Warhammer: Start with a dog.

Chapter 692 All is Dust - A Dream for My Brother
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Where is this?

Ahriman blinked, numbness coursing through his limbs, as if he had just been crushed under the rubble of a vast ruin.

This absurd association made him smile at first, but then the smile froze into a look of doubt on his face.

Because he found himself really lying in a pile of smoking rubble, his power armor was covered with black marks from smoke and fire, and when he moved a little, he found that he was actually almost completely buried under a pile of black gray dust. The fine sand-like dust had just covered him from head to toe, and now as he tried to get up, it slid down the gaps on his almost invisible red power armor surface to the ground, and piled up into mini piles of ashes again.

What made him even more uneasy and alert was that he recognized what the rubble was and what the debris was underneath it—it was part of the Black Crow Pyramid! What was going on?! Was Tizca attacked head-on?! He looked up and saw that the city he loved and had lived in for many years had been reduced to ruins. The only thing that could prove that there had once been a prosperous and happy civilization here was the rubble on the ground and the countless flashing broken glass in it. Apart from that, there was only the roaring sandstorm in the sky, nothing else.

He remembered that when he fell, the huge joint fleet was heading towards Prospero, so it seemed reasonable that he was later brought back and sent to the medical room of the Black Crow Pyramid. However, what was unreasonable was——

Who, who dared to come so brazenly to attack the homeworld of an Astartes Legion when the Thousand Sons and other brother legions and the primarchs were gathered here? !
What happened here before he woke up? Where are the others? Where is the Primarch? What happened to the Primarch?

He searched his memory palace, which had been so beautifully and neatly organized as a library shelf, and found that all his memories were frozen at the moment when he entered Gasper Hauser's dream in the cold canyon of Satya and was seriously injured and fell to the ground by the original Annihilator lurking there.

Then, a remembered face flashed through his mind like lightning.

Olmuzd!
His fingers were chilled by the memory of his twin brother, who had tragically died in the flesh mutation when the Primarch returned, reappearing before him in a way he had never expected.

What happened after he fainted? What was the situation now? He knew that his father and his brother were nearby, so there was no possibility of hiding anything, so how did they deal with that person in the end...

That must not be a human. He sadly reviewed every detail in his memory. The fluctuations of that creature were much more similar to his own guardian spirit Etepio than to humans.

So where is this?
He tried to recall again, when he sank into the darkness of coma, it seemed that someone had roughly but forcefully pulled him up, making sure that he would not drift further and further into the vast ocean, which was much more clumsy and rough than the last time he was stuffed in - wait, when was the last time? He couldn't remember a time when he had been so seriously injured.

Someone sighed.

"Yes, you really don't remember. Look at how your memory has been pruned to fit your needs. That's why the things you want to restore can never be reshaped into what you want to restore. If everything you think you can trust is already broken, then what can you rely on to hold on to so many lost things?"

who? !

He gritted his teeth and pulled his legs out from under the rubble. He moved them a little. The servomotors roared, and together with the electronic muscle bundles, helped him complete the movement. However, more pain came from his own bones and tendons, making him groan. However, his fingers grasped a familiar object during the groping, his gold-blue scepter.

With the help of the scepter, he managed to hold himself up. Unlike mortals, the injured flesh and bones of a legionnaire would not take months or even years to completely heal. He could already feel the genetically enhanced organs implanted in his body beginning to repair his internal injuries - it looked like he was more like being affected by the destruction of a building when something fell down than being directly attacked.

If it was damage of this magnitude, even he could be buried underneath it, and maybe he would soon remember what happened and why he was here.

He calmed himself down and began to look around, but everything he saw made him more shocked, sad, and angry than when he had just woken up.

At first he thought this was just a part of a building in the Black Crow Pyramid, but he was wrong. It was only because someone had used a flamethrower to completely burn everything that could be burned here that he did not recognize where this place was.

