The Cursed King, Chapter 65

A few decades before Isstvan.

Khârn stood in the ruins of what had once been a forum, or maybe a market square. Hard to say now. The stone underfoot was slick, wet with blood and rainwater, tracked with bootprints and dragged bodies. Smoke curled from the windows of the buildings that still stood. Most had not. Their bones jutted like ribs from ash heaps. Somewhere a bell was ringing, slow and cracked, swinging from a tower that leaned as if it meant to fall but hadn’t yet remembered how.

He breathed in the sulfur and the rot and the oil-burned stink of promethium and found no comfort in any of it. His helm hung at his side. His brow was marked with someone’s blood. Not his. He did not know whose.

The chainaxe in his grip made a low sound, still alive. The teeth were clotted, the casing splattered. It had bit deep and wide. Into men and women both. Into the backs of those who had run and into the faces of those who had not. It had not known the difference. He had known and it had not mattered.

This world had not resisted.

That was the part that stuck. That soured the air in his lungs. A world full of people, humans, old stock and clear of corruption. Their speech was close enough to Gothic that he could understand them without his helm. Their crops were ordered. Their cities laid with care. The children had lined the streets when the dropcrafts came, waving banners painted with stars.

They had bowed when the Legiones Astartes disembarked. The governors came with gifts. Spoke words of welcome. Of loyalty. No barricades. No weapons drawn.

He remembered one of them—an old man with a spine bent sideways, hands shaking not from fear but age. Had offered Khârn a cup of wine. Said his people were ready to join the dream of the Emperor. Said they had waited. Said they were glad to be found.

Khârn had not struck him.

Others had.

He remembered the scream. The sound of a skull hitting stone. The red that spattered Khârn’s pauldron was not from his own blade. He had turned and watched a boy with half a head stumble once and then fall in silence.

Angron had given the order.

That was all it took.

The comms crackled. The voice came calm. Clear. Kill them.

No cause. No defiance. No mistake to punish.

Kill them.

And they had.

The World Eaters poured into the streets. Bolters barked. Blades shrieked. Chainaxes chewed through flesh and walls both. Civilians broke and scattered. Some ran to temples. Some stood and shouted pleas. Some knelt in the gutters with hands raised to men who would not stop. The storm broke through them without mercy. Without slowing.

Khârn had moved with it.

He did not remember the first kill. Or the tenth. He remembered the weight in his arms, the sound of steel through soft things, the way his boots slipped on stairs wet with blood. He remembered a girl clinging to her brother and how both had screamed. He remembered the moment the chainaxe struck and the screaming stopped.

He remembered how the axe had hummed in his hand afterward, like it approved.

The sky overhead was dark with smoke now. The orbital barrage had flattened the eastern quarter of the city. Fire still burned in the heights, falling in black drifts like snow. The air was thick with ash. It coated his armor, painted his skin.

He walked past a burned-out habblock. A mural on one of the walls showed a man reaching upward toward a sun. That hand had been scorched away. Only the arm remained. He did not stop to look.

Far off, he heard the laughter of his brothers. Too loud. Too empty.

He stepped over a woman’s corpse and looked down. Her face was turned toward him. Her eyes gone, but the mouth still moved slightly in death. A tremor. Maybe wind.

He did not know her name. He did not know any of their names.

This planet had not been the target.

He had read the brief. Listened to the mission code. Their orders had placed them half a system away, at a mining world where rebels had risen with the aid of xenos machines. This world was not that. It had been a beacon of compliance. A world long-isolated but never hostile. A misjump, some error in the navigational runes, or perhaps something darker. It did not matter now.

Angron had not asked questions. He had not demanded answers. The error—if it had been that—was secondary to the outcome.

He had given the signal.

And the legion had obeyed.

Khârn’s fingers tightened around the axe.

He turned his head and spat. The blood on his tongue did not taste like his own. He walked on. Behind him the tower bell cracked on its hinges and fell, the sound lost in the wind.

It was on the fifth hour of the carnage that new ships came.

They did not come in force. No fleet. No grand display. Just a handful. Silent. Slow. Steel shadows slipping through the void, cold and without preamble. They dropped from the edge of the system and slid into orbit like they’d always been there, like they belonged. No challenge was issued. No response was given.

Khârn stood in the shattered plaza of the city’s southern quarter when the vox clicked live in his helm.

The Conqueror.

The voice on the channel was short. Clipped. Not one of their own.

