The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,96

I could not even glance at them directly, and merely hearing their roars, even from so far away, was physically painful. Those things led the charge against the Lion’s Gate itself, and when their sorcerous fire met the barrage from the lascannons the resulting inferno was like the voidborn destruction of stars.

Some of them were cast down by the Custodians, working in conjunction with whole phalanxes of null-maidens, and the many brutal duels between daemon and defender were horrific to witness. But they could not all be stopped, and I could only watch as the gate itself was finally breached, its towers torn down and its guns silenced. I watched the brazen doors crumble under the relentless onslaught, and saw the first of the behemoths pass through the portal.

Even at such a time of unsurpassed destruction, nothing I lived through then was worse than that sight. I saw the vast creature stride across the threshold, its whip of flame curling about its bloody torso, its obscene head splayed open in a roar of triumph. I saw the ancient defences stacked around it slide into heaps of burning rubble, and saw the defenders buried alive even as they ran from their stations in terror.

I do not know what would have transpired if he had not been with us that night. I like to think that Valoris would have rallied his troops, thousands of which were still contesting the great void port expanse beyond, and pulled back to defeat it. I like to think that, if he had somehow failed in that, the mortal defenders, who still numbered in the millions, would have been able to staunch the assault with the sacrifice of their own lives.

In the end, neither was needed. The Lord Guilliman came at last, hastening down from the heights of the Sanctum. He brought with him all those he had been able to gather from his already war-wearied task force – companies of Space Marines from many Chapters, the living saints with their haloes of gold, the last of the Grey Knights summoned from Luna. That force, so small in number compared with the deluge of monsters that had spilled through the gate, took them on.

You will never hear an account of that battle, not as you will hear accounts of his triumphant return to Terra, nor the great crusade that followed those days. You will never hear how Roboute Guilliman fought the greater daemon atop the ruins of the Lion’s Gate as the skies rained crimson tears around them. You will never read of how the two of them duelled amid the screams and the rearing flames, each testing the other to destruction, teetering on the edge of the treacherous precipice while the hordes of damnation seethed below. You will never hear how the monster nearly ripped him apart with a single lash of its whip, or how his brow glowed with the light of the sun when he fought, or how in the end he drove his sword into the daemon’s chest and clean out the other side. You will never hear how he choked the life from that unnatural leviathan with his great gauntlets, then cast its body down from the pyramid of debris to break apart on the bloody dust below.

I watched it all through my tears, and felt no shame in that. My knuckles were white on the railings; my heart was hammering like a child’s. I watched Guilliman fight, a scene dragged straight from the age of legends, and for a moment I imagined I could have been there, right at the start, when it was the Warmaster’s armies breaking through the walls.

You might think me fortunate to have seen such things. If you had asked me in my youth what I would have given to see a primarch take the fight to our greatest enemy, I might have told you that I would have happily died for the privilege.

But just then all I felt was a kind of numbing grief. For so long we had been in moral stasis, rehearsing old stories and drawing strength from them. We laughed about the primarchs returning, mostly because we knew it would never happen. Now that it had, I felt empty. The dream had not become reality; reality had become like a dream.

More than the gate was destroyed on that night. As I watched the columns of smoke rise into the storm-light and saw the vengeful Custodians pursue the screaming daemons far from the burning