Fabius's laboratory was a cathedral of heresy and horror. In the shadow-choked underdecks of the dark city, his sanctum stood out as the largest and most grotesque—an unholy shrine to unnatural science, teeming with bio-altered xenos and grotesque experiments.
The vaulted ceiling bristled with cracked tubing and antique wires, some sparking with unstable energy.
In the peripheral darkness, twisted servitors—half-machine, half-flesh—stood sentinel. Their gaze never wavered, their weapons primed, their forms fused to metal rotary bases like turreted abominations.
When the Shrieking Warband's Chapter Master strode into the hall, the servitors instantly swiveled their weapons toward him.
Only the croak of a voice—rasping like a scalpel over bone—made the gun barrels recede.
The Chapter Master pressed forward, his armor brushing against rows of vat-grown horrors. Within the bubbling gel of flesh-vats and cloning beds, malformed figures writhed. Some twitched with spasmodic energy; others floated, their eyes blind but their fanged mouths pressing against reinforced glass like a wall of mocking smiles.
He ignored them. He had seen worse. He had become worse.
Deeper into the lab he walked, until a gravel-rough voice echoed from the chamber's far end.
"Incise at the lower trapezius. Retract the muscle group. Expose the anterior spine."
It was the sound of surgery—a dissection being conducted not by man, but machine.
When the Chapter Master stepped into the chamber, his heart thudded—not from fear, but the raw, absurd reality before him.
Fabius Bile—genius, war criminal, and butcher-artist of flesh—lay supine on an operating table, his chest cavity flayed open, exposed to the stale air. Mechanised limbs protruding from above the slab performed intricate, precise operations. Scalpel-arms, serrated saws, injectors, and whirring drills moved like arachnid legs over his dissected form.
He was conscious. Awake. No anesthetics dulled his senses.
And yet, his expression remained calm—eyes cold, calculating, utterly unafraid.
For the first time, the Chapter Master felt a flicker of faith—if only a madman like this could forge salvation, perhaps damnation too could be sculpted to his will.
Fabius turned his bloodless gaze toward the intruder.
"What do you want?" he rasped. His chest remained cracked open, intestines and cybernetic grafts exposed beneath the surgical lights.
"The Cursed Host is closing in. We are running out of time. You made a pact. Augment my warriors now—or we all die under the boots of the Imperium."
Fabius said nothing for a moment. The procedure neared its end as the mechanical arms carefully began stitching his ruined flesh. One clawed limb plucked a mass of tumorous tissue from his innards—veined, pulsing, and swollen with larval sacs like decaying insect eggs.
He smiled.
That mass had festered within him since the last confrontation with the Plague God's legion.
Years ago, during the infernal campaign in the Garden of Nurgle, Warmaster Dukel and Roboute Guilliman had set the realm aflame. For twenty-two days, crimson firestormed across the Warp. Reality screamed.
In the aftermath, Rainfather Rotigus rose as Nurgle's newly favored spawn.
Intent on proving his worth, Rotigus launched a vengeance crusade against the Imperium, especially against Dukel, whose ascension to Warmaster marked a new, terrifying epoch for the Throne.
Rotigus mobilized multiple plague arks through a maelstrom of pestilence and rain. Fabius, always watching, was intrigued.
Rumor told of a relic hidden within the lead ark—a shard of flesh from Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter himself.
Fabius—one of the Triumvirate of Thieves alongside the elusive Tassinla the Endless and the ever-hungry Blood Ravens—could not resist. His obsession with cloning the Primarchs drove him across battlefields and across centuries. Bones, rags, blood-slicked fragments—nothing escaped his hunt.
To gain Curze's genetic material, Fabius deceived the Plague Legion with practiced ease. Then, with perfect timing, he diverted pursuing Imperial warbands into the path of Nurgle's forces, sparking a slaughter that let him vanish amid the carnage.
It should have been flawless.
But Typhus—the Herald of Nurgle and de facto commander of the Death Guard—was not amused.
After Mortarion's betrayal of the Emperor, Typhus had become the favored general of the Plague God. His devotion to the Grandfather was fanatical. Unyielding.
Fabius's deception humiliated Nurgle's legions and cost them dearly.
And Typhus, rabid with indignation, came for him like a virus incarnate.
