one his father.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here is the tragedy folded inside the tragedy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The honest road, the slow, lawful road of the astropaths, was two uncertain and two slow for a warning of such terrible urgency.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Magnus did not trust it to carry his message true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, he chose instead the swift road.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forbidden road, the very road his father had commanded him never again to walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gathered his greatest sorcerers about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: and together they cast a mighty spell.
[SPEAKER_00]: A working of such power that it could leap across the Gulf of space in an instant and lance the warning straight into the Emperor's own mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: that is the dreadful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The spell flew true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It pierced the wards and the hexes that guarded the Imperial Palace.
[SPEAKER_00]: It drove down through all the deep and secret levels beneath, and its struck home, filling the emperor in a single moment with the whole of Magnus' vision and all the bitan knowledge of Horace's fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Emperor was working in those depths upon a great and secret labor, a project of his own, that he had told to almost no one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Magnus' spell, crashing through the palace's defenses, like a storm through a window, shattered that work to ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wards collapsed, the dark of the warp came pouring in, where it had been so carefully held back.
[SPEAKER_00]: hundreds who labored there, were killed in an instant, dragged screaming into horror.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus believed in the moment of casting that this would be his vindication at last.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought that surely now his father would see the worth of the gift, that surely now, when only sorcery had been swift enough to carry the warning, the old quarrel of Nikkeiah would be set aside and forgiven.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had saved them all, or so he believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He waited for gratitude.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no gratitude.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only wrath.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the emperor saw none of the loving it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw his son's flagrant disobedience, the breaking of a solemn oath, his precious labor smashed.
[SPEAKER_00]: and his servant slain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And worst of all, he saw proof that Magnus had only pretended to lay down his power at Nicar, while practising it in secret all the while.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the warning itself, the very heart of the matter, the emperor cast aside entirely, believing it a lie woven by the dark powers to deceive him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was that the truest warning ever sent in all the long history of
[SPEAKER_00]: and the son who sent it in love was condemned for it as a traitor.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Emperor summoned Lehman Russ, the Wolf King, the very brother who had always mistrusted Magnus most deeply of all, and commanded him to go to Prospero, and bring the rebel primarch to account.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here, you must mark this carefully, Frit is the coolest thread in the whole reef.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Emperor's command was that Magnus be captured, taken alive, brought home in disgrace to face his father's judgment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but brought home living.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not remain so.
[SPEAKER_00]: For Horus, watching from the shadows, where he now worked his ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Saw in all of this a chance to perfect to let slip.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of his father's legions set against one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: What could serve the cause of chaos better than that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, through his own warriors, the sons of Horus, he sent a quiet word to leave and rest, and by some art or argument that I have never fully learned, that word turned the Wolf King's purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mission of capture became a mission of slaughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Russ went to prospero no longer to take his brother, but to break him
[SPEAKER_00]: and the host that gathered for the breaking was a terrible thing to behold.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of the Space Wolves Legion assembled for war, and with them the emperor joined a company of his own custodian guard, the golden warriors of his household.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with them came the sisters of silence, the silent sisterhood, women who were as voids in the warp, against whose very presence no sorcery could stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And trailing behind the war fleet came the grim shapes of the black ships, sent to carry away in chains, any psycho who might yet be living when the killing was done.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were coming for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we, upon prospero, in our city of light, did not know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We slept and we studied, and we kept our quiet faith in our Father and our Primark, and far across the dark the ships drew on toward us, and not one of us heard them coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a thing that happened in those last days that I have never been able to forgive, and never been able to condemn either, and I have turned it over in my heart for longer than you have been alive without ever once finding the bottom of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will tell it to you as plainly as I am able, and you must make of it what your own heart can bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the spell struck the imperial palace and Magnus stood at last within his father's mind and felt the full force of the Emperor's wrath break over him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The veil was torn from his own eyes as well, and he saw the truth of what he had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw that he had been used, all his long search for knowledge, all his desperate reaching after the power to save his legion from the flesh change, all of it had been guided quietly and patiently, by one of the very powers his father had warned him against.
[SPEAKER_00]: The great deceiver, the architect of schemes, who had whispered Magnus toward this exact ruin, one small step at a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: each step seeming wise and good in the moment of its taking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus had believed himself the freest and most knowing of all his brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been a pawn upon another's board from the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does a soul do when it learns a thing like that about itself?
[SPEAKER_00]: When it understands that its greatest gifts were the very leash by which it was led to disaster.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew the fleet was coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have raised the alarm across all of Prospero in a single thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have woken the defenses, summoned the legion to the walls, called his scattered ships home to make a wall of iron in the void above us.
[SPEAKER_00]: he did none of these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, having grasped that the whole catastrophe had been engineered to set Wolf and Sun against one another for the delight of the dark powers, he resolved that he would not give them the slaughter, they hung good for.
