Up Against the Gates of Hell

Part III

By author Perfidious Albion

For a long time, the old, old man had scoured the galaxy for his daughter. He had braved the sickening nearness of the Abnormality, that great and terrible wound in spacetime inflicted by the folly and depravity of the Eldar—an ancient and accursed species heading soon for the extinction that they deeply deserved—to explore its fringes for the Warp-tormented Death World that he knew she dwelt on.

Being anywhere near that screaming Warp Storm of hideousness felt, to a psyker, like being shoved face-first into a rotting corpse. And that was for most psykers. They were not a millionth as sensitive as the Emperor was.

For her, he had endured that for years.

But one day—one day, nearly thirty years after she had been taken from him—the millisecond the Bucephelus dropped out of the Warp—

—there was—

LIGHT.

Light beyond bonfires. Light beyond the sun. Light like a supergiant star blazed out and about all around him.

That moment—that very moment—he knew. Of course he knew. As soon as he was anywhere within several hundred light-years of her, he knew.

The golden light in the Immaterium was so brilliant a blind man could see it, feel blinded by it and feel compelled to close his useless eyes.

The Emperor had seen figures that made the Warp sing. Some had been human, some less so. His friend Malcador, who was the top of mankind's bell curve: the strongest psyker ever born to the human species by natural means. (The Emperor's birth was anything but natural.) The greatest witch-seers of the Eldar, a vile species, depraved and cruel, but powerful in the ways of the Immaterium. The mightiest psykers of any of a thousand xenobreeds he had felt and fought.

Those were stars, perhaps, in the Immaterium by this analogy: yellow ones like Sol and any of its billions of cousins. Solar-mass stars were respectable in their luminosity, even impressive.

But one supergiant shone brighter than a thousand of them combined.

The master of mankind had seen that kind of light before. Three others shone like this: Ozymandias, Derwyn, Nyx. He knew what it meant. It meant Primarch.

The Emperor reached out for the Primarchical presence. It did not react, which surprised him. He had not been bothering to be subtle. He would have expected one with the Tenth Primarch's psychic gifts to notice his approach. But he was giddy in his relief and he did not care. He would have time to teach his daughter later, if matters went as well as he hoped.

"West," was the first word he said, half a second after his starship emerged from the Warp.

"Your Imperial Majesty?"

"We must return to the Warp. We must go west," the Emperor said. "Three-hundred light-years."

There was no untainted space to the west of where they were now. He was ordering them to go straight into the mouth of Hell—straight for the Abnormality.

Lesser women would have flinched or questioned his orders. The shipmaster of the Bucephelus was no lesser woman. She only blinked twice, took in a deep breath, fought her fear, won, and said quietly, "As Your Imperial Majesty wills. I shall inform the Navigators."

"No," said the Emperor. "Do not trouble them. I shall Navigate this course myself."

After years of searching, the Emperor of Mankind finally set foot on his daughter's world of Chaos-cursed sky and grinding ice.

He landed in a shuttle from the great golden battleship Bucephelus. She had arrived in-system a week ago. The auspex officers knew now what they were here for: something that had happened only twice before in Imperial history, with Lady Nyx and Lord Derwyn. The Emperor could feel how excited they were, how eager to be a part of history like this, and how anxious to do their very best in this fateful moment, to impress their liege. They had offered him to intercept enough transmissions to figure out where the Primarch was currently located. He had allowed it as a kindness to the auspex officers, though in truth he had no need of it. His daughter's presence practically shouted at him. He could have taken a shuttle to her with his eyes closed. Well, he could, were it not that she was deep underground and a great part of the planet was in the way.

Still, that might not be wise. The Emperor preferred not to reveal the full extent of his power, even to his servants. Elsewise they were prone to thinking him a god, a misunderstanding which was always tedious to persuade them out of. God-worship was a parasite, gnawing away at the minds of mankind, eroding people's initiative and self-respect. He would not permit it, even of himself.

So he had waited as the Bucephelus's auspex officers identified the location of "the Starchild" and her Mechanicum tech-adepts—only the best in the Mechanicum, of course, to attend the Omnissiah personally—plugged data into specialised linguistic-symbolic cogitators to decode the local language. Such things did not offer true fluency. There had been cogitators in the Golden Age which did reach that lofty standard, but all of those were based on Abominable Intelligences and thus deplored since the Cybernetic Revolt. Still, for a quick and rudimentary grasp of the language, they were good enough.