::Stand down. Cease operations. The world was assigned to the Devourers. Their forces have arrived.::

He did not speak.

Others did. Confusion. Laughter. Orders from captains cut through the channel in bursts, some contradicting others. Some already drowned in screams. The message repeated.

Assigned.

Khârn looked out over the ruin. The streets lay dark. The fires had eaten most of the lower districts, and the wind from the sea carried the ash inland. He could hear the whine of servos as the broken remnants of the local defense grid twitched in death. A child’s doll sat in a gutter, its cloth scorched, one button eye missing.

He walked on.

By the time he reached the western landing field, the sky was lit again.

Not with fire. Not with shell or barrage.

Dropships came first—sleek, dark, low-slung things with hulls the color of dried blood and no markings save a single sigil etched over each prow. It was not the Aquila. It was not any symbol of the Imperium that Khârn knew.

The Devourers.

Children of the King of Curses.

Those who’d witnessed them fight called them the Blood Tide.

Khârn watched them descend. There were no vox-chants. No fanfare. The dropships opened, and they stepped out.

The first of them wore burgundy plate, deeper than red, almost brown in low light. The armor drank color. No polish. No ornament. Even their helms bore no lenses—just black pits where eyes should’ve been. Their movements were precise, unhurried. Each carried weapons Khârn did not know. Some had blades shaped like broken tusks. Others had long rifles that gave off no heat signature.

And they stared.

Not at the wreckage. Not at the fires.

At them. At the World Eaters.

Khârn took a step forward.

One of the Devourers turned toward him. The Astartes cocked its head. Behind its helm, the black sockets narrowed slightly, as if weighing him. It said nothing. Made no move.

Then the wind howled, and the sky tore.

Something fell.

Khârn looked up.

It was not a craft. Not a pod. It had no heat signature. No reentry markers. Just a figure, descending fast. A streak against the clouds. It fell without flare or correction, straight as a thrown spear.

It hit like a hammer.

The shockwave crushed a ring of burned-out ruins and threw smoke into the air in a pillar. Stones lifted from the ground. Ash rippled. Khârn raised one hand to block the grit in the air.

When the dust cleared, he saw him.

Naked.

Four-armed.

Four-eyed.

Red hair wild and unbound, trailing like torn streamers behind him. His body was lean, marked in black lines that pulsed faint with light. Tattoos or something more. Across his chest were sigils that shifted when Khârn tried to read them. Symbols of binding, or maybe of mockery.

He stood at the center of a ring of Devourers.

None knelt.

He smiled.

His voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be.

“Angron!” he called. “Come out! I just want to talk!”

He spread his arms wide, two on either side, palms open. Smoke curled around his legs.

Khârn stared.

Ryomen Sukuna.

The Destroyer.

The King of Curses.

A Primarch.

Khârn had seen many things in his service. The death of planets. The fall of warriors he’d called brothers. The sight of his own hands slick with the blood of those who should have been allies. But he had never seen a Primarch descend without armor into a warzone already burning and ask to speak.

There was no madness in the man’s eyes. No rage, but for a faint amusement.

Khârn felt something shift in the earth beneath his boots. He looked down.

The blood in the cracks of the stone was trembling. Pulling outward. Toward the center of the city.

Toward Sukuna.

Angron came through the smoke like a thunderhead broken loose from the earth. Blood soaked his limbs and wept from the seams of his armor. His gait was uneven, not for pain but for the weight of rage—an uneven force made flesh, staggering and then still and then lurching again with a howl in his throat. His hands were claws. His mouth split wide enough to tear itself open. He did not speak. He bellowed.

Khârn turned toward the noise. He saw him. The silhouette outlined in ash and flame, the blood fresh and hot steaming off his pauldrons. Bits of armor hung from him like meat from a butcher’s hook. The Butcher’s Nails had taken hold fully now. There was nothing left of clarity in his eyes. Only the red. Only the roar.

And still, Sukuna did not move.

He stood with both heels planted in broken stone, one hand loose at his side, the other folded across his chest. Four arms. Four eyes. His skin was pale and lined in black ink that pulsed like veins. His eyes tracked Angron without blinking. No armor. No weapon. Shorter by a head at least, maybe more. Yet somehow larger.

Angron thundered toward him, boots tearing the stone with each step. Khârn saw the rage, felt the heat of it radiating off his primarch like a furnace about to burst. He did not slow. Did not hesitate. The ground cracked under his weight as he drew close, raising a fist the size of a grown man’s chest.

