The light was a searing, impossible white — a bloom of purity rupturing the quiet dark. It was agony. Not pain of flesh or limb, but the unbearable violence of soul reknit to form. Memory slammed into matter. Spirit became sinew.
Sanguinius, the Brightest Angel, roared a soundless protest as the void gave him back.
His wings, once folded in the repose of death, exploded outward in defiant glory — vast spans of snow-white feathers tearing through the embryonic light. Golden armor, radiant and baroque, wove itself around him in a halo of solar fire. His eyes snapped open — not in tranquil awakening, but the instant, predator-fast awareness of a warrior reborn into war.
In his hand formed a sword. The Blade Encarmine? Perhaps. Or perhaps something new, something shaped from memory and legacy. Either way, it pulsed with the will of the Angel.
His internal auspex screamed. Presence: close. Non-Astartes. Not human. Not daemon. Not known.
The chamber around him was smooth stone and light-reactive crystal, half-tech, half-artifice. Ancient. Secure. And standing before him was a figure — slight of frame, shaven-headed, robed in simple earth-tones. Marked by glowing blue lines like old bending paths of spirit energy.
The figure made no move, but its presence rang with immense age and power.
Sanguinius's soul, honed across millennia of warfare and betrayal, screamed warning.
"Speak, creature!" he thundered. His voice was a cathedral bell struck with war. Wings flared wide, casting titanic shadows. "Daemon? Deceiver? What mockery is this?"
The being did not flinch. It merely looked at him — and in those eyes, Sanguinius saw something strange.
Not malice.
Not seduction.
Sorrow. And patience.
But he could not know that yet.
The Blade rose.
In a burst of motion too fast for mortal senses, the Angel lunged, golden fire trailing behind him like a comet's tail. The blade screamed through the air, an arc aimed to end whatever threat stood before him.
And then—everything stopped.
Not in motion, but in mind.
Something pressed inward — not violently, but gently. A thought. A presence. Immense. Soothing. Sorrowful. Aang.
The name was not spoken. It was known, deep in Sanguinius's resurrected soul.
Then came the vision.
Not memory. Not hallucination. A tapestry.
He saw the galaxy. Not in snapshots, but as one feels the shape of a great tree by touching each leaf in sequence.
Wars beyond number. Fortresses rising from ash. Human faith twisted into fearful worship. The Emperor — broken, blazing, bleeding — bound to a throne that was a prison and a lighthouse all in one.
He saw Vader. Cloaked in darkness. A being of fire and will, facing an energy unlike the Warp — the memory of another galaxy's trials.
He saw his brothers.
Not as he remembered them. Not as they remembered themselves.
Fulgrim, a thing of silk and screams.
Mortarion, a shrouded corpse, breathing plague.
Angron, red and endless, more scream than man.
Lorgar, voice of a thousand heresies.
Magnus, drowned in tragedy.
Curze… oh, Curze.
Each face — lost. And Horus…
Absence. A hole where light should be.
He relived his death. Not as a memory, but as truth. His stand. The final blow. The betrayal.
And then…
He saw his own body entombed — not on Terra. Deeper. Stranger. Preserved not as relic, but as hope. A vault designed not by man alone, but by something more. A choice made by many hands — the Emperor's, perhaps. Cegorach's certainly. Aang's presence part of that design.
A failsafe.
If he awoke, it meant the end was near.
---
The vision faded.
Sanguinius stood still.
No longer lunging. No longer striking.
His sword remained in hand, but his wings drooped. The room's sterile white softened into something ancient and sorrowful.
He looked at Aang.
And Aang looked back — no threat, no deception.
Just truth.
Memory returned fully now.
The siege. Terra. His father.
Horus.
And death.
But what hurt more was the now.
The Imperium he had died for was a rusted cathedral of fear.
His brothers, consumed.
The Emperor… no longer Father, but God-In-Pain.
The galaxy bled, and the angels were fallen.
Sanguinius dropped to one knee, not in weakness, but reverence — not for Aang, but for the gravity of what had been shown. He breathed once. Then rose.
He was Sanguinius.
Primarch.
Angel.
Sacrifice.
He stepped forward. His sword dimmed, but did not disappear. He looked to the ceiling — to the stars he could not see.
He finally spoke.
"If I am risen again," he said quietly, "then the stars are bleeding."
A beat.
"And if Horus lives…"
His voice sharpened.
"…then I will end him."
The air in the hidden place was thick with the dust of millennia and the residue of colossal sorrow. It was not a tomb, not truly, but a stasis—a pocket dimension carved from psychic might and gilded with forgotten hope, where the Great Angel, Sanguinius of the Blood Angels, rested. He was not sleeping as mortals sleep, but enduring: a statue of purest gold and grief, his mighty wings furled, his noble face a mask of terrible peace.
It was into this place that the Avatar stumbled.
