Archive of Our Own

Frost-flame dim on day’s brow; bale-wind — wolf-voiced, woe-bound — wound about the stone halls when thought’s high-builder, law-wise shield-lord, trod spear’s road for ill-fated kin.

Roboute allowed himself the ghost of a smile at the thought, careful not to bare his teeth. He had found, when he searched the libraries of Terra, that Fenris kept no written history. The collective memory of its people was preserved in sagas and songs, carried in the word-hoards of skjalds. He had been surprised at first at the capacity of mortal minds to recall the tales of a thousand winters, realising too late how the verse-forms clung like burrs to a pelt, impossible to shake free. Now, the knotted stanzas and kennings, the oblique turns of phrase and alliterations, kept slipping into his own thoughts unbidden.

He welcomed the reminders. It was all too easy to underestimate the Wolves of Fenris, looking no deeper than their barbarian appearance, the furs and bones decorating the battle-plate of the honour guard leading him through their mountain fortress. But he had met the Sixth Legion twice before and knew well that he Wolves were as complex as their verse-work.

None of which they shared this time. As the Wolves led him deeper, descending great flights of stairs hewn from the mountain’s heart, the weight of silence pressed in. The arrival of a primarch called for ceremony, even among the infamously unpretentious Sixth Legion, displays of martial pride, swords and axes brandished as if two clans met upon the ice. But only a single pack had emerged as his Stormbird crossed the high meadows of Asaheim, vast fields of snow and evergreen forests giving way to peaks even greater than the Hera’s Crown Mountains of Macragge, and the Wolves had only spoken a few terse words in greeting.

He had been told the situation was dire, had sped through the warp with all haste, but he had not imagined it would already be this grave. The warriors of Fenris would no sooner show weakness to an off-worlder than roll over and bare their bellies, but the freezing caverns of the Aett held a stench of piss-sour sweat that would have been fear-stink if it had risen from lesser men.

There were gaps in the ranks of the Wolf Guard lining the hallways and caverns, vaerangi with fresh paint on their pauldrons, grim-faced thegni leading squads with mismatched company brands. They clustered in wary packs, hands never far from the hilts of their weapons, yellow eyes exchanging glances as he passed. Their expressions were as warm as the death-edged winter gale howling outside the mountain. They knew why he had come.

Packs of warriors waited outside the deep-delved hall that served as Russ’s chambers of state. A handful of the faces were familiar, Einherjar Roboute had met before, Russ’s own blood-sworn council and their huscarls. They stood without order of rank, as if loitering idly, but all of them wore full plate. It was impossible to tell whether the hersirs were guarding the doors or barricading them.

Among them were Apothecaries, black-armoured Wolf Priests with the stink of counterseptics and blood clinging to them as though they had just stepped out of the surgical theatre. Others had shed their helms in favour of horned head-dresses, so hung about with amulets it was difficult to tell the colour of the ceramite underneath. Bones clicked and rattled as they turned to regard him, wrinkling their noises at the scent of him, the spiced oils rubbed into his skin, the lingering smell of lavender on his robes, the aromatic perfume of the fresh laurel wreath he wore.

It was clearer than ever why they had earned the name Space Wolves among the people of the Imperium, though the men called themselves Sky Warriors in their ancient tongue and the wolves at their feet weren’t wolves at all. Animal motifs were rife in Imperial iconography; the Legiones Astartes abounded with lupines and hounds, ravens and raptors, eagles, aquilae, and mythological hydras. None embodied their chosen symbol as closely as the Sixth Legion. Too-long canine teeth jutted from coarse beards thick as fur, jaundice-yellow eyes stared black-pinned and inhuman.

“Our lord is in seclusion,” a Wolf said, stepping into Roboute’s path. His long hair was braided in the Fenrisian style, tied with leather cords and polished beads, but his word were the High Gothic vocabulary of an Imperial diplomat. Blue-inked tattoos snaked along his cheeks, curling over the heavy ridge of his brow. His eyes were a predator’s eyes.

“The Emperor sends me,” Roboute said. He was well aware that the Wolves used their appearance to trick others into underestimating them. They looked like feral marauders, wild and undisciplined, but they possessed Astartes combat intelligence to match his own Legion. It made them highly efficient weapons. It also meant they knew exactly what they were doing, getting in a primarch’s way.