[SPEAKER_00]: He laid a veil of silence over the whole of his world, so that his legion drowsed on in ignorance and felt no breath of the doomed ascending.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent his feet away, scattered far from prospero, where it could neither fight nor flee to safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: He bird his worlds throat to the blade, and he held it still, and he called it repentance.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few among us came close to the truth in those final days.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here and there someone stumbled upon a fragment of it, a report half glimpsed, a rumour of ships, a wrongness in the silence, and those few I have come to understand, simply vanished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their memories taken from them, or their lives, so that the great and terrible quiet
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of them often, those disappeared ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they were the only prosperines who died with their eyes open.
[SPEAKER_00]: For myself, and here is my own small confession, the one I have carried longest, I was nobody.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an old scholar bent over old books, and on the last night of the world I knew, I slept.
[SPEAKER_00]: I slept soundly in my bed, in my city of silver and light.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I dreamed of nothing at all, while above me in the dark the ships of my own imperium, slid into their killing places, one by one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not feel it coming, none of us did.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the gift my primar gave us in his shame, a last untrubbled night, bought with the silence that would also be our grave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have wandered ever since, what manner of love that was.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it was love, I am certain of it, Magnus believed with his whole broken heart, that he was doing the only right thing left to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: that by giving up his legion and his world, he was at last being a true son, refusing to dance to the deceivers tune.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what father, what lord, what shepherd, decides upon such a thing on behalf of millions who never asked, never warned, never given the smallest chance to choose their own ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: He condemned us all to atone for his error, and he
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not know if that was the noblest thing he ever did, or the most terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps in the way of all the deepest sorrows, it was both at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came down out of the warp in the last dark hour before the dawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that grey and tender time when a city sleeps most deeply and trusts most fully in the morning to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where a moment before, there had been only the cold familiar stars.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was suddenly a fleet, a great host of ships, hanging in the black above my world, and not one bell rang to mark their coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the watching engines of Prospero, all the layered and patient defenses that should by every right have screamed their warning into the night, the orbital platforms wheeling far above.
[SPEAKER_00]: the great batteries, the cannons sunk deep into the crust of the world to throw fire at any you dared the sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every one of them lay silent and blind and useless as the doom slid past them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus had seen to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: His veil lay soft over all of it, and the killers came on through defences that never so much as stirred.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only the cities themselves kept their own small guard that night, as cities always had, more from the comfort of old habit than from any true fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the thought that an enemy might one day actually reach the surface of prosperer, was a thing so absurd that none of us had ever truly held it in our minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: we had grown safe, we had grown certain, and certainty I have learned is only the last and quiet store that disaster walks through.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the flagship of the Wolf King opened her guns, and the first lines of fire came down like cold light scored into the living face of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: drawn there with a slow and dreadful patience and a heartbeat later the whole of the fleets spoke at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I would have you set aside whatever you have read of that morning in the cold reckoning that came after.
[SPEAKER_00]: The after-action reports, the tallyes of ordnance and tunnage and time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bloodless language in which great horrors are written down, so that those who were never there may file them and forget them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was not in the void, watching through an august screen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was on the ground, I was in the city, in the streets of Tiska.
[SPEAKER_00]: An old man among my own people, and I will tell you what it was truly to be there.
[SPEAKER_00]: For that is a thing no report has ever held, and no report ever will.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of it was the wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: A hot wind, when no hot wind had any business blowing, at that grey and gentle hour, came pressing down out of the sky, upon the hole of the sleeping city.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the air grows thick and strange and heavy, in the last moments before a great storm breaks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it carried upon it a smell I had never known in all my long years, and would
[SPEAKER_00]: Not in 10,000 years of trying, a smell of scorched metal and burning oil, the rank and accurate stink of the heavens themselves catching fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the static, it leapt and crackled between the tops of the great pyramids, sparking from one silver spire to the next and the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: dancing along all the high places of the city of light, as though the towers had begun to whisper to one another in their fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the low clouds above us, the soft grey clouds, began to glow from somewhere deep within.
[SPEAKER_00]: Litt by a sick and rising radiance that had no name.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember standing alone in the street with my old heart, hammering against my ribs, not yet understanding.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see, not yet able to put a shape to it, knowing only in the deep marrow of my bones,
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the sound reached us, and I understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: A crash of thunder, without any lightning to father it, rolling across the hole of the sky at once, and behind it, the long, terrible shrieking of things falling faster than sound out of the high air.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that men and women, who had been sleeping peacefully in their beds, were flung from them by the shaking of the very stones beneath.