The Emperor had allowed them six days, longer than the usual two. There was no threat of hostile starships or Star Forts in the void, here in the Sheol system. And this was not a meeting he wanted to be any less persuasive than his best.

When that time had passed, the Emperor had finally been able to do as he wished. He landed a shuttle and went to see his long-lost child.

The Sheolites espied their approach, of course. These humans, despite the lamentable condition of their world, had managed praiseworthily at retaining the technology of the Golden Age. The Emperor noted with approval the signs of men with lasguns, rad suits well maintained, and even a few aerospacecraft patrolling the sky. All were drones, unmanned. None had a wingspan exceeding a few metres.

Those drones had seen the intruders—Imperial aerospacecraft, both the shuttles and the interceptors of the Emperor's escort—and not attacked them.

That was an even better sign. The Emperor hoped it implied trust.

To help secure that trust, he had ordered one of his fastest shuttles to race ahead, faster (hopefully) than the locals could catch it; and from that shuttle, a man had stepped out, visibly obviously human. The Sheolites, he knew from his visions, had been in all-out war of humans versus mutants for five-thousand years. They would be suspicious. That was inevitable for outsiders from beyond the stars. But he had hoped, he had intended and it seemed he had succeeded at showing them that these outsiders might be on their side.

That lack of attack did not mean lack of guardedness. The Sheolite aerospacecraft—machines of superb quality, obviously of Golden Age manufacture, though equally obviously not intended for war, for the lascannons that had been bolted on were clearly after-the-fact attachments—had kept watch on the Imperial aerospacecraft from a safe distance. Doubtless they were reporting every detail of the intruders to his daughter.

The Emperor and sixty Custodes stepped out of their shuttles near what the Bucephelus's auspices' orbital scans had revealed was one of the underground bunkers that were this frozen Death World's bastions of human life.

The old wanderer had thought to take fewer Custodes, so as not to intimidate the Sheolites. The Custodes struck fearsome figures, tall and handsome with their golden armour, red cloaks and long Guardian Spears. But Malcador had argued with him, which the Custodes themselves never would. One Primarch had already defied him and almost threatened him, Malcador said, so keen was she to get him off her planet. The Emperor should not discount the possibility that an encounter with a newly rediscovered Primarch would reach the point of violence. How would mankind fare if its master were slain by bad luck in some lousy skirmish? Unlikely as it was, how heavy would be the consequences if he were distracted and let himself get slain by a lucky spear thrust? He needed, Malcador said, to be well-protected in moments like this. Even the Primarchs, his children, could not be trusted, let alone the fanatical followers whom their charisma might cause to flock around them. The Emperor had argued that there was almost no chance of them managing to harm him. Malcador had agreed, but said even small chances should be averted; taking lots of small risks added up to big ones. The Emperor regretted it, but he had bowed to the force of Malcador's logic. Much as he might wish to trust his children more, the Sigillite's words were not without reason.

They did not have to wait long. Dozens of warriors, male and female alike, popped up from behind boulders and jutting out heaps of snow, neatly surrounding the Emperor and his party. Then a tall, somewhat nervous middle-aged woman made them an offer. "Hail, strangers," she had said, and seemed surprised when they hailed her in return, in her own tongue. "Which is your leader?"

"I am," said the Emperor, stepping forth.

"Where do you come from?"

"We," said the Emperor, "come from Terra, the Throneworld of mankind, thousands of light-years to the galactic southeast."

Wonder rippled on the face of the woman and her companions, visible through the transparent facemasks of their rad suits. They had never heard such claims before. The Emperor was well aware that this was the first time the people of Sheol IX had seen offworlders for thousands of years.

Yet she did not contradict him. This too did not surprise the Emperor. Doubtless his daughter had sent this woman and ensured she had been well briefed.

"Then, stranger, the Lady of the Dawn extends an offer of hospitality, conditional on your conduct. Swear an oath not to harm any of us, and we shall not attack you, and you will be permitted entry to our bastion, with your weapons in hand."

The mutters and disapproving expressions gave abundant evidence that numerous of the Sheolite soldiers had not been happy to let them keep their weapons. The Emperor took it as a good sign that they were allowed. He was not such a fool as to assume this meant that they were trusted, however. It was quite possible his daughter simply thought that he would refuse to meet otherwise and she was expecting to have to fight him. He hoped not, but at this stage nothing could be assured.

