I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.

HEROES OF THE UNDERWORLD

Even as the lords of the Imperium look to the defense of their most important strongholds, the rest of Terra suffer also under the depredations of the Slaaneshi daemons. From the depths beneath the hives, where the laws of the Imperium hold no sway, the Keeper of Secrets Yria and its blood-worshiping cult rise up, crushing all resistance in their path as they make to the surface. Amidst the madness of the Angel War, there is only one force left to bar their path, however unlikely – and among that force, an ancient champion, returned from slumber by Light's End …

To the billions who toiled on Holy Terra, life was as harsh as it was short more often than not. The unending flow of pilgrims coming from all over the galaxy meant that the constant stream of resources from the rest of the Imperium was forever strained at its limits, with starvation a constant companion for entire bloodlines. While the mighty decided the fate of the Imperium in gilded halls, the people suffered from the diseases brought by overcrowding and the afflictions caused by pollution. The brutal fist of the Arbites kept order, while the Inquisition relentlessly hunted for the slightest sign of deviancy.

For millennia, the people of Terra had lived in fear, most of them not knowing that this dread was the legacy of the Roboutian Heresy, which had shattered the hope of progress and healing for Humanity's birthworld. Fear had kept most in line, but it had also driven many more into the arms of the cults that festered beneath the orderly surface – such as the cult of the Distillate, whose vile rituals had helped the Exalted Keeper of Secrets Yria the Seducer manifest in their temple, deep beneath the nominal surface.

The followers of the Angel, the Cult of the Distillate, grew in number as they went up through the many layers of Hive Tashkent, on the Asian continent. Daemons of Slaanesh manifested alongside them as their crazed fervor grew, and more and more were swept up in the tide of emotional excess, caught in the false promises of the Warp. The Echoes of Blood resonated through the world's collective soul, and with the death of the Emperor and the collapse of the psychic barrier His presence had projected around Terra, millions succumbed to madness. They were channeled toward the ascending horde by the cultists of Slaanesh, who had awaited this day for thousands of years and now let loose all their hidden desires and hatred of the Imperium.

The man did not remember his name. Like almost all of his life, it had been drowned beneath an ocean of grief. The priests had found him in the gutter, after his life had fallen apart, and they had remade him.

They called themselves the Angel's Tears. No one knew where the name came from, though there were some who said it had been bestowed upon the first of their numbers by the Great Angel himself.

It didn't matter to the man where the name had come from. Where the False Emperor had abandoned him, had abandoned them all, the Angel had not. He wept for their suffering, for the cruelty they endured. He accepted them, and he promised them vengeance.

All he asked of them in return was their grief, and it was for that reason that the priests had cut the man's skull open and put the machines inside. The machines burrowed into his brain, and made him relive his worst memory – the one that had destroyed him, that had driven him into the arms of the Tears. Over and over, without end, the memory replayed itself in his mind's eye, leaving him barely aware of the real world, barely able to function in it.

The memory hurt as much now as it did when it had actually happened – but then, that was the point. His grief must remain pure, must remain as potent as on the horrible day. That was why he had let the priests put the implants into his skull, so that he would never forget, so that he would never forgive.

How many years had it been ? The man did not know. But the moment had come at last. The False Emperor was dead. The priests had gathered the Tears, all of them – and there were so many, far more than the man had ever seen together – to wait for … for something. He did not know what it was, but …

He saw it, then. The servant of the Angel, rising from the depths.

The machines in his head bit deeper into his brain, and amidst the pain and the grief, he felt power flow through his battered body.

In the name of the Angel, they would kill all those who served the False Emperor. They would tear down the entire rotten edifice of the Imperium, and when the Great Angel took his throne, he would remake the galaxy in his image. He would bring about paradise – an end to grief, an end to sorrow, an end to torment.

And, at last, an end to the man's suffering. An end to his tears.

The roots of the world were also shaking, as ships crashed from orbit and the Tear of Nightmares made a mockery of the laws of physics. Entire sections of the hive collapsed, creating fields of rubble that stretched for scores of kilometers, full of corpses and wounded.

