Chapter 93: Destiny Has Always Been in My Hands
The corridors of the Imperial battleship had become abattoirs.
Konrad Curze moved through the darkness like something carved from shadow itself. His armor, once midnight blue, now ran with crimson, a living testament to the violence he dispensed. His Power Sword gleamed with the wet light of perpetual execution.
The Word Bearers chanted their litanies of damnation to bolster their courage. Each psyker's wailing incantation met the same conclusion: a blade through the throat, silence eternal, their connection to the Warp severed at source.
The World Eaters roared their battle-hymns, chainaxes raised to strike with the fury of their corrupted god-thing. Their limbs fell to the deck plating before they could complete the upswing. Precision. Absolute, merciless precision.
Daemons materialized from the immaterium itself, twisted geometries of fang and claw and hunger, and hurled themselves at the Night Haunter. The Warp's own servants could not slow him.
The metal floor became a mosaic of blood and severed limbs. Wreckage accumulated like trophies. Konrad Curze advanced through this charnel landscape with footsteps that neither hesitated nor quickened, his face a study in cold focus.
From the shadows ahead, a figure emerged.
"Konrad Curze," Erebus whispered, his voice dripping with serpentine seduction. "Do you truly believe your slaughter will alter anything? Destiny is already written. Your fate is—"
He never finished.
Konrad Curze accelerated like lightning, given form. He shattered the psychic barriers that surrounded Erebus and drove his sword through the Word Bearer's chest, pinning him to the deck plating itself.
"Ah! Ah ah! Release me! Release me!"
"The Four Gods will not forgive this transgression!"
"The gods themselves choose me! You cannot...you cannot do this!"
Erebus thrashed with the desperation of a dying insect, his screams warping the air itself. The battleship's superstructure trembled in sympathy. Rune-inscriptions extinguished across every wall.
Yet even through the agony, Erebus's eyes held something unexpected: a smile. A victorious smile.
"You are already too late, Night Haunter," he rasped, his voice fading. "Gaze upon your future..."
The air around Konrad shimmered.
Konrad Curze's consciousness fractured and reassembled elsewhere.
He stood in ruins.
What had once been a magnificent Imperial city, spires reaching toward hope itself, now crumbled into ash and scorched earth. The skyline held only broken teeth where towers had stood.
Around him, voices competed in a symphony of anguish:
"Surrender your gene-seed! Surrender everything!"
"Never! We will not yield to this perversion!"
"Kill. Kill. Kill. Let me taste your fear!"
He witnessed the Night Lords Legion fragmenting, breaking into warring cells, each consumed by Chaos's corruption, their legion standard burning to cinders in the war's consuming flames. He reached toward them, but his hands passed through the vision like smoke.
The scene rippled. Changed.
The Emperor stood before him, but something was terribly, catastrophically wrong. The Golden Throne beneath his father's feet shattered into pieces. From the Emperor's form erupted a sun, black and absolute, a darkness that devoured light itself.
Power beyond comprehension tore Terra asunder.
A vast eye, infinitely terrible, opened above the ruins of the Throne.
"No! Emperor, save me!"
"Emperor! Mercy!"
"No, no, no—"
Across the galaxy, humanity turned to ash. Countless souls coalesced before that black sun, their faces twisted in despair and accusation.
"Kill him! The Emperor betrayed us!"
"Slay the False God! He deceived us all!"
"Save us. Please. Save us."
They turned toward him. They looked at Konrad Curze with eyes full of bottomless accusation, as though he bore responsibility for creation's ending.
His old self would have shattered into madness.
But something shifted in the Night Haunter's consciousness. Voices emerged, not his own, but echoing through his soul like ancestral memory:
"Born into humility? Born under an unjust destiny? I will carve my path through blood and bone, shattering this false heaven."
"So-called destiny is merely a test for the strong. Today I break the sky. Tomorrow, I will erase myself from it entirely."
"At night, I paid the ultimate price, and I climbed higher still."
Konrad Curze had never known such absolute certainty. He tucked his hair deliberately behind his ears and roared, a sound that fractured the vision itself:
"All these so-called futures are NOTHING BUT ILLUSION! Destiny has ALWAYS been MINE — it has ALWAYS obeyed MY WILL!"
The scene froze. Every despairing face crystallized into something far more grotesque, a landscape of eternal mockery.
Then weightlessness claimed him.
When his vision cleared, Konrad Curze saw himself, or something wearing his face, seated upon a Chaos altar.
Daemons clustered around him. Corrupted Aeldari whispered their blandishments. Traitors knelt in supplication. His own bloodstained Power Sword rested in hands that had become something less than human.
The light in those eyes, his eyes, had been extinguished entirely.
That corrupted reflection turned to meet his gaze. Mockery blazed behind its pupils.
A voice, many voices, reached him from the immaterium itself: "Your life is already predetermined. The Emperor himself surrendered you to us. You are different from your brothers, Konrad Curze. You always have been."
The Night Haunter's response came without hesitation: "Silence. I, Konrad Curze, have never believed in destiny. Not in this life. Not in any life to come."
"And if all you speak is true, I will end myself before that ending can claim me."
"If I must die, then I shall choose the method and the moment."
He raised his sword and swung at his seated reflection. A white light consumed everything.
Konrad Curze gasped back into consciousness, his chest heaving violently.