[SPEAKER_00]: and out beyond the edge of the city, where the green country met the sea, the first great lance of fire from the fleet above, came down and struck the earth, and the ground leapt up to meet it, and the morning, that last ordinary morning, the last morning of all the world I had ever known, ended forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: by every reckoning under heaven, that should have been the death of Tisca in a single hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to understand the scale of what fell upon us, for it is hard to credit even now.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire that came down upon the city in those first dreadful minutes was enough to level
[SPEAKER_00]: Enough to scour a whole continent, down to bear and blackened and smoking rock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Enough to wipe the very name of a place off the face of a world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It should have been the end of us before we had even properly woken.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet Tisker endured, the city of light stood through it, and it stood not because of any wall of metal, nor any engine of war, nor any shield raised up by the cold cleverness of machines, but because of a shield woven from nothing more, and nothing less, than the joint and gathered minds of living men,
[SPEAKER_00]: High in the burning sky, unseen by any eye below, the sorcerers of the raptor occult, reached up with all their will together and caught the falling heavens upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's with the strongest such shields that any city in all the vast imperium of man could ever have boasted.
[SPEAKER_00]: harder than the thickest armor ever forged, more unyielding by far than layer upon layer of the common void shields that lesser worlds set their faith in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they spread that invisible roof of pure will above us, and took the full and annihilating weight of the bombardment upon themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they held.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through strength of mind alone, a handful of my people held the death of an entire world at bay.
[SPEAKER_00]: But oh my friend, that shield was never free, nothing in this universe of ours is ever free.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the dearest things of all are paid for in the coin we can least afford to spend.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shield above Tisker was bought with souls, those who held it were burning themselves away to do it, pouring out their very lives the way a man might pour out water from a flask onto a fire, giving and giving of themselves to keep the killing light from
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not enough simply to be strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had to keep being strong, moment after moment after moment, with no rest and no relief, and no end of it in sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holding fast long past the point where there was anything left in them to hold with.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have come to believe, in all the long years I have had to turn it over, that more of my people died in those high and silent places of the mind, that morning, than ever felt a boat or blade down in the burning streets, it was a massacre that no one saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no wounds to show for it, no bodies broken open, no blood upon the stones.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only warriors of the mind who simply went out, one after another, like candles guttering down to nothing in a cold and endless draft.
[SPEAKER_00]: One moment a soul was there, straining upward, pouring out everything it had.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next it was gone, spent utterly, and another took its place at the shield and began the same slow surrender.
[SPEAKER_00]: I find myself thinking even now of one among them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a hero, I do not even know if such a one truly existed, or whether my old heart has simply made him up across the lonely centuries to have someone to grieve for.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I imagine him all the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some ordinary gifted young prosperine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scasely more than a boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of quiet studious lad, I might have passed a hundred times in the galleries of the libraries, without ever once marking his face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody's son, somebody's whole world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I imagine what it was for him, up there in the silence at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not glory, not the bright-clean heroism of the songs, but acquired and agonized endurance, the unbearable strain of holding, and holding, and holding, while everything in him cried out to stop, while he felt himself burning down toward the wick.
[SPEAKER_00]: Knowing surely that to let go even for an instant was to let the fire fall upon the city he loved, and then holding on past even that, past the place where there was anything left of him at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not know my name, and I will never know his.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the part I cannot make my peace with, though I have tried.
[SPEAKER_00]: They saved us, those young souls in the high places, and the ones they saved never even felt the saving.
[SPEAKER_00]: We never knew down in the streets how near the fire came to us, or who it was that stood between us and our ending, and bought us a few more hours with the whole of their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a particular loneliness in that, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: The loneliest death there is, to pour yourself out completely to spare others a doom, they will never so much as know they escaped, to die unseen, unthinked, unnamed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that strangers might go on living in a peace they will always believe, was simply theirs by right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have wept for them, more than for almost anyone else, in all this long and sorrowful tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those nameless people who held up the sky, and I do not think the Imperium that came to kill us, ever spared them so much as a single thought, and somewhere in the dying city below them, my master watched it all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not see him in that hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was nobody, an old scholar cowering in a doorway while the world came apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have heard the truth of its sins, from those who stood near him, and I believe them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus the red stood and looked out upon the lightstorm, as it blistered and burst across the sky above his beautiful city.
[SPEAKER_00]: the city he had raised up as the seat of all our learning, and as he watched the land beyond the walls, begin to burn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The deep forests he had walked in, along with his thoughts, the wild grasslands, all the unspoiled and gentle country that had been the quiet glory of our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: A single tear fell from his one good eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: The skies turned a deep and bloody orange as the burning rounds said, even the clouds are light.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forests went to ash, the grasslands blazed from horizon to horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the space of a few short minutes, all the green and living country around the city of light was unmade, and remade into a wasteland of fire, and smoke, and ruin, that would never bloom again.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the desolation of prosperer, and my master did not live so much as a finger to stop it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he understood it now you see.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the thing I have always had to hold in my mind, alongside my grief, the thing that makes it so much harder to bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let it burn because he believed in the depths of his broken heart, that he had earned every flame of it, that here, falling from the sky in fire, was his father's answer to his disobedience at last.
[SPEAKER_00]: made plain in a language that needed no words, and could not be misunderstood.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he bowed his great head beneath it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He accepted it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the tears come, and he let his world die around him, and he did not raise his hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so it was that on that one terrible morning, my people fought two battles at once, though only one of them was ever written down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below, the young sorcerers of the Reptora poured out their lives to hold the sky up and saved everything they could.