Yet amidst that desolation, small pockets of order remained. One of those took form on the path of Yria and its followers, though its leader had no idea of the threat coming his way yet.

Years ago, Salvor Lermentov had been a trooper in the Astra Militarum. He had served in the Imperial Guard for over ten years, fighting in the God-Emperor's name on three worlds, and earned many honors for his bravery and martial prowess. Twelve years ago, after surviving a close encounter with a pack of Orks, Salvor had put in a request for leave in order to make a pilgrimage to Holy Terra, in order to thank the Master of Mankind for his platoon's survival. His superiors had put in a word to get that leave approved by the Departmento Munitorum before the soldier died of old age, and Salvor had begun the long journey to Terra.

By chance or by fate, Salvor had actually reached the Throneworld, arriving less than ten years before Light's End. But he had never left. Caught in the throng of pilgrims, he had seen the misery of Terra's people, the squalor and the fear that forever crushed them. More than that, when he was accidentally separated from the pilgrim crowds and lost in the sunless depths, he witnessed the depredations of the monsters that dwelled beneath the surface – serial killers and mutated beasts spawned from thirty thousand years of accumulated pollution. Realizing that the lords of Terra cared nothing for the fate of the Throneworld's downtrodden, Salvor then decided to dedicate his life to helping them.

In the years since, Salvor had become known as the Emissary. In the dark, he gathered people around him, building a community based on principles of mutual help and the sharing of what little resources they had. To defend themselves from the monsters, his followers built crude weapons – hammers made of broken rockrete and jury-rigged flamethrowers. They did not use bladed weapons, for they knew the consequences of spilling blood on Terra. Despite the best efforts of the Inquisition, legends still spoke of the False Angel, and of how bloodshed could rouse him from his slumber.

By the time of Light's End, the Emissary's group counted tens of thousands of members – men, women and children, all faithful servants of the Emperor, if not the High Lords. Despite Salvor's efforts, some factions among the community had begun to attack Imperial institutions, raiding for better weapons and supplies. The Ordo Hereticus, forever watchful on Terra, was starting to tighten its net around them. But the death of the Emperor and the dawning of the Angel War put all these concerns to rest – though it replaced them with others that were much, much worse.

As the Angel War shook Terra, Salvor did his best to protect his people. He rallied his followers, exerting every inch of his charisma to keep them from succumbing to the rampant madness. In the anarchy, the Emissary gave them purpose : to look out for one another, and for the other abandoned children of Holy Terra. Atop a mountain of rubble, Salvor Lermentov built an army, that fought against cultists and daemons alike, driven to face the nameless horrors of the Warp by a belief that had outlived the Emperor. Along with his militia fought soldiers and enforcers of the Imperial Law, who had been cut off from their commanders and sought somewhere to fight and die if needed. There were no mention of how Salvor's actions, and those of his followers, were technically crimes against the Lex warranting summary execution. In that desperate hour, the tyranny of the Imperium was finally lessened, and the sons and daughters of Humanity stood as one.

In the depths of Tashkent, the Keeper of Secrets Yria could sense Salvor's gathering, a shining pocket of order and faith amidst the beautiful madness, and it offended it. Initially, the Exalted daemon of Slaanesh had sought to direct its ever-growing forces out of the hive and toward the Imperial Palace, in order to turn the uncounted billions of desperate souls eking out an existence in the Eternal City beyond the walls to its cause. But the Emissary's defiance was an affront to its master's glory, and so Yria drove its minions to confront and crush those who dared cling to decency and basic humanity in the hour of Slaanesh's triumph.

As the army of the Distillate cult approached the Emissary's makeshift camp, daemonic entities circled on the loyalists ahead of the main host, testing their defenses. Despite their courage, the mortals were hard-pressed by the infernal predators, whose malice was invigorated by the distant will of Yria. Eventually, the cordon was breached, and a pack of Slaaneshi Neverborn was set loose within. They moved quickly, drawn to the improvised field hospital by the pain and torment of all the wounded souls gathered there, like flies drawn to carrion.

