[The underground complex beneath the Palace of Terra was not simply a prison.]
[A thousand years of excavation had gone into the mountain range above it, boring through the ancient rock of the Himalayas with the patient thoroughness of an institution that understood it had time and the will to use it. The result was a network of chambers and tunnels and sealed vaults that had hollowed out the mountain's interior to a degree that would have surprised anyone who had only ever seen the peaks from outside. A treasury, in the broadest sense. A repository. A place where things the Emperor wished to keep close, for whatever reason, were kept.]
[It was also, you and David discovered, extremely easy to get lost in.]
[You moved through the deeper sections together, David's sensors mapping the passages as you went, the two of you working through junctions and branching corridors with the methodical patience of people who understood that the alternative to systematic exploration was walking in circles. The cavern system that opened around you was natural in its geology but had been modified at key points, drainage channels cut into the rock, a maintained floor surface running through the worst of the uneven terrain.]
[Eventually you found the stream.]
[It ran with the quiet persistence of water that had been moving through the same channel for a very long time, and the banks on either side showed the marks of deliberate shaping: the angles were slightly too clean, the depth slightly too consistent. Someone had improved on what nature had provided. You stood at the edge of it for a moment, then followed it downstream.]
[The cavern widened as you went. The stalactites above you were white in the light of your vision, thick formations hanging from a ceiling that rose progressively higher as the space opened out. The damp air carried the cold of deep stone and the smell of mineral water, and somewhere ahead the acoustic quality of the space was changing in a way that suggested something much larger.]
[Then the palace complex came into view.]
[It sat beside an underground lake, the water dark and still, its surface reflecting the faint luminescence of the formations above. The buildings were ancient in their construction and large in a way that registered before you had consciously processed the scale: the doorways, the proportions of the walls, the height of the ceilings visible through open archways. These structures had not been built for Astartes. The dimensions were those of beings considerably larger, the kind of scale that was comfortable for Primarchs and simply enormous for everyone else.]
[David's eyes cycled through their measurement routine and he gave you the count quietly: twenty-one palace structures in the complex. Twenty were complete and intact. The twenty-first had foundations laid and nothing more, its basic structure never begun.]
[You exhaled.]
["If I am reading this correctly," you said, keeping your voice low, "these are the living quarters the Emperor prepared for His sons."]
[David did not have time to respond.]
[The psychic surge hit the air of the cavern from somewhere deeper in the complex with enough force that you felt it as a physical pressure against your skin. The temperature dropped several degrees in the space of a breath. Frost formed on the nearest stone surfaces in fast-spreading crystals. The wrongness of the energy signature was something you recognized in your bones before your mind had assembled a complete picture of what you were sensing.]
[Your grip tightened around the relic spear. The chain-wrapped fist vibrated with a low, resonant hum in response to the psychic interference.]
[You and David moved at the same moment, without discussion, running hard through the palace archways and into the deeper complex.]
[The courtyard was situated at the lake's edge.]
[You came through the archway and stopped.]
[A figure of enormous size dominated the center of the space. Red-haired, several meters tall, armored in plate that had been crafted for both function and display, the figure held a frail old man in black robes suspended in the air by a psychic grip, the old man's feet well clear of the ground, his posture that of someone who was tolerating the situation with more composure than it warranted. Nearby, four Astartes in blue power armor trimmed with gold had ranged themselves in a tense standoff with a woman whose expression had the focused stillness of someone calculating responses rather than reacting to them.]
[You recognized the red-haired giant immediately.]
["Magnus."]
[The name came out of you before you had decided to say it, the fury behind it giving it the quality of something thrown rather than spoken, and it echoed through the courtyard and off the lake surface and into the carved stone above.]
[Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, Primarch of the Thousand Sons, the being whose psychic communication had shattered the Emperor's Webway Project from the inside, turned his single eye toward the sound.]
[You were already moving.]
[The relic spear left your hand with everything your frame could put behind it, the weapon's disintegration field crackling to life as it accelerated, the air it passed through registering the transit as a visible shockwave. Every stone surface in the courtyard registered the launch as a physical impact. The spear crossed the distance between you and Magnus in far less than a second.]
[Magnus dropped the old man and raised one hand.]
[The psychic countermeasures he generated looked casual. They were not casual; they were simply faster than the spear, a web of interlocked psionic forces assembling in the fraction of a second available and meeting the weapon in mid-air. The relic spear came apart under the collision, fragments scattering outward, the disintegration field discharging harmlessly into the stone floor.]
[Magnus's single eye found you properly now, tracking up the full height of your frame. For a moment his expression held something that was not quite certainty.]
["This is not possible. Brother — you are still alive?"]
[Then the moment passed.]
["No. No, you are not him. You are just another one of my little brothers I would very much enjoy tearing apart." The composure collapsed entirely, replaced by a rage that was old and personal and very well-maintained. His teeth showed. "You meddlesome, wretched jinx. Give back what you took from me. Give back my soul fragments, you lackey of the false Emperor—"]
[The psychic surge that erupted from Magnus's body was not aimed at you specifically. It was simply released, the way pressure releases when a vessel can no longer contain it, expanding outward from him in every direction simultaneously. The Thousand Sons Astartes were thrown sideways. The woman was knocked clear. The old man in black, already falling from where Magnus had dropped him, was blasted further across the courtyard. Even at your distance, the leading edge of the surge reached you with enough force to matter.]
[It did something unexpected when it did.]
[The sensation was not pain exactly. It was more like an instruction delivered at a level below conscious processing, something in the architecture of the body you currently inhabited receiving the psychic energy and responding to it according to its own nature. You felt the change happening before you saw it.]
[Diamond-shaped scales erupted across your exposed skin, iridescent and layered, pushing outward from beneath the surface with the efficiency of something that had always been latent and was now simply active. The scales covered everything: hands, neck, any surface the restraint armor left exposed. Where they met the armor's edges, they cut through the metal without resistance, the material simply yielding to them.]
[Three bone spikes forced themselves out through the chain-wrapped iron fist, each one approximately a meter in length, the adamantium links deforming around them.]
[Your other arm, the bare one, began to change at the cellular level. The shape of it softened and extended, the rigid structure of bone and muscle giving way to something more fluid, and within seconds it had lengthened into a configuration that had no human analogue, flexible and many-jointed, the tip splitting into subsidiary extensions.]
[You had no time to examine what was happening to your body.]
[The blood-red color was spreading through your vision from the edges inward, your eyes having decided on their own that this was the appropriate configuration for what was currently happening. You fixed them on the Crimson King, who was gathering himself for whatever came next, and you spoke with the clarity of someone who had decided that the situation was very simple.]
["Magnus. Prepare to die."]
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