In the years since, the Herald had razed Fabius's laboratories, unleashed plagues upon his assets, and even now—Fabius could feel the rot creeping ever closer.
It was why, when Horus vanished, he welcomed the Shrieking Warband into his fold.
To Fabius, Typhus was a greater threat than the Imperium itself.
"I will enhance your warriors," he said finally, voice laced with poison. "Your flesh shall be broken, refined, and reborn."
To the Chapter Master, it was a promise.
To Fabius, it was a lie of convenience.
The Shrieking Warband were expendable. Raw materials for experiments. Nothing more.
He was about to speak again—another half-truth poised on his pale tongue—when a shrill klaxon wailed through the vault.
"Intruders!" the vox crackled. Outside, bio-augmented guards and cybernetic servitors relayed urgent updates across the comms.
The enemy had come.
Upon receiving the alert, Fabius's expression soured immediately.
His first instinct was that the mad dogs of the Death Guard had returned to hunt him once again. But then he glanced at the surveillance feeds—and what he saw made his frown deepen.
A warband of Astartes in decadent, purple power armor was advancing through his laboratory world. Their iconography was unmistakable.
The Emperor's Children.
Fabius cursed under his breath.
It would have been better if the Death Guard had come instead...
Once, he had been the Apothecary of the Third Legion, before the Horus Heresy had twisted everything. But now, most of the Emperor's Children loathed him. Their hatred was personal—and justified.
There were many reasons for it. The first was his experimentation.
Ten millennia ago, Fabius—still nominally loyal to the Imperium—had dissected countless Slaaneshi cultists, the kind with serpentine lower bodies and multiple limbs. His original intent had been to resolve the genetic flaws plaguing the Third Legion, but his grotesque methods drew Slaanesh's attention.
Under his bioengineered treatments, many Emperor's Children were temporarily "cured" of their flaws. But they paid the price: they became dependent on chemical treatments, unable to function in battle without injections.
The second reason was more grievous.
Fabius had once grown a clone of their Primarch—Fulgrim. But instead of returning it to the Legion, he gave the clone to Trazyn the Infinite. The Necron collector added the clone to his vaults, an insult that infuriated the Emperor's Children beyond reason.
So while their assault was sudden, it was not unexpected.
Fabius knew he had made too many enemies.
He grasped the staff at his side—a weapon from the depths of the warp, forged at great cost. With it in hand, he issued orders to his twisted spawn.
From his breeding pits emerged the horrors of the laboratory—mutants and aberrants bred in vats of gene-flesh and dark ambition.
But the Emperor's Children tore through them like wildfire.
Gunfire lit the corridors. Power swords and sonic blasters shredded limbs and torsos. The traitor Astartes laughed maniacally as they fought—gleeful, ecstatic, every kill a note in their symphony of violence. They trampled the dead, shrieked praises to their dark prince, and relished every moment of slaughter.
Thousands of mutants were butchered in moments.
Fabius's experiments were never intended for such overwhelming force. The laboratory halls were soon smeared with gore, but the attackers did not stop. They advanced like predators on a scent trail.
Fabius fled down the reinforced corridors of his fortress-lab, the Captain of the Screaming Warband trailing him. Behind them marched a force of Gland Hunters—heavily modified monstrosities designed to rival the Adeptus Astartes in raw strength.
These brutes were created to harvest the gene-seed of Space Marines—Fabius's answer to Imperial Apothecaries.
As the Gland Hunters and the Screaming Warband joined the defense, the tide of battle began to turn.
The Emperor's Children, reckless and maddened by sensory obsession, had arrived without strategy. Their fury had been stirred by a whisper from Typhons, Lord of Contagion of the Death Guard. It was his trap.
Typhons, now the de facto master of Mortarion's fragmented Legion, had long desired vengeance upon Fabius. By feeding information to the Emperor's Children, he unleashed them as bait—and knew they would rush in blindly.
Tactics no longer mattered to them. Victory was irrelevant. Only the thrill mattered.
The once-proud warriors of Fulgrim had become slaves to sensation. Now they screamed with laughter as they were eviscerated. Pain was pleasure. Death was theater.
Yet madness could only carry them so far. As the minutes passed, they were steadily overrun.
