Lorgar looked mercifully upon the puppeteered skeletons and let out a quiet sigh.
His gaze swept over the tide of white bones surging toward him, over the twisted, pieced-together abominations that defied human anatomy, over the skulls with ghostly green light flickering in their sockets, over the jawbones that kept opening and closing in agony.
He saw the scraps of cloth hanging from them, long since rotted and drained of color, barely recognizable as what had once been some coarse, cheap fabric.
He saw their shriveled, cracked bones, bearing the marks of chronic malnutrition and overwork, the combined effects of calcium loss and abnormal bone growth—the brand of serfdom, indelible even in death.
Lorgar could clearly tell that these had been made from serfs oppressed by the nobles.
Enslaved by the nobles in life, they had exhausted themselves in mines, fields, and factories, dying in pain and despair.
And even after death, they were denied rest.
Their remains had been dug from their graves, dismantled, pieced together, and processed, embedded in walls as decorations, incorporated into structures as materials, and infused with psychic energy to serve as weapons.
Their souls were bound within these remains, unable to leave or find peace, forced to wander in eternal darkness and howl in agony whenever they were driven to act.
Lorgar could, of course, destroy them where they stood.
With his power, a single burst of psychic energy would have been enough to shatter every skeleton into dust and utterly destroy the psychic chains binding their souls.
That would have been simple, efficient, and effortless. But when he saw those shriveled bones, those ragged scraps of cloth, and those souls that had struggled in agony for untold years...
His mercy ultimately prevailed.
He was Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers, a son of