A thunderous hiss of actuators answered him as the crowd parted around a veteran in Cataphractii plate. Pelts hung over his pauldrons, their fur matted and rank with age. He was bareheaded, his scalp shaved to stubble except for a rough crest, his grey beard criss-crossed by old battle scars. His massive armour did not allow him to tilt his head. He leaned his entire frame back, the servos of his armour growling in protest at the precarious balancing act, to meet the primarch’s gaze.

It took insane courage to stare down a primarch. Roboute felt a flicker of grudging respect.

“The rathgjafí speaks true, Great Jarl Guilliman,” the veteran rumbled. His voice was thick with the Juvjk hearth-cant of Fenris, slurred by long eye-teeth that dug into his bottom lip. “The Wolf King rests. No one disturbs his den.”

“The Emperor sends me,” Roboute said again, harder this time, pitching his voice below the range of lesser beings in a register like the deep thrum of a buccina signal-horn. It made furred ears flatten and tails curl between legs. Wolves, both those on two legs and fours, shifted uneasily, hackles raised.

Another voice answered.

It came from behind the doors: a howl, raw and primal. The thick oaken slabs, iron-bound and rune-etched, barred with heavy beams, trembled as the sound passed through.

It was not a man’s voice. It was not the voice of anything born human. It was the wail of a winter storm raking the ice plains, the bass throat-roar of a prehistoric predator. Roboute felt it in his gut. Somewhere in his genetic depths, the vestiges of his human ancestry recognised the sound of humanity’s earliest nightmares — the great sabre-fanged cats, the cave-dwelling ursines — all crying out in that single note.

The four-legged wolves whined.

Roboute bared his teeth. The grimace came surprisingly easy. It was not calculated, a theatrical threat display, simply the outwards demonstration of his frustration. The Wolves all blinked at once.

“Terra will suffer no further harm upon loyal citizens of the Imperium,” he said, almost managing a growl. Even without the ceramite bulk of his armour, wearing only a fur-edged robe over a long senatorial toga, he towered above the Rout, making children of transhuman warriors.

Looking down at them, seeing the stubborn set of their jaws, he added, “And I will not leave my brother to suffer.”

Slowly, the wolves parted. Behind them, the massive doors groaned as they swung inward, ancient mechanisms creaking beneath the weight of centuries. Warm, fetid air spilled out into the hall, a thick spoiled-meat rankness like a predator’s breath.

Roboute drew a slow breath of his own to steady himself. He had come as fast as the tides of the Immaterium allowed, his ship hurled and battered like a wyrm-prowed longboat caught in the teeth of a winter storm. It had taken every ounce of determination he possessed to reach Fenris at all.

He only hoped he had not come too late.

He gave a nod to the captain of his Invictus Guard and the squad that had been allowed to accompany him. They already had their orders. The great doors would open for two primarchs, or they would never open again.

Then he stepped inside, under the lintel notched with marks of aversion.

Russ’s chamber was a natural cavern, larger than the longest longhouse on the ice. It had been furnished like the mead halls of ancient warrior-kings. The great firepit at its heart was cold, but braziers guttered along the walls, filling the air with the black smoke of burning tallow. Orange tongues licked at the dark, casting writhing shadows across pillars carved into curling wyrms and many-armed kraken.

Above, high in the gloom where the firelight barely reached, hung old trophies taken from vanquished foes: grotesque xenos skulls with curling tusks, long sea lances tipped with iron-hard scales, round shields split by mighty blows. It was a hall made for feasting and fellowship, for the skjalds’ sagas and the spit-crackle of roasting meat. The silence seemed unnatural.

The stone beneath Roboute’s feet was marked with more cast-out sigils — sun-discs, warding eyes, runes of power predating the first settlers on Fenris. A hundred eyes, drawn in charcoal ash and powered bone, watched him with unblinking scrutiny. Between them squatted talismans: animal figures shaped from finger bones and wax, etched bolter shell casings crowned with seabird feathers, effigies and prophylactic protections. They seemed to crouch and leap, lent the illusion of life by the flickering firelight.

To each side of the doorway, clusters of machines seemed anachronistically out of place. Cogitator banks hummed, plugged into portable field generators. The backlit plates of their control panels were hung with bones and notched rune staves. The bleachy reek of counterseptics rose from the black glass bed of a medical body scanner. Its manipulator arms had been torn from their sockets, severed cables dangling like veins pulled from flesh. The stone floor beneath was stained dark with oil and blood.

