Secret Prison, Cormorragh:
When the God-Emperor and his Warmaster manifested in Cormorragh, the dissipating energy seared into the buildings around them. The Dark Eldar sentries around the prison of Jagatai Khan were stunned by the light, and still more stunned by the towering figures that presented themselves before them. It had been an act of great risk to take captive the powerful Mon'Keigh warlord who'd torn through the Webway and destroyed entire fleets of Corsairs on his own. An act of madness, in a sense, that had torn the heart out of armies.
Now it had brought the Mon'Keigh's father, the terrifying God-Emperor of Mankind, a figure of dread power who was carving still a distinct new path among the Webway and who had spent many centuries personally butchering entire communities of the Dark Eldar in alliance with their 'redeemed' weakling kindred. A colossus in golden armor whose very body emanated a light that burned with the fires of Order. A light before which the sickly warp-light of Cormorragh was as nothing, burned away and the eyes of the Eldar turning dark, almost like a mask.
The wrath of the Emperor was terrifying to behold, and there was no less a sense of fear in the grim Warmaster, the Primarch of the dreaded Iron Warriors whose firearms and dreadful Iron Cages had been the doom of many a Dark Eldar fortress. The Dark Eldar soldiers prepared to call upon the dreadful Power that enslaved them only for the crackling light stored up in the Emperor's Power Claw to blaze forth, searing them into ashes, their bodies crumbling. Others, deterred from seeking to face the glowing God in their midst turned for the Demigod.
A mistake. A very, very painful and dreadful mistake. Worldbreaker was in their midst with a speed that seemed unnatural given the immense hulking armored form of the Primarch. Speed for speed no Space Marine or Primarch would match the Dark Eldar, but with the added power granted by the veneration of the billions among the Imperium of Man, it was more than mere raw genhanced power that struck. Each shatteringly bloody fatal strike of Worldbreaker was a blow to avenge the captivity not merely of a battle-brother but in the hopes of Perturabo that his alone times were coming to an end.
Between them, they made good work of the entire set of guards, and then they came to the prison. The Emperor simply clenched a fist and a blast of light smashed the door in. From it, they heard a voice:
"Father?"
It was Jagatai Khan, who stood, having snapped the neck of his captives, bloodied yet unbowed.
"Father? It is you!" Grinning, he then knelt before his father as he saw Perturabo smiling and nodding toward him.
"Perturabo?"
"He is my Warmaster now."
Jagatai blinked.
"Come, my brother," as Perturabo extended his arm to him. The Khan took it. Before them, the Dark Eldar rose in power, the most elite of the Lord of Comorragh's soldiers rushing at the Emperor, only for the Emperor to place his sword by his side and summon to his hands a vast staff that he'd built for just this kind of purpose in the Long War against the Traitor Legions.
The Emperor raised the staff, body glowing with his own Psyker abilities and the power of the Faith of the billions of the Imperium. The staff slammed into the ground and a brilliant flash of light and a howling gale incinerated wide swathes of Comorragh. By the time the light dissipated, the Emperor and the two Primarchs had vanished and a significant portion of the jail was gone and a near-quarter of Cormorragh's manpower with it.
XXXXXXXXX
On the Emperor's flagship, Jagatai Khan listened with a fascinated glance, leaning inward, breathing heavily and lightly as elements of the story registered to the story of where things had been since he'd vanished early in the 30th Millennium.
"So, I take it a lot's changed since last I vanished."
Both Perturabo and the Emperor nodded.
The Emperor spoke, "When last you left, Roboute was still Warmaster of the Imperium, and the Traitor Legions were driven to the Eye of Terror. It was not long from your disappearance that he met a brutal fate at the hands of Fulgrim and Mortarion."
Perturabo nodded.
"The two Traitor-Primarchs, one fallen into the utter abyss that is the Warp, the other not entirely so as yet assailed him on Maccrage. Perturabo fought with him, as he did with all of you when the time was needed."
