To my life of constant loss, constant compromise, constant bowing of the head.
Yet resistance was precious; freedom was precious.
Drop by drop, black flame dripped from the cracks in the Traitor Primarch's sinister ghostly mask, blazing fiercely.
The fourteen daggers that had pierced the Traitor Primarch's body and soul earlier burrowed desperately deeper into his soul like living leeches.
Psychic Power was forcibly extracted. Rather than being freely offered, it flowed along the daggers' sharp blades like blood drawn out under high pressure, gushing like streams into the altar's pulsing recessed runes and igniting a sea of black flame.
Only the Traitor Primarch Mortarion stood here alone.
Black flame seared everything as the High Heavens twisted and roared here. Three kinds of crimson, green, and purple fire flickered across the ground amid the black flames, surging with the primarch's breaths.
At the horizon, countless white meteors shrieked as they fell, tearing terrifying rifts across the sky. As those stars crashed into the earth and blasted out enormous craters, they erupted into towering fountains of C'tan energy. Violent currents of energy rushed toward the heavens, twisting into vaguely spherical entities.
Those entities were alive.
The Shards of the Star God scattered through the air sought to merge with one another, but it was no easy task. Black flame flared, and the white fragments that had extended threads toward each other, on the verge of connecting, recoiled as though in pain the moment the fire touched them.
Compared to the High Heavens around Death Mortarion and Guilliman, lord of the Imperium, the Warp here was even more chaotic. It had nearly become a state of pure energy, while more concrete imagery vanished amid Warp currents like flame.
Two threads of fate were drawing closer.
The Traitor Primarch realized this with