Their gleaming purple armor, once symbols of nobility, were drowned in waves of fleshcrafted horrors and bolter fire. Screaming warriors fell, trampled under the mutant tide.
"Kill them all. Take none of their gene-seed," Fabius ordered coldly.
Even he found the corrupted organs of Slaaneshi Astartes repugnant. Left unchecked, his Gland Hunters might instinctively harvest them. He would not risk contamination.
Just as the battle reached its climax—just as the Emperor's Children were about to be wiped out—something changed.
A new force entered the fray.
Mutants and Gland Hunters alike fell in rapid succession, torn apart with surgical precision.
Fabius stared at the displays, stunned. His horror turned to disbelief.
"This is impossible!"
His voice rang across the comms.
Amidst the carnage strode a giant—massive, cloaked, and shrouded in a tattered robe. Simple armor hugged his towering frame. In one hand, he held a long, wicked blade, serrated like the maw of a predator.
The weapon sliced through Fabius's monsters effortlessly. One after another, the grotesque creations he had labored over for years were cleaved apart like butchered cattle.
Every move was elegant yet brutal. The figure fought with an efficiency that stunned even the Emperor's Children, whose laughter fell silent as they beheld him.
They stared in shock—morbid fascination flashing in their drug-glazed eyes.
The man moved like a phantom, like death incarnate.
The delicate tendrils on their faces twitched, responding instinctively to the surge of bioelectric energy coursing through their warped forms—bodies long ravaged by narcotic alchemy and gene-splicing.
Now, that current made them tremble.
The source was a towering figure, cloaked in simple robes, whose every movement suppressed the battlefield. The aberrants, the gland-hunters, even the howling remnants of the Screaming Warband—each fell before him like wheat under a scythe.
The Screaming Warband's commander, a deranged war-leader steeped in the power of the Warp, bellowed and lunged with his chainsword raised high.
Three strikes later, he lay crushed beneath the giant's armored heel.
Even with his warp-born enhancements, the gap between him and this foe was absolute.
The figure raised a slender, serrated blade—its edge red and glistening—and pressed it against the fallen warlord's throat. Death was a heartbeat away.
"Stand down," the giant said, voice clear as mountain springwater, slicing clean through the noise and chaos. "Or he dies."
The battlefield froze.
The Screaming Warband—warped Astartes once loyal to the Emperor's Children—lowered their weapons first.
Then the aberrants halted, still and twitching, followed by the remaining Slaaneshi warriors, standing slack-jawed in a haze of disbelief.
Fabius Bile stared. So too did the degenerate Emperor's Children.
Recognition struck them like a thunderclap.
That voice.
It echoed in their veins. Imprinted in their corrupted gene-seed. Carved into the very foundation of their existence.
A memory long buried surfaced.
Ten thousand years ago, they had been noble.
They had stood as paragons of the Emperor's will. Custodians of perfection. Guardians of humanity's dreams.
They had once walked in the light.
And he—he had been their father. Their Phoenix. The Primarch of the Third Legion.
"No... it can't be..."
Fabius staggered, clutching at his scepter for balance, his thoughts spinning.
It had to be a trick.
Fulgrim, the Phoenician, had fallen millennia ago—his soul devoured by Slaanesh, his body twisted into a daemon prince.
The Fulgrim of legend no longer existed. He had been destroyed by the loyalist Primarch Dukel, the Emperor's chosen executioner.
Which left only one possibility.
A clone.
A clone of Fulgrim.
And if that were true...
Then the only one capable of producing such a specimen—was Fabius himself.
Yet he had given his only completed clone of Fulgrim to Trazyn the Infinite, to be imprisoned within the galleries of Solemnace.
So why was it here?
Then the realization hit him.
Trazyn.
That wretched collector of rarities.
Fabius recalled the last transaction—the moment he had handed over the clone to gain access to forbidden knowledge.
He hadn't known then that Trazyn had his eye on more.
In this facility, in this dark sanctum of abomination, he now had near-complete templates for twenty Primarch clones.
Trazyn must have taken more than Fabius ever realized.
"Trazyn!!!"
Fabius roared, his face contorting from shock into a mask of rage and dread.
The pieces had fallen into place. And what they revealed chilled even him.
...
TN:
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