"My compliments to the Lady of the Dawn," he said graciously—it was never too early to make a good impression on the locals— "and I of course accept these generous terms. I solemnly swear that neither I nor any man in my service shall do harm to any man, woman or child of Sheol IX during my stay here. Unless they attack me or my men first, in which case such treachery will be answered with retribution."

A hand gestured skyward to the Bucephelus. She had descended into low enough orbit that she was visible from here, quite clearly: a golden dot in the black and green and purple swirls of the sky.

It was good to convey kindness when encountering a new culture, the Emperor knew from many years of experience of diplomacy, but never weakness. Men were like sharks. Weakness was blood in the water. Even good men did not respect those who lacked the will to stand up for themselves.

The woman accepted his words with a nod of understanding. "No such will be necessary," she said. She added: "We are human. You are human. We are not foes."

As if it were that simple. But then again, to the people of Sheol IX, it was. The Emperor only wished that everyone in the galaxy was like-minded.

The Terrans were whisked away and guided to the secret entrance to the bunker. From orbit, the Bucephelus's auspex officers had not known where the entrance was, for it was well hidden. They had only known roughly the underground location of the bunker itself. The Emperor had known what to expect. He had seen in his visions his daughter entering and leaving the bunkers of her homeworld a fair few times, though the visions were not constant; he did not know this particular one. And so indeed it proved. They walked for six hours.

They passed over cruel mountains replete with narrow pathways and sudden crevices that could kill a man who took a single step wrong.

They passed under a foul sky with no sun to lighten it. The star Sheol existed, but from the planet it could not be seen. The Abnormality was too near. Here the black of night was twinned with violent purple swirls of Chaotic energy, pulsing with the power of the Dark Gods' domain. The Sheolite people knew better than to look up.

They passed through deep, dark caves of jutting stalactites and stalagmites and tunnels beneath the earth, with skeletons aplenty—some mutant, some human—and slippery treacherous ice underfoot. They knew precisely which patches of ground to step on and which would betray them if they set foot there.

They moved quickly—far more quickly than most professional mountaineers would consider safe. For there were other risks than falling. The blizzards of Sheol IX were shrieking gales of hail and snow that could shred a man with shards of razor-sharp ice. One could not risk being caught out in the open for long.

And through all this, the Sheolites neither paused nor faltered.

Even the Emperor was impressed by these men and women, devoid of genetic modification or psychic powers, who moved with such surety in an environment that was horrendously dangerous and hostile to human life.

He already envisaged a future where his daughter recruited only from this world, or perhaps this and others like it: rugged, tough ice-worlders who did not flinch at extreme temperature or radioactive peril, who tolerated incredibly vicious conditions like they were nothing, and who knew the cold and the scaling of mountains like the back of their hands. They will make for a strong Legion, the Emperor thought, quietly satisfied.

In due time they found their way to a false floor, kilometres into the maze-like tunnels of a complex cave system. Three strong men got together, straining every sinew, to heave up a rock. That revealed a magnetic lift of ancient manufacture. There was no doubt it was of Golden Age making, though likely at the tail end of that better era. Its grey metal was pitted and scarred by ice and stone, and yet its ancient red lights were steadily blinking, still, even now, after five-thousand years.

Only eight people fit in the lift at a time. The Custodes had to divide into parties as they went down. The Emperor came in the fifth party, after dozens of his Custodes had descended into the earth. And he laid his own eyes on the place where his tenth-born daughter had spent the last twenty-eight years.

It was cramped, was his first thought. It was ordered, was his second. The ceiling was barely over two and a half metres—decent for most men and women, but poor for one of Aurora's height. (The Emperor simply shifted his body and armour down to size. A subtle snaking of psychic suggestion, and the men and women escorting him had no idea that his height had ever been different.)

Cleaned rad suits hung drying in one room. Another was there to decontaminate them. Machines sucked up moisture from the air as they dried and fed it back into the bunker's water system. Others processed the water of urine from the toilets and turned it back to fresh—far safer than drinking the toxic, radioactive water from outside. Other rooms were workshops, where men and women with orderly workbenches bent down over bits of gear and saw if they could keep the remnants of a civilisation that had died five-thousand years ago working for a little while longer.

