174. First Contact

He sat on one of the slabs in the room and stood up when she entered.
The way he moved told her what Gerneya had already mentioned: The body in front of her was severely damaged. It came out in the careful tensing of each muscle in turn as he straightened up to his whole, impressive height and the sluggish way he curled his hands while folding them behind his back. As Xavor had mentioned, he had used his chance to get rid of his hair and he wore one of the robes of the Wings of War. Crimson and golden without insignia on it.
The effects of the white fire had probably worn off by now, Vox reckoned.
They watched each other for a long time before Horus said: “I feel, I should know you.”
This made Vox laugh.
“Impressive!”, she said archly. “Sanguinius tells me, you were an even better actor in your own body.”
There was the merest flaring of his nostrils as he changed mental gears.
“I am his voice”, Vox introduced herself meanwhile. “Vox Sanguinius. You may address me as ‘my lady’.”
“My lady”, he said and there was a dangerous, yet slightly amused glint in his eyes when he tilted his head in a mock bow. “I suppose you know who I am.”
“I do”, Vox confirmed and sat down on a slab. Not only because she felt weak but to stop herself from tensing up. There was something about this man that set her on edge. An inner strain she threatened to catch from him.
“And you’ve gone to quite some lengths to get me here”, Horus continued. “Will you tell me the reason?”, he inquired with a polite firmness that was not threatening as such, only had the edge of a threat artfully woven into his tones.
Vox smiled along with Sanguinius. Apparently, Horus had never been one for small talk and was not about to start.
“I want to bring you before your father and ask his forgiveness for you”, Vox stated calmly, giving him a second to digest this before she continued: “Afterwards, I intend to unite you with him and Sanguinius to make him into the god mankind already worships.”
“Is that his plan?”, Horus asked in a flat voice that conveyed quite a lot of silent horror. “To use me for what I tried to stop?”
Vox shook her head meekly.
“No, it’s not”, she replied. “It’s the plan of your brother. The Emperor never wanted this.”
“Excuse me? He never wanted this?”, he burst out. “And you believe you could do anything to him he doesn’t want you to?”
“Why not?”, she asked back calmly. “It’s not as if he could dodge me after your last visit.”
“I beg your pardon?”, he asked coolly.
Vox cocked her head. Could it be that he really was ignorant of what he had done?
“What do you remember, Horus?”, she asked softly. “What’s the very last thing you can recall before he killed you?”
Suddenly, disgust flowed into his features. He leaned forward threateningly.
“Tears!”, he hissed. “And my broken, outstretched fingers!”
Vox blinked and looked away for this blow. She knew this image from the outside all too well. These memories had never dwindled.
“How did your father look?”, she urged him on nevertheless.
He started to walk up and down in a fidgety manner.
“He… I had… He lost an arm and he was bleeding…”, he stopped and frowned. “It’s not very clear”, he said more to himself.
“My apothecaries tell me that you didn’t speak to anyone yet”, she let him know. “Did anyone tell you anything?”
“No, I’m speaking to you because you look like the first overling so far”, he said with cruel honesty.
“In that case, you should know a few things”, Vox said calmly. “You didn’t kill your father, Horus but you hurt him so badly that he had to be entombed on the golden throne on Terra. It has been ten-thousand years since you fought him and since then, humanity has started to worship their Emperor as the god he never wanted to be. I don’t know why you rose against him, Sanguinius doesn’t know either but because of your betrayal your father is trapped in his mortal form, upholding a beacon of psychic light in the warp which enables us to travel the stars while we do to him what he had intended to put a stop to.”
Horus stared at her in now unconcealed horror.
“Ten-thousand years?”, he asked hoarsely.
“Yes.”
“And he is worshipped as a god?”
“He is”, she confirmed again.
Horus turned away at this point. His hands were still tightly clenched behind his back. It seemed to cost him a lot of strength to loosen them and grasp the edge of the sink, the apothecaries cleaned their instruments in. For a moment, he leaned on this piece of furniture.
As if his resolve had only taken him this far, he suddenly flew into a rage. He screamed, lashed out against the mirror over the sink and blindly hammered both his fists into the shards. Accompanied by incoherent screams, blood and glass flew through the room before he spun around to kick the slab closest to him.
Vox leapt over it as it fell. She caught one of his bleeding fists while the other dislocated one of the shelves on the wall. A container with surgical instruments flew through the air, spilling its contents and Vox rammed into him to topple him over.
They hit the shard covered floor with a muffled thud.