Laying among the countless wounded Salvor's disciples had dragged from the devastation, was one body taller than all except the ogryns – for Salvor's words and ideals had found purchase even within the brute minds of the abhumans. Even in silent repose, the man was a giant, his musculature speaking of genetic alterations and a life without the privations that afflicted almost all Terrans. The loyalists had found him naked and unconscious near the ruins of a monument so old no one remembered its purpose, and had dragged him along out of reflex more than anything else. There were no obvious wounds on his body, and so the few medicae in the congregation had ignored him, focusing on the many who needed their attention.

The flame of that man's life had been extinguished, once. In the deepest darkness, under the knives of monsters that fed upon suffering, its light had been drowned out.

But it had been kindled anew by a brother's love, and lit in perpetuity.

The light shone once more, and the eyes of the slumbering giant opened.

He heard the screams. It was a familiar sound. People being hurt by monsters, dying as they fought in vain to keep the beasts from their brethren. And he, helpless, unable to do anything …

No.

Not again.

This.

Would.

Not.

Stand.

He was among them before they could react, his hand grasping the back of one head and pushing it onto the needle-like protrusion that ended another's arm, the point piercing through the first's eye and into whatever passed for its brain.

"You," sneered the daemon that led this pack of infernal abominations. It recognized him, of course. He had carved the memory of him into the Warp when this world had burned last. "You will not -"

He did not listen to its words. There was no point. Instead, he plucked a piece of rock from the ground, and threw it into its grotesquely perfect teeth, shattering them and making it recoil before leaping toward it and pummeling it with his bare fists.

Within moments, it was over. The daemon was dying, inasmuch as its kin could ever be said to die. Some sort of translucent ichor was dripping from its wounds and onto the parched earth, which sizzled and burned at its poisonous touch.

It had stood higher in the infernal choirs than most, this one. Not so high that it could be called Great, but a cut above the rest of the infinite host birthed from the Dark Prince's every action and thought. Brought forth from the abyss by the machinations of the Angel, it had cut and maimed its way through hundreds before the warrior had put an end to it.

Yet it was only one daemon, in the end, and there were so many more left. The Angel War raged in full, across not only Holy Terra but the entirety of the Sol System. There were so many that it seemed as if the Court of Slaanesh had been emptied, vomiting an unceasing tide of horrors upon Humanity's cradle as if seeking to drown its flickering light under the flow of nightmares.

Above, in the burning skies of the Throneworld, the Tithed Ones fell, screaming their madness and loss to the planet on which they had been cast down like so many hellish meteors. Every so often, the ground trembled with the impact of one of them, no matter how distant. For theirs was a metaphorical fall as well as a literal one, and drenched in the stuff of the Empyrean as Terra currently was, such things lent weight and power to their descent.

They should have died, for their fall had taken them down from the wound in the fabric of reality that had ripped across Sol. But they did not, and rose from the pits of their descent clad in burning and warped armor, howling in abject torment. It tore at the warrior's soul to see his brothers reduced to this.

"Slaanesh's children stole them from the stars, you know, even as their homeworld burned in the fires of Fabius' crusade."

The warrior's hands tightened into fists at the mention of the Arch-Renegade. There would be a reckoning there too, in time. He turned his gaze, which burned softly golden, to the daemon at his feet. The scars that had once marred his face had been smoothed away by his latest resurrection, but there was no hiding the weariness, nor the sheer, brutal determination.

"How much longer ?" croaked the dying daemon, and even in the throes of dissolution and facing its executioner, it managed to sound mocking. "How much longer can you go on, Lucius ?"

"Until it is done," said Lucius the Reborn with an oath's certainty, and crushed the daemon's head beneath his foot.

One can only guess at what emotions Lucius must have felt as he took stock of his situation. Here he was, back on Terra, ten thousand years after his death in the Siege, and the Throneworld was once again under attack. Only this time, he did not have his brothers and cousins to fight alongside him – only the ragtag host that Salvor Lermentov had gathered.

Knowledge flooded the Reborn's brain, as it had before during the Siege. When Lucius had returned from the Bleeding Wars and set foot on the Throneworld, he had been overwhelmed with premonitions of doom, warnings of the future that had guided his footsteps across the world-spanning battlefield. These premonitions, taking the shape and voice of his lost brothers, had helped him save the lives of many of his brothers and cousins, preserving the heroes whose deeds would shape the Imperium in millennia to come. Now it returned, without such disguise, and gave him a sense of what was transpiring all over Terra.