The lights were glaring neon fluorescent. There was no pretence to make them look like the natural glow of the sun, to imitate the comforts of the outside world that the Sheolites had for so long been denied. There was no wood here. Nigh all was plastic or metal. There were pipes openly running by the walls. The people who built this bunker had not put them behind the walls. There was no concession to homeliness or aesthetic.

There was no softness in the design of the underground bunker on Sheol IX, no laxity and no warmth. All was strictly functional. It could not have been more obvious that the people who had designed these bunkers had meant them to be something like a bomb shelter: a brief and temporary thing. They had not meant them to be the primary residence of human life for five millennia.

Yet the human species had done that, on Sheol IX; survived it; withstood it; endured it. The Emperor felt a surge of pride in the ingenuity, hardiness and adaptability of his species.

And there were little touches, here and there, where generations of human beings had put life in a structure built just for cold function. There were pict-casts on the walls. Family trees were sketched on the ceilings. Children played games with each other darting between the tall shadows of the hanging rad suits. Metal wires had been turned to crude stringed instruments; bits of old pipe to brass trumpets and tubas. Above the hammocks where people slept, crammed like sardines (male and female alike, with no room for modesty), paintings had been made and glued to the ceiling. The art of Sheol IX was a unique thing. There was plenty of red, grey and blue but no green, yellow or purple. The strange, vivid yet incomplete set of colours had been constricted by what was there to hand.

Even in this harsh, nigh-intolerable existence—on a world immensely hostile to human life, always teetering at the edge of extinction—people had made beauty here.

After a brisk walk, they came to what looked like a boiler room. The ceiling was higher here, high enough for the Emperor to stand at his full height. A thought, and he did so. People stood among great vats of water and tall shelves full of neatly ordered stacks of food.

Word had clearly spread of offworlders' arrival. For thousands of people stood there, tens of thousands if one counted the adjoining rooms. The bunker was noisy with chatter. The Emperor saw people peeking at him out of a room where damaged snowcrawlers were parked, half-taken-apart, half-put-back-together.

The Emperor's eyes scanned the room, seeking out a tall silhouette. He saw none, until all of a sudden the hubbub abruptly quietened.

A door swung open, and there she was.

"Offworlders," announced the woman who was their guide, "our victorious leader: Aurora Starchild."

For the first time in twenty-eight years, the Emperor laid eyes upon his tiny baby daughter who once snuggled up to him and asked him her sweet little questions until she fell asleep dozing next to his thoughts.

The woman strode in with the calm, steely-eyed confidence of one who does not need to boast or swagger to know that they are in charge; everyone knows they are in charge. When she walked, everyone fell silent, expectant, awaiting her words.

She was not clad in armour. None of the people here were. The Emperor supposed they lacked the means for it. Rather, she wore a rad suit fitted for her tremendous frame. Its uneven lines and ill-fitting curves told that this rad suit had not been built to fit the towering figure of a Primarch, one of his tallest Primarchs at that. Undoubtedly it been put together from parts taken from smaller rad suits. The modifications looked graceless and crude but workable. It would do the job it needed to.

Her skin was pale, too pale, unhealthily pale. It looked wrong on her. All of the other Sheolites were pale alike. No wonder. In her entire life on this planet she had never—not once—seen a distant star or moon, let alone the system's sun.

A chainsword hung at one of Aurora's hips. A big gun—which looked suspiciously like someone had taken the lascannon from a tank—lay at the other. She wore a belt of power packs and climbing tools, and on her back lay a hefty rucksack of supplies, secured by many straps so that a sharp bit of rock slicing as she climbed would not suffice to let it fall.

The Tenth Primarch appeared altogether a rugged figure, perfectly ready to go back out into the Death World's frozen, toxic wilderness. Fierce; assured; commanding; dangerous.

No wonder she had won over the tough, hard-bitten survivors that were the people of this world. She was them. She looked like she belonged here.

The Emperor's heart ached with pride and misery mingled as one. She had done so well here. Yet she should not have had to.

None of them should have had to.

None of his twenty-five scattered children should have been stolen from him and forced to face such mighty challenges at a tender age.

