A Cold God, Chapter 33

“A Primarch?”

Captain Lokir Amarith dragged a hand down his face, thumb and forefinger pressing into his eyes until the colors behind his lids sparked and flared. He exhaled slow through his nose, breath fogging faintly in the chill of the command deck. The overhead lights buzzed softly. Instruments beeped in the background. Somewhere behind him, the vox array clicked as it cycled through open channels.

Of all the outcomes he’d prepared for—xenos contact, lost human colonies, warp-tainted worlds—this wasn’t one of them. Not really. Every captain in the Imperial Navy had been briefed on the possibility. The theoretical. Protocols layered under layers. Dusty lectures buried in the memory. If you encounter a lost son of the Emperor… report to Command, maintain distance, render no insult, request further instruction.

Lokir hadn’t expected to actually need those instructions.

He turned from the data-slab and paced slowly toward the central display—an angled hololith flickering with the grainy image of the Icewalker. That towering figure standing still in the snow, his breath curling visibly into the air. The vox recording echoed faintly beneath the hologram.
“I am Arthas. I am a Primarch.”

Lokir watched it again. That voice like deep stone shifting under pressure, like glacial shelves cracking beneath the weight of their own history. Not merely loud. Heavy. Real.

“This is a little above my paygrade,” Lokir muttered.

His command staff stood silent around the chamber. No one dared speak. They knew what this meant. The recon team’s report had been thorough. The creature had known what a Primarch was. Had identified himself as one without hesitation or prompting. And he looked the part. More than just the height—though yes, the height was there, towering and unmistakable—it was the presence. The way the vox picked up the silence around him. Like the world itself bent slightly to his will.

Lokir’s mind flashed back to the last time he’d witnessed something like this. The parades on Cthonia and Terra. Horus standing above the crowds, flanked by the Luna Wolves, light catching on the silver of his armor. A moment etched into him. This… this felt the same.

He rubbed the back of his neck, the fabric of his collar damp with sweat. Then he turned to his comms officer.

“Send word to all recon teams,” he said, voice firm now. “Full deployment. Begin phase two of surface operations. Establish outposts. Get the research stations running. If there are survivors or native populations, I want them monitored—cautiously. No engagements unless provoked. Their education and upliftment is not our job.”

The comms officer nodded and moved. Vox lines opened with a soft hiss of static.

Lokir turned back to the hololith. His gaze lingered on the figure of Arthas—on the way the snow curled around him, drawn in like breath. Something old lingered in the air around him, something colder than the ice.

He cleared his throat and spoke again, quieter this time. “Send an astropathic message. Priority alpha. Encrypt and route it through Terra’s primary relay. Word it clearly: One of the Emperor’s long-lost son has been found. He walks upon the surface of this world. His name is Arthas. He claims the title of Primarch.”

He exhaled again and sat heavily in the command chair, the servos adjusting with a quiet hum beneath him. His hands closed into fists against the rests.

No turning back now.

“Prepare my personal shuttle,” He said. “I would like to meet and see this Primarch for myself.” 

He’d never talked to one before or seen one up close. If he played his cards right, Arthas might just be his ticket to the highest echelons of the Imperium.

—

“You’re the commander of this… fleet, then?”

Even stripped of my deeper nature—the Void and all its hunger, the storm and its frozen stillness—my voice still carried too much weight. It filled the air like thunder muffled behind clouds, louder than it had any right to be. It didn’t rupture ears or break bones, but it pressed into the hearts of the humans who heard it. Their breath hitched. Their backs straightened. Their eyes lowered, even when they tried not to.

It didn’t reach the People. They’d been born beneath my shadow and raised by the silence of the snows. But the men and women of the Imperium felt it with every syllable. So it didn’t surprise me that Captain Lokir Amarith still flinched—just barely—each time I spoke, even after bread had been broken and salt shared between us.

“I am, Lord Primarch,” Lokir said.

He bowed his head once, quick and formal, then straightened. Around us, both his crew and the tribesfolk had gathered. They stood in uneven clusters, their clothes and weapons marking the two peoples clearly—one draped in metal and data-threads, the other in furs and obsidian. They watched each other with cautious eyes. Curious. Tense. The mingling was strange, yes, but not unwelcome. If the Imperium brought warmth, then the People would not turn it away.

I saw no reason to stop it. Let them speak. Let them trade stories. Let them learn. The Imperium would bring tools, medicine, roads. Fire that did not die in winter. Food that grew without the sun. The old ways could be honored, but not preserved in ice. There was no virtue in clinging to hardship.

“Though,” Lokir added, “mine is an exploratory fleet. Once the official envoy arrives, my vessels and I will depart... unless given a new assignment.”

He shifted slightly as he spoke, glancing at the unmoving figure of one of my guards. The Iceborn warrior stood like carved granite behind me, twin axes strapped across his back, breath misting gently in the chill.

“How long before official envoys from the Imperium arrive, then?” I asked.

“A month, perhaps,” Lokir replied. “But now that they know… that you’ve been found… I’d wager on two weeks. Less, if the astropathic lines are clear.”

I nodded. Snow crunched softly beneath my feet as I stepped closer to the central fire pit, its heat drawing flickers of steam from the fur lining of my mantle. The People had built it earlier, and someone had added tinned rations from the fleet into the stew.

“What sort of development can I expect for this world?” I asked, watching the flame shift and rise.

There was a pause. A beat too long.

“In truth?” Lokir said, voice low. “I don’t know, Lord Primarch.”

