A Psychic Videotape (Finale)

Perturabo bent down and laid his brother's corpse on the ground. Then he slowly sat cross-legged, like a weary old man.

Yet in the process, his unique suit of power armor, handcrafted by himself, let out a mournful groan. Sigismund stopped behind him and looked closely, only to see a terrible gash in the back of the armor that had completely breached its defenses.

Long and ragged, impossibly deep. Yet what seeped from the wound and dripped from either end of the gash was no longer blood, but pus.

Sigismund understood at once who had left that wound.

"You fought well," the Lord of Iron said.

His voice was calm and hollow. It did not sound like the voice Sigismund remembered—Perturabo's voice, as he remembered it, had never sounded so...

Sigismund did not know how to describe it either, so he remained silent.

The Adeptus Custodes moved back and forth around them, entering from outside and continuously carrying heavy objects into this dimly lit room. Its walls were stone and its roof was mud, utterly unremarkable, and it had no business existing upon a fragment of Terra as vital to the Imperium as the Astronomican Hall.

But Sigismund understood that their work was now the most important thing—only once they had finished this primitive transport could the thing that had brought both him and the Lord of Iron here truly begin to function.

Perturabo continued slowly.

"Although this attack bypassed the fleet cordon we had no choice but to establish, our long-standing rapid-response training proved effective. We ended the raid in only a day and a half. That cannot be called inefficient. Still, there is room for optimization."

"The reason your primarch and I chose to build our respective fortresses at opposite ends of the Astronomican Hall fragment was not