The Warmaster nodded. "So I did. In what the superstititous now call the Battle of the Four Primarchs, Roboute fell into a terrible coma, and I ended up retreating with him after breaking Mortarion's leg with Worldbreaker sufficiently to a point that Fulgrim decided to cut his losses. Even the fell daemons of the Warp cannot simply abandon their masters' pawns.
Corax, Russ, Johnson, they all fell too."
His face grew haunted with a terrible memory.
"In the Second Black Crusade, however, as the Traitors called their wars against the Imperium," he sighed, "Dorn drew me into a terrible trap. His price to ascend to a daemon prince of Chaos, and he did so with what he termed an Iron Cage. I was drawn into it in hopes of destroying him and stopping his ascension. 200 of my best warriors, and my first Trident, were destroyed. But the rest escaped, and I with them.
It was when I returned, learning that Russ and Corax were gone, that I was appointed the third Warmaster of the Imperium. Successor of the Traitor, and of Roboute. And for ten thousand years I waged my Long War against the threat of the Traitor Legions, no knowing that was the next millennium that the new threat appeared for the first time. The first elements of the Tyranid Hive Fleets. The Necrons have also awakened. Ancient Artificials, animated by a perverse faith in their Star Gods, intent on waging a war until life is a silent tomb as coarse and brutal as their own."
The Emperor spoke, continuing his own side of the tale, "For ten thousand years the Long War has been waged. Elven grand False Crusades waged by Abaddon, inheritor of Horus. In that time Perturabo and I have destroyed Alpharius and Omegon, and we have been the strongest arm of the Imperium against the Daemon-Primarchs. It is thanks to the mighty deeds of Perturabo and his Iron Warriors that the Long War is less hopeless than it would be. He deciphered a means to use the Blanks, most obscure of all Psykers, and to take the concept of Servitors. For each False Crusade aimed at the Imperium, a Great Crusade into the Eye of Terror has been launched.
We have shrunk the Warp-wound by a third, though it continues to bleed. The last False Crusade was two thousand years ago, since then the Imperium has largely fought Necrons and the Tyranids. We estimate the Hive Fleets we've faced thus far are but miniscule portions of overall fleets that are striking at the Galaxy from straight head on and below. The Necrons…." The Master of Mankind sighed, "They have been more straightforwardly dealt with as they appear."
"It has been too long, brother." Perturabo smiled with an unusually generous smile, "I have fought alone too long. I am glad you have come back to us."
Jagatai nodded. "Ten thousand years?"
His eyes widened.
"I get to command my sons again?"
"You do," the Emperor said, and he smiled, taking Jagatai's hand in his own.
"And you will be able to meet your new brothers as well, my new Primarchs who command my Grey Knights."
Jagatai blinked. "So Perturabo and I will have Battle Brothers to accompany us?"
"You will."
XXXXXX
That evening Perturabo was shaken by a strange vision. Terra was bleeding light, strange and eerie veins of glowing gold that marked the planet in an unnatural pattern of bizarre geometric configurations. The Imperial Palace oozed that same unhallowed light, but he was hovering over it in a jump-pack, awed and crying for reasons he did not understand. Within the Palace he could see and not see an immense man in armor mutating into a strange many-angled being with angles that should be obtuse acute and with a curiously cubic aspect, and then the brilliant flash of light began to ripple out as he escaped with the last survivors of the doomed Earth into his flagship, the Iron Warriors solemnly beholding the birth of something new and terrible, the last of humanity's home left, and Perturabo alone refusing to ascend to this perverted future, now the Master of a still more shattered Mankind ravaged by the deadly birth pangs of a new and unhallowed deity. The moment passed. But Perturabo, who sank for a few hours into a Sus-An coma shaken by what he'd seen didn't understand what to make of it beyond the impression that he would need to evacuate as much of the population of Terra offworld as he could, to preserve some last traces of what was in the wake of what would be…..
