A Thousand Sons

THE HORUS HERESY Graham McNeill A THOUSAND SONS All is dust… 1 A Thousand Sons THE HORUS HERESY It is a time of legend. Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history. The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors. First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat. Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor. Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme. As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test. 2 Graham McNeill ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~ The Thousand Sons MAGNUS THE RED Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion The Corvidae AHZEK AHRIMAN Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons ANKHU ANEN Guardian of the Great Library AMON Captain of the 9th Fellowship, Equerry to the Primarch The Pyrae KHALOPHIS Captain of the 6th Fellowship AURAMAGMA Captain of the 8th Fellowship The Pavoni HATHOR MAAT Captain of the 3rd Fellowship The Athanaeans BALEQ UTHIZAAR Captain of the 5th Fellowship The Raptora PHOSIS T’KAR Captain of the 2nd Fellowship PHAEL TORON Captain of the 7th Fellowship The Primarchs LEMAN RUSS Primarch of the Space Wolves LORGAR Primarch of the Word Bearers MORTARION Primarch of the Death Guard SANGUINIUS Primarch of the Blood Angels FULGRIM Primarch of the Emperor’s Children The Space Wolves AMLODHI SKARSSEN SKARSSENSSON Lord of the 5th Company of Space Wolves OHTHERE WYRDMAKE Rune Priest of the 5th Co. of Space Wolves The Custodes CONSTANTIN VALDOR Chief Custodian AMON Custodian Guard 3 A Thousand Sons Non-Space Marines MALCADOR The Sigillite of Terra KALLISTA ERIS Historiographer MAHAVASTU KALLIMAKUS Scrivener Extraordinary to Magnus the Red CAMILLE SHIVANI Architectural Archeohistorian LEMUEL GAUMON Societal Behaviourist YATIRI Leader of the Aghoru 4 Graham McNeill “The ancient knights’ quest for the grail, the alchemist’s search for the Stone of the Philosophers, all were part of the Great Work and are there- fore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Such a task is eternal and its joys without bounds; for the whole uni- verse, and all its wonders… what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing heirs of the galaxy and eternity, whose name is Mankind?” — The Book of Magnus “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” — Ahzek Ahriman “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself: ye, all which it inherits shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind!” — The Prophecy of Amon 5 A Thousand Sons All is dust… How prophetic those words seem now. A wise man from ancient Terra said them, or words just like them. I wonder if he was gifted as I am. I say gifted, but with every passing day, I come to regard my powers as a curse. I look out from the top of my tower, over a landscape of madness and storms of impossible energies, and I remember reading those words in a crumbling book on Terra. Over the centuries, I read every one of the texts from the forgotten ages that filled the great libraries of Prospero, but I do not think I really understood them until today. I can feel him drawing near with every breath, every heartbeat. That I still have either is a miracle, especially now. He is coming to kill me, of course. I can feel his anger, his hurt pride and his great regret. The power he now has was unlooked for, unwanted and unnatural. Power is fleeting, some say, but not this power. Once acquired it can never be given back. His abilities are like nothing else wielded by man. He could kill me from the other side of the galaxy, but he will not. He needs to look me in the eye as he destroys me. It is his flaw, one of them at least, that he is honourable. He behaves to others as he expects to be treated. That was his undoing. I know what he thinks I have done. He thinks I have betrayed him, but I have not. Truly, I have not. None of our cabal betrayed him; we did everything we could to save our brothers. It has come to this, a father set to kill his favoured son. That is the greatest tragedy of the Thousand Sons. They will call us traitors, but such an irony will go unrecorded, even in the lost books of Kallimakus. We remain loyal, as we have always been. No one will believe that, not the Emperor, not our brothers, and especially not the wolves that are not wolves. 6 Graham McNeill History will say they unleashed the Wolves of Russ on us, but history will be wrong. They unleashed something far worse. I can hear him climbing the steps of my tower. He will think I have done this because of Ohrmuzd, and in a way he is right. But it is so much more than that. I have destroyed my Legion: The Legion I loved, the Legion that saved me. I have destroyed the Legion he tried to save, and when he kills me he will be right to do so. I deserve no less, and perhaps much more. Ah, but before he destroys me, I must tell you of our doom. Yet where to begin? There are no beginnings and no endings, especially upon worlds of the Great Ocean. Past, present and future are one, and time is a meaning- less. So it must be arbitrary, this place where I begin. I will start with a mountain. The Mountain that Eats Men. 7 A Thousand Sons BOOK ONE IN THE KINGDOM OF THE BLIND 8 Graham McNeill CHAPTER ONE The Mountain that Eats Men/Captains/Observers THE MOUNTAIN HAD existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imag- ine. Though its people had no knowledge of geology, the titanic forces of orogenic movement, compressional energies and iso- static uplift, they knew enough to know that the Mountain was too vast, too monumental, to be a natural formation. Set in the heart of an undulating salt plain the ancients of the Aghoru claimed had once been at the bottom of an ocean, the Mountain rose to a height of nearly thirty kilometres, taller even than Olympus Mons, the great Fabricator’s forge on Mars. It dominated the blazing, umber sky, a graceful, soaring peak shaped like an incredible tomb, crafted for some ancient king, of magnificent, cyclopean scale. No regular lines formed the mountain, and no artifice of mankind had shaped its rugged flanks, but one look at the Mountain was enough to convince even the most diehard sceptic that it had been crafted by unnatural means. Nothing grew on its rocky sides, no plants, gorse or even the thinnest of prairie grasses. The earth surrounding the Mountain shimmered in the baking heat of the planet’s sun, which hung low on the horizon like an overripe fruit. Despite the heat, the rocks of the Mountain were cold to the touch, smooth and slick as though freshly raised from the depths of a black ocean. Sunlight abhorred its sides, its shadowed val- leys, sunken grabens and sheared clefts dark and cold, as though 9 A Thousand Sons it had been built atop some frozen geyser that seeped its icy chill into the rock by some strange, geological osmosis. Surrounding the rumpled skirts of the Mountain, scattered col- lections of raised stones, each taller than three men, were gathered in loose circles. Such monuments should have been tower- ing achievements, incredible feats of engineering by a culture without access to mechanical lifting equipment, mass-reducing suspensor gear or the titanic engines of the Mechanicum. But in the face of the Mountain’s artificial origins they were primitive afterthoughts, specks against the stark, brooding immensity of its impossibility. On a world such as this, what force could raise a mountain? None of the many people gathered on Aghoru could answer that question, though some of the greatest, most inquisitive and brilliant minds bent their every faculty to answer it. To the Aghoru, the Mountain was the Axis Mundi of their world, a place of pilgrimage. To the warrior-scholars of the Thousand Sons, the Mountain and its people were a curiosity, a puzzle to be solved and, poten- tially, the solution to a riddle their glorious leader had sought to unlock for nearly two centuries.

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