[SPEAKER_00]: Above them, the greatest of us all stood weeping and chose to save nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one was an act of love, and the other, an act of penance.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I have never been able to decide which of the two was the more terrible, only that both in their own way were a kind of surrender and that both broke my heart in the very same hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the fire from above at last fell silent, we breathed, those of us still living.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the space of a few heartbeats, we dared to think the worst had passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were fools to think it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bombardment had only been the knock upon the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the door was to be opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came down through the burning sky in their thousands, drop ships and assault boats and gunships beyond counting, falling toward us in dark waves, and behind them the heavier craft that bore their war engines and their armour.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shield that had saved us from the fire could not save us from this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in any case,
[SPEAKER_00]: What use is a roof against the rain?
[SPEAKER_00]: When the storm has already let itself inside the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of their land in craft to reach us was an enormous grey thing marked with the image of twin wolves upon its blunt prowl, and it did not so much land, as smash its way down into the eastern quarter of the city, into the old district we called Old Tiska, blasting a path for itself, with missile and cannon fire before it ever touched the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its ramps fell open.
[SPEAKER_00]: and out of it, first of all the invaders, ever to set foot upon the soil of Prospero, came Lehman Rass himself, the Wolf King, with two great wolves howling at his sides, and a score of his mightiest warriors at his back.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood upon our broken streets, and he threw back his head, and he roared up at the ruin his fleet had made of our sky, and he was glad of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that is the thing I have never been able to forgive in him, more than all the killing, not that he came to destroy us, but that some part of him rejoiced to do it, and my people may they be remembered, did not simply stand aside and let him walk in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Understand, none of them believed they could win, none of them could have believed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The citizen militias of Tisca, who took up what poor arms they could find, and climbed to the rooftops and the high windows, they knew surely they knew that against the warriors of a space marine legion, they were as children with sticks, but to let such an enemy stroll unchallenged into the city of light, to offer no defense of the place that had
[SPEAKER_00]: and all our long peace, was a thing too shameful for them to bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they fought.
[SPEAKER_00]: They fired down from the rooftops, ordinary men and women of my world, scholars and artisans and the children of scholars and artisans, and they died for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do not think a single one of them changed the course of that morning by so much as a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: High above them, the skyguard rose to meet the enemy in the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every squadron they had, those swift, disc-shaped flyers of theirs, came screaming up from the southern hangars, armed with lance and missile.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a while, the sky over Tiska was a wild and frantic thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or gunfire, and streaking smoke and aircraft falling in flames, as our pilots threw themselves against the gunships of the wolves with a courage that outran or hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could not hold the air any more than the militias could hold the streets, but they tried, by the throne, how they tried.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the ground, the soldiers of the prospering god, the spy
[SPEAKER_00]: well-drowned and well-armed and braver than anyone had any right to ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: Move to take the weight of the estates upon themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a young commander among them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A fear, the heir of one of our oldest and finest houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: A gifted officer, who set his men upon the high places, overlooking the burning port, with all the skill that any war school could have taught him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He chose his ground well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He positioned his soldiers with real tactical wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: It availed him nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lehman Russ and his wolves fell upon a fierce position, and overran it, in less time than it takes to tell of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two minutes no more, and that brave young man and his careful defence were simply gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweeped away like a sandcastle before
[SPEAKER_00]: And elsewhere in the city, another captain, Vithara, set his command in the vestibule of the oldest gallery of art and sculpture on all of Prospero, the Cretis Gallery, and there among the beautiful made things of 10,000 years, his soldiers fought and fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not know what became of him in the end, so many of those stories simply stop, with no one left who saw the ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, at last, the true defenders of Prospero deployed, and the whole shape of the battle changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thousand suns came forth into the burning city.
[SPEAKER_00]: My master's warriors, the gene sons of Magnus, clad in their deep crimson armour, and where they stood the route, became a war again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The spyaguard had been swept aside in the opening storm, but the thousand suns rallied what was left, and would not let it become a simple slaughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: They drew a line through the heart of the city.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thin line of crimson warriors linking the six great pyramids of Tisca, one to the next, a ring of defenders, with the central square at its heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind that line, the last hope of my world, true breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember the water around the southern most of the pyramids, and how it was covered over with pages, loose pages, drifting and sodden, the torn out leaves of countless ancient books floating upon the dark water, and slowly burning even as they floated.
[SPEAKER_00]: All our gathered wisdom, all the knowledge we had loved more than safety, coming apart upon the water in the firelight.