It was another reminder that the Wolves were not ignorant savages, gaping in awe at the marvels of a more advanced culture. They wrapped themselves in cloaks of mystery, but they understoood their place in the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind perfectly. They took what they needed, made it their own, and discarded the rest without sentiment. Their pragmatism was as cold and sharp as the ice-fields of their homeworld where survival was the only law. They used whatever worked, ran a patient through a medicae scanner while shaking bone-rattles over his head, packed his wounds with poultrices of moss and seal-fat while the Apothecaries adjusted the readout of their Narthecium. For the Rout, science and superstition were not in opposition; each was a tool to wrestle fate into submission.

In the warding marks and whirring machines, Roboute saw the fierce devotion of sons for their father, their desperate attempts to aid him in any way they could. But also a terrible, uncertain fear that should have had no place in the heart of Astartes.

Beneath the hum of cooling fans and the distant cry of the wind outside, Roboute caught another sound: breathing. Not the slow draw of a resting man, but a quick, deep panting. It reminded him of the big shaggy dogs Konor Guilliman’s master of hounds bred to run down boars in the wild forests of Illyrium. It was the respiration of a great hunting beast, hot and restless in its cage.

Roboute advanced, stepping carefully over the talisman on the floor.

At the rear of the chamber, a dark shape stirred, rising slowly from its throne into the flickering flame light. It was a jotun of ancient myth, a mjod story to frighten warriors around the fire on a winter’s night.

The Wolves gave themselves a hundred boastful war-names. They roared their epithets across battlefields, etched them into trophies, set them in the mouths of skjalds to echo in firelit halls. Their chieftain had claimed more names than any, bestowed upon him by allies and enemies, sons and brothers. Wolf King. Murder-maker. Lord of Winter and War.

Those names had never seemed more fitting. His face, which had been ruddy and grinning the last time Roboute saw him, flushed by the savage joy of war and brotherhood, now looked lean with late-winter hunger. He looked like had not slept a full night in months. Frost-blue eyes glared up through a tangled mane of blond hair. When they caught the light they glowed like twin moons, silver and full.

“Leman,” Roboute said in greeting.

Leman moved. There was no hesitation, no warning. One moment, he was still, his arms clamped tight around his body as though in pain, a wounded warrior holding his guts from spilling out. The next, he surged forward in a blur of brute speed and bared teeth that even Roboute’s transhuman reflexes struggled to track.

Energy crackled. Half a dozen steps from Roboute, the veil of a force field barrier rippled as Leman struck it with the violence of a charging mammoth. Both his fists came down together in a double hammer blow, sending arcs of ghost-light dancing along the shimmering surface. For the briefest instant, the barrier bulged, threatening to give way. Then it rebounded, throwing the shock back into Russ’s arms. The chamber rang with a thunderclap echo.

Behind the force field, Leman snarled.

He seemed broader, larger than Roboute remembered. His gene-forged frame had swelled, becoming a hulking mass of coiled muscle. His bare chest heaved, slick with sweat. The hands he pressed against the force field were clawed and covered with thick, dark hair that ran up his forearm to his elbow, laced with scars like rune-script.

A deep rumble rolled from him, the deep-chest growl of a megafauna predator warning another away from its territory.

“Brother,” Roboute said. He did not back away, but he was surprised by the instinctive urge to do so. A primarch should not feel intimidated by another primarch; such apprehension was reserved for lesser beings. Roboute had only known the awe others paid him in the presence of the Emperor. And yet, for a brief, disconcerting instant, he hesitated.

Theoretical he thought reflexively, but of course there was no theoretical. There was no tactical precedent for a primarch to attack another primarch.

Leman’s breath came heavy. Slowly, the tension in his shoulders slackened, his stance relaxing into a more regal bearing.

When he spoke, his voice sounded human, but the words came out thick as though they pained him to shape. As if the act of speaking itself had become unnatural to him.

“The Allfather sends you.” It wasn’t a question. It was both an accusation and an admission.

“Yes,” Roboute said.

“To cut my thread.”

“Only if necessity leaves me no other course,” Roboute replied. It was not his first plan, nor his second, but he had weighed every eventuality. He knew the reputation of the Vlka Fenryka. He knew their cunning, their pride, their fury. He knew the strength of their lord.