Yet perhaps she did not entirely belong here. Two things marred that hard façade. One was the hair. Outlining the unhealthily pale skin of Aurora's face, a long, luxurious mane of golden hair drifted down past her shoulders. It was strikingly bright, gleaming like polished metal. She was centre of attention in any room she entered. Every eye was drawn to her.

The too-white pallour was her only physical flaw. Rosy lips; a slender, gorgeous figure; a perfectly proportioned face; startlingly pretty eyes, deep green like emeralds; those radiant golden locks… She was breathtakingly beautiful. That otherworldly beauty looked out of place among the bunkers, ice-fields and mountains of Sheol IX, its harsh, regimented, austere life and its vicious, bitter struggle for survival.

The second was the beaming warmth of her smile.

The Emperor of Mankind looked upon his Tenth Primarch and was gladdened. She seemed healthy and well. Was that just on the surface?

He gazed upon her, then, with more senses than mere eyes. The Emperor's psychic regard fell upon the source of the great glowing aura he had sensed here on this world. With a fine-toothed comb he searched her form for any trace of underlying sickness. The taint of Chaos could take any of a thousand forms and flavours in the way its foul touch was perceived on a human: black and boiling with hatred or sickly sweet or poisonous with ambition. The Emperor knew them all.

And he found… nothing. No corruption by the Ruinous Powers and their fell influence. Not a hint. Not a trace.

The Emperor of Terra and his scientific staff, ably led by the most brilliant mind he had ever worked alongside—no, do not think of her—had run millions of tests on the infant Primarchs. Of course, he had never dreamt of running the experiment of throwing his babies' lifepods into the deep Warp to be tossed and hurled about by the raw, mad power of that black abyss.

Even the Emperor, the oldest and wisest psyker in human history, had not known what that would do to his poor helpless children. In his years away from his children, cursing himself for his failure to protect them, the Emperor had had plenty of time to muse gloomily on what the consequences might be.

Would the Primarchs emerge from the Warp as anything like he had known them? Or would his beautiful children be utterly corrupted into monstrous creatures of Chaos and ruin? Or anything in between? He truly had not known.

Seeing Derwyn and Nyx had given him hope. Both his twentieth-born son and his nineteenth-born daughter were relatively intact. Oh, both had suffered in other ways; but neither had seemed terribly affected by the frothing ocean of malevolent power they had been dumped in during their childhood. It had surprised the Emperor how intact they were. He had surreptitiously tested their genes after their recovery, and while there were divergences from his design, he had feared it would be worse. Much worse.

But the Emperor knew better than to think that must be a rule. The Warp was the Warp. Expecting consistency from it was folly. It was quite possible that one Primarch could emerge from it totally pristine while another was mutated into Chaos Spawn.

The Emperor had feared that especially a Primarch who had been this close to the Abnormality for decades, as Aurora had, would be tainted by the touch of the Ruinous Powers. Such Primarchs would not be overcome entirely. The protections the Emperor and—no, do not think of her—had built into them were formidable. But they would have significant mutations. Extra limbs, fur instead of hair, animalistic protrusions, unhealthy cravings caused by the taint of Chaos on their bodies, such as for blood or corpses… the Emperor had pondered these questions at length after his children were stolen from him, and that was what he had guessed.

Apparently, wrongly.

Female; 4.16 metres tall; golden-blonde hair; emerald-green eyes, slightly glowing, evidence of being a powerful psyker; two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, ten toes, ten fingers; no mutations. That had been his design. The Tenth Primarch was exactly as he had designed her.

The Emperor, ever disciplined, allowed no trace of it to show on his face; but inside he was practically collapsing with relief.

Perfect.

He was unspeakably glad to see her well.

Finally, he reached out one more time, discreetly, with his psychic powers, this time not to her body but her psychic aura. He sensed that there was not a trace of Chaos on her. Indeed, not a trace of visible psychic power at all. She was a creature of the Warp, of course, as all Primarchs were. But if he had not known better, he would not have known she was a psyker at all.

The golden light in the Warp shone as pure as a bell and as bright as a beacon, undaunted by the churning storm of darkness that sat right next-door.

The Emperor took a deep breath in. He took a deep breath out. He took another deep breath, in, out; in, then out.

Of all his scattered children, their bodies stolen by the Enemy, who might also lose their souls, he had feared the most for the Tenth Primarch. A psyker with an extremely powerful connection to the Warp, right next to the dominion of Chaos where the raw and screaming power of the Enemy bled into the material universe… it was a recipe for catastrophe. How in Terra's name had she emerged untainted?

