M1919

When Giyahun hit the magma, his hunched power pack exploded, igniting a bubble of thundering flame. For a moment the entire chamber seemed to shudder. The White Scars halted, sudden disbelief staying their hands. Even the orks sensed something, and their headlong charge missed a beat. The Khan himself broke from combat and stared into the waves of breaking fire, his cloak snapping against the gale of force unleashed. What remained of Giyahun’s body was consumed in that hurricane, burned away, rendered down to atoms.

Then the primarch looked up, and despite the racing furnace around them, a chill descended over every soul. He uttered two words only, his voice suddenly as spare and bleak as the void.

‘Pull away.’

His sons complied instantly. Even Sejanus and the Luna Wolves, warriors from a Legion that gave no quarter to any foe, withdrew.

The Khan advanced then, alone now, his demeanour changed from flamboyance to a night-sere menace. He swung his sword about him languidly, loosening up, cutting the air into whispers, and the orks themselves hung back, bellows snuffed out, bravado shaken into wariness.

Then he started to kill. He broke into a run, first heavily, measuring his strokes, then accelerating, faster and harder, until he had moved into that state the Chogorian sages called alakh geh, where the thought alone could kill, where the distance between intention and action was made nothing, and where vengeance became a living thing with both extension and immanence. Under a gathering shroud of elemental vendetta, he killed them all. If he had slain freely before, now the carnage was so complete that it scraped the boundaries of both the divine and the diabolic. Even the war-hardened Legiones Astartes, used to witnessing prodigal exercises of violence, were silenced by it.

The xenos never laid a claw on him. The Khan moved now, not with joy, but with dreadful perfection. They faced up to him, and they were swept away. They tried to parry, and he cut them down. They tried to combine, and they were ripped into whimpering slivers. He danced through their numbers and built a corridor of blood around himself, slaying like some spectre of the endless dark, silent as a grave-mark, chill like the night gale of the Ulaav.

One of the Luna Wolves, inspired by that vision, tried to join him then, to add his blade to his, and it took Qin Xa to hold him back.

‘No, brother,’ the keshig-master warned, quietly. ‘Only observe.’

But by then, the Khan himself was almost invisible, hidden behind a curtain of severed flesh and thrown blood, a primordial force burning through the xenos ranks, inviolable and darkly magnificent. For the first time in that entire campaign, the greenskins tried to run, to scramble away from the hungering devil that raced to devour them, but there was no space left, no time left, no hope left. Most were caught as they turned, their backs carved open and their necks broken. The few that managed to get back to the gate cowered under the shadow of that greater monster, the swollen master of their brood-lair, who retreated beyond the portal in a shuffling, shaking display of abject submission.

The Khan passed under the gate’s edge. None of his army followed him in. They held vigil on the spur instead, watching the gaping entrance, holding to their last order against every instinct. All that emerged from the far side of the gate now were alien screams, one after the other, overlapped and smothering, a chorus of terror and panic that went on and on and on and never relented.

Not one of the xenos escaped back to the spur. Seconds of that carnage passed, then minutes, and the screaming just got worse. The magma fires, as if in sympathy to the apocalyptic toll of life-ending, slapped and blazed against the outer walls of the last chamber, grasping futilely at the horror unfolding within and powerless to stop it. After a while, it became impossible to listen to.

Eventually, though, even the screams echoed out.

[...]

After a while, they passed beyond the watch patrols and the overflights and, for a few moments at least, were something like alone. The Khan turned back to face the way they had come and looked over the site of destruction. The Bloodmaw smouldered away in the darkness, a sinkhole of ruin. For a long time, he said nothing.

‘It was weakness,’ he said, at last.

‘No one says it,’ Qin Xa replied, calm as ever.

‘I have lost warriors before.’

‘He was with us at the start.’

‘It had to happen, sooner or later.’

‘Did it?’

‘Nothing is eternal.’

‘Some things are. A good blade. The wind on skin. An oath.’

The Khan let slip a crooked smile. ‘Just what would make you angry, then, Xa?’ he asked.

‘If you became, in some way, like other men,’ the master of the keshig said. ‘If you had seen him die and not done what you did. If you had let one of them, just one, live. Then, Khagan, I would have been angry.’