He knew, without knowing how, that the shrieking meteors falling upon Terra had once been the descendants of his brothers. He knew that this was the Angel War, and that the fate of Humanity hung in the balance. And he knew that, soon, the Enemy would send forth another of its champions to try and slay him before he could do anything to tilt the balance in the Imperium's favor.

We see Lucius. Lucius the greatest swordsman of his age, and of every age since. Lucius the devoted, Lucius the faithful, Lucius who died under the monsters' knives and was dragged back to life by a brother's hands. He has slept long and deeply, freed from nightmares and reminiscences, but now he rises once more as the world he died so many times to defend suffers once more the presence of the Archenemy.

We see the mantle over his soul. It is vast and heavy, a responsibility that was meant for someone much more powerful than a Legionary. But its intended incumbent turned from his duty to pursue unending ambition instead, and so the mantle was passed onto another immortal. We see the spear of lightning, wielded by the hand of an old friend of Omegon, and we hear the snapping sound as the mantle is cut from the shoulders of he who would be a god.

It is ill-fitting, that mantle, and it lays heavy upon Lucius' soul. But he will not let it crush him. He will endure this, as he endured so much before.

We see the corridors of the Bleeding Wars. We hear the whispers from beyond, that promised him power, restoration, glory. We see him ignore them all as he prosecutes his campaign of retribution upon the Drukhari. Vengeance, duty, honor – it is all one and the same to Lucius, and he will not give up. The Bleeding Wars never ended for him.

This is the Reborn, brother. The one who makes daemons afraid, and the Dark Prince frustrated. The epitome of the Third Legion as it was always meant to be.

Our lost brother would be proud.

The face of Lucius the Reborn was bare of the many self-inflicted scars he had born before his death at the Siege of Terra, but that face was the one the Ecclesiarchy had used in their myths. Now, having seen him in action, the followers of the Emissary finally recognized him – prior to that, the few who had seen him had been too exhausted, too terrified, to make the connection. They fell to their knees in supplication and thanks, and when Salvor himself arrived, accompanied by his guard and expecting to find a slaughterhouse, the mortal leader was awed by the Space Marine legend who stood there.

"Not rebels. Not traitors. Not that – never that. We are loyal servants of the Throne. All we want … all we want is to defend ourselves from the monsters in the dark."
Salvor Lermentov, to Lucius the Reborn, during the Angel War

Lucius and Salvor spoke, and an accord was reached. Though Lucius could feel the pull of his duty compelling him to the walls of the Imperial Palace, he could not abandon these people to the infernal horde that was closing in on them from the depths. The Reborn would stand along them, and as word of the Saint's resurrection spread among the Emissary's followers, a spark of hope was kindled alongside the flames of defiance that had sustained them so far.

Pieces of improvised armor intended for the use of ogryn were hammered in place over Lucius' body. He picked up a piece of jagged metal, testing its weight before nodding and marching to the edge of the camp. There, like an old barbarian-king, he stood before the gathered hosts of Hell.

He looked just as deadly.

Soon, all too soon, Yria itself emerged from the depths. The Exalted Keeper of Secrets towered above the battlefield, a figure of infernal glory that burned the eyes of the Imperials. Along with it came a host of daemons and mortal slaves of Chaos. Preachers shouted hymns of hatred and purity, pitching the strength of their flock's faith against the Greater Daemon's corruption. Yet the sheer immensity of the Chaos host – which outnumbered the beleaguered loyalists many times over – weighed heavily on the courage of the Emissary's followers, who had already endured much and found themselves wondering if there was any point to their resistance. As the horde of monsters advanced, moral began to waver.

And then, everything changed.

"This is our home."

No one knew who said those words first. They were barely more than a whisper, a desperate prayer for strength in the face of horror. But they struck a chord within the hearts of the thousands who had gathered in this final, desperate stand against the unholy and the monstrous.

"This is our home," a hundred voices repeated. "This is our home," said a thousand throats.

