City of Holy Edict
Capital of the planet Colchis
Lorgar, Primarch of the Seventeenth Legion and lord of the Word Bearers, sat alone behind his immense desk, carved and polished from a single block of obsidian.
The desktop was spotless. Only an antique brass lamp casting a gentle glow and several unrolled parchment scrolls written in High Gothic rested upon it.
The dim light traced his strong profile, like that of a classical statue of a deity, but could not penetrate the deep shadows in his sunken eye sockets.
He wore a simple dark gray robe rather than the ornate power armour that symbolized supreme authority. It made him look more like a scholar immersed in endless contemplation, or an ascetic burdened with a terrible secret.
He had just finished communicating with his son Dexter, who was fighting on the front lines of the planet Twilight in a distant star cluster.
The holographic image had long since faded, but the information conveyed during their exchange, the front-line company captain's report, delivered in a voice that betrayed faint tremors despite his restrained emotions, and the series of cold, uncompromising, unquestionable orders Lorgar had subsequently issued all weighed like heavy lead upon the depths of his consciousness.
"Erase every trace... Exterminatus..."
He had spoken every word himself, sending them across the vast sea of stars in encrypted messages to become ironclad directives that the front lines had to obey.
He could even picture clearly what would happen as those orders were carried out.
Terrified, helpless mortals brutally stripped of all their possessions, the despair in the eyes of the wounded as they were isolated, artifacts bearing the last memories of their civilization reduced to smoke in the flames, families torn apart at gunpoint amid barked commands...
At last, an almost imperceptible sigh