The meeting room dimmed, the lingering blue light of the holographic star chart sweeping across the Primarchs' sharply defined faces.
Lorgar's gaze locked onto Saladin's face.
On the gentle features of the Lord of the Yellow Sands' Primarch, Lorgar keenly caught a calculated pause.
It was the silence of a precise mind weighing variables, yet it overlapped with the cold foreboding in Lorgar's heart.
Saladin noticed his gaze.
He turned and offered a frank smile.
Yet that smile only put Lorgar further on guard.
"Brother Saladin," Lorgar said, his voice steady but brooking no argument.
"For the next operation, I want you with me."
Only he knew the weight of those words. Saladin, Primarch of the Second Legion, the Lord of the Yellow Sands, commanded a Legion as unpredictable and deadly as a desert storm.
Yet in the future Lorgar knew, the records of this brother and his Legion ended with the Rangdan Xenocides, leaving only an erased blank.
If Saladin fell here, what would be the reason?
Death in battle? Lorgar immediately dismissed it.
However weak Saladin might be, he was still a Primarch. Apart from their Warmaster, who among the Rangdan could defeat a Demigod in single combat?
Overwhelmed and slain? In the vast sea of stars, a Primarch determined to break through had a capacity for survival that mere numbers could never suppress.
Then the most horrifying possibility surfaced, the one that best explained why history had been thoroughly "cleansed": betrayal.
Not betrayal of his brothers, but of the human race, the Emperor's ideals, and the foundations of the Imperium. Saladin had defected to the xenos.
A son of the Emperor whose creed was "human supremacy," born to drive out the xenos, ultimately siding with humanity's enemies?
That would not merely violate the Imperial Truth. It would