Crosius led his troops in an orderly withdrawal. The Death Guard warriors marched in silence, using no armored vehicles to aid their movement. This was a tradition of the XIV Legion; the Pale King believed it could help his sons forge unyielding wills.
A faint dark-green sheen surfaced across their gray-and-white armor. It was the Warmaster's blessing and gift. Crosius knew that certain Warp entities had submitted to Horus's power and merged with their weapons.
"Warp daemons. Yes, those things really existed."
As a Legion Apothecary, Crosius had always believed in the Imperial Truth promoted by the Emperor. But after the Legion betrayed the Imperium and the Word Bearers revealed the truth of the Empyrean to their comrades, his thinking began to change.
He was close to Typhon, the Legion's First Captain and a trusted companion of the primarch Mortarion. In private, Typhon often spoke to him of and taught him the forbidden faith known as the God of Life.
It was through his contact with Typhon that Crosius realized the Legion's First Captain was actually a Psyker—the very thing the primarch hated most!
Other than Astropaths and Navigators, the Death Guard Legion had almost no Psykers. The root of this lay in Mortarion's extreme hatred of psychic power.
According to First Captain Typhon, when the primarch had fallen upon Barbarus, he had been enslaved by a xenos psychic overlord. Had the Emperor not arrived in time at the final moment, the primarch might have died at that xenos psychic overlord's hands.
Of course, this information was secret and not to be shared. Typhon had specifically warned him not to let Mortarion learn of it.
Though the Pale King was kind and loving toward his sons, the moment the subject involved that xenos overlord who had raised him, or psychic