‘Then you will not be persuaded,’ said Mortarion, his filtered voice sunken into a surly growl. ‘A shame. I invested much energy to save you, brother. I shall take no pleasure in your destruction.’ Behind the Khan, the keshig readied their blades. ‘And there is the difference between you and me,’ said the Khan, moving his dao into guard. ‘By the time I make my kills, I am always laughing.’.....The Khan struck first, moving faster than thought, his cloak swirling about him. Mortarion met the blow with his scythe, and a radial wave shot out from Silence, throwing up the ash in swirling clouds.....‘I see your mind, brother,’ hissed the Khan, hammering home the attack. ‘You would turn me, or end me.’ Mortarion grunted as he blocked the incoming dao. He moved far more slowly than the Khan, but everything he did was solid, dense, and indomitable. ‘If you’re stubborn enough not to see the chance here, then, yes – your time is over.’ The Khan laughed. Wielding his blade again freely felt good. The psychneuein had been a trivial challenge – going up against a fellow primarch was the kind of test he had missed for too long. He darted in close, spinning on one boot before thrusting his sword at Mortarion’s midriff. The strike was blocked, but the Death Lord stumbled. ‘So slow,’ taunted the Khan. His blade danced, flashing like the lightning above. Every strike was weighted heavily, slicing chunks from Mortarion’s thick plate as if it were corroded scrap. ‘You got everything wrong. Why exchange one master for another? And do not take me for a fool – only one soul may rule from the Throneworld.’.....Mortarion rallied, breathing hard. Though his reflexes were slow, his strength was impressive. He had already taken blows that would have felled a lesser warrior and yet seemed barely troubled. ‘Your Legion called out,’ he snarled, wielding Silence in deadening sweeps. ‘You have cells operating in every brotherhood, desperate to serve. All we did was answer them.’ The Khan laughed again. He felt alive, unfettered, free for the first time in months to act. ‘The lodges, eh? Secret societies? You think that’ll be enough to drag us behind the Warmaster?’ Mortarion dug in, and his heavy boots sank into the ash. The Khan launched a series of blistering dao-blows, glancing off the Death Lord’s thick pauldrons and sending him reeling. ‘I let them meet,’ the Khan said. His blade was moving brutally, smearing with speed and clanging from the scythe. ‘I have always let them. I am not a tyrant, brother.’ Mortarion started to rally, meeting the Khan’s fury with resolute efficiency. He took a stride back in close, planting his feet widely to close down another incoming stroke. The two weapons twisted and rebounded, sending sparks flying through the gloom. The intensity of it was vicious. Every perfect movement was vindication of the Emperor’s gene-majesty, albeit exemplified in two totally different aspects. The troops battling around them, themselves titans of combat, were reduced to irrelevance, like mortal warriors straying into the quarrels of gods. ‘We are all tyrants,’ Mortarion rasped, picking up the pace of his scythe-blows. ‘Do not fool yourself. We were bred for nothing else.’ ‘Not I,’ said the Khan, whirling around him, moving with an almost unconscious balance. ‘I care nothing for dominion. Never have. You, on the other hand... You. You yearn for it.’ The Khan drove Mortarion back further, pounding and pummelling him across the square’s margins and towards the edge of the broken pyramid. They reeled together under the shadow of Photep’s Arch, the old entrance to the immense vaults within, now roofless and gaping....They could fight now. They knew the enemy. They could see him, and that was enough. ‘I deserve it,’ Mortarion wheezed, gasping into his rebreather as he laboured under the assault. ‘I always deserved it. You could have joined me.’ The Khan did not relent. His blade was like a shard of starlight, fierce and irresistible. ‘Your time will come. You tell me the warp should be forgotten, shut away. How little you know. It will come for you now. Killing you here will be a mercy. I can already see your future darkening, dragging at your very soul.’ The two of them thundered across the base level of the pyramid, followed at every step by the echoing clash of arms around them....‘All futures are dark, now,’ Mortarion replied, swiping savagely and backhanding his scythe into the edge of an exposed archway. The keystone smashed to rubble around him. ‘You have no idea what Horus has become, nor the Emperor. They are both monsters, but you have chosen the wrong one. Horus is a fighter. He is one of us, not some immortal… aberration.’ The Khan laughed as he pursued him, this time from genuine pleasure. ‘Immortal aberration?’ he mused, dragging his blade down at a sharp angle and nearly severing a thicket of Mortarion’s feeder cables. ‘We all share his blood. What does that make us?’ More powdered stonework, destroyed by Mortarion’s wild scythe-blows, bloomed in a cloud around them. Bolt-trails whined and punched through the haze before cracking into what remained of the architecture. Uncaring of anything but their own contest, the two primarchs hacked their way towards the pyramid’s core, overshadowed by immense pillars and gaping roof-curves, trading blows of such heft that the earth shuddered beneath them. ‘Just what do you think will happen here?’ spat Mortarion, digging in again and halting his backward course. His armour had been hacked into a tattered parody of its former solidity. ‘Think you can behead me, like Fulgrim did Ferrus?’ The Khan missed his aim then for the first time. Was that true? Was Ferrus gone? Mortarion surged back at him, kicking the hilt of Silence hard into the Khan’s leading leg. The ivory greave-plate cracked, fizzing with energy as the ceramite fractured. The Khan veered away from the follow-up strike, nearly losing his footing entirely. He staggered backwards as Mortarion went onto the offensive. ‘Oh yes, he’s dead,’ Mortarion rasped. ‘The numbers are against you already. They will only get worse.’ The Khan glanced upwards, up into the immense voids of the pyramid’s heights. Tiny flecks of glass rained down from the smashed apex, sparkling bloodily from the fires kindling in the fissures below. Prospero’s landscape growled its sullen anger, as though the world itself were outraged at a second duel of primarchs upon its soil. The carbon-dark sky, starless and empty, roiled above the jagged maw of the summit. Mortarion’s cloak spread wide, buoyed by hot updraughts from the cobweb of glowing crevasses. For a moment, he looked like some vision of the underworld, a phantom of old Chogoris – consumed by yaksha, eternal and devilish. The Khan fell back further, holding his dao two-handed. Mortarion was strong, as strong as the roots of the Ulaav mountains, but he was slow. The two of them were perfectly matched, like two sides of a medal. If we fought on the same side, he and I, countering our weaknesses, could anything stand before us? he thought. Even Horus? Even the Emperor? He gazed into Mortarion’s pallid face and saw the resentment burning there, just as it did in him. He is lost. We have all been betrayed. The Death Lord strode closer, sweeping Silence low and hard, his expression curdling into hatred, his sclerotic breath low and rapid. ‘Come then, brother,’ said the Khan, bracing for the impact once more, holding position amidst the glass tears of Magnus’s lost city. ‘Let us decide this, you and I. For eternity.’.....Mortarion’s raw strength was renewed. Facing it full-on, the Khan doubted that any of his brothers, save perhaps Ferrus, could have matched it. The Death Lord absorbed every strike that connected, sucking the power out of the blows like a leech, taking the hits and coming back for more....As they broke into the circle, the Khan felt himself tiring at last. Never in uncounted years of combat had he felt more than trivial stirrings of fatigue. He had fought the greatest champions of xenos races, had brought down creatures that stood as tall as Warhound Titans, had carved his way through fields of greenskins as violent and unending as the tides of the sea, and still he had never felt the bone-deep drag that Mortarion inspired. Only the primarchs could destroy the primarchs. Mortarion began to laugh in his coarse way. ‘Never had it this hard, eh?’ he grunted, still wielding Silence heavily. He was suffering too – blood flecked his cheeks and forehead, and his rebreather rattled as he hauled in thick breaths. The Khan launched another attack, flourishing the dao before searching for a way through Mortarion’s stony defence. He was still faster, still more accomplished with the blade, but it was like duelling with entropy itself. ‘You neither,’ the Khan observed, gesturing to the lines of reddened sweat trickling down Mortarion’s ash-grey temples. ‘True enough.’ Mortarion’s voice gave away his regret. Even amidst the slow-burn resentments, the long bitterness, the Death Lord was still sane enough to see the irony of the situation. The primarchs had been bred to fight as part of one army, each brother making up for the deficiencies of the other. For all the jealousies and rivalries, in terms of raw conquest that army had been perfect. The Emperor’s vision – the Great Crusade for Unity, sweeping across the stars, governed by twenty immortal avatars of his own unmatched psyche – had been impeccable. Now, though, here they were: brawling amidst the embers of Russ’s vandalism. The fall was already severe, and they both knew that it would plummet deeper before the end. ‘You could recant,’ the Khan said, falling away from a whistling sweep of the scythe just as it angled at his helm. ‘Horus does not own you.’ Mortarion snorted. ‘No, and he never will.’ ‘You have seen our father’s glory unleashed – none of us could stand against him.’ Mortarion surged back on the offensive. Around them, the columns flickered and leapt with the reflection of fiery disruptor energies. ‘He is hobbled by his own mistakes. The Throneroom is a den of nightmares, one that he cannot leave. The field is open – it is ours to claim.’ The Khan beat away a scythe-strike and went for Mortarion’s gorget. At the last minute he jutted the blade down, slipped below the defence and cut a long gash in the primarch’s breastplate. This time the blade cut deep, paring already fractured armour and delving into the ribcage below. Mortarion grimaced and jerked clear, cracking the Khan’s sword away with his scythe-shaft and staggering backwards. ‘There is nothing to seize,’ growled the Khan, going after him. ‘Nothing but burned earth. Look around you – you will make this the whole galaxy.’ Mortarion snarled defiantly and barrelled back at him, using the scythe like a halberd and smashing the hilt into the Khan’s midriff. The Khan lurched away, stumbling across the uneven floor, and Mortarion lumbered after him. More blows came in – hard, heavy, earth-shaking blows. The Khan was driven further, only barely able to weather the explosion of fury directed at him. When they slammed together again the impact was bone-jarring. They tore into one another, each strike powered by raw defiance. Fragments of armour flew like shrapnel. Gas exploded from Mortarion’s store of vials as the glass was shattered, nearly blinding them both. Blood flew in straggling splatters, trailing across both combatants and staining their armour. As they hacked and countered, neither giving up so much as a centimetre of ground, it mingled upon the blades’ edges, as rich and dark as wine. As the Khan fought on, the taste of copper in his mouth and the burn of acid in his muscles, he felt the lore of the plains nag at him. He needed space – room to use his speed. He had to break free, to turn the fight to his strengths, to rip clear of Mortarion’s cloying grasp. Summoning up one last burst of energy, the Khan bludgeoned aside the scythe and pulled away, beckoning his adversary to come after him. The Death Lord held Silence high, casting a sickleshadow over the eye-device upon the floor. His ripped cloak billowed out in an almost parodic vision of old legends – the reaper-myth of a thousand human worlds, summoned into life on a world of extinguished souls. The Khan held position, panting hard, trying to drag up energy for the final clash. His hearts thudded, his lungs burned. He held the dao poised, waiting for his enemy to move. Come to me. You can see my weakness. One thrust. One perfect thrust, angled precisely – he had the strength for that. It would have to be flawless; if it were not, no defence remained. Nothing else would suffice for this enemy. No lesser move would accomplish the kill. But Mortarion did not move. He stood, rigid, as though suddenly listening for something. His scythe fell into guard. A thin coughing broke from his mask, which the Khan soon realised was an exhausted kind of chortle. ‘So the choice has been made.’ The Khan held his ground, unsure what he meant. Mortarion gestured to the Deathshroud, and they began to pull back towards his position. ‘Our ships are at war, brother,’ wheezed Mortarion acidly, limping into retreat. ‘This was not what we were promised, but I will not lose a fleet for this fight.’ The words blurred from all the blood bubbling in his mouth, spilling out from the edges of his mask. ‘Mark it, though – this thing is eternal between us, now. You and I, our fates bonded in this place. Remember that. It was here that it started.’
-Warhammer 40k: Scars
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