Above the planet, the entire XIII fleet hung at high anchor, every lance and torpedo primed to fire. Strike cruisers surrounded Hrafnkel, the Gloriana-class behemoth, like a pack of wolves circling a bull saeneyti, staying out of reach of its mighty defences until their alpha gave the signal to close for the kill. A Legion poised to strike against another Legion’s homeworld. It was unthinkable. Unprecedented. Emperor willing, it would never happen again.

Russ blinked slowly. His lips curled slightly, exposing inhumanly sharp teeth. “He knows…” he began, then faltered, the capital letter of the pronoun implicit in the lowering of his voice. He swallowed hard, jaw clenching. “He knows what is happening to me?”

“A progressive genetic instability,” Roboute said.

He lifted a compact lithcaster from his belt, the device doll-house small in his grip, and thumbed a rune on its surface. Blue light burst upward as a hololithic projection flared into life, casting his face in water reflections. The rotating model was complex, a three-dimensional nucleic strand twining about itself, annotated in High Gothic and flickering with pulsing loci.

In the centre of the spiral, a helix lit up red, glowing like an ember in the sooty dark.

The flaw predated the Sixth Legion’s departure from Terra and their resettlement on Fenris; it may even predate the artificial conception of their gene-sire. Lying dormant for decades, buffered by epigenetic suppressors and stabilizing redundancies, it had awakened slowly, at first detectable only in the geneseed of Leman’s son, in their inhuman eyes and keen noses, before accelerating logarithmically, driven by the cumulative stress of unending warfare. Molecular bonds had broken, replication errors compounded, deleterious mutations propagated unchecked.

A lesser being would have perished, but primarch physiology had responded instead with uncanny plasticity. In the pursuit of Astartes perfection, the Emperor had drawn on multiple sources of inheritance. Non-human alleles had activated for expression, truncated strands knitting themselves together in new configurations.

There were no true wolves on Fenris. But cold-resistance genes had stiffened hair into fur. Cranial and dental morphology reshaped, lengthening teeth into fangs. The musculoskeletal system adapted, imitating the evolutionary journey of the original Fenrisians, the ones now prowling the icebound wilds in lupine form.

On the far side of the transformation lay the perfect predator: ruthlessly efficient, unburdened by notions of moral philosophy, honour, or fealty, driven only by hunger and survival. No longer a man, or even a primarch. A monster out of ancient legend, a skinwrought wight — warwolf, werewolf, a being cursed, not by witchcraft or fairy tale magic, but by the unintended side effects of High Terran biotechnology.

“I have brought a gene-anchoring agent,” Roboute continued, “and a host of Father’s own genetors to ensure it takes. It’s not a cure. It cannot reverse the damage. But it will arrest the genetic degradation.”

“Such a gift,” Leman rumbled, eyes fixed on the swirling helix. A low growl threaded through his voice.

Roboute didn’t miss the weight of the word. He had spent the time in transit reading, studying lexicons, the scarce records of oral histories, the comparative dialects of Fenrisian and Ancient Scandic. He knew that gift carried a second meaning. In the oldest Fenrisian tongue, it did not signify generosity. In the Wurgen war-cant, it was the word for poison.

“I would not have come here,” he said, “if I did not believe this could help you. You and your Legion. I have seen your sons, Leman. The instability lingers in their geneseed, barely contained. They grow more feral with each generation. There are reports of them losing control in battle, killing indiscriminately.”

“We are the Allfather’s executioners.”

“Perhaps,” Roboute said, clicking off the projector and setting it aside on top if one of the humming machines. “But not His murderers.”

Leman flexed his clawed hand, watching the veins bulge, the scars pull tight over tendons and sinews. His lip lifted into an unpleasant snarl. “Some might say that is the true gift,” he said slowly. “That this is my wyrd, and the wyrd of my Legion. Rage that breaks chains, unstoppable berserker fury. Who would dare to stand against me?”

“We already have one Angron, brother. We don’t need another.”

Leman laughed, a low, bitter rumble.

“And what of your treatment?” he asked. “Even if it works, it is poison. It will cool Fenrisian blood. Blunt claws. Pull fangs.” He looked up at Roboute, and there was no warmth in his expression. “It doesn’t matter what you call it. What you’re offering is still a dog collar.”

“I have been reading, on my way here,” Roboute said. “One story stood out to me, an ancient legend.”

Stories mattered to Fenrisians, and more than the stories themselves, the telling of them. A tale was a dead thing until it came alive in the mouth of a skjald, a frozen thing until warmed by a man’s breath. That was why Fenrisians abhorred the written word, unspoked, undead.

