Perturabo's memories completed the fractured picture of Olympia's rebellion.
He had so desperately wanted to prove his worth before The Emperor, yet Olympia had betrayed his expectations. Under the propaganda of his adoptive father, it had actually raised the weapons of rebellion against the Imperium.
Had Horus not rebelled afterward, he would have become the laughingstock of all the primarchs—a useless fool who could not even govern his own planet.
Only slightly better than that brainless idiot Angron...
The fury of betrayal had ultimately incinerated Olympia. The defenses the Iron Warriors had built for the planet with their own hands were then ground apart inch by inch by those same hands. That sense of loss pained the entire Legion.
After the slaughter ended, Perturabo watched Olympia regress from a civilized and advanced world into a primitive slave society.
One moment, they had been the people's heroes, destroying the invading Hrud xenos time and again. The next, they had inflicted genocidal punishment upon their own people, becoming war criminals with blood-soaked hands.
Perturabo would not forgive himself, and neither would The Emperor.
But fortunately... no... he should not use such a relieved tone to excuse himself.
Horus's rebellion was in no way comparable to his own mistakes... Wrong was wrong... one mistake after another, until there was no way back...
This was his fate: a broken king who had struggled endlessly between ideals and reality, only to kill his sister and stand guard beside the grave of his ideals... How fucking ridiculous... At heart, he and Angron were the same kind of person...
As he reflected upon his mistakes amid Olympia's heaps of corpses, news of Horus arrived as well. This revered Warmaster had dropped virus bombs upon the soldiers of other Legions on Istvaan III.
From that moment onward, the