Vox slung her arms around him and was almost surprised that she managed to control him. Her weak hands managed to hold his mangled body in a lock. Only now fully understanding the extent of his restraints, she rolled both of them onto her right wing to shield their bodies from the shards. With a diminished healing rate, any little scratch she could avoid counted. Now, they were properly cared for, her feathers were sturdy and dense. Not even his wriggling weight could drive the glass through them.
When he stopped screaming incoherently after a few seconds and started to yell at her to let him go, Vox actually relaxed a little. She had been worried Titus might enter to come to her aid as soon as the noises had started. When he heard this, her beloved surely would continue to leave things to her.
It took a while before Horus calmed down and when his anger subsided, it left the despair that had sparked it. She could feel him fighting the losing battle against his dismay and wondered what sent a man like him into a fit of emotions like this. Had he not seen and committed any atrocity possible? What could shake him so fundamentally? Sanguinius was as clueless as was she.
“It’s alright”, she said quietly in the hope to calm him down. She shifted her grip on him and rubbed his arm in a comforting manner. “Nobody’s here”, she added in the same, soothing tone.
“Are you crazy?”, he snapped. “You’re here!”
Vox let go of him when he tried to pull away and he stumbled upright, wiping his hands over his face impatiently. He gave a heartfelt groan when he scratched the glass fragments that were stuck in his flesh over his skin.
Vox came to her feet too and looked down for a moment. He was as barefooted as she.
Gently and firmly, she got hold of his wrists again and pulled him over to the closest upright slab. Thankfully, he followed her lead. Leaving a bloody trail on the floor, he sat down beside her.
Carefully, she started to pick the shards she could find out of his hands and when she had finished, his gaze flickered up to her for a moment.
Vox was unable to tell where the impulse came from. She leaned towards him, reached out a hand and gently, gently wiped the last tear away that was running down his cheek.
She smiled sadly for the fact that she smeared more blood on his face. Horus’ dark eyes snapped up and locked on her, his features full of fathomless sorrow and distrust.
Vox lowered her hand as if he had caught her out on something. To distract from the shyness welling up, she started to pick shards out of her feet.
Silent minutes went by, in which Horus only stared at her as if studying the stranger could force the world back into sense.
After a while, Vox stood up to fetch a towel from the cupboards nearby. Brushing the shards away with her wing took a while.
When she returned, Horus was trying to remove glass fragments from his feet as well. He muttered his thanks when she handed him a towel.
Again they sat in silence. At some point, as if he had finally gathered the courage to do so, Horus turned to her and picked a piece of mirror from between her feathers.
Without comment, she angled the appendage so that he could reach it better. Wiping his fingers on the towel again and again, he nevertheless smeared blood on the white feathers in his search for glass. 
Finally, he laid his bleeding hands into his lap.
“Your implants have been damaged”, Vox told him quietly while she retracted her wing. “You don’t heal properly anymore.”
“Good to know”, he said demurely and watched the blood trickle into the towel he had draped under his grip. “It was you down there between the daemons, right?”, he changed the subject.
“People with wings haven’t gotten any more common than in your days”, she said with a shrug.
The corners of his mouth actually twitched in a lightning fast smile.
“How did you manage to bring me back?”, he inquired. “After ten-thousand years? This is Ezechiel’s body, right?”
“It is”, she confirmed. “His was the only body with your blood I could reliably find and… well. The rest is complicated to explain.”
He shot her a long glance and then, suddenly turned away as if embarrassed.
“And his body has been so badly damaged that I’m not even able to stand up to an injured woman…”, he said despondently.
“An injured Astartes”, she corrected him and pulled her collar aside to show him the black mark framing the armour duct on her neck.
“So, the others were really women”, he commented after staring at it for a moment. “Times have certainly changed.”
“Horus?”, Vox asked quietly. “You said, I’d use you for what you tried to stop. What did you mean by that?”
Horus looked away guiltily.
A few suspicions dawned in Vox’s mind, not all her own. Sanguinius thought about what he heard just as animatedly as she did.
“Was that your reason?”, she inquired softly. “Did you turn against him because you thought he wanted to become a god after he had sent you to eliminate religion itself?”
Horus said nothing but he did it in a very meaningful way.
“Who told you that?”, she wanted to know.
He gritted his teeth and looked down.
“The daemons”, he admitted uncomfortably. “They… They told me that, if everything continued on its course, my father would be worshipped as a god and I would be obliterated from history.”
Vox stared at him and bit down on all the comments she could have made. So, this was it. This had been the lie that had broken an empire.