[SPEAKER_00]: A whole civilization of learning, dissolving page by page, while its keepers died to hold the line a little longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the thousands sons were dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: For all their skill and all their armor, they were grievously outnumbered, few of them left standing against more than three times that count of space wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Wolf King's fury moved through them, like a size, through standing grain.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were being killed, and they could see that they were being killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, at the last, they made the choice that I think they had been straining against from the very first moment, the only choice that might yet turn the tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: They unleashed their sorcery.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had held it back, you understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had fought as warriors, with bolt and blade, because their primarx hole purpose had been to show the galaxy that they were not what they had been accused of being.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now with death closing over them, they reached out into the warp and loosed the full black weight of their arts upon their enemies.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Space Wolves were thrown back, and great numbers of those howling warriors of Fenris, were slain by powers they could neither see nor strike.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a moment, a single bright and bitter moment, it seemed the day might yet be saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that very moment, in the act of saving themselves, my people proved their accusers' right,
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you see the cruelty of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you see the trap that had been laid all those years before at Nicaria and beyond?
[SPEAKER_00]: The Imperium had come to Prospero to punish sorcerers.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so long as the thousand sons did not use their sorcery, they remained in some final reckoning, innocent, soldiers defending their home, no different from any other.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the price of that innocence was death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when at last, with the blades of their throats, they reached for the only weapon that could save them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They ceased in that instant to be the wronged, and became the very thing the invaders had named them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Warlocks, witches, sorcerers fighting with forbidden arts.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could die as innocents, or they could fight as the guilty.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no third road, then never had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole long tragedy had been built so that they could not be.
[SPEAKER_00]: and as if the universe itself wished to punish them for the choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was then that the true horror of the imperial host revealed itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had come with the wolves a silent order of women, and the thousand sons had not been able to see them.
[SPEAKER_00]: For these women cast no presence at all into the warp.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were as holes in the world, as absences in the place where every other soul gives
[SPEAKER_00]: The sisters of silence, the nomadans untouched and untouchable, and they had been moving among the battle unseen all the while, drawing closer.
[SPEAKER_00]: They gave no war cry, they made no challenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: They simply came, and where they came, the warped self went quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the sorcery of the thousand suns hoped and died.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dark clouds of their magic burned away like fog before a hard wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sorcerers staggered, clutching at their throats, the words of their conjurations dying half spoken upon their tongues, blood leaking from beneath their homes, their hands curling into useless claws, as the power was simply switched off within them, stolen, silenced.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that moment of helplessness, the sisters fell upon them with their swords, and the space wolves surged forward gladly alongside them to take what the silence had given.
[SPEAKER_00]: My people died in their hundreds in that breaking, gagging on spells that would not come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cut down with their greatest weapon turned dead in their hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: They rallied even from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will say it because it is true and because they earn the saying of it, even with the silence laid upon them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thousand sons gathered themselves and turned and concentrated their fury upon the sisters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until they had thinned that silent order enough to draw breath and called their power back to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even unmade, they would not simply lie down and be slaughtered, but the rallying could not last, for the wolf king was coming, and worse than the wolf king was coming with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wolves had brought their own monsters.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were among the space wolves, certain warriors who carried a curse in their blood, much as my own people carried theirs, a curse that twisted them into something more beast than man, all fang and talon and mindless savagery.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wolf and the mutant sons of the wolf kings own floor gene line, and the wolves loose these creatures upon us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have always thought there was a special cruelty in that, almost a mockery that the legions sent to punish my people for their corruption, should fling their own corrupted brothers into the fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Monsters set against monsters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mutants come to slay the mutated.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wolf and torrent to the crimson line with a fury that nothing could match, shrugging off wounds that should have killed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their claws shearing through armour as if it were cloth, and the thousand sands recoiled from them in something close to disgust, that the proud wolves would stoop to this, would unleash such degenerate horrors and call it justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: but disgust does not hold a line.
[SPEAKER_00]: The roofen punched through, and where they tore the gap open.
[SPEAKER_00]: The space was, and the golden custodians, of the Emperor's own household poured in after, and the crimson ring around the pyramids buckled and broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Warriors were surrounded and huned down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The howling of the beasts rose and rose until it seemed the whole dying city was screaming with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the survivors, the best and the bravest who were left, fell back along a great causeway over the water toward the last refuge they had.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pyramid of photep, my master's own tower, were the last of our knowledge and the last of our people had gathered to wait for the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: The howling followed them every step of the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, high above, at the very edge of despair,
[SPEAKER_00]: For Magnus had come at last to the defense of his sons, he had borne the silence as long as he could bear it, had let his world burn, and his people die in the name of his repentance.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a limit, even to a primaxoro, and when the howling of the beasts rose over the dying of his children, that limit was reached.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came forth and he was a glory and a terror to behold.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was cladded golden armor and his wild red hair blazed about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: with the fire of the power he carried, and that power was greater now than anything his flesh had ever held before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So great that it had begun to burn through him, to remake him even as he walked.