He did not know how she had done it. Even the slightest use of her powers would carry risks to her soul, without intense training and iron mental discipline, on that accursed planet, so close to the Abnormality and the corruptive touch of the Ruinous Powers. She must have been extraordinarily careful.

It was like a mountainous weight off his back, knowing that his sweet little daughter had passed undamaged, this close to the Enemy's realm.

…All of this scan took place in less than a second after Aurora Starchild walked through that door.

The Starchild raised a hand, and there was silence; and she looked at the Emperor.

Everybody looked at him.

The Emperor braced himself for what was sure to be another painful and difficult conversation. He had seen this before. He knew how it would go. It was never easy, convincing a prideful and protective superhuman warlord, prickly, with their hackles up, to put their trust in him and join him. Newly found Primarchs were wary of this intruder from the stars who possessed such mighty fleets and armies. They were fearful, though they would never admit it, of the implicit threat to the people whom they had come to see as their own, theirs to rule and theirs to call kith and kin and theirs to protect.

"Greetings and well met, Aurora Starchild," he began portentously, in what his best Mechanicum tech-adepts had decoded was the language of Sheol IX. "It gladdens my heart to see the triumphs you, the humans of this world, have had against the inhuman foe. I am—"

Then, silently, Aurora did something that stunned the Emperor.

She knelt.

There and then, silence was complete; absolute; total. One could have heard a pin drop.

The ancient, immortal lord of the Imperium was utterly overtaken by surprise. He strove firmly to keep his face cool and calm. He managed it, but it was no easy task, when it was taking effort to prevent his jaw from dropping.

He had anticipated two-thousand, three-hundred and eighty-nine possible scenarios and drawn up detailed countermeasures for what he would do in case of each.

None of them had been this.

The Lady of the Dawn turned her face up to her shocked father. It was a beautiful face framed by long locks of golden hair. She said:

"You do not need to tell me who you are. I know who you are."

Then she turned to her followers and she spoke in a firm, glorious soprano, instantly and immediately captivating the room:

"My friends! Warriors of Sheol! Heroes of mankind! Tonight is my high honour to introduce to you the man who has done more for our cause than any other. A tireless champion of the human species. An immortal scientist who has lived through the lost Golden Age, remembers its glories and its technologies and is working to return us to them. A brave and mighty warrior who has fought his way through the worst horrors that the Fall unleashed on ancient Terra, and beat them all. A unifying leader who has brought together thousands of worlds, led them out of the dark ages and given trillions of human beings back their birthright: the light and comfort of civilisation.

"Now he comes to us. My friends, I know you may be scared. There is no shame in that. The unknown is fearful. And the past five millennia have not been kind to Sheol IX. But that time is over. This man is not our enemy; he is our light and our hope. Ladies and gentlemen—I give you my lord and father, the Emperor of Mankind!"

And the crowd surged to their feet. Thousands of voices shouted their approval. There was a tremendous roar of noise. The ground shook, as men banged their hands against the water tanks or else stamped again and again on the bunker floor.

All was noise, and all was indecipherable; but in half a minute's time the stamp became rhythmic, and a clear voice emerged, a voice that was a thousand voices:

"EM-PE-ROR! EM-PE-ROR! EM-PE-ROR!"

Aurora spoke over the cheering. Her lilting, songlike soprano effortlessly rose above the noise of the crowd.

"This is a glorious day. The coming of the Emperor means that Old Night is at an end. Let us leave it without a backward glance to that sad and benighted past, and let us stride forward into the open arms waiting to embrace us! Let us retake our rightful place in galactic—human—civilisation!"

The crowd went mad for her.

Fifty seconds' speech, and she had their hearts soaring and shaking with uncontainable emotion. Just like that.

A bonfire of joy burst out to fill the cold, grey bunker. And its spark caught light through the many more men and women in other bunkers, watching this on their screens, around the world of Sheol IX. The light swept across the world, and the darkness of despair was banished and could not withstand it.

Men and women kissed each other full on the lips; and these were not lovers but strangers. They laughed. They cried. They tossed their children in the air.