Erebus, that damned schemer, had vanished entirely. His Power Sword stood embedded in the deck plating, still thrumming with residual psychic energy.
The battleship shuddered around him, groaning toward catastrophic failure.
Konrad Curze chuckled, a sound devoid of humor. "A mere phantom of wind and frost."
He turned and moved toward the breach. He moved toward the external breach, reaching the hull's surface as the vessel began its death spiral. Jago Sevatarion waited there, the First Company Captain's face etched with urgency.
"My Primarch! Depart immediately! The vessel is collapsing!"
"Uziel Kurl and the others, they have been corrupted into daemons!"
Konrad Curze's eyes flashed with something lethal and absolute. "Capture him. Destroy every trace of his existence. How dare he betray the Night Lords? How dare he?"
"Kill. Them. All."
The Furious Abyss swept through the stellar void like something antithetical to creation itself —a colossal beast of war and hunger, its prow turrets roaring with the voice of thunder, forcing Lorgar's flotilla into a desperate retreat.
The dynamic shifted. Hunter became hunted. Predator became prey.
On the Word Bearer command bridge, alarms wailed. Lorgar's hands clenched into fists as his command bridge erupted with barely-contained fury.
"How could this happen? Fulgrim was supposed to...that useless fool! How did he fall so swiftly?"
"Damn these treacherous wretches! The Sons of Horus refuse my command! The White Scars turn a deaf ear! Even the Alpha Legion ignores my authority!"
After Horus's fall, Lorgar had assumed the mantle of supreme leader among the traitors. But his subordinates, Abaddon's legionaries, the scattered remnants of other forces, had declined to acknowledge his supremacy. His initial strategy lay in ruins.
Yet contingencies remained. Always contingencies.
Lorgar stepped toward the viewing port. Lorgar's body began to shift, his form deforming subtly, his armor scraping against itself as warped flesh pressed against blessed steel.
His voice emerged distorted, almost unrecognizable: "This Abyss-class battleship should belong to me! It will belong to me! The Adeptus Mechanicus should bend the knee to the Word Bearers!"
"Why has this been denied? WHY?!" Yet even through his hysteria, calculation remained.
His command bridge held perfect discipline, every warrior silent, every weapon crew ready, awaiting their master's word.
He turned back to his officers. "Execute the designated course," Lorgar's voice cut through his own madness.
"Their pride. Their arrogance. These will prove their undoing." He smiled then, an expression without joy but pregnant with calculated certainty.
"They will fall directly into the snare I have set, a Warp rift of magnificent proportions. Let them charge into it like fools. The Four Gods will reward their sacrifice."
"I will become the Four Gods' most devoted servant." Victory seemed assured.
Then the vox crackled to life.
Then Francis's voice crackled across every frequency: "Lorgar, I must confess: you are the single worst tactician I have encountered in all my existence."
"Did you truly believe I am some psychic simpleton like Guilliman? Unable to perceive a rift so monumentally obvious?"
"Surrender now. Otherwise, when you next observe a sun, should you survive the Warp storm, you may lack sufficient dignity to genuflect before it."
Across the battle network, there was silence. Guilliman's silence was deafening.
Aboard the Furious Abyss, Francis wore his Hundred-Eyed Bio-Armor, each of its optical sensors burning with the light of true perception. Hundreds of eyes tracked the reality-warping distortions where Warp collided with physical space itself.
Without this form, he might have missed the snare entirely. Behind that rift waited ancient powers, entities whose patience spanned millennia, old schemers whose hunger had never dimmed.
Entry meant skinflaying at minimum, death at worst.
"Francis! You surrender instead!" Lorgar's desperation crackled through the vox. "The Four Gods transcend your comprehension! The False Emperor is merely mortal; he cannot hope to stand against divinity!"
Even as he spoke, Lorgar orchestrated a frenzy of chanting among his Word Bearers, their collective will attempting to expand the rift further, to make it insatiable.
But speech moves more slowly than action.
The Soul Drinkers had already fired. The Soul Drinkers launched their ordinance, shells, and psychic bombs, screaming toward Lorgar's position. The moment the Word Bearer attempted evasion, the psychic payload collided directly with the Warp rift itself.
The reaction was instantaneous and apocalyptic.
Rumble.
Explosion bloomed simultaneously in physical space and the immaterium, a detonation that transmuted Lorgar's carefully-constructed rift into a raging Warp storm. Daemons shrieked at the boundaries, their forms dissolving and reforming in perpetual torment.
"Francis! You are utterly despicable! I will return! MARK my words, I WILL RETURNNN!!!"
A force of incalculable magnitude seized the Word Bearer's battleship and pulled. The vessel shuddered as the Warp storm's gravity tore at its superstructure, rending steel and faith alike.
Beside Francis, Sanguinius stepped forward. Sanguinius watched the scene with visible unease. "Will he survive that? The storm could easily consume—"
"Let him," Francis replied with calculated cruelty. "He claims the Four Gods protect him. If they don't, then his faith was merely a pathetic delusion. Either way, not my concern."
Something in Francis's expression shifted then, a moment of genuine perception crossing his features. His gaze snapped outward, as though perceiving something vast and distant.
He turned away from the viewing port.
"We depart. Immediately."
The Furious Abyss began its withdrawal, leaving only void and ruin in its wake.
[End of Chapter]