He stepped forward and joined me by the fire. His fingers hovered over the heat for a moment, before he pulled them back—too hot. “But I suspect full control will be handed to you. That’s how it goes, from what I’ve heard. The world will be yours in name and law. The Mechanicus will begin building—manufactorums, extractors, orbital relays. Everything needed to make use of what this place offers.”

“And if I don’t want that?”

He hesitated. “Then it stops. Or slows. The final word rests with you. Some Primarchs choose differently. I’ve heard the Wolf King kept his world as it was. Said his people would grow soft if they lived in cities. So they still live among the trees and hunt beasts with spears. And the strongest are chosen to join the Vlka Fenryka.”

The wind shifted, pulling through the open clearing where the gathering had formed. The People didn't stir. They were used to the cold. The Imperials, less so, clutched their coats tighter and stood closer to the portable heaters their servitors had assembled.

“I care little for their strength,” I said. “I care for their survival. Strength means nothing when the body rots from frostbite and the child dies from a cut left untreated.”

Captain Lokir gave a slow nod. His face tightened, not in disagreement, but in understanding.

“Then the cities will come,” he said. “And roads. And heat. And all the wondrous technologies the Imperium has to offer. Ultramar is a place that cares for its people. Its worlds are properly industrialized, its people educated and safe; and the Ultramarines are known to be one of the finest of the Legionnes Astartes.”

I turned slightly, looking out toward the ridgeline where the sun dipped low, casting long shadows across the white fields. The ice caught the last of the light and glinted like old glass. A slow wind moved through the snowdrifts, stirring loose frost along the surface. This world had endured. It had hidden me in silence and cold, and I had endured with it. But that time was ending. It was time to raise walls from stone and iron. Time to shape the land into something more than survival.

Around us, the gathering thinned as evening crept closer. A few of the People lingered near the fire, watching the Imperials from the corners of their eyes. But the children were different—curious, tireless, bold. They circled the armored soldiers, tugged at the seams of their robes, pointed at the cogitators and blinking lights, unafraid. It was through them that the thaw had begun.

“Will my people be expected to fight on behalf of the Imperium?” I asked, still watching the line of twilight crawling across the horizon.

Captain Lokir adjusted his gloves, then shrugged. “That, my lord Primarch, depends on how many people actually live here. From what I’ve seen… not many. Too few to conscript into war without collapsing your own foundation. In that case, the answer is no. The Imperium doesn’t ask for blood it can’t afford to lose.”

He paused a moment, then added, “But you… you will eventually have to lead your own legion. That much is certain. I imagine you already knew that.”

“I did.”

The words left me flat, like breath in the cold. In the years of my sleep, that knowledge had dulled, buried beneath layers of snow and time. But now it stirred again. The Astartes. My sons.

Even now, I could sense them—distant lights flaring faintly across the void, flickering threads bound to me by blood and something deeper still. They had grown in number. Twenty now. Not even a fraction of a fraction of what a Legion should be, if my memory served. But they were there.

Few in number, yes. But they carried pieces of me. Not just in flesh, but in purpose. They were born from the storm that was my true self, carved from the silence of the void. If they were true to that shaping, then they would command the winter. Ice would answer them. And the dead, too would rise again at their call.

That would be their strength. Not numbers. Not overwhelming firepower. But inevitability, just like me. 

Still, I would not know for certain until I stood before them.

No—I could do that now.

I shifted inward, peeling my true consciousness away from the Icewalker, the body I wore like a coat. The flesh of the Primarch was powerful, but it was not all that I was. I followed the faint, frost-threaded lines that stretched from me across the void, lines no man could see but which pulsed faintly with the chill of my will. They guided me to the others—my sons.

And then, I was elsewhere.

The void expanded around me, cold and endless, until it narrowed again and shaped itself into a new place—another world wrapped in snow and silence. But this one had not always been so. The land still bore the bones of what it had been. Beneath the frost, beneath the pale sky, I saw shattered glass towers, broken monoliths, dead machines embedded in ice.

Bodies were stacked in such quantity they had become terrain. Ridges of limbs and skulls stretched across the horizon. Entire ranges of bone and ruin. There were so many that even the wind no longer howled—muffled by the sheer mass of the dead.

My Astartes were here. 

I found them easily—each a beacon in the frost. They moved with slow purpose, armored shapes wading through the drifts of corpses, accompanied by legions of the reanimated dead. These were not human remains. They were xenos—long-limbed, bright-blooded creatures with once-gleaming weapons now cracked and buried in the snow. They had resisted. Fought. Died.

And now, they walked again.

I drifted closer. Not with eyes, but with will. I touched the thoughts of one of my sons and drew back the veil of memory. Through him, I saw what had been. A green world. Thick with forests, alive with technology and color. The xenos had lived here for millennia. Their cities sang with power. Their skies glowed with ships that rode the light.

And then the storm came.

Twenty warriors. Just twenty. My sons.

They struck like the cold itself. Without herald. Without warning. Not for conquest. Not for sport. They had no hunger for trophies or celebration. They came to silence. And silence is what they left behind.

The piles of dead had grown too tall. Too vast. Why not raise them too?

And then the answer.

Limits.

Even now, with all their strength, each of them could command no more than a billion corpses at once. Any more, and the connection frayed. Precision gave way to chaos. They could make armies, yes—but not worlds. Not yet.

So the rest remained still. Not buried. Not burned. Just… waiting.

I looked down through the storm of memory and watched as my sons moved across the frost, their hands aglow with winter light, shaping the dead into formations that moved with perfect silence. Death followed in their wake, but it was not wild or uncontrolled. It was ordered. Cold. I felt no pride. No grief. Just a quiet certainty.

They were mine.

And I would soon call them home.