The Wolves themselves preserved nothing in ink or digital record, relying on memory and oral transmission. They had even, politely but insistently, asked him to surrender the quill he always carried when they came to meet him on the landing pad. Only a few recordings of Juvjk and Wurgen existed in the Imperial archives. He had extrapolated what meaning he could from context, and then turned to much older accounts, archival picts of Scandic rune stones, archaeological remnants from the earliest epochs of Terra, seeking convergences in cold-climate mythologies. Before departing Terra, he had visited the Great Library in the Imperial Palace to secure original manuscripts, the myths of the Svedd, the Norsca, the Varangaria, now preserved in secure stasis pods aboard Macragge’s Honour, the uncured vellum brittle as old barrow bones.

Leman’s head tilted, wolf-like, unsure whether this was some ploy or simply another lecture.

“Once,” Roboute said, voice dropping into the rhythmic cadence of a dróttkvætt lay, “there was a wolf. A great wolf. So mighty was he that when he leapt, the seas rose, and when he landed, the earth cracked beneath his paws. With a swipe of his claws, he could tear the moon from the sky. So fearsome was he, so strong and so cunning, that some even said he was the son of a god.”

Leman snorted at this foolishness, but his breath slowed. He was listening, his interest piqued.

“In time,” Roboute continued, “a madness came upon the wolf. Rot festered in his heart. He ran howling through the night, wild and without reason, striking down all who crossed his path. Not for need, not for justice, not for vengeance. He slaughtered the guilty and the innocent alike, brother and stranger, warrior and child, until all the world ran red with blood.”

He paused, letting the words hang like the black smoke in the air. Reaching into the folds of his toga, he withdrew a tightly rolled bundle of cloth. He held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it. Then he threw it.

The cloth unfurled in midair, draping itself across the rough-hewn stone at Leman’s feet to display the embroidered crest: stylised apple trees, each one crowned with red fruit, beneath the wingspan of a golden eagle. The edges were frayed, scorched black where fire had touched the weave. It was the banner of Ruris I. An Imperial world. A compliant world. A dead world, stripped bare to the bedrock by virus bombs.

“The Ruris system has supplied two point four per cent of the astropaths currently serving in the Crusade,” Roboute said. “It was a critical military resource.”

“They were witches and traitors,” Leman spat.

“The psyker mutation is invaluable. Without the Great Houses of the Navigators, we would still be trapped on Terra. Without astropaths, we would be shouting into the void of space and hearing nothing but the echo of our own voices.”

“I am not actually a barbarian savage. I know what psykers are.”

“You were sent to quell a small rebellion, pacify the planet, bring it back into the fold. Three weeks later, four point eight billion Imperial citizens were dead, a Mechanicum forge destroyed. Supply lines are in shambles across the subsector.”

“They attacked us. Not just the rebels, all of them. They were all secessionists.”

“They were all terrified.” Roboute could see it before his mind’s eye. Psykers, taught to guard against the corrupting influence of the warp, its madness and mutations, confronted by men that looked like monsters. All it would have taken was one PDF soldier losing his mettle, one astropath crying out in revulsion, for fear to fuel a frenzy.

Leman started pacing, flexing his claws again. “They had maleficarum in them. Vile sorcery.”

Maleficarum.

The word was not Fenrisian, not Juvjk or Wurgen or any of the handful of lexicons Roboute had skimmed and committed to memory. It wasn’t High Gothic or Low. It was older. Much, much older.

“They were beyond saving,” Leman insisted. “They had to die. They had to die to cast out the maleficarum.”

“Did they? Or did you lose control of yourself and your Legion, then justified it after?”

“This is how we fight,” Leman snarled. “This is how we have always fought. Without qualm or sentiment, without hesitation or fear of dishonour. We fight the dirty fights no one else wants to fight. We are the Allfather’s hunters, not His sheepdogs. If He didn’t want a murder-make, He wouldn’t have unleashed the Rout of the Vlka Fenryka.”

“Thus spake the great wolf, blinded by his hunger,” Roboute said. “If you have done nothing wrong, brother, as you claim, why are we having this conversation through a force field barrier? Why did you throw your Legion against a civilian population and the walls of a loyal Mechanicum bastion until there was nothing left on the planet to kill? Why do your sons look grim as death? Why did you think I had come to end you?”

Leman looked away.

