He had not known such pure elation in untold millennia. Where his brothers were disturbed by the portents his sister foretold, that their enemies were mustering a combined front against them, Mordefir was quietly growing ever more eager to face that front. Yet he did not wish to interrupt his foes; let them build their forces up. Having seen the bloodletting of Shanolok, the Angel has reached out through her Aeldari contacts and now a small Craftworlder strike fleet accompanies their Necron vessel? Good. The femme fatale Inquisitor duo brings their full battlefleet to bear? Great. The Night Daemon finds itself in a combined Rogue Trader and Inquisition entourage, with a small flotilla of warships of their own? Wonderful!

  Let them come! Mordefir had broken too many worlds unopposed. He had heard the rumors of his peers, of how Ka’Bandha had built a celestial monument to Kharnath at Baal from a mountain range of Hive fleet corpses; he had heard of how Angron was smashing through the unending tide of Indomitus Fleet Quartus at Malakbael. There was no force great enough to sate the hunger Mordefir felt within, a hunger that remained since first making his deal with the Hound on Vaktez.

  No, that was not true. There was her. His sister. Oh, how legendary their battle would be! Mordefir’s veins already throbbed at the thought of breaking the combined fleets that would soon assail them, but a carnal lust evolved within him as he set his eyes on his sister. She had changed since rejoining with her Vaktez-born flesh. She was smaller, now, than her brothers. Yet she was more than she had ever been. And when she glanced to him and smiled, Mordefir’s blood cooled. She knew what he was. And he knew that while their battle may have been star-shattering and world-sundering, that while they might need days or even weeks to fight it out, in the end, it would be his skull that would be cleaved from its shoulders. And no offering would be made to Kharnath from that result.

  “When we arrive at Apotheosis,” Mordefir said to the group then. He had unknowingly interrupted Lunacius; his brother’s wry words fell on ears utterly deaf, and Mordefir’s interruption came out of the blue and without much care for those around him. “Bring our fortress in low. Atmospheric.”

  Lunacius stared daggers at his brother for the interruption, and it took Veralith’s voice to keep him from lunging at his blood-brother. “Why, Mordy?”

  “The enemy fleets will gather and cluster above, where our guns cannot reach them and where they cannot harm our vessel. They will set boarding parties and footmen upon us, the Angel and the human that gave my brother a thrashing among these parties. I would meet them,” Mordefir explained.

  “No human gave me a—” Lunacius began to shriek.

  “I think this is a fine plan,” Veralith agreed. Then, with a coy smile, she added, “You and your brother can mount the defense against their boarding troops together. When the enemy fleets coalesce above us, I will swipe them from the skies,” she said, whisking two left hands aside. Her flesh and flood had had only two arms, but upon joining with her external consciousness, her third and fourth arms, along with her wings, had sprouted from her body. Her skin had begun to fade to blue, but she had not developed the multitude of eyes her once-external visage had possessed.

  The meeting continued from there, but Mordefir’s attention waned. For a time, he dwelled on his coming combat with the Angel, but that did not last. He found his thoughts uncharacteristically drifting to the distant past. Vaktez was not something he had often given much thought about, but he found himself, then, remembering the life, and partial-ascension, of his human self. Of the blood that had caked his flesh. Of the flesh in his mouth, and the blood that rose from it as he chewed. Covered inside and out in the gore of those he had slaughtered— while his brother did what, exactly? Languish? Instability and opportunity always came to Lunacius; Mordefir had to be the one to make room for his opportunities from his own strength.

  That he was having these thoughts at all was his sister’s doing, he reflected. She was not inserting them into his mind, but rather, it had been Veralith’s command that they retain their humanity—and thus their memories—rather than ascend to full daemonhood. That opportunity had presented itself, but to be a daemon was to be a pawn in someone else’s game. Veralith had wanted her kin to be players, not pawns. No, when they ascended in full, they would rise to the Pantheon of Gods, and nothing less. The Vaktez Quartet saw the Great Game for what it was, but knew it was not the only game to play.

  “Your brother would say it’s not like you to think for so long.”

  The words snapped him from his thoughts, and he looked up. “My brother is a poor arbiter of thought,” he replied. He was alone with her. The meeting had ended; the others had left. Veralith remained, but why? “Do you have need me?”

  A special sort of grin spread across Veralith’s lips, one Mordefir had not seen before. It was coy and knowing, yes, and he had seen those from her many times in the past. But this smile was possessed of another element, which he could not so soon identify. Very worrisome. “As ever I have,” she answered, maintaining the grin. “Walk with me.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  He did so, and only after his feet began to move—in longer but slower strides than those of his sister—did he ask his next question. “Where to?”

  “Anywhere,” she shrugged. She led him on through Noctilith halls, though indeed, it did not seem as though she had any goal in mind for their walk. The walk itself was both journey and destination.

  For a time, Mordefir entertained the journey. They had had these halls to walk through for eons, yet the Blackstone Fortress was of such a size that, as there were only four of their kin, there were still new paths to take. But, eventually, he interrupted their stroll with an observation of his own: “My brother would demand you spit them out.”

  “What?”

  “Your thoughts.”

  “A wise man tells me that Lunacius is a poor arbiter of thought.”

  “Is that what I am? Wise?”

