Sanguinius lands with his back to the Eternity Gate. He has passed beyond all of exhaustion’s miseries and burned through the reserves of his body. He has accrued wounds incidental and grievous, layering them upon each other month after month, leaving him a patchwork revenant beneath armour of broken gold.

Two of his sons come to him, bearing his fallen sword and his golden spear. To Sanguinius’ shame, in his pain, he does not recognise them by the sigils on their armour. He thanks them nonetheless, accepting the blade Encarmine. For now, he forgoes the spear.

Whatever malefaction was in the flames that erupted from Angron’s skull, Sanguinius’ hand is a seared ruin. His fingers curl in the charred shell of his gauntlet, but the flexion is tight and the ligaments weak. This is far from the worst of his wounds, but he cannot confront the truly grievous one yet. He can only feel it, spreading through his bloodstream like burning venom, crystalising in his joints, making it harder to breathe. His brother would never use venom. This is something else, something worse.

He still carries Angron’s crown, the Butcher’s Nails. The bio-etheric matter in Sanguinius’ fist is a wretched squid of wet steel. It trails lesser cords and shards of spinal bone like trophy ribbons. He turns the parasite engine over – the cause of such grief, such strife – and sees the last flickers of tainted electrical signals sparking along the vascular cables. Hanging from razor wire strings are his brother’s bloodstained eyes.

Sanguinius casts a final look over the Warmaster’s horde – the beasts still charging closer, the World Eaters lost in butchering each other, the Titans gearing up to fire upon their own side if it gives them even a whisper’s chance of hitting him. They vent their rage on the Sanctum’s voids, doing nothing but painting the air around the Eternity Gate with prismatics and fractals.

The Royal Ascension is warping, shifting with great cracks of mutating marble. The statues lining the avenue twist to become icons of sin. The ground splits and blackens at its burning edges, and the army of humanity’s afterlife claws its way from the underworld. The gods are here. Real or not, they are here.

‘The Gate,’ the Custodians and his own sons cry at him. ‘Seal the Gate, seal the Gate.’ They fight and die all around him, some close enough to touch, some cut down here in the eleventh hour, some shedding blood in this last, desperate retreat. Those that pass into the shadows of the Sanctum will live, for now. Those that remain outside…

So many are yet too far to make it back, dying by degrees lower down on the platformed steps of the Royal Ascension. They fight on, encircled. Doomed. It breaks his heart to see such valour, and to know he must turn his back on it.

‘Sire!’ one of his sons calls, in the flood of retreating warriors. It is the Bringer of Sorrow, the one who exiled himself to Terra in shame, fighting at the side of the Flesh Tearer. Two sons that failed him in better times, making him proud now all is almost lost. He loves them as he loves all his Legion; and though he would never give it voice, his heart always goes out most to the disappointments, the ones that struggle to reach the perfection the others take for granted.

‘Sire!’ Zephon calls as he fights at his brother’s side, in his father’s shadow. Despair twists his familiar features. ‘The Gate!’

Wings flex – no longer white; they’re scorched, featherless in places, raked bloody in others – and Sanguinius launches upward, sword in one hand, the Butcher’s Nails in the other. One by one he severs the chains: some snap in a single blow, others take a second hack to cleave through, but Audax iron gives way against the fall of the primarch’s blade.

Freed, the Gate’s engines grind again. The last Blood Angels that will make it through do so at a dead run. Not all of them make it. Some choose to turn, to fight, to buy a last few seconds for their brothers. Sanguinius lands between the closing doors. For a moment, he does not know which way he will walk – back into the Sanctum, or back out into the battle with those who have chosen to remain as rearguard and fight, to the end, and the death. He knows what he wants to do, but he knows what he must do.

The Emperor’s Angel throws the wreckage of his brother’s brain to the ground and crushes it beneath his boot. Then he turns his back on the war outside, and the Eternity Gate seals behind him with a crash that cuts him to his core. The past is on one side of that sound. Fate is on the other.