“A chain was forged to hold the wolf,” Roboute continued, picking up the skein of his tale. “But the great wolf was wary of losing his freedom. Though his rage threatened to break the world itself, he would not let the collar be fastened around his neck. So one man stepped forward and placed his right hand between the beast’s jaws—”

“You speak of the chaining of Fenrisúlfr,” Leman growled, the muscles in his jaw tight. “I know the ending to this tale. I do not enjoy it.”

“No? It seems to me a good ending. The chain held. The world was made safe from the wolf’s madness. The wolf’s sire did not have to strike down His own son.”

Leman let out a low, strangled sound that wasn’t quite a snarl.

“It’s a story of betrayal,” he spat. “A story of lies and deceit, kith turning against kin. The gods told Fenrir the chain would prove his greatness, but instead it made him a slave.”

“I read it as a story of courage,” Roboute said mildly. “I take heart from it.”

Leman wheeled on him, nostrils flaring. “Courage? What is there of courage in that tale, brother?”

Roboute said nothing.

Leman stilled. His pacing ceased. Slowly, he turned, staring into Roboute’s eyes as if he could dredge truth from them like treasure from the depths of the sea.

“Father sent you here with the chain He forged,” he said slowly. “And now you mean to surrender your hand to my jaws while you close the collar around my neck.”

Roboute held up the pen-sized injector, incongruously small for the potency of what it held. “It must be done,” he said. “You know as well as I that you cannot go on like this. Your Legion cannot.”

Roboute had spent only moments with his father, only long enough to understand what needed to be done. Even now, his mind recoiled from the memory, shying away from the unbearable weight of the Emperor’s undivided attention. He recalled the tang of cleansing fluids, the buzz of machines, the gurgle of amniotic fluids pumped through fat tubes to feed the circle of metal cylinders at the heart of the vast, sterile chamber. It had seemed strangely familiar, a deja vu from a forgotten dream. Stepping up to an incubator, he had peeked through the glass viewplate at the embryonic form floating inside, already certain of what he would see—

But the face staring back at him had been wholly alien, subhuman, as if evolution itself had reversed course and dragged the sapient ape of humanity’s ancestors back down the branching clades of the family tree.

“You will accept the gene-treatment,” he told Leman, “or you will die, and your sons will share your fate.”

“Fine,” Leman growled. “Then leave it and go.”

“I must administer the treatment.”

Leman’s brow furrowed, a low rumble vibrating in his throat.

“It must be delivered directly into your cerebrospinal fluid,” Roboute explained. “Between the vertebrae at the base of your spine. The injection requires absolute accuracy. You can’t reach that spot yourself, not even if you were as limber as Fulgrim. And your sons—” He paused, glancing meaningfully at the dried blood staining the floor. The Wolf King had not gone meekly into his cage.

“I must do it,” he repeated.

Leman’s eyes gleamed in the firelight, narrowing with a slow, predatory focus. “I will not be satisfied with biting off your hand, brother,” he growled. “If that field drops, I will tear you apart. I won’t be able to stop myself.”

“I know,” Roboute said simply.

Leman’s nostrils flared, as though sniffing at a strange scent. “You have a plan. Some scheme or strategy you think will defeat me.”

“Yes.”

Leman bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. “It won’t work.”

“In the legend of Fenrir, the man knew the wolf would bite him. He was willing to pay that price for peace.” Roboute stepped up to the edge of the containment circle. “Do you trust me, brother?”

Leman didn’t answer at once. His gaze held Roboute’s for a long time, studying his face, searching for weakness, for deceit, for a crack in his resolve. He found none.

At last, he gave a single, slow nod.

“Aye. I trust you. Brother.”

The force field shimmered between them like the thinnest wall of ice, flickering in the dim torchlight. Roboute’s hand moved toward the control panel of the field generator. For a moment, it hovered there.

Then he pressed the switch.

The field collapsed. Light folded inward, flaring brilliantly before breaking apart, energy dissipating into nothing.

Leman was on him in the time it took to blink. He attacked the way his Legion did, a full-frontal assault at maximum speed. The floor cracked under a pounding step, and then he leapt, not as a man would leap to clear an obstacle, but as an animal pounces to bring down its prey.

Roboute didn’t flinch.

Leman slammed into him, shoulders lowered, arms wide. Roboute met him, ducking the fist swung at his head. If it had connected, the blow would have knocked down even a primarch. He planted one foot back to brace against the assault, caught the second fist as it came at him, and pulled, twisting around in a full-body spin.