[SPEAKER_00]: His staff throughout arcs of lightning that tore the enemy's war engines apart in thunder, and when he turned his single eye upon the warriors of the Wolf King,
[SPEAKER_00]: the ones who met that gaze simply died.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their minds undone in an instant, by the unbearable depth of what they glimpse looking back at them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only Rast did not flinch, only the Wolf King and his two great wolves stood unshaken before that terrible regard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am told, and there was a light in Rast's eyes, as he looked upon my master, that was almost like joy, the joy of a hunter, who has at last cornered the only quarry worthy of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before the brothers closed, Madness did one last thing for his children.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it is the reason that any of us are here at all to remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: He reached into the very flow of time and slowed it, so that the whole roaring battle hung suspended around him like insects caught in amber.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the still moment, he had made, he turned to his most beloved son, his greatest sorcerer, the one called Arrimand, and he gave him his final commands.
[SPEAKER_00]: He bad Achryman gather the survivors and lead them within the pyramid of Fotep, where they waited a faithful servant bearing a gift beyond price.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Magnus reached down and touched the green stone, the Jade Scarab, set into the center of Achryman's breastplate, and he told him that every warrior of the Legion bore its like.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that when the moment came, Achryman would understand what it was for, and would pour all his strength and all his brother's strength into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Achryman did not understand how could he, but he obeyed as a loving son, obeys even when he is afraid, and he withdrew into the pyramid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind him came the last of the thousand sons, their crimson armour gone black with the falling
[SPEAKER_00]: Within those wars, Achriman found the servant who awaited him.
[SPEAKER_00]: holding up a chest, and when he opened it, he found an old book, its cover cracked and read with age, and he knew it at once for what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the great book of all my master's knowledge, the whole summation of everything Magnus had ever learned of sorcery and the warp, the most precious thing the Legion possessed, and in that moment, our Freemann understood the truth that the gift carried within it.
[SPEAKER_00]: that Magnus did not expect to walk away from the Jewel that was coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was passing on his life's work because he did not intend to live to keep it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And outside, in the restored rush of time, the two brothers met.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot give you that jewel as it truly was, for no mortal mind was made to hold it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was fought on every plane at once, body against body, mind against mind, soul against soul, and the lightning leapt up from the ground around them in a cage of fire that shut them away even from the armies that had come to watch their lords contend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Russ reigned down blows that shattered Magnus' breastplate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus answered with a cold fire that cracked the Wolf King's armour and set his hair a light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frostblade met Golden Axe.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wield and grappled beneath the sky, gone mad with storm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two demigods bending the whole of their near limitless strength toward the single purpose of destroying one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the world shook with every exchange.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus drove his fist into his brother's chest and broke it open.
[SPEAKER_00]: Raskoth my master's arm and snapped it into ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: A blade of pure thought slid from Magnus' other arm, and punched clean through the Wolf King's body, and rust-bellowed his agony to the heavens, and his walls added their howling to his cry.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two great beasts leapt upon Magnus, and fasten their jaws into his legs, and he's smoked one of them down with a blow that surely shattered its skull, and tore the other from him with a thought,
[SPEAKER_00]: and then a flare of black light, and rust cried out, and his blinded blade lashed out, and struck the one thing in all the galaxy that Magnus could least afford to lose.
[SPEAKER_00]: It found his eye, his terrible farceeing eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus ruled away, one hand clutched to his ruined face, and rust, broken himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bleeding from a dozen mortal wounds, but a brawler to the last and quick to see his moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close the distance and seize my master about the waste, as a wrestler sees his man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lifted him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He raised Magnus the Red, the greatest siker ever born of the Emperor's blood, high above his own head, and he brought him down across his knee.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he broke his brother's back.
[SPEAKER_00]: They say the sound of it tore through the heart of every thousand sun still living, that across the whole of the dying city, the warriors felt it as a wound in their own bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Wolf King howled his triumph to the blackened sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let his broken brother fall to the mud, and he brought up his blade to take Magnes' head and end it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Magnes was not done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even broken, even blinded, even with the blade descending toward his neck, my master had one last working left in him, and it was the greatest he ever made.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the last of his strength, he turned his ruined head and found Ahriman, with what remained of his sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he spoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my last gift to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he whispered the old words of power, and his body came apart, not slain, but unmayed, undone by his own will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its whole structure dissolved in a single word, so that russes blades swept down through empty air.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all the vast power that had been magnus the red poured out of him and into his sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Surging first and most fiercely into Achryman, who gasped as he felt it flood him, and knew suddenly and completely what the Jade Scarab was for.
[SPEAKER_00]: He pressed his hands to the green stone at his breast.
[SPEAKER_00]: He pictured its twin upon the chest of every one of his brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the power within him reached out through all those scattered stones, and seized hold of the whole city of light, and lifted it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tiska was torn from the face of Prospera.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of it, the surviving pyramids, the libraries that yet stood, the last of the thousand sons, the last frightened remnant of our people sheltering within Fotep's walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it was ripped up out of real space and flung through the warp itself, carried away from the burning corpse of our world and set down at last in the one place beyond the imperiums reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within the eye of terror upon the demon world.
