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Lysander hated the annual Legion mixer. Time passed differently in his home system, and it felt like they were entertaining this farce on Terra every few months. The privilege of walking the Imperial Palace’s gilded halls did not elude him and he took great comfort in his rites of preparation, the hours of prayer and the weeks of cleansing. But nearness to the Master of Mankind’s immense psychic will and the crushing force of the Astronomican had his bones itching the moment their fleet entered orbit, leaving him at the edge of his very last nerve when it came time to meet his cousins.
Worst of all was accompanying his Primarch. The Twin Flame was a beacon of pure radiance to Lysander’s warpsight as he flitted about the gathering, greeting his brothers with guileless ardor. He threw himself around Guilliman’s waist from behind, snuggled up into Sanguinius’s long robes, and reached for Horus to pick him up for the kisses he so adored.
Lysander watched from the door, barely tolerating the urgency of his body screaming to run and the spectral tether on his mind keeping him in place. Lucien knew well his discomfort but demanded he keep up appearances, to demystify the Iridiates from their cousins and prove they were, in fact, just another breed of Astartes.
As Primus of the Lightborn chapter, it was technically Lysander’s duty to keep watch over his men as they mingled. They chatted with the Blood Angels and eloped into pocket dimensions with the Emperor’s Children, meeting old friends and finding new paramours as their primarch curled his fingers through the webs of fate. Lysander could see him plucking and twisting every interaction into his sons’ favour, pushing reciprocity where awkwardness smoldered, passion drowning out dread.
Lysander turned his inner eye away as he had practised, instead focussing on the bright flares of the other primarchs. Aside from Lucien, Magnus’s aura shone the loudest. Rogal Dorn and Perturabo were not present – making out in a corner somewhere, his intuition told him – and their sons were facing off in neat ranks opposite each other, engaged in vicious discourse. Mortarion was nowhere to be seen and neither was Corvus, though he made a regular habit of being invisible if rumours were to be believed. Night Haunter was quite predictably haunting the night around a cluster of his sons, perched barefoot like a gargoyle on the back of a tall leather chair. The Night Lords seemed to be protecting the rest of the gathering from him, arranged in a circle with stimms in their veins strong enough for Lysander to smell at a distance.
Angron was missing too, a fact Lysander quietly thanked the Emperor for. The ticking torture of Angron’s neural implants was agony beyond most psykers’ endurance, brutalizing their minds with empathic resonance. He could only imagine what the Red Angel felt in the presence of Magnus and Lucien.
A memory rose of the day Lucien had boarded the Conqueror all bright-eyed and cheeked up, ready to heal the most broken of his brothers. It vanished into candy coloured mists astride a stinging reprimand from the primarch. Lysander jolted in his armour. It corrected him into stillness and left him silently twitching in his glove beneath the opaline ceramite. As ever, his thoughts were not his own and all he could do was endure.
It was more embarrassing than entertaining, the way his gene-father treated the other Astartes. Done fawning over his brothers, Lucien’s luminous gaze shone upon his cheekbones from behind his golden halfmask, scanning the room for the loneliest souls around. He ignored Lysander and instead pounced upon a group of his nephews, some sweet little World Eaters all piled together like kittens in a crate for warmth.
In reality, they were stood in phalanx formation by a wall staring blankly at their Captain, but Lucien’s rosy perception coated everything in sugar. He swept across the room on a trail of fragrant sparkles, heart-shaped flowers blooming beneath his gilded power heels. The ceiling’s vaulted arches seemed to bend towards him and breathe a sigh along their candlelit reliefs when he flopped down onto a couch summoned before them.
“Oh, look at all you darlings all on your lonesome!” he cooed, stretching one long, elegant leg out and crossing it over the other. His iridescent silks pooled around him, stretching salaciously tight across his pale curves as he reclined. “Dearest Khârn, loyal as ever. Are you looking after your brothers tonight?”
Khârn turned to the scintillating vision spread in luxuriant madness behind him and saluted. His aura did not flinch from the primarch’s hypnotic haze, and no mantras or meditations eased its pull. Lysander had ever been impressed by Khârn’s unwavering calm, one of the rarest traits among his own men. He quietly supped upon the brotherhood of the Eighth Assault Company’s first squad before Lucien got his claws too deep into their minds.
It wasn’t long before they were crawling all over Lucien and he was purring about what good boys they were, pretending to chide them for tugging his slip dress too roughly and baring a breast or two. Lysander praised the Emperor again when Khârn approached him, and a silent understanding passed between them. The hold on Lysander’s mind loosened then, and they slipped into the hallway unseen.
Khârn clasped his cousin’s arm in a warrior’s greeting and Lysander returned it. “You live,” he noted, a twinkle of humor in his otherwise flat blue eyes.
“As do you,” said Lysander, clapping him on the back twice to usher him as far from the gathering as possible.
They walked for a time through the palace’s long corridors, two Astartes in polar opposite colours. Khârn’s blue and white plate was an ascetic contrast to Lysander’s dazzling hues, where not even the black cloak he wore over a pauldron could darken its glamour. The opaline glaze typical of the Lightborn shone with kaleidoscopic depths only a psyker could appreciate, mirroring the Warp’s mercurial currents. To Khârn it looked quite gaudy, but he wasn’t going to say that. Lysander could hear him thinking it anyway, and agreed.
They eventually came to an intersection where a Custodian stood watching all three directions at once, a Sister of Silence leaning against the wall beside him. Khârn had seen worse things than Blanks and ignored the uneasy feeling creeping into his core. Lysander exhaled in such genuine relief that his vox hissed it out like a sob.