Leman was a brawler. Roboute was a wrestler. He had trained with the finest masters in the Five Hundred Worlds, practicing as a boy with grown men to match his strength. He had not had an opportunity to exercise his skills in quite some time, but he had not forgotten how to widen his stance, how to dip and twist and pull to unbalance an opponent larger than himself.

Leman snarled off-guard as his footing gave way, but he was a mightier opponent than any Roboute had faced: heavy-limbed but agile, lightning in motion. He hooked an arm around Roboute, sending them both tumbling to the floor.

The moment they landed, Leman bucked like a beast, elbow slamming up into Roboute’s ribs hard enough to dent ceramite. The blow would have pulverised the bones of a mortal being. Roboute grunted, adjusting his hold as Leman twisted beneath him like a trapped bear and tried to rake at his throat. Leman’s fingernails had thickened and elongated, sharp as claws. Roboute barely caught the wrist, muscles straining as he locked the arm and yanked Leman closer. They rolled across the stone floor in a tangle of limbs and fury, grappling like Grekan demi-gods.

Leman roared, utterly lost in the fury of his actions. His eyes blazed, bright and wild. With one clawed hand, he seized Roboute’s shoulder, the other tangling in his hair and tearing free the laurel wreath. Wrenching Roboute’s head back to bare his throat, he reared, the daggers of his fangs flashing.

Roboute’s toga came undone at the shoulder, the fabric falling away. Under it, he was naked, shaved and oiled in the Macraggian tradition. The perfume of crushed herbs rose between them, and the scent of the pheromones they had masked.

Leman’s jaws halted a finger’s breadth from his throat. His nostrils flared. Teeth still bared, mouth gaping hungrily as if one twitch might finish the bite, he pressed his nose to Roboute’s neck, taking a long, lingering sniff. The hot rasp of his tongue traced the line of Roboute’s pulse as the scent kindled other instincts.

Releasing his grip on Roboute’s hair, Leman’s nose trailed down the planes of his chest until it nudged slightly against a tightened nipple. From there, it moved sideways until Leman’s face was buried in the hollow beneath Roboute’s arm. He exhaled there in a slow, hot rush, the breath sending a prickling shiver across the smooth skin.

Roboute surrendered without protect. Pressed together, trapped in place by the weight of Leman’s hips on top of his own, he felt the low, resonant throb in Leman’s chest, a sound that couldn’t decide whether to be a wolf’s growl or the rumbling purr of a great cat. The air between them was thick with the dark, musky scents of aggression and arousal, saturating every breath.

Leman rocked against him, rutting mindlessly, rubbing his hardening cock between Roboute’s thighs until Roboute angled his hips up and it pressed into him without resistance. Reading Fenrisian folktales wasn’t the only preparation he had made on the way. He had teased himself open over and over, conditioning the tight muscles until he could comfortably take all five of his fingers, before switching to the rounded length of a ceremonial baton from his weaponarium, toying first with the slender grip and then the rounded head.

In all those weeks, he had not once let himself come.

Roboute let out a gasping groan as Leman pushed into him. Leman was easily as big as the baton, and careless as a rutting beast. His tangled mane spilled over his shoulders as he bent down over Roboute and closed his mouth on Roboute’s shoulder in in a half-kiss, half-bite.

It only took minutes, but it felt hours, before Leman’s hips stuttered and he let out a low, throaty howl.

Roboute seized him around the waist and pulled him closer, urging him deeper. His roaming fingers found the ridged knots of vertebrae beneath the taut muscles of Leman’s back.

In one swift motion, he brought the injector up and pressed its end to the exact notch he had memorised.

A sharp hiss followed the click of the internal mechanism driving the micro-needle through skin and tendons. The vial’s payload emptied in an instant, delivering a rush of retro-virals and tailored gene-stabilizers.

Leman’s roar tore the air, but this time it wasn’t a war cry. His body convulsed in Roboute’s grip, every muscle locking, then seizing in spasms. His fists and heels hammered against the stone floor as he thrashed. His eyes flew wide, rage and arousal fractured into confusion and something close to fear, as though part of him had just been unmade.

Roboute held him close, not letting go.

A primarch’s physiology was a formidable biological machine. Genes rewrote themselves in minutes, proteins folding into new shapes, cells dividing and dying in accordance with new blueprints.

Slowly, the convulsions ebbed, each shudder smaller than the last. Leman’s howl broke apart into ragged, choking gulps of air.