[SPEAKER_00]: that would come to be called the planet of the sorcerers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their all are preserved knowledge would be kept safe in its libraries forever, and their thousand sons would be saved from their enemies.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is how we lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the only reason any of us drew another breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus gave the very last of himself to snatch his children out of death and carry them somewhere the wolves could not follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you must understand what it cost, and I do not mean only his life, for a primarke is not so easily ended as that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were saved, yes, we were carried into the eye, and the price of our salvation was that we passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that single moment, out of the Imperion, and out of the light, and into the keeping of the very powers that had engineered the whole of our ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus had spent his world, and his body, and his place, at his father's side, to deny the deceiver its slaughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the deceiver, in the end, took us all anyway, simply by a slower road.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were saved at the cost of our souls.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have had a very long time to weigh that bargain.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am still not certain who truly wanted
[SPEAKER_00]: When it was over, when the fires had burned down, and the silence came back to the place where my world had been, the counting began, as it always does after such things.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Imperion is fond of its numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the number they set against Prospero was 30 million dead, or near enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: 30 million souls, the greater part of them, ordinary folk, men and women and children, who had never cast a spell and or wish to, who had been guilty of nothing at all, saved being born.
[SPEAKER_00]: upon a world their masters had decided to erase.
[SPEAKER_00]: The records that were kept afterward placed the number of survivors from among prosperous people at zero.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: A clean, round, final nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was not quite true of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a few of us, a scattering carried off with the Legion.
[SPEAKER_00]: A handful who had been abroad in the galaxy when the end came, the smallest remnant of a whole branch of mankind.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as a people, we were finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: But whatever Prospero had been, that gentle, foolish, beautiful experiment, that one world in all the galaxy that had chosen to love the gift instead of fearing it, that thing was gone, and it would never come again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reflecting caves where the crystal had held the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: The endless quiet libraries, the silver pyramids catching fire at dawn without burning.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it ash now, or worse than ash, scattered across the place where a world used to turn.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not defeated you understand, a defeated people still exists, we were unmade.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Legion fared little better in the reckoning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of all the thousands of Magnus' gene sons who had stood upon Prospero, only a little over a thousand walked away from it living.
[SPEAKER_00]: and even some of those were lost in the very hour of their salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the moment the fighting ended, the old curse came creeping back.
[SPEAKER_00]: The flesh changed, that ancient terror my master had once cured.
[SPEAKER_00]: We turn now with the fall of his protection, and brothers who had survived, bolt and blade, and the silence of the new maidens began to twist and ruin before their comrades eyes, until they had to be put down by their own.
[SPEAKER_00]: So few, after everything, so very few.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the records of the Imperium, the thousand sons were simply struck out, listed as destroyed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their name erased exactly as the emperor had sworn at Nicar, that it would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a time the galaxy believed the 15th Legion had ceased to exist altogether.
[SPEAKER_00]: As for my master, death is not so simple a thing for one such as he.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnus had given up his flesh willingly, and in the giving of it he passed beyond the reach of mortality entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: He rose again on the far side of his unmaking, not as the primarque had known, but as something else, something weaved in the light of stars and the wild fire of the warp.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of all, the demon primax, lifted up by the very power that had used him to a place among its own.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Deceiver had what it had always wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: The greatest psycher ever borne of the Emperor's blood, now belonged, body and soul and all.
[SPEAKER_00]: to the architect of his ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have wondered sometimes whether Magnus understood in that moment that he had lost the last throw of the game, that even his final sacrifice made to deny the deceiver it's prize had been folded somehow into the deceiver's design.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he must have, I think that knowing is part of what he is now.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the bitterest thing of all was still to come, and it came not from our enemies but from one of our own, from love, and from desperation, which together have wrought more sorrow in the galaxy than all the malice ever has.
[SPEAKER_00]: For when we were safe upon the planet of the sorcerers, the old curse did not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: The flesh changed, spread through the survivors, like a tide, threatening to take every last one of us, to turn the whole saved remnant of the legion into mindless jibbering horrors, after all we had endured to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Achryman, my master's most beloved son, who carried now the great book and the great
[SPEAKER_00]: could not bear to watch his brothers be unmayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the siege of terror, he gathered a secret cabal of the most gifted sorcerers left to us, and together they worked a great and terrible spell.
[SPEAKER_00]: The working that the galaxy would come to call the rubric of Ariman, meant to hold the curse forever and save what remained of the legion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the horror of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the saving fell only upon those who had the strength of will to weather it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The true sorcerers, whose powers it did not diminish, but rather magnified beyond all former measure.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the rest, for the great mass of ordinary battle brothers who had no gift of sorcery, who were warriors and nothing more.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rubric did a different thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their bodies crumbled away into dust within their armour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their souls were caught and sealed inside the empty suits.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every joint locked fast by the spell, so that what had been living men became hollow or tumotons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Animate armour filled with nothing but ash, and a trapped and dreaming soul, bound to march and fight at their master's word through a sleep without waking, and without end.
