The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘I have been here before,’ he said, removing his helmet and hooking it to his belt.

‘You remember this cavern?’ said Aximand as the Mournival and Justaerin spread out.

‘No, but every fibre of my body tells me I stood here,’ said Horus, moving through the chamber.

Light refracting through the translucent columns and crystalline growths imparted colour to the walls: bilious green, cancerous purple, bruise yellow. They were standing in the guts of the mountain. Literally. A chamber of digestion. A suitlight played over the lake, holding steady enough for Horus to picture it as a low-hanging moon.

Not Molech’s moon, but Terra’s moon, as though the lake wasn’t a body of water at all, but a window through time. He’d sat with his father on the shores of the Tuz Gölü and skimmed rocks at the image of the moon and for a moment – just a fleeting moment – he could smell its hypersaline waters.

The light moved on and the water was just water. Cold and hostile, but just water.

With a growing sense of purpose, Horus made his way towards the water’s edge. Shadows where no shadows ought to be stretched over the walls, and a thousand muttering voices seemed to rise from the water. He glanced back at the Mournival. Could they hear the voices or see the shadows? He doubted it.

This cave was not entirely of this world, and whatever was keeping it anchored was fraying. Just by being here he was tugging on its loose threads. The image of bones and sinews returned, something organic, the architecture of the mind.

‘That’s what you did here,’ he said, turning on the spot. ‘You cut through the world here and reshaped us, made us forget what we’d seen you do…’

‘Sir?’ said Aximand.

Horus nodded to himself. ‘This is the scab you left behind, father. Something this powerful leaves a mark, and this is it. The bruise you left behind when you shaped your lie.’

The frayed edge pulled a little more. The scab peeled back.

Ghost shapes moved through the cavern, given life by his picking at the wound in the angles of space and time. Each was numinous and smudged, like figures seen through dirty glass. They were indistinct, but Horus knew them all.

He walked among them, smiling as though his brothers were here with him now.

‘The Khan stood here,’ said Horus as the first figure stopped and took a knee on his left. A second figure knelt to his right.

‘The Lion over there.’

Horus felt himself enveloped in light, cocooned by its cold illumination. He’d retraced the steps he’d taken almost a century ago without even knowing it.

Horus moved back, detaching from a rendering of his own body in ambient light. Like his spectral primarch brothers, his radiant doppelgänger knelt as a figure approached from across the lake. Gold fire and caged lightning; the Emperor without His mask.

‘What is this?’ demanded Abaddon, his bolter raised and ready to fire. The figures were only now becoming visible to them. Horus waved their weapons down.

‘An imprint left over from days past,’ he said. ‘A psychic figment of a shared consciousness.’

The ghost of his father walked over the surface of the lake, wordlessly repeating whatever psycho-cognitive alchemy he had wrought to reshape the pathways in the minds of his sons.

‘This is where I forgot Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Maybe here is where I will remember it.’

Aximand raised his bolter again, aiming it at the numinous being on the water. ‘You said that thing is an echo? A psychic imprint?’

‘Yes,’ said Horus.

‘Then why is it boiling the lake?’