V2 Chapter 60: From This Day Forward, Every Miracle Flows From Me. Every Glory Is Mine to Claim.
In the boundless white light, Markus Sevian felt himself stripped entirely from the warped shell that ten thousand years of suffering had made of his body, and pulled down into a memory buried at the deepest level of his soul.
He was back on Terra. Back at the moment that every Shadow Wolf carried like a wound that never closed: the first time they had stood in the presence of their gene-father.
It had been a ceremony of pure and sacred honour. Since the Emperor had made them and sent them into the void to bleed across the stars, these Astartes had never stood before their Primarch with their own eyes until that day.
The closeness that came from the gene-bond itself, the absolute instinct of recognition and submission that no Astartes can suppress in the presence of his sire, had moved through Markus and his brothers beyond anything they could control. They had knelt before that figure who stood like a god made into a man, and they could not have done otherwise.
But the great Wolf-Shepherd had not left them kneeling. He had reached down with broad hands and raised them himself.
"I am proud of you, my sons." That vast, warm voice still resonated in Markus's soul as though it had never stopped. "Do not kneel too long. The galaxy is still waiting for us to take it."
But why.
The vision in the white light began to fracture, memory-shards cutting through Markus's consciousness with the sharpness of something that has been suppressed for too long.
Why had it become what it became? Why had the most kind of fathers lifted the blade against the most loyal of sons? Why had the Warmaster walked into that temple on Davin and emerged as something else entirely?
Every question, every betrayal, every descent into despair traced back to the same source.
It was the Word Bearers. It had always been the Word Bearers. That scripture-scarred wretch had poisoned his father, had pushed the Primarch into the abyss.
The Warp be damned. The Word Bearers be damned. Every traitor be damned.
In the white light, fury and despair twisted together until they cancelled each other out. The light contracted sharply and snapped closed.
Markus Sevian's consciousness was pulled back into the physical universe with a force that left no room for resistance.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself on the cold stone floor of the temple in a half-kneel, his twelve surviving brothers alongside him in the same posture. And directly in front of him, the mortal commissar in the black greatcoat was looking at him with an expression of absolute calm.
Then Markus Sevian understood something.
He looked down. He raised both hands in front of his face.
No compound-eyed growths. No corroded bone-spurs fused with metal. Both hands were encased in ceramite gauntlets that were exactly as they should be: regular, unwarped, without a single mutation across their surface.
More than that. He could see that the layer of sea-green paint that had covered his armour, the colour of the Sons of Horus, had peeled away entirely. What lay beneath it had come back.
White. The white that had always been there underneath.
The sound of his brothers taking sharp breaths broke the silence around him.
Markus turned his head and found all twelve of his surviving brothers returned to the form he remembered from before everything had gone wrong. White power armour. Every mark of Chaos corruption forced flat and gone.
On their shoulder guards, clear against the white, the black wolf's head and inverted crescent of the Sixteenth Legion.
"Welcome back, Markus Sevian."
The quiet words cut through Markus's shock. The Shadow Wolf sergeant turned sharply and stared at the mortal in front of him.
"How do you know my name."
It was not quite a question.
"I saw your past glory." Duvette stood where he was and looked at this veteran who had found himself again, and the smile on his face had nothing performed about it. "Great warrior."
Markus was still absorbing the impact of those words when a sound erupted from the ruins at the edge of the battlefield: a scream pitched high with fervour, piercing and raw.
"A miracle!"
Duvette's brow came together. He turned toward the sound.
Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner was pulling himself out of the scorched crater.
The white light of [Purification], which had been centred on the Shadow Wolves, had inevitably spread across the surrounding area. For Heinz, a mortal whose body had taken severe physical damage from direct Warp-energy discharge, the field's absolute restoration effect had done what no medicae intervention could have managed: the half of his body that had been carbonised by Kobath's strike was entirely restored.
Heinz raised both hands and stared at them. He turned them over. He looked at the flesh that had come back from burning, and kept looking, as though he could not hold the fact of it in his mind without checking again. Then his head came up and he fixed Duvette with a gaze so intensely fanatical that the whites of his eyes had gone almost entirely to red.
"Oh, Emperor above! By the Golden Throne!" The voice that came out of Heinz was unsteady with the force of what was moving through him. "You! You truly are—"
"One moment."
Duvette withdrew the smile. His voice came out flat and cold as he spoke to Markus Sevian, still half-kneeling on the floor.
The Shadow Wolf sergeant paused and rose. He watched the mortal commissar turn away from him, take Entropy's Song in one hand, and walk with an unhurried and entirely steady stride toward the heavyset man who was still screaming his fervour at the temple ceiling.
Heinz saw Duvette coming and showed no caution whatsoever. He pulled himself upright, trembling with excitement, and threw both arms wide.
"You are the only miracle! You are the Emperor's will made manifest! You are—"
"Shut up."
Heinz stopped.
The fanaticism froze on that round face. He looked at the coldness in Duvette's eyes and, following that gaze, turned to look behind him. His Storm Trooper escort was entirely gone. But the scribe attendant, apparently the luckiest man on the daemon world, had survived behind a stone column and was now pressed against it, shaking, the vellum in his hands barely staying in his grip.
Heinz's fervour overrode his judgment in one final surge. He pointed at the scribe and bellowed: "Yes! Good! Write it down! Write it all down! I have found the sacred vessel!"
He turned back to Duvette.
Duvette raised Entropy's Song with one hand, brought the dragon skull at the sceptre's head around in a short, precise arc, and pressed it down with full force onto Heinz's right shoulder.
The sound that came from Heinz's skeleton carried through the temple.
The weight behind that press was not a commissar's arm strength. It was something considerably beyond that. Heinz's legs failed under it immediately. He went down with a crack of kneecaps on stone, the cry that came out of him sharp and involuntary.
The pain dragged him out of the fervour for one honest moment. He looked up from the floor, round face contorted with humiliation and rage.
"How dare you." The words came through clenched teeth. Heinz glared up at Duvette from the ground. "I am a Lord Inquisitor. Only through my recognition do you become the Emperor's will. Only I can confirm that you are—"
Duvette did not reply with words. He shifted his grip on the sceptre, turned his wrist, and brought the heavy dragon skull down precisely against the side of Heinz's jaw.
The crack was clean.
Heinz's jaw dislocated sharply to one side. The torrent of declarations collapsed into a wet, wordless sound. Blood and saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. He made the noise of a man in significant pain who has completely lost the use of his jaw.
Duvette let that settle for a moment.
Then he brought the sceptre back and pressed it steady against Heinz's shoulder again. He turned his head toward the scribe, still sheltering behind the column, shaking hard enough that the vellum was audible.
He watched the scribe give a trembling nod.
Duvette's voice came out level and unhurried, every word placed with precision.
"Imperial hero. Colonel-Commissar Duvette Erdmann. On a daemon world, at the head of his regiment: destroyed a Word Bearers warband, halted a Chaos ritual, recovered the relic of the Lord of Fire and Drakes, and carried out the Emperor's will."
A pause. In the temple, only the wind moved, and Heinz's muffled sounds.
"Witness: Heinz Werner."
He let the scribe finish.
Then he brought his gaze back down to the Thorian Lord Inquisitor kneeling under the weight of a Primarch's relic on his broken shoulder, body shaking, the fanaticism reduced by the sceptre's weight and the pain of a dislocated jaw into something considerably more manageable.
"From this day forward," Duvette's voice dropped into a register that carried its weight without raising its volume, "every miracle flows from me. Every glory is mine to claim."
He held Heinz's eyes.
"You are the first witness, Lord Werner."
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