Deliverance Lost

It was so much to take in, but Corvus knew it to be true. Not only the words of the Emperor seemed certain, the idea of what he described meshed with a much deeper feeling. Knowing he was a primarch, that he had been created to fight and to command, explained much that Corvus had never understood about himself. On a level that he understood in his spirit and was encoded into every cell of his body, Corvus knew what he was.

‘I swear my loyalty to you,’ said Corvus, sinking to one knee in front of the Emperor. He met the Emperor’s gaze and felt elation like no victory had given him before. ‘I am your son, your primarch, and your will shall be my command.’

‘That is good,’ said the Emperor. ‘I have an army waiting for you. They are the Raven Guard, highly decorated and distinguished in my campaigns already. When you are ready, you will assume command of the Legion.’

‘Am I not ready now?’ Corvus said, having been elevated and then deflated by the Emperor’s words.

‘Not yet, my son,’ said the Emperor. ‘But soon you will emerge to join your brothers and take your place at my side and at the head of the Raven Guard. First though, tell me of Kiavahr. What are your intentions?’

‘To bring peace to both the world and its moon, and to heal the wounds of the past,’ said Corvus. ‘With your help, I will succeed.’

‘Peace is the hardest goal to achieve,’ said the Emperor. ‘Victory, the cessation of war, the demilitarisation of our opponents, these we can obtain with might of arms and perseverance. Peace? That is an altogether different beast.’

Corvus frowned, but nodded slowly.

The Emperor sipped from his glass, his gaze unmoving. ‘Tell me again, then. Tell me of the wounds you and your followers inflicted upon this world, and of the peace you would bring to it with my help.’

THERE WAS PALPABLE excitement amongst the legionaries within the i

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Had the Primogenitors of the Alpha Legion known this was where they would send their agent? Surely not, Alpharius thought. Who would have believed that this place still existed?

Everything was pristine, exactly as it had been for decades, centuries perhaps. Alpharius wondered why this place had been kept in this way. What purpose did it serve? He heard Magos Orlandriaz talking excitedly as he accessed a data terminal in the central tower. Wires snaked from the wrist of the tech-priest, plugged into a series of sockets beneath a flickering holographic runepad. A wide screen scrolled with a mass of symbols, the green light reflected in the magos’s eyes.

‘This… This is amazing,’ gushed the tech-priest. ‘So much is here. So much!’

‘What have you found?’ asked Corax, as the primarch looked over the magos’s shoulder.

‘Everything, I would say. All of the genetic files for you and your brothers. I have studied the splicing of genes and the manipulation of the same for over a hundred years and I ca

‘We do not have years,’ said Corax. ‘Horus readies himself for his offensive. I need something that will enable me to rebuild the Raven Guard, not spawn endless theses and theories for your Martian friends.’

‘Of course,’ muttered Orlandriaz. He busied himself at the console for a while longer while Alpharius absorbed what had been said.

Corax intended to bring the Raven Guard back to full strength, that much was now clear. Alpharius did not know if such a thing was possible, but if it were, a restored Raven Guard Legion would be a serious threat to the Warmaster’s plans. The Alpha Legio

It struck Alpharius that there was some more complex scheme at work than the simple elimination of his adopted Legion. He considered the possibilities and came to the inevitable conclusion: the Alpha Legion could do what Corax intended. If he was able to secure the secrets of the gene-tech for his primarch, his Legion would become paramount amongst those who had turned against the Emperor. He could see the sense in such a plan, and was pleased that it offered some explanation as to why the Alpha Legion had sided with Horus. The Warmaster had struck the first blow against the Emperor, but it would be the Alpha Legion who would eventually emerge from the shadows to take their rightful place.

His thoughts were interrupted by an exclamation from the magos.

‘Look at this!’ Corax leaned even closer, brow furrowed as he observed Orlandriaz’s work. ‘Here we see the derived strands, the foci divergences from the primarch material that was used by the Emperor for the first of the Legiones Astartes.’

Everyone in the chamber had heard the magos’s words. Custodians and legionaries all turned towards the tech-priest as he continued, talking more to himself than the audience.

‘It’s a masterpiece of engineering,’ Orlandriaz said. ‘Such sublime beauty encoded into the structure, yet imbued with endless potential.’

‘Speak clearly,’ said Corax. ‘What have you found?’

‘Evidence of the Emperor’s true greatness, proof of his claim to be the Omnissiah,’ exclaimed the magos. ‘New life from old life. Millions of years of evolution extracted, distilled and improved. It is the key.’

‘The key to what? You make no sense, magos,’ said Agapito. ‘What is so important?’

‘We must look for the stasis chamber,’ a

The magos’s words prompted another flash of memory in the mind of Corax. He saw a cylinder, glowing with silvery light, encased by a mesh of golden wire. A sequence entered his thoughts, and the primarch tapped in the code on the holograph.

Dozens of lights lit up on the central console, flashing in sequence as Corax entered the cipher. When he tapped the last rune, the strobing lights settled into a constant gleam. New messages flickered across the screen, a