"It was time, Typhon. Lead Mortarion onto the right path."
"The Father of New Life and the End required Mortarion. A primarch was the prize a great power of the Warp desired most."
"Offer your primarch to the Kindly Father, and you will receive His favor. Take that step toward the ascension of life."
Kalas Typhon recalled the soul-transmission from his Word Bearers friend Erebus several hours earlier.
In a sense, Erebus had also been Typhon's guide. The Hand of Fate had taken the initiative to find Typhon while he suffered amid hesitation and confusion.
Typhon had already joined the XIV Legion at the time, but he knew full well that he was different from all his battle-brothers.
It was not merely because he was a powerful Psyker. The Death Guard's gene-seed compatibility was exceptionally high, and its numbers ranked among the foremost of the eighteen Legions. It was not as though no Astartes had awakened psychic powers.
The deeper reason was that Typhon was not human in the conventional sense.
His mother had been human, but his father had been a humanoid xenos from Barbarus.
Do not ask whether genetics still existed. On Barbarus, humans could mate with xenos and bear offspring—though this was limited to human women and male xenos.
Typhon's origins were more blasphemous than the mutants and abhumans the Imperium so loathed and despised, because half-xenos blood flowed through his veins.
The Imperial Truth told humanity that two things in the world were the most hateful and dangerous.
The first was Abominable Intelligence; the second was the xenos race.
Of course, due to Lox's influence, that first iron law was becoming blurred and weakened, but the second remained an absolute principle.
What was even more absurd was that a mongrel half-breed of human and xenos blood