[SPEAKER_00]: the rubric eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are called now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have stood among them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have looked into the eyeslits of warriors I once knew and found nothing looking back, only a faint and distant glimmer, like a candle seen through deep water.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last ember of a man drowning forever inside his own war plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ahri Man had meant to save them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had loved them, and he had reached out to save them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had condemned the better part of them to a fate I would not wish upon my worst enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Magnus learned of what his son had done, his grief and his fury were terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he very nearly slew Ahri Man for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and yet he could not, in the end, fully regret the power the working had unlocked, and so he exiled his most beloved son instead, cast him out to wander the galaxy forever, in search of the understanding he had reached for, and not quite grasped.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our Creman wanders still, they say.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is wandering even now, somewhere out beyond these wars, chasing a wisdom that always
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the inheritance we bought with our salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you see it now?
[SPEAKER_00]: You who asked me for the whole account.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will not pretend we were not.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am alive to tell you of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: When by every right, I should be a smear of ash on a dead world, 10,000 years gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: But look at the shape us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our world is destroyed and our people extinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our primarke belongs to the dark powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The greater part of our brothers are dust sealed in armor, dreaming their endless dream of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those of us who kept our minds and our flesh kept them by giving away the one thing the Imperium could never have taken from us by fire or by blade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our souls freely surrendered, in exchange for a little more time in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of that gentle world that loved the gift when all others feared it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of how proud we were of what we knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the great and final lesson of Prospero is the coolest one there is.
[SPEAKER_00]: that there are kinds of saving that cost more than dying ever could, and that a soul made damn itself most surely not through malice or weakness, but through love and through the desperate reaching wish to keep the ones it loves from harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: We knew so much on prosperer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We knew almost everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We never learned that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there, the old man set down his pen, for a long while he did not move at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lamps had burned low while he wrote, and the amber light had grown soft and dim at the edges of the desk, and the carpet is elbow, had long since gone cold and stopped its steaming, forgotten in the deep current of remembering.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside the heavy curtains, the strange sky went on shifting through its slow and hungry colours.
[SPEAKER_00]: In different as it had always been, and the great libraries breathed their quiet breath in the dark, and the city that was not Tisca, and would always be Tisca hung upon the tides of the sea of souls, as it had hung for 10,000 years and more.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sat with the weight of the whole telling settling over him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way it always did, the way the cold settled up through the old stone into his bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had set it all down at last, the true account, the one that flinched from nothing, the world that had loved the gift when all others feared it, the red giant who had risen among them and made them great.
[SPEAKER_00]: The warning sent in love and answered in fire, the silent sacrifice and the shield held up by the souls of his people, the brother who broke the brother across his knee, and the saving that had cost them everything a soul can be asked to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had told it true.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had promised himself that much, and he had kept the promise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he found now that the keeping of it had left him very tired, and very old, and strangely at peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not know whether the young librarian who had asked it of him would understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: The inheritors were born to this place after all.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had never known anything but the eye and the endless quest and the slow-cold company of the rubric in the halls.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had never walked the streets of a living world at dawn, never read in a library that was not also.
[SPEAKER_00]: A tomb never loved a thing simply because it was beautiful, and not because it was all that remained.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the telling would only be words to such a one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the grief in it would find no soil to take root in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He hoped otherwise.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had set it down hoping otherwise, hoping that somewhere in the long account a single line might catch.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a seed catches in a crack in the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And remind even one of them that they were not always what they had become.
[SPEAKER_00]: That before the dust in the damnation and the sealed and dreaming armor, their forebears had been a gentle people, who had wanted nothing in all the galaxy, but to know things, and to keep what they knew, and to be left in peace to love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole of the sorrow, when you came down to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that they had been wicked, they had not been wicked, they had been curious and proud and loving and unlucky, and those softer failings had damned them every bit as surely as Manus, ever damned anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: more surely perhaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: For malice at least knows what it is, while love does not, and goes on believing itself good right up until the moment the world burns down around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old man rose slowly, his joints protesting the long hours in the chair, and crossed to the window, and after a moment's hesitation, he drew the curtain back, the smallest fraction, and looked out, as he so rarely allowed himself to do, upon the impossible sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was terrible, as it was always terrible, but he made himself look
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent the night looking unflinchingly at far worse things than a sky, and he would not turn away from this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere out beyond that shifting light, lay the place where a green world had once turned beneath an honest sun, where forests had grown, and grasslands had blazed gold in the wind, and silver towers had caught the morning fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Ash now, it had been Ash for 10,000 years, but he had walked there once when he was young, and he carried it still, every stone and every page of it, in the one library that could never be burned and never be sealed and never be carried off through the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: the small and stubborn library of an old man's memory, which would keep faith with the city of light until the very last day of his unnaturally long life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps, if there was any mercy left, anywhere in the wide and grieving galaxy, for a little while beyond it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the curtain for closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gathered the pages he had written, and squared their edges with his thin and careful hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he laid the masside for the one who had asked, and he put out the lamps one by one, until only the last and warmest of them remained.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the old man, who remembered Tiska, sat down again in the gentle amber dark,