With time restored to the Horusian domains, the Warmaster could not help but wonder just how long he and his warriors had been trapped inside the Eye. Horus knew that the Legion Wars, for all their apocalyptic scale, were but a distraction : the true prize laid outside, in the Imperium they had forged from their sweat and blood. Yet with the armies of the Crimson Accords renewing their assaults, bolstered by the great fiends called forth by Lorgar, he had little time to investigate.
It was Konrad Curze, the mad Primarch of the Night Lords Legion, who delivered to the Warmaster the answers he sought – and with them, the means to inflict a terrible blow upon his enemies. One day, the King of the Night appeared on Maeleum without warning, presenting himself to the gates of the Warmaster's palace to the utter stupefaction of its guards. He came without fanfare or escort, accompanied only by a single mortal woman.
The woman was clad in tattered rags, and an iron collar circled her neck, connected to a chain of silver whose other end was firmly in Curze's grasp. Yet she walked like a queen as she and the Night Haunter were welcomed into Horus' great stronghold, and did not appear troubled at all by the weapons trained on her by hesitant guards – Konrad said nothing to this, seeming amused by his nephews' caution. Queries as to how Curze had come to Maeleum – there had been no sighting of Eighth Legion vessels, no perturbation in the Aether detected by the Sorcerers, nothing – went unanswered, save for the slightest, mocking smirk on the corpse-pale lips of the Night Haunter.
"Hello, Konrad."
"Hello, Horus."
"Who is your companion, brother ?"
"I am Moriana, Great One."
Conversation in the inner chambers of Maeleum's greatest stronghold
Moriana – for this was the name claimed by the mortal woman – had come to the Eye of their own volition, seeking to meet with Horus to bring him knowledge of the events that had transpired in the Imperium since the rebellion's defeat. Her ship had been mislaid by the currents of the storm, and she had been rescued from its wreck by Curze himself. The Night Haunter had felt the ripples of Moriana's presence across time, and sought their source.
Exerting his will, Horus compelled Moriana to speak only truth, and let her speak.
The first of Moriana's many revelations was just how long had passed outside the Eye of Terror : more than seven centuries, where (before the Theft of Time) some parts of the Horusian dominion had seen mere decades pass – and some others, millennia. In those seven centuries, the Imperium has changed so much as to become almost unrecognisable to those who had fought in the Great Crusade and the Heresy.
Before coming to the Eye, Moriana had been a high-ranking member of the Imperium's ruling class, and knew a lot more than the typical Imperial citizen. Just what position she occupied was unclear, and in the years that followed there would be plenty of speculation in the Eye. Some would think her a renegade Inquisitor, others a prophetess of the Dark Gods. Some would write entire treaties explaining how her every action made it clear she was an agent of the Alpha Legion, and others would remain convinced that she wasn't human at all, but a daemon in disguise.
Regardless of her true origins, Moriana told Horus that his father, the Emperor, still lived, after a fashion. Wounded nigh unto death by the blow inflicted upon Him by the Warmaster aboard the Vengeful Spirit, He had been placed into stasis upon the Golden Throne, where His spirit was sustained by the thousand daily sacrifices of psykers, their souls consumed to fuel the Astronomican's blazing light. That much had been expected by Horus, who could feel the burning fire of the Astronomican even from Maeleum. What the Warmaster hadn't expected was that the Master of Mankind was now commonly referred to as the God-Emperor.
The cults born of Lorgar's Lectitio Divinatus had grown exponentially during and after the war, feeding on the mythological scale of the conflict and the fear caused by the reveal of the Warp's true nature. With the Emperor falling to Horus' Talon and the exile of His "fallen angels" into the Eye of Terror, preachers and demagogues alike had found it all too easy to convert billions to their blasphemous beliefs. As the loyal Primarchs hunted down the remnants of the traitor forces (unwittingly helping cement their part in the newly-written religious canon), these cults slowly coalesced into one, galaxy-encompassing leviathan. In the wake of the anarchy and terror brought on by the war, the High Lords of Terra quietly supported the rise of this new faith, hoping to instrumentalize it to solidify their control of Humanity.
To avoid a second civil war, the Primarchs had been forced to concede and allow the rise of the Ecclesiarchy as a central force of the Imperium. Even Sanguinius must now play the part assigned to him by the Imperial Creed : that of the God-Emperor's most loyal and powerful servant, given to Mankind to guide and protect them in the Materium while He safeguards their souls from the Dark.
In response to this, and combined with his own guilt over failing to face Horus during the Siege and completing the vision of his doom he had known must come, the Angel had withdrawn from the Imperium. Leaving his Legion in the hands of his capable subordinates, Sanguinius now wandered the Imperium alone, seemingly driven by divine inspiration. He appeared where and when he was needed most, though that was not always obvious, and where he came, so did the wrath of the God-Emperor. Rebellions against tyrannical Governors had been quelled by his appearance, and religious fervor had been turned from degenerating into fanatical calls for purging the unbelievers by a single word of the white-feathered Primarch.