This is the great library of the Black Crow Pyramid!
He suddenly realized what the thing that just covered his face and body might have been.

He ran madly to the heaviest parts of the ashes, and used his hands to push away the dark ashes in handfuls, trying to find any other clues.

Finally, he found the first evidence between two pieces of charred wood that were thick enough not to be completely carbonized.

It was the corner of a fragile, browned page, but Ahriman's memory was good enough that he might not be as familiar with the knowledge that they had painstakingly gathered over the centuries in the Black Raven Pyramid as Eku Annan, but he would never fail to recognize this rather famous tome.

"The Book of Dragons," he murmured. He remembered this book. It was part of the tome of knowledge about dragons that Eku Annan often mentioned. After being recruited as a Thousand Sons, the latter had been troubled by a prophetic image about dragons. This prophecy continued to trouble him until he was promoted to the Black Crow School and took charge of the Great Library.

A feeling of dread and prophecy rose from his stomach and gripped Ahriman's two hearts tightly.

He put the piece of paper into his waist bag, and then began to dig towards the pile of ruins that he had a feeling about. More black ashes were scattered around as he dug.

The First Captain of the Black Crows tried hard to hold back the tears in his eyes as he dug. From the broken remains that had been melted into metal and transparent glass tears, as well as the composition of the ashes that floated into his respirator, he could already guess what they were originally. These were bookshelves made of steel, glass, or wood, filled with countless books of knowledge in various binding methods, countless different scripts, and papers of various textures, as well as more advanced knowledge storage methods, mechanical cores, crystals, or others. There was also the special smell left after an organic body wrapped in clothing was burned to ashes.

He thought vaguely that the reason why he could identify the source of these subtle smells so quickly was because of the five years he had spent as an exchange officer in the Word Bearers. During those five years, he followed the Word Bearers in battle and participated in every step of their campaign. The kind and attentive chief priest Erebus, as a good friend, once taught him how to find more books hidden by the aliens and those who would not surrender in the ashes of the ruins that had been burned once.

It's him again. It's him. He's everywhere!

Someone was speaking with extreme coldness.

But Ahriman seemed not to have heard it at all.

He continued to dig down the pile of ashes until his hands touched something more familiar to him. He dug twice more and then couldn't stop the sadness in his heart when he saw what was exposed from the ashes. This was a human figure that had been twisted and melted by the high temperature. The reason why it didn't turn into ashes was that only the metal part of the power armor was left.

Even though the gem-like red paint coating on the ceramsite steel had almost disappeared and most of the markings had been melted away, Ahriman could still recognize the owner of the power armor - Eku Annan, the guardian of the Thousand Sons' Great Library, the most outstanding tome lecturer in the Black Raven School, and an old friend of his. Now his body was exposed here, lying among the ashes of the tomes he was willing to protect with his life.

"Rest in peace, Eku Annan... You kept your oath..."

Ahriman's eyes turned away in sorrow from the fatal wound that pierced the heart on the destroyed breastplate - apparently the deceased had suffered a similar collapse accident as him, and a broken sharp steel bar pierced the heart of the deceased like a spear of fate - but then a careful inspection immediately made him furious.

Although the fatal wound was the puncture crack on the breastplate, the dead man's head was chopped off, and the intact plane of the remaining cervical vertebrae, which was roasted to a crisp and yellow color, still showed him that the enemy chopped off his head when Eku Annan might have been dead or alive. Even Ahriman realized dizzily that there was no trace of the pharmacist's saw on the armor at the location of Eku Annan's two gene seeds! In other words, the battlefield situation did not even allow the medical pyramid, which was close at hand, to send a pharmacist to take away his brother's last precious legacy!