“Revered Custodian,” said Lysander, surprising Khârn with his deference. “Would you like some company?”
The Custodian did not reply, or move a muscle. The disconcerting shape beside them shifted with interest; Lysander felt the Sister’s gaze on him but no matter how hard he stared, his autosenses showed nothing. He took his helmet off as a show of respect, and after a moment, Khârn did the same.
The Sister gave a friendly wave, enough motion for their genhanced eyes to percieve her. She stood at half the Custodian’s height with a tall dark topknot of hair and a burnished vox-grille covering her mouth, the corners of her soulless eyes crinkled in amusement.
“Long shift?” asked Khârn, and she shrugged in reply.
Lysander was still looking at the Custodian. The master-crafted auramite left him breathless in the glory of its artifice, every finely tooled curl of decorative filigree delighting his senses. They were perfectly symmetrical, formed by hand, and no warp trickery shimmered across the voidproofed power armour wherever he looked. He yearned to touch it, though he knew no sensation would pass through his gauntlet, nor would the satisfaction last. It was an Iridiate impulse, one of those things put into him by the geneseed, and any other Legionary would keep his hands to himself.
Lysander bowed his head. “If you don’t mind… we could use your protection for awhile.”
The Custodian still gave no reply and did not seem to be breathing. Lysander carefully took up position beside the Sister against the wall, and Kharn joined him. The null aura surrounding them both was the closest they’d get to privacy from Lucien’s all-seeing warpsight. Lysander could still feel the omnipresent barbs in his mind, those curly nettle-hairs of psychic entanglement his primarch put in all his sons, but they didn’t itch anymore.
“So,” Khârn began. “Another year. What news?”
Lysander thought for awhile. Most of it was basking in the pure sense of right belonging where he stood – in the Emperor’s own house, beside one of His Ten Thousand, where his entire being could only output that which he was made for. His words would align with the Emperor’s will, or the Custodian would cut him down. There was no doubt about it, no hesitation when he chose to speak, and the sheer relief from his tortuous anxieties hovering at the sharp end of a guardian spear brought tears to his eyes.
Khârn saw this and gave him as many moments as he needed. Eventually, he set a hand on Lysander’s gauntlet, though he knew his cousin did not like being touched. Lysander’s crimson eyes fell shut and he lowered his head. In Khârn’s peripheral vision he caught the Sister tilting a little to examine him with something like concern.
It was several minutes before Lysander found his words. “It has been… difficult.”
Khârn nodded, and let him speak. Lysander told him of the campaigns waged and won, his helplessness at his father’s heel, and many more things he secretly hoped the Custodian would relay to the Emperor if they were indeed alive and not just a statue at their post.
In return, Khârn told him of the glories the World Eaters had found across the stars, his smooth voice doing nothing to dull the awesome thrill of close victories under Angron’s merciless battle countdowns. The thirty-one hours in which their tactics and skill was pushed to the finest edge, honing their minds and unit cohesion razor-sharp under incredible pressure.
“I wish I were with you,” Lysander said. “More than ever, I think I should have been forged an Eater of Worlds rather than… this.” He gestured dismissively to the aquila across his breastplate, each feather glazed in a different colour of the visible light spectrum. “I feel like some xenos circus pet dragged around on my primarch’s trail. He does not even field me in battle.”
“A waste,” Khârn shook his head. “I have seen how formidable you are.” The Sister nodded soulfully as if she had seen it too, and Khârn grimaced. “…Perhaps we could find somewhere here to spar. It sounds like you need it.”
“I could not live with myself if I lost a duel under the Emperor’s hallowed gaze, blessed be His name.”
Khârn snorted. “You are truly depressed if your first thought of the sands is defeat.” He straightened with a clank of ceramite. “Though I do not blame you. I am as undefeated as my Father.”
“Would that I could fight alongside you. Ever since he made me Primus, I feel as if I have been… rotting, in my skin.” Lysander’s gauntleted fingers flexed in and out. “I don’t know, is that normal?”
“Nothing about your Legion is normal,” said Khârn. Lysander huffed through his nose in reply. “Do you want to see one of our apothecaries?”
Lysander shook his head. “There is so much strangeness within me, I doubt they could make sense of it.”
“Nonsense. You are still Astartes, no matter what witchcraft has been done to you. Join me aboard the flagship. We will go together.”
“My primarch will be displeased.” The look on Lysander’s broad, square features was the most pitiful thing Khârn had ever seen, and he had seen unarmed mortals pissing themselves in terror before his axe had drawn blood. It was not a look that belonged on a Legionary’s face.
Somehow, the Custodian saw it. “You should go with him,” came a deeply resonant voice from within the tall, plumed helm.
Lysander straightened up at once. He screwed his helmet back on, dimly aware of the iridescent tears tracking down his cheeks. “Yes, Golden One.”
Khârn lead him down the hall and chanced a look back. The Sister waved at him before dissolving into nothingness, and he could hear the Custodian speaking in low tones that were not for his ears. He caught a few snippets nonetheless.
“That one is weak. I would put him down…”
Khârn screwed his own helmet on and the world narrowed to their footsteps marching along the palace’s gilded halls. Lysander walked in lockstep beside him like it was his only chance to do so. Khârn did not mock him. He hoped, in a secret place that almost felt like kinship, that his Legion’s finest apothecary Gahlan Surlak would be able to set his cousin right.