Behind his mask of calm and control, Horus was shocked by this revelation to his core. Years ago, on the moon of Davin, he had first been convinced to rebel against his father by visions showing the Emperor worshiped as a god, and he and eight more of his brothers forgotten, erased from history. At the time, he had believed that this was the Emperor's plan – to elevate Himself to godhood at the cost of every ideal the Great Crusade was founded upon. It had been the first step on his path to rebellion and revelation, and now, he had learned that his own rebellion had brought about that very outcome. For a time, his mind reeled with the implications, and Moriana was silent, sensing his inner turmoil. Then, displaying a surprising insight in his brother's mind, Konrad spoke.
"I have learned that it does not matter who we were before, or how we came to be who we are now. All that matters is this : what do you want, Horus ? And what are you ready to do to get it ?"
The Night Haunter to the Warmaster
According to the Dark Angels, Lion El'Jonson was dead, struck by a vile Horusian plot – the Warmaster actually chuckled when he heard the fiction the sons of Caliban were presenting to the rest of the Imperium in their desperation to hide the existence of the Fallen, and noted to make sure to inform Vortigern. Jaghatai Khan had gone missing, pursuing the Dark Eldar raiders who had pillaged Chogoris and inflicted untold atrocities upon the world's population while the Khagan was fighting in the Heresy. Leman Russ had spent the longest of all Primarchs in the Scouring, unsatisfied with the severity and thoroughness of the purges of Horus' supporters. As far as Moriana knew, the Wolf King was still hunting the distant descendants of those who had sided with the Warmaster and fled to the unexplored regions of the galaxy after his defeat.
Rogal Dorn had turned the Cadian Gate into a fortress, pouring his Legion's resources and influence into securing the one stable entrance and exit to the Eye of Terror. The Praetorian had sworn himself to the task of guarding the Gate, while his son Sigismund led the Black Templars into more proactive forms of warfare across the galaxy.
The Iron Hands, shattered during the Heresy, had been wholly brought back into the fold. In an unparalleled feat of diplomacy, Guilliman had managed to convince the Medusan warriors who had abandoned the Imperium after the death of Captain Shadrak Meduson to return. What he had offered the Blackshields-in-all-but-name to persuade them, Moriana did not know – she doubted that a simple pardon for their actions during the Heresy would have been enough.
Vulkan and the few remaining Salamanders were split between Terra and Nocturne. On the Throneworld, the Salamanders had replaced the Imperial Fists as guardians, manning the walls and helping keep the peace planetwide. On Nocturne (which Vulkan still visited once every fifteen standard years, at the Time of Trials), the decimated Legion was still slowly rebuilding its numbers. Salamander forces were dispatched on very select missions, mostly to reclaim lost artefacts of the Legion or on humanitarian assignments, where the presence of Space Marines, while not indispensable, would help lower the death toll in civilian populations.
As the Traitor Legions were banished to the Eye of Terror and the Scouring concluded, Guilliman had claimed that the remaining Legions needed to evolve. The Avenging Son declared that the battlefield had changed : no longer did the armies of the Imperium wage great wars of conquest and liberation, gathering billion-strong forces to bring entire Sectors into the fold. The age of the Great Crusade was over, and now they must hold that which they had conquered against the threats of the xenos and the heretic. The influence of Chaos had not disappeared with the banishment of Horus and his cohorts : cults of Ruin sprouted on thousands of worlds, hiding in the shadows and quietly growing in strength until they revealed themselves.
At Guilliman's suggestion, the loyal Legions were reorganized into smaller forces, each operating in near-total autonomy, but still part of an overall chain of command with their Primarch (if he still lived) at the top of it. These Chapters counted a thousand Astartes, with a complement of warmachines, ships, serfs and recruitment facilities. They were scattered across the Imperium, to serve as fast-response forces capable of crushing most insurrections and xenos threats. The greatest concentration of Space Marines in the Imperium was on Cadia itself, where Rogal Dorn commanded more than ten thousand Legionaries across the system's many, many strongholds.
Guilliman himself had returned to Maccrage, from where he directed the efforts of his entire Legion, receiving reports from all Chapters of the Thirteenth Legion and collating data in order to detect patterns and react to threats with maximum speed and efficiency. He was also the voice of reason in Imperial politics, sending Ultramarine emissaries to regions of the Imperium where those who claimed the Emperor's authority to rule were misusing that privilege and failing in their duties.