Sukuna smiled.

“I would’ve preferred to talk,” he said. “But I guess this is better.”

Khârn moved without thought. Axe in hand. Chainblade primed. Behind him he heard the others. World Eaters, sons of Nuceria, mad with the same fire that drove their father. Not one of them hesitated. They charged the moment Sukuna had spoken. It was not about orders. Not about strategy. It was instinct. The Nails screamed and they followed.

Then the sound came.

A single note. Not a voice. Not a cry. A sound like thunder without a storm. Like a continent breaking open. Like something real and holy had been struck wrong. Khârn did not see the blow. Not truly. Only the moment after.

Angron was flying backward. His limbs splayed. His chestplate folded inward like tin struck by a hammer. His head lolled, eyes wide, mouth bleeding. He hit the side of a municipal tower, shattered it at the middle, then passed through it entirely and vanished in a wash of dust and shattered ferrocrete.

Silence followed.

Sukuna stood with one arm still extended. Open palm. Fingers spread. The air shimmered around his hand. Nothing else moved.

The World Eaters halted. Not all. Some had already committed. Khârn among them. He turned his charge at the last moment, carving his momentum sideways, skidding to a halt. His heart beat like a war drum in his ears.

He saw them now. The Devourers. Motionless. Their visors cold and black. Their weapons held at their sides, but not drawn. Not ready. Not even needed.

Khârn breathed in. Ash. Oil. Blood.

He looked toward where Angron had vanished. A crater now. Stone torn up in a ring. Smoke rising in curls.

Ryomen Sukuna lowered his arm.

“Anyone else?” he asked.

The air was still. Nothing answered.

Khârn did not move.

He stared at the man. At the thing. At the monster that wore skin like a man and stood calm among the wreckage. A primarch, yes. Born of the same father. But there was something wrong about him. Something deep in the way he breathed or didn’t breathe. The way he stood, weightless, like he didn’t need the ground and only tolerated it.

The King of Curses blinked. And vanished.

No warning. No lurch. Just gone. A blur of nothing.

And then he was there.

Wading into the ruin like it were knee-deep water. Rubble shifted aside. Concrete bowed and steel bent away from him, like it feared his touch.

He found Angron half-buried beneath a slab of broken road and the twisted ribs of the tower he’d passed through. His limbs were splayed. Blood pooled beneath the creases of his armor, though the plates were cracked and hung in pieces. His breath rasped like rust caught in a pipe.

Sukuna didn’t speak.

He reached down and grabbed his brother by the heel.

One hand. One grip.

Then, with no ceremony, he dragged Angron back into the open like a sack of meat. Stone scraped and split as the corpse-weight slid. Sparks danced across rebar. A leg twisted wrong at the joint. The Butcher of Nuceria tried to rise. Sukuna didn’t give him the time.

He turned his grip and slammed him down.

Heel first. Then shoulder. Then the head.

The skull struck the street with a sound that was not thunder and not steel. It was wet and final and rang out across the city like a dropped bell. The stone cratered. Bone split. Blood sprayed.

Angron convulsed once.

Sukuna looked down.

“Ah,” he said. “This is what’s holding you back.”

He crouched beside the broken primarch. His fingers moved with care, not haste. He ran his hand along the side of Angron’s skull, brushing away blood and grime. The cables and plugs and anchor-pins of the Butcher’s Nails shimmered in the dust.

Sukuna placed one hand on the crown of Angron’s head.

The other reached in. He gripped half the array in one motion and tore them loose.

Not cleanly.

Wires ripped. Bone came with it. Part of Angron’s scalp peeled away in a strip. A gout of blood, thick and dark, arced into the air.

Angron howled. Or tried to.

And in that moment—Khârn felt it.

A pain not his own. A scream not from lungs or throat. A pulse through the Nails.

Every World Eater dropped.

Their bodies seized. Their limbs locked. Some fell to their knees. Some screamed. Some clawed at their helms. Blood spilled from ears and eyes and mouths. Their vision went white and then black.

Khârn fell sideways. His axe clattered.

The Nails bit deep into his skull. He felt them writhing, not as metal but as thought. A thousand voices all shrieking at once. Rage without target. Pain without wound. The connection tethered to the core of who and what they were, undone by someone pulling at its root.

He heard nothing after that.

Only the beat of his heart.

And then—not even that.