730. Listen

Before he came, the Khan had imagined more than a dozen different kinds of conversation.

Some where he was treated with courtesy, some where he was left out in the cold—but none of them could possibly have been like this.

He drank milk tea from Chogoris, the taste of the vast grasslands bursting again and again across his tongue. The flavor of home had been brought before him by means he could not begin to understand. After entering the Webway and hunting without cease for ten thousand years, Jaghatai Khan finally felt the urge to weep.

Never had he wanted so badly to go back and look upon it once more.

—But he could not. At least, not now.

The people of his homeland were people; did that mean the people in the rest of the Empire were not? Across a galaxy filled with wailing, there were still many places waiting for him and his Scions to save them. The Khan had always been a man of clear reason, yet in this moment he could not help feeling a little hatred for himself.

Why could he not be a little more selfish? Abuse his power for his own ends. No one would say anything.

Unfortunately, he was destined not to be that sort of man.

The outside world knew very little of Jaghatai Khan, and misunderstood him greatly. Many people even wrongly took him for a barbarian. They would never know what wisdom this Primarch possessed, nor what resolve.

Setting down the empty teacup, the Khan slowly spoke in a hoarse voice. "Before this conversation begins, I must thank you for what you have done. Perhaps it is a trivial thing to you, but to a man who has been parted from his homeland for so long, it is truly