I Could Never Stand Beside the Emperor

The wisdom revealed within the Source Blood Repository made Fabius Bile's heart pound with fear.

His fingers trembled slightly as he stared in disbelief at the power permeating those sacred genetic sequences.

At that moment, Fabius Bile finally unraveled the mystery that had lingered in his heart.

Why were the Primarchs he had cloned no different from the true Primarchs in either genes or memories, yet always incapable of matching the genuine article?

Flesh was not everything that made a Primarch. Fabius looked at the power seeping from the Source Blood Repository.

The Source Blood Repository did not merely contain the sequences of the twenty-one Gene-Primarchs. It also stored samples of twenty Warp entities' power.

Fabius extracted a trace of one of them.

Like fire, like ice, like howling wolf packs, like northern blizzards, like the kraken of the deep sea, like molten colossi in the depths of the earth, like the king of the dead leading the Wild Hunt in late autumn.

It was a primal, savage current of thought—the embodiment of a world of ice, fire, and colossal beasts; a fascinating Golden Age experiment in reconstructing ancient myths.

Fabius vaguely saw ancient memories. He saw Golden Age psykers and researchers standing upon a barren world covered in ice and snow.

On that planet, they completed the reconstruction of ancient myths, awakening humanity's primitive worship of natural phenomena—ice and fire, storms and mountains, beasts and thunder—and drew that power down from the Warp.

Then—

Fabius watched humans let out savage screams, watched manes grow from their bodies, claws sprout from their hands and feet, and watched them become wild wolves upon the snowfields.

He saw gods born in the heavens, raising goblets as they gave wild laughter. He saw colossal beasts born in the seas, wraiths sprouting from the