“Peace, brother, peace,” Roboute breathed.

Leman stirred. A low groan escaped him as consciousness returned. His eyes blinked open, clearer now, the maddened haze receded from his gaze. He looked down at Roboute, at the bruises, the claw-marks scoring his skin, the crescent bite marks on his shoulder.

He drew in a long breath.

“You knew,” he rasped, his voice a coarse whisper. “You knew this would happen, and you still came?”

“Actually,” Roboute groaned, “I haven’t come yet.”

Leman laughed, sounding more like his old self. The smile that followed was not quite like Roboute remembered it. The gene-wrought changes had lengthened the philtrum, lending Leman’s mouth the beginnings of a muzzle, turnings his smile into a threat display of teeth.

“I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,” Leman chuckled, spitting into his palm and reaching down to close his fist around Roboute’s erection. It didn’t take long before Roboute arched into the grip, finding Leman’s mouth again as he shuddered through his climax.

“Thank you,” Roboute sighed. His body ached, but the feeling was a good one, warming him with the satisfaction of a task successfully completed.

Leman licked his hand clean, then rose to his feet and stretched. He picked up a black pelt from the throne and draped it across Roboute’s shoulders to replace his torn clothing. With his other hand, he held out a silver-inlaid drykkjuhorn. The liquid within the curled ram’s horn was dark as ink and reeked like unrefined promethium.

Roboute took a cautious sip and immediately coughed. The mjod burned all the way down. After a moment, heat spread through him, settling into a slow, pleasurable warmth that seeped into every muscle.

Leman crouched next to him, looking into Roboute’s eyes.

“I thought you hated me,” he said.

Roboute blinked, caught off guard. “Why would you think that?”

Leman gave a dry laugh, more a huff of air than anything else. “Because you’re everything I’m not. Civilised. Learned. You speak in treatises and quote dead poets. You and yours, you raise cities.” He spread his hands, still half-clawed. “Me and mine, we raze them.”

Roboute didn’t answer right away. He sat straighter, wincing slightly as he pulled the thick pelt around his shoulders. It was surprisingly soft.

“Cities fall,” he said at last. “That’s a lesson history repeats. Every great empire since the rise of man on Terra, the Romanic, the Preussic, the Americ, the mech-conclaves of the Golden Era of Technology. Each believed it would endure. None of them lasted a thousand years. Their cities are dust on Terra’s winds. Even Fenrisian myths speak of Ragnarok, the end of days, the breaking of the world.”

Leman’s gaze hardened. “You think the Allfather’s empire will fall.” He spat on the floor in the Fenrisian custom of warding off bad luck.

For the first time since arriving, Roboute’s voice faltered, just slightly.

“I hope not,” he said. “I would pray to never see such a day, if there were any gods left in our Father’s galaxy. But I must consider it. I must form a theoretical to deal with that eventuality.”

He paused, leaving the rest of that thought unspoken. I think Father did. I think he foresaw the threat of such a moment. I think he has anticipated threats we can’t possibly imagine, and you are part of His answer to those threats. This, you— I don’t think this transformation was a design flaw after all. I think this is your purpose, only prematurely triggered. One day, the Imperium will have need of a wolf so mighty it can tear the moon from the sky, so wild it can kill anything in its path. You have been collared for now, brother, but one day, on the final day, you will be unleashed.

A long silence stretched between them.

“If it happens,” Roboute said at last, “if the sky cracks, if Terra burns, if everything we have bled for crumbles into dust…” He met Leman’s frost-blue eyes. “I would want you fighting by my side. That is the truth of it.”

Leman’s throat worked. No words came. He reached out and took the drinking horn from Roboute, lifting it to his mouth in a gesture that had the feel of solemn ritual, the swearing of a compact.

“Until next winter,” he said.

“Until next winter,” Roboute echoed. Despite the heat of the burning braziers and the thick pelt around his shoulders, a chill rolled down his spine, cold as Fenrisian snowfall.

But the smile was already back on Leman’s face. “We better go show our sons we haven’t killed each other yet,” he said, standing and offering his hand to Roboute. Roboute took it, letting himself be pulled to his feet.

“Yet,” he said dryly, pressing a hand to the bite Leman left on his shoulder. “I must admit, I’m rather hoping for a rematch.”

Leman’s deep chuckle rolled through him, warm and rough, chasing away the lingering chill.