This Was All the Choice of Numerology

"What?"

Szarekh stared in disbelief at his arm and the Scepter of Eternal Glory before him.

Weapons and bodies forged from Living Metal would not gather even a speck of dust over sixty million years. How could they suddenly rust?

Though the C'tan had deceived the Silent King back then, what they had truly played with was wordplay. The eternity they had promised Szarekh had indeed been fulfilled.

Some C'tan had even insisted, as Szarekh shattered them, that they had given the Necrontyr exactly the eternity they had promised.

Yet now, eternity itself had developed a problem.

"I heard you call the False Emperor an old salted corpse who toyed with sorcery?"

"Then what are you? A rusty skeleton who toys with technology?"

A mocking voice, cold as rain clouds, rang out beneath the veil of reality. The trembling of wing cases echoed across the barren land, while scale dust fell from the empyrean like raindrops.

Rolling toxic gas swept across the earth like a tide. A cold scythe tore through the veil of reality, its hood fluttering in the chill wind of the material universe, a gaunt face vaguely visible beneath its mask.

The Emperor's fourteenth son, the Nurgle Demon Primarch, the Lord of Clouds, the great sage and supreme master of numerology—Mortarion—had descended into the physical universe.

Mortarion looked down disdainfully at the Silent King before him.

As a traitor Primarch, Mortarion hated the Master of Mankind, hated his own Gene-father, hated that man who called himself the Emperor.

He hated that man, believing him to be nothing more than another tyrant corrupted by power.

He also believed that although the man claimed to love all humanity, he had never loved any specific person, nor any specific people. He had tried to tame Mortarion, just as Mortarion's adoptive