For a long time, Horus mused on Moriana's revelations. Then, he came to a decision. He commanded Konrad to take the woman and bring her to Sicarius, the daemonic homeworld of the Seventeenth Legion. The Night Haunter was then to call upon a life-debt owed to him by Lorgar, from when he had saved the Aurelian from the talons of Corvus Corax on Isstvan V. Lorgar's ascension to daemonhood may have greatly increased his power and granted him immortality, but by the same token, he was now bound by the same rules as all of daemonkind, and would be forced to accede to Curze's request. That request, Horus commanded, would be the following : that none, no matter how great or small, hurt Moriana after she was left on Sicarius. Her safety and freedom were to be guaranteed by the Aurelian, now and forevermore.
Curze's laughter was heard across all of Maeleum. Once he had stopped laughing, he swore to his brother that his will would be done, and took Moriana with him out of the chamber – though the Justaerins who guarded all entrances did not see him pass, nor did anyone else in the palace.
Not long after – perhaps immediately, but it is impossible to know for certain – Konrad reappeared on Sicarius itself. His arrival was greeted in a much different fashion than it had been on Maeleum : dozens of sorcerous alarms started to ring, the aura of a Primarch disturbing the Aether. Thousands of Word Bearers converged on the Night Haunter, who stood in the middle of a sacrificial plaza, having ripped the mortal priest overseeing the sacrifices to shreds (which, in the spirit of the daemon world, he had carefully arranged upon the altar in a pattern pleasing to the Dark Gods).
The Word Bearers surrounded Curze, but did not dare attack. For all that the Primarch of the Eighth Legion had aligned himself with Horus the Weak, he was still a Primarch, and clearly blessed by the Pantheon. They waited, hesitant, and Curze watched them, Moriana at his side, seeming as unconcerned by the host of deadly warriors as the Primarch himself.
Finally, Lorgar appeared, manifesting in a gout of hellfire. His voice burning with eldritch power, he demanded to know what his brother was doing here, before he face the wrath of Chaos Undivided. For several seconds, Curze looked Lorgar in his burning eyes, smiling. Then he did as Horus had commanded, and called in the debt he was owed.
Just as the Warmaster had planned, Lorgar could not refuse his brother's demand. The Aurelian knew there was a trap hidden in the seemingly innocuous request – what harm could a simple mortal woman be, after all ? But he could not disobey the laws of the Neverborn, not when the one calling in the marker was a being as potent as Curze. He swore that Moriana would be kept safe and free by him, the Bearers of the Word, and all others upon whom the Daemon Primarch had authority.
Konrad gestured for Moriana to begin speaking. Before Lorgar Aurelian, several members of the Dark Council, the ambassador of the Thousand Sons and thousands of Word Bearers, she repeated her tale of the Ecclesiarchy and its worship of the God-Emperor. She spoke for hours, detailing the beliefs and origins of the Imperial Creed, while her audience listened, stunned and spell-bound not to do anything to silence her. When she was done, Konrad looked at the face of Lorgar, seeing something that mere mortals could not see on his brother's burning visage, and nodded slightly.
Then he was gone, seemingly slipping through a fold in space, leaving Moriana behind.
The testimony of Moriana broke Lorgar's will. His long-held beliefs that the Primordial Truth was the only way for Mankind's salvation, that the rebellion against the Emperor had been just and necessary, were thrown into question by the fact that all he had achieved was realize what he had once dreamt of accomplishing and had later turned against and sought to avoid at all costs.
The Daemon Primarch could hear the laughter of the Dark Gods, and, without a word, he withdrew from the Legion's affairs, secluding himself into his sanctum. There, he contemplated the will of the Gods, seeking an answer as to what he was meant to do now. Was Horus still the anointed champion of Chaos ? Had the Warmaster actually succeeded in what he had been destined to accomplish, even though the rebellion had failed ?
With Lorgar's withdrawal, the Dark Council assumed joint command of the Seventeenth Legion, but it was divided. Some wanted to continue the Legion Wars against the Horusians, while others thought that Moriana's words were a warning of the consequences of infighting while the true enemy grew stronger outside the Eye. Meanwhile, without Lorgar's will to hold them under control, the host of powerful daemons the Aurelian had summoned broke free. Some spread across the Eye or returned to their own domains, but others sought revenge against the Word Bearers for daring to presume to command them. No few of those ended up allying themselves with the Warmaster's forces, however temporary and uneasy such alliances may be.
As for Moriana herself, she was left untouched, protected by the oath of Lorgar. In fact, the wording of the oath forced the Dark Council to permanently assign her a guard, to make sure that her life and freedom were preserved. At her request, this guard was limited to a "mere" hundred Word Bearers and a singular cruiser-class vessel, named the Ashdrinker. With it, she left Sicarius to parts unknown, having dealt a nigh-lethal blow to the Crimson Accords – with nothing but the truth.