  Veralith halted in her stroll, and Mordefir with her, in front of a window to the outside Empyrean. She turned to him, and he peered down at her. Unholy lights danced over the halves of their bodies that faced the window. “I have thought so.” Whatever unknown element had been present on her earlier smile still remained on her lips, even if the coyness and knowledge had gone. “You don’t recognize it, do you?”

  Mordefir beamed down toward her, bricklike expression unchanging.

  Veralith laughed from his gaze, and turned to face the Empyrean. “I met a traveler from an antique land,” she began, then chuckled to herself. “Aren’t they all, eh? Do you know what the Angel is missing, though others have sought to offer it to her?”

  “I cannot,” Mordefir sighed.

  “Love,” Veralith answered, and Mordefir rose upright, as though recoiling from the word. “It is not something our kind have known. But I have wondered on its power in the cosmos. Faith grants power. You needn’t look further than the Imperium for that, and you, notably, have such faith in me.”

  “Rightfully.”

  Veralith paused, biting her lower lip in hesitation, then asked, “You have felt something akin to love for me.”

  “I have felt lust, sister, and not for your flesh,” Mordefir answered. Veralith faced him once more. “For the battle you and I would have, were you embroiled in the same bloodlust I have lived in for celestial lifetimes.”

  Veralith regarded him. A lesser mind may have seen a simple creature, one caring only for carnage. But there was more beneath his thick hide than that, she knew. There was wit, strategy, intelligence. Mordefir was burdened by the demands of his patron, as she was of hers, but he was not so wholly defined by them. But even within those demands, he had allowed himself to borrow from her own repertoire, and employ a deceit. She was happy to see it so.

  “Mordy,” she chastised him, tilting her head to the side.

  He paused and, after a struggle visibly evidenced by the twitching of knotted muscle, disarmed himself. “Very,” he greeted her at last, the titanic brute surrendering to the little girl ahead of him.

  “There you are. I wonder how things would have changed had we met on Vaktez, before the Hound and the Raven took us in. Do you ever wonder the same?”

  “Tens of trillions of souls would have been spared, I imagine,” Mordefir answered.

  Veralith blurted out a laugh. “That is true, I suppose, yes! Oh, Mordy…,” she started, beginning to raise a hand toward him but, realizing that she could never reach up to him now, pulled her grasp away. She retreated to staring back out toward the Empyrean. “The Night Daemon plays with its mortal host’s heart. Love defines its host. It is no greater or lesser weakness than blind fury, and, with eyes wide open, love can be just as strong. One wonders why we have not embraced ours, then.”

  Mordefir had an immediate answer, which even Veralith was not anticipating. “Love is a strength, yes, and it compels souls to push themselves to greater deeds. But it takes time for the fires of love to kindle. It takes time for them to flare. Time is something we have spent in great quantities, but never down the avenue of love. To start now would delay us terribly, and that has ever been the case in the past. We have not been allowed to suffer delays.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “What?”

  “Wise.”

  A thin smile crept over Mordefir’s lips for the first time in hundreds if not thousands of years, he enjoying his sister’s keen memory as he would a great battle.

  “Of your faith,” Veralith began then, and turned toward him once more. “How great is it in me?”

  “Absolute.”

  “When the times comes—and it will, and soon—when you must choose between Kharnath and me, what will your choice—”

  “You, Veralith, in a heartbeat,” he answered at once.

  She bit her lips again. “I have never shared my plans with you or the others. Not with anyone.”

  “And I would not ask you to start now,” he shook his head. “My faith in you comes from the path of success we have left in our wake for eons, not from weightless words any fool could utter. You, my sister, are the Doom of All Things. It is a title earned, not given. I know that. Our brothers know that. The mortals out there will come to know it too,” he explained, pointing out toward the Empyrean.

  “But, for my plans, I have a request of you that you may not understand,” Veralith began.

  “Need I understand it to fulfill that request? If not, I would hear it all the same.”

  She looked up at him, pausing for a moment. Then, spontaneously, she blurted out another laugh before fighting to compose herself. “I want you to get your brother killed. Not to kill him yourself, do not do that. But I need him dead at our enemies’ hands. You must fight our foes alone, when the time comes.”

  Mordefir regarded her coldly for a time. “Veralith,” he started, then grinned. “You are not the only one with such a plan in mind.”

  She smiled at him, but in truth was glad that he could not read her thoughts. You are going to die too, Mordy. Go out in the glory you deserve. I will see you in the afterlife soon.

  Veralith playing at if not that?

  Shelley's Ozymandias here, only because I read the poem recently and it has stuck with me in a somewhat lasting, profound manner. But contextually, it raises questions over how she would have heard the poem herself, some ten or twenty thousand years from now, on Vaktez.

  Ka’Bandha had built a celestial monument to Kharnath at Baal from a mountain range of Hive fleet corpses" - This is a reference to semi-recent lore. As it hints, a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan attacked the Blood Angel homeworld of Baal. The Blood Angels, and their late Primarch, Sanguinius, are sworn enemies of the Greater Daemon Ka’Bandha; so-sworn, however, that Ka’Bandha wants to save them for himself, and so wielded his legion of daemons to crush the Tyranid invasion and build a monument to Khorne from their corpses on his way out.

  Khorne and began plowing through a chunk of his brother's Indomitus Crusade, ultimately only being stopped with the return of the Lion.