THE BETRAYER
I was there the day that Horus fell…
'It is the folly of men to believe that they are great players on the stage of history, that their actions might affect the grand procession that is the passage of time. It is an insulating conceit a powerful man might clasp tight to his bosom that he might sleep away the night, safe in the knowledge that, but for his presence, the world would not turn, the mountains would crumble and the seas dry up. But if the remembrance of history has taught us anything, it is that, in time, all things will pass. Unnumbered civilisations before ours are naught but dust and bones, and the greatest heroes of their age are forgotten legends. No man lives forever and even as memory fades, so too will any remembrance of him.
'It is a universal truth and an unavoidable law that cannot be denied, despite the protestations of the vain, the arrogant and the tyrannical.
'Horus was the exception.'
- Kyril Sindermann, Preface to the Remembrancers
'It would take a thousand cliches to describe the Warmaster, each one truer than the last.'
- Petronella Vivar, Palatina Majoria of House Carpinus
'Everything degenerates in the hands of men.'
- Ignace Karkasy, Meditations on the Elegiac Hero
ONE
Scion of Terra
Colossi
Rebel moon
Cyclopean Magnus, Rogal Dorn, Leman Russ: names that rang with history, names that shaped history. Her eyes roamed further up the list: Corax, Night Haunter, Angron… and so on through a legacy of heroism and conquest, of worlds reclaimed in the name of the Emperor as part of the ever-expanding Imperium of Man.
It thrilled her just to hear the names in her head.
But greater than any of them was the name at the top of the list.
Horus: the Warmaster.
Lupercal, she heard his soldiers now called him – an affectionate nickname for their beloved commander. It was a name earned in the fires of battle: on Ullanor, on Murder, on Sixty-Three Nineteen, – a world the deluded inhabitants had, in their ignorance, known as Terra – and a thousand other batdes she had not yet committed to her mnemonic implants.
The thought that she was so very far from the sprawling family estates of Kairos and would soon set foot on
the Vengeful Spirit to record living history took her breath away. But she was here to do more than simply record history unfolding; she knew, deep in her soul, that Horus was history.
She ran a hand through her long, midnight black hair, swept up in a style considered chic in the Terran court –not that anyone this far out in space would know, allowing her fingernails to trace a path down her smooth, unblemished skin. Her olive skinned features had been carefully moulded by a life of wealth and facial sculpting to be regal and distinguished, with just the fashionable amount of aloofness crafted into the proud sweep of her jawline.