"THIS IS OUR HOME !" roared ten thousand souls.

Among the slaves to darkness it had gathered, Yria heard their defiance, and anger distorted its monstrously beautiful features.

The dispossessed children of Holy Terra stood against the Slaaneshi horde as it charged. They cried out in terror; they wept; they puked and they soiled themselves.

But they did not take one step back.

The few tanks the Guardsmen had brought with them opened fire, emptying their magazines into the Slaaneshi horde. Hundreds were slain in the sporadic barrage, but the rest kept coming. One of the tanks' crews tried to target the Greater Daemon, who stood in the middle of the horde, but each shell was either dodged or casually redirected with a single blow, crashing into the monster's slaves instead. Knowing from experience that it would take far more firepower to destroy such a creature, Lucius ordered the tanks to focus their fire on thinning the horde as much as possible before contact.

As the horde approached, lighter weapons were brought to bear, and a disordered hail of las-fire slammed into its front line. It did little damage to the daemons within the Slaaneshi tide, but scores of the mutants and cultists were brought low, only to be mercilessly trampled by those behind them. The closer the two forces became, the louder the noise got, as the Imperials screamed their oaths to drown the horrible sound of the Slaaneshi.

Then they clashed, and the battle began in earnest. At the forefront of the line stood Lucius, who cut down all slaves to Ruin that approached him. Daemons and heretics and maddened, daemon-possessed cyborgs hurled themselves at him, and though some succeeded in wounding him, the son of Fulgrim fought on, answering every injury with a lethal counter.

Those Tithed Ones that had rallied Yrea's host sought Lucius with single-minded focus, their broken minds somehow recognizing him. Perhaps they sought to kill him because he reminded them of what they had lost, or perhaps they knew he could deliver them from their unending torment. Regardless, all of his broken brothers who approached him were slain, swiftly and without mercy – for Lucius knew that the only mercy he could grant them was the release of death.

Drenched in blood, the Reborn fought on, until a hushed silence suddenly descended upon the battlefield. Lucius looked up from the remains of the last enemy he had dispatched, knowing what he would see. There, towering above him, was the leader of the Slaaneshi horde – Yria itself. The name and sins of the Exalted daemon flowed into Lucius' mind, and that knowledge granted him an understanding of the true nature of this foe.

With that knowledge came a burning determination to destroy the Seducer, and Lucius felt neither fear nor doubt as he confronted the Greater Daemon of Slaanesh.

Two of the daemon's hands held weapons : a whip and a sword. Lucius ignored the abominable nature of the weapons, focusing instead solely on their reach. It didn't matter to him that the sword was made of a single shard of crystal that shone with impossible colors, or that the whip was a living thing, ending with a needle-teethed mouth.

Yria was faster than him. It was also taller, stronger, and a lot more resilient. It had experienced the death of uncounted worlds, feeding off the terrible emotions that course through the mind of those who watch everything they ever knew fall apart around them. It had whispered unholy truths and beautiful lies that had brought the doom of empires. It had fought Titans in the Webway, and come close to breaching the Palace long before the dogs of the Arch-Traitor had ever reached Sol.

This was not a fight he could win. But that didn't matter. Lucius' past was a litany of such fights.

He dodged every blow by a hair's breadth, or turned them aside by the tiniest angle. Even then, his improvised armor was dented, and his skin covered in scratches that gleamed with deposited poisons that would have killed a mortal man a dozen times over since the duel had begun. The Child of the Emperor had yet to strike a single blow in return.

And yet, it was Yria's features that were distorted in frustrated anger. It wanted to taste his fear, his despair at facing an opponent he could not possibly defeat … and it found no such thing.

"The Emperor is dead, Lucius. You fight for nothing. This world is ours already."

"He may be," acknowledged Lucius. "But I fight for the Imperium and its people. And this world will never be yours."

"Your Legion is dead too," it taunted him further. "Chemos burned. We took your surviving brothers and made them into our pets."

Ah. Now that was making him angry. But his anger was a cold one, not one that would shake his focus.

"Then I shall be a Legion of one," spat Lucius. "I shall destroy you, and then the next monster – and the next, and the one after that. I will never stop. I will never relent. I will never surrender !"