Across the planet of accursed sky and unforgiving ice, a thousand cries echoed from a million voices. "AURORA! AURORA!" they cried, and "EM-PE-ROR!" and "STARCHILD! STARCHILD!". "LADY OF THE DAWN!" they hailed, and "STARFATHER!" and "TERRA!" and "FOR MANKIND!"

There was weeping—much weeping. Grizzled old warriors sobbed into their beards, openly and unashamed. Aurora's words had touched something deep in their hearts with not only the sparkling flame of hope but the soft, soothing hearth-warmth of relief after long suffering.

Thousands of years they had suffered. Not just themselves, but their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-grandfathers, and their distant forefathers far, far back for generations beyond memory. That ancestral anguish had etched scars into their psyche. For long millennia, life had been a ceaseless spiral of decline and despair, never-ending.

Then the Starchild had fallen from the stars, and with her she brought a flowering of hope. A better future could be grasped, she had said, and such was the force and passion of her rhetoric that they had been swayed to fight for it. Even some of those who fought for Aurora had thought that hers seemed an impossible hope. They had joined her because they thought that it was better to die fast and defiant, to die standing, than to die slowly and on their knees, bunker by bunker, as the last outposts of the human species were snuffed out by the mutant tide.

Yet, in spite of fear and despair, they had fought. Like heroes they had fought. Their dauntless valour and feats of skill and courage were the stuff of legends. And no god was to thank for it. By human hands, the impossible had become possible, then the possible had become fact. The mutants were defeated. The dark ages, ended. Their isolation, undone. Their ties to galactic mankind, restored.

The better future was here and now. Joyously they grasped it. Five-thousand years of ever-bleeding wound had finally found a balm.

The Emperor, curiously, felt himself almost forgotten in the celebration. He was not, of course. Certainly there were admirers. Many, many men and women rushed to shake his hand and thank him for their reunion with the outside galaxy. But it did not feel like he was the centre of attention. Nor was his daughter. Both of them seemed small and insignificant next to the magnitude of what he could see and feel through his psychic senses: the overpowering joy of millions of people, thrilled, overcome with happiness, delighting in their liberation.

He wished he could feel like this every day. If every day of the Great Crusade felt like this one, his war to save his species would be a much happier occupation.

The Emperor walked through the crowd. They parted for him with awed reverence. He took his kneeling daughter's hands and raised her to her feet. After she had risen, her hands did not let go of his.

For a time, father and daughter both said naught. They just stood together, his daughter's hands in his. Two figures of bright eyes and towering height gazed down at the spectacle of a planet celebrating returning to civilisation, reclaiming its links with scattered and sundered mankind.

"They are so happy," Aurora said quietly at last. Her gaze was fixed on her people, hugging strangers, dancing, kissing and weeping tears of gladness.

So splendid was she, so flawless, so supremely and perfectly beautiful that she could have passed for a statue carved out of stone, except for her face. She was smiling, ever-so-slightly, a small curve of perfect lips. And there was an utter softness in her glimmering green eyes.

"They are," agreed the Emperor.

The master of mankind looked upon his works—the world and the woman—and he was content.

Nevertheless he felt he had to ask: "How did you know me?"

"I dream of you, sometimes," his daughter said.

Our psychic connection, the Emperor thought at once. It goes both ways. As I can see through her eyes she can see through mine. I never knew.

There were no records, nor tomes of lore to consult about psychic connections like these. Nobody had ever done something like this before. There was no precedent to the creation of his Primarchs. This was uncharted space. He and he alone would have to map its stars.

…Or perhaps not quite alone.

"And when I was a baby," she continued, "you would speak to me."

The Emperor's breath caught. From its place locked in a safe deep in his heart with agonising fondness, reared up a cherished memory: a tiny voice that liked to keep asking him: What this? Why? What this do, Daddy?

"You remember that?" His tone was strangled.

"Yes," she said. "Only faintly, truth be told. I was very small—not even yet born. And yet whenever times seemed darkest I would recall the warm voice that told me tales and lulled me to sleep when I was a babe. It was a comfort to me."

She smiled at him, then, a warm glance of emerald eyes and an upward curve of ruby lips. That small soft smile was brilliant, blinding, brighter than the sun.

"Your voice is exactly the same."

The Emperor opened his mouth, then closed it. Quite uncharacteristically, he found that he had no idea what to say.

He turned away, so that his daughter would not see the tears in his eyes.