Was the battle situation so fierce and urgent? ! This was the city of Tizca on Prospero! Inside the School Pyramid! Were the system defense fleets, orbital defense platforms, and all the facilities blind, dumb, and paralyzed? ! The unknown enemy was allowed to rush directly into the heart of the Legion's home planet? ! What kind of fierce and powerful enemy was this? ! They were not mortal armies! They were Astartes! The most powerful Thousand Sons Legion among the Astartes! Could it be that some terrible alien creature that he didn't know about was launching a vicious and dangerous invasion against the Empire? !
Where are the Falcons?! Where is the always-hot-tempered Phossis Taka?! Where is Phil Toren, who has been defending Prospero?! Where are their forcefield shields?! How did they let the enemy rush into the city and cause such damage to the buildings?! Where are the Phoenixes?! Where are Calophus and Aura Magma?! Where is Sky Owl? Where is Bright Feather? And where is his own Black Crow?! Are they all dead?!

And... and the Primarch... Could it be that the Primarch also...?
Ahriman was filled with inexplicable grief and anger, and almost wanted to shout to the sky. He clutched his staff tightly, and tried hard to summon the invisible force that he was proud of. At the same time, he summoned his glorious guardian spirit Etpio through his mind.

But it was all empty, a void, no power, and no creature living in the vast ocean responded to his call, and his power seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

His shout only echoed for a moment in the cold wind, and then disappeared in the wind.

Nothing happened. When he lost the unique power that he once was proud of, all he had were the ashes and weapons in his hands.

After he shouted himself hoarse, he finally calmed down.

After mourning for a moment for the death of Eku Annan, he reburied his old friend in the ashes, and then began to trek through the ruins that he had once been so familiar with.

He stopped at the edge of the pool in front of the pyramid that once sparkled, and saw that it was filled with rotten bones and scraps of paper with words soaked off; he limped past the huge wreckage of the Apex Dog that had passed through the entire city and finally fell from its original memorial position in front of the Fire Phoenix Pyramid, and at the same time a sense of enlightenment came to his mind, and he made a simple condolence for Carlophis; he stopped in front of the Pyramid of Fotep where the Primarch once lived. This place was the most severely destroyed, and he could even smell the lingering scent of the terrible energy water flow that flowed here from the collapsed dam of the Vast Ocean long ago, and realized that this might be the final burial place of the remaining Tizca residents and legion soldiers.

He struggled desperately to open the broken bronze door of the pyramid, but there was nothing behind it, only a shattered and burned nothingness.

Ahriman didn't know how long he had been wandering. His mood had changed from the extremely intense anger, sadness, and pain at the beginning to a state of numbness after being stimulated too much. But he still didn't meet another living person in the ruins of Tizca, not even a living creature. The city he once knew and lived in was now only broken statues, rotten pages paving the streets, and crystal glass fragments that were broken from the collapsed outer walls of all six beautiful pyramids and scattered across most of the city.

It flickered and sparkled, like a thousand will-o'-the-wisp fires and a thousand eyes, staring at him from a thousand angles as he stood alone.

Why is this happening?! Where are the others?! Where is the Primarch?! Why is he the only one left? Now that he has lost all his innate powers, he is wandering like a lonely ghost in this ruin?! Is he the last orphan of the Thousand Sons Legion, the only echo?! And what can he do now...

Even though he wanted revenge, Ahriman was extremely sad and angry to find that without the guidance of the prophecy and the power to dispel the fog, he didn't even know who to take revenge on.

Prospero must have been abandoned or isolated, because he found that he could not find anything that could allow him to leave this dead planet.

Suddenly, his combat boot struck something buried in the ashes.

He bent down and reached out to push away the ashes.

It was a silver object, like a silver coin.

He picked up the silver coin and looked at it carefully.

There was a wolf's head and a crescent moon on it, but it wasn't a Luna Wolf's.

There was a sharp cut in the middle of the pattern by a sharp blade.

Ahriman looked in the direction of the hole on the silver coin, as if he had sensed something.

In front of him was the Secret Eye Square.

A naturally collapsed road leads down below.

"Reflective Cave..."

His lips murmured.

(End of this chapter)