He lashed back, seizing the slightest opening and scoring a wound on one of Yria's wrists. It was a small thing, the kind of injury even a human might survive, especially when compared to the size of the Greater Daemon. But it was a blemish on the incarnate form of a creature born of nightmares of perfection, and it made Yria shriek.

"You … you dare ?! I will break you myself, Lucius. I will sunder your mind over a thousand thousand years of torment, until you are broken. Then and only then, what will be left of you will serve us, like the rest of your misbegotten bloodline's dregs !"

Enraged, Yria redoubled its assault, and Lucius found himself forced to step back. Around them, the daemon's slaves watched with wide eyes and slack jaws, their broken minds unable to comprehend the unholy beauty of their master's battle. Some were weeping, heartbroken that their lord had been injured, however small the damage.

As the pressure on his defense increased, Lucius wondered if he was going to die again. The thought did not cause him fear – only regret that he might fail to protect the humans whom he fought alongside.

Then, there was a shift in the air, the psychic equivalent of a gust of icy, clean air over a charnel pit. Pale, translucent hands reached up from the piles of dead that surrounded them. At first, there was only a few, then more and more, and then spectral shapes emerged from the carnage, eyes blazing with vengeance as they flew at Yria in a ghostly storm.

"What ?! No ! No, this is wrong ! This cannot be !"

Lucius watched, eyes wide. This … this was new. This was not something he had ever encountered before, and the mysterious font of knowledge that had kept him informed of the Angel War was silent on its origin.

It seemed that this new age had brought with it new wonders and mysteries.

"You are nothing !" shrieked the Greater Daemon, lashing out at the specters around it. "You are prey ! You are toys ! You are FOOD for us, and nothing more !"

Lucius' gaze briefly flicked away from Yria, drawn by movement at the back of the Slaaneshi horde. There, he saw an army of Martian soldiers, and among them, two Legionaries clad in the colors of the Fifteenth Legion.

From the Imperial Palace came the Chosen of Magnus, dispatched by Omegon to stop the psychic menace the Tower of Hegemon's sensors had detected in Hive Tashkent. Of the two sons of the Crimson King, it was Khalid Harut who had roused the spirits of the wrongly slain to attack the Keeper of Secrets. The Herald of Prospero could barely cope with the amount of the dead that cried out for his attention, and he called upon Vindicta's power to grant them a chance to inflict retribution upon those who had brought ruin to their world. The host of the dead fell upon the Slaaneshi horde, their ethereal claws tearing through the incarnate Neverborn and sending their mortal cultists reeling.

The beleaguered Imperials were shocked by this sudden phenomenon, bewildered by the fact that not only were the ghosts of their slain comrades returning, but that they seemed to be assisting them. Since the opening of the Tear of Nightmares, they had witnessed many impossible things, yet all had been the stuff of horrors beyond speaking. That such a miracle might occur to their benefit seemed impossible, yet they could not deny the evidence of their eyes.

As the wraiths slammed into the Slaaneshi horde, more conventional reinforcements struck it from the back. Meherzah Jahangir, an Athanean whose flesh had been heavily replaced with augmetics years ago, had found a skitarii cohort along the way, and used his telepathic abilities along with the prestige his augmentations afforded him among the disciples of the Machine-God to rally them to his cause. Shielded from the corruption of Chaos by their mechanized minds and the Athanean's own powers, the skitarii cut the rearguard of the Slaaneshi host to pieces. Despite numbering less than five thousands, their superior equipment, combined with the shock of the spectral assault, made the skitarii all but unstoppable.

At the forefront of the battle, Lucius stood back up, ignoring the wounds he had sustained at the hands of Yria. While the Exalted Keeper of Secrets struggled against the wrathful spirits of its victims, the Reborn seized the opening the dead had provided him. From the other side of the battlefield, Khalid sensed the champion of the Emperor's Children's presence, and, acting on an impulse inspired by Vindicta, threw his power sword over the mass of cultists and daemons. Amplified by telekine power, the weapon cut through the air before being snatched by Lucius.

