The golden light receded like an ebbing tide, finally coalescing into a distinct figure on Ullanor's scorched battlefield, thick with smoke and the stench of blood.
Lorgar descended from the sky. His six radiant wings dissolved into drifting motes as he touched the ground, leaving only a faint golden glow around him that illuminated the barely perceptible weariness on his bronze face now that his task was complete.
He casually carried something in his hand: Uralk's head.
The hideous severed head that had once belonged to the tyrant of Ullanor now looked lifeless and terrifying.
It was bound and isolated within a pure golden force field. Its green skin was rough as stone, and its single eye stared wide but dull, frozen with the spite and disbelief of its final moment.
The severed neck was ragged, but intense heat had cauterized it, preventing any more filth from dripping out.
This head was the full stop to a long and brutal campaign, the closing mark of a barbaric age.
Carrying it, Lorgar strode across the still-warm ground, strewn with metal fragments and ash, straight toward the figure surrounded by battered Luna Wolves and Emperor's Children warriors—Horus.
"It's done," Lorgar said, stopping before Horus. His calm voice broke the eerie silence that had settled over the battlefield ruins after victory. "It's all over."
He casually set Uralk's head on a relatively flat, shell-blackened boulder nearby.
The head landed with a soft thud and rolled halfway around on the stone, its hollow eye turning toward the still-smoking fortress ruins in the distance, as though offering one final, silent mockery.
Then, as though remembering some trivial loose end, Lorgar turned his head and added in the same casual tone he might have used to discuss the weather, "Oh, right. Remember to send a few