The moment Lucius' hand closed around the standard-issue weapon, it ignited with power as the lingering energies of Vindicta were set ablaze by the strength of Lucius' own incandescent soul. Leaping through the spectral storm, Lucius plunged his blade deep into Yria's chest, breaching the daemon's corporeal form.

Yet even as its power bled from the wound and the ghosts tore it ever wider, Yria struck back at the one who had defeated it. Lucius' attack had given no thought to his defense, leaving him completely open. With a single mighty blow, the Keeper of Secrets sent Lucius flying, his broken and bloody form crashing onto the earth, where it remained unmoving. A great cry rose from the Imperial ranks at the sight of their champion laid low, and Salvor rallied his people into a final push into the Slaaneshi horde, finally breaking it and sending the survivors scattering across the ruins of Hive Tashkent even as the last of Yria's strength bled out and the daemon was sent back to the infernal realm that had spawned it.

His hearts beat. He breathed. His eyes opened.

He was alive again. He had not known this would happen – but then again, that had been the case every time he had died before. He had always gone to his death knowing this might be the last one, even if during the Siege, he had been forced to realize it would take something truly monumental to really end him.

And now, here he was again. Millennia after the galaxy had burned in the fires of Guilliman's heresy. Returned by the will of the Emperor … who was dead. He knew this to be true, knew it in his hearts and soul.

So be it. His duty did not change, even if his lord was dead, even if his Legion was gone. He was Lucius of the Emperor's Children, and he had sworn an oath.

"Until it is done," he murmured to himself as he stood. The humans surrounding him looked at him with awe that was uncomfortably close to worship.

So many of them had died, yet many remained. More than would have, had he not been here. That made it worth it, he knew. It was the lives his actions saved that made the pain of death and rebirth worth to endure.

"Lord Lucius," said the one who led them. He too looked at him in awe, but did not let it overcome him. The burden of command laid heavy upon him – this was something Lucius could recognize, even if he had never experienced it for himself. "You … you live."

"This … this wasn't the first time I died," Lucius replied, knowing he wasn't telling the man anything he didn't already know. It was obvious in their stares – these men and women of the Imperium knew him, even after so long. "Nor will it be the last."

"At least once more," called out one of the two Thousand Sons who stood nearby. "Always, at least once more.

Lucius considered it, and nodded. "Yes." He turned to Salvor. "Look after your people. Fight where you must … but you must survive. This is your world. Your home," he added, something like a smile on his face.

"What about you, Lord ?"

"I will go to Lupercal's Gate. I am … I will be needed there. I can feel it." He looked at the Thousand Sons, who nodded silently. Perhaps they could sense it too.

"Not alone," Salvor said, so low that Lucius' superhuman hearing barely heard it over the noises of the Angel War raging.

"What ?"

"You will not go alone. You said it yourself, Lord : this is our home."

Salvor Lermentov looked around, and Lucius saw that the soldiers and militia who had survived looked back at him. In their eyes burned a fire the Reborn recognized, for it was all he had left himself.

"And we will fight for it."

AN : "They are evil incarnate, cruel and without mercy. But you ? You will be greater than any of them. Slay and save, until is done."

Salvor Lermentov is a character from Vaults of Terra : The Carrion Throne. And the line "This is our home" comes from Watchers of the Throne : The Emperor's Legion. It is just as badass in that book, so I really recommend reading it.

Well, here we are. Lucius has returned, as was foreshadowed in a teaser post on Spacebattle. The Reborn, greatest swordsman of the Third Legion, cursed with perpetual existence and battle. And yes, I am using that word deliberately.

After all, consider this : in canon, Lucius' first resurrection is attributed to Fabius Bile, and his following reincarnation to the gift of Slaanesh. But what if ... what if he was always a Perpetual ? His first resurrection would be the only "natural" one, with the Dark Prince twisting the immortality his champion already had in order to make him more interesting.

It is just a theory, and it doesn't really matter, even in the RH timeline. And with Vulkan having turned against the Emperor, Terra needs another protector ...

There have been some problems on ffnet, with new chapters not showing up. It seems to have been solved, so to all readers : you can go check my latest short story now.

Thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this. Next week : The Assassinorum Temple.

Zahariel out.