Not through physical means, for the chamber existed beyond the veil of stars and planets, nestled in a fold of reality that brushed against the spiritual. Aang found it in the deep quiet of meditation, following a resonance more profound than any spirit he had ever encountered. He stepped—not with his body, but with his consciousness—into a realm where the weight of centuries pressed down like mountains.
He saw the figure first—immense, radiating a tragic light. Golden armor, impossibly intricate, covered a form of perfect, terrible beauty. Great feathered wings were folded behind him, catching the ethereal light of the void. A human, Aang thought at first, but the scale, the sheer aura of power and suffering, was unlike anything he had ever known. Not even the most ancient spirits carried such presence.
Sanguinius stirred. It was less a physical movement than a ripple through the potent energy that held him. Golden eyes, ancient and weary, opened, scanning the boy who stood before him—small, bald, clad in simple robes, yet containing a presence that felt like the very hum of existence.
What art thou? The thought was a resonant chime directly in Aang's mind, magnificent and sorrowful. A psychic echo? A fragment of the dream?
Aang bowed slightly, instinctively. "I am Aang. The Avatar." He felt no fear, only a deep empathy for the sorrow he perceived. "I sense great… imbalance here. And great pain."
Sanguinius shifted, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the soul. He saw the boy's form, fragile compared to the warriors he had commanded and the enemies he had faced. No bolter, no chainsword, no gene-wrought strength. But he saw something else—a bridge. Aang was connected to the air, the earth, the fire, the water. To the spirit world. To the balance that undergirded existence.
He had spent uncounted ages in this state, watching, sensing, understanding the rot that had consumed his father's dream. The Imperium had become a monstrous machine of war and dogma. Its faith, a blind inferno devoid of insight. It crushed psykers and feared the unknown, worshipped the Emperor as a corpse-god, and had long forgotten the subtle, vital currents of the soul.
The enemy, Chaos, was imbalance given form. Yet the Imperium fought it only with fire and fury, having lost the language of the spirit.
And here stood a being whose very purpose was balance. A guardian of the fundamental state of things. Not a warrior of iron and wrath, but a keeper of equilibrium. Something the grimdark galaxy had long choked out of existence.
An Avatar, Sanguinius mused, the psychic voice softening from inquiry to recognition. A vessel of harmony. A bridge between worlds.
He looked at Aang, truly looked, past the child's form to the infinite, swirling energy within. You see the imbalance. You understand the need for more than force.
A sigh, like the wind through shattered battlements, echoed in the psychic space. We built an empire of iron and fire, and forgot the soul.
"The imbalance gets worse," Aang said, his voice gentle but firm. "I feel it, stretching across the stars. It threatens everything."
Sanguinius knew that energy intimately. He knew its masters.
Chaos, he named it, the word a bitter taste in the psychic air. It spreads like cancer. And my brothers... many are lost to it. Or lost to time.
He looked at Aang not as a soldier, but as something far more crucial. A guide. A beacon. A soul who could walk the hidden paths of spirit and truth.
We must stand together, Avatar Aang, Sanguinius projected, the thought radiating power that solidified their surroundings. Not only to strike the Manifested Ruin with blade and bolt. That is necessary, yes. But it is not enough.
His golden eyes, filled with ancient sorrow and dawning purpose, locked onto Aang's.
The galaxy needs balance restored. It needs its guardians. And many are scattered, hidden, sealed away, or sleeping, waiting for a sign.
He spoke of his loyal brothers, of ancient orders cloaked in forgotten lore, of saints in stasis and relics buried in the shadow of oblivion. He could sense them faintly, like pinpricks of loyal light across the vast psychic dark. But he could not reach them alone. He needed someone who could see beyond.
"You need to find them," Aang realised. "The ones who still hold the light."
Precisely, Sanguinius affirmed. They are not soldiers for war. Not all of them. Many are guardians, scholars, mystics... keepers of the light we have lost.
He extended a psychic hand, not physically, but as a golden beacon in the shared space.
Will you lend your sight and spirit, to find those the galaxy has forgotten?
It was a pact unlike any Sanguinius had forged. Not of blood and command, but of resonance and trust. Aang felt the weight of it—a responsibility stretching far beyond his own world. He saw the grim vision of spiritual annihilation, and the glimmer of hope in the idea of rediscovery.
"Yes," Aang said, voice steady. "Balance must be restored. The hidden must be found. We will stand together."
As Aang accepted the pact, anchoring his spiritual light to Sanguinius' immense presence, the golden aura surrounding the Great Angel intensified. No longer mournful—vibrant with renewed purpose. The pocket dimension shimmered, unstable for a moment, as the psychic awakening of a Primarch bled into reality, rippling across the Warp.
Across unimaginable light-years, in a palace of impossible beauty sculpted from agony and ecstasy, Fulgrim, the most beautiful and damned of the Emperor's Children, paused.
Reclined on a divan woven from silken hair, a chalice of liquid despair at his lips, he felt it: a tremor in the psychic sea, sharp and golden. A signature he knew more intimately than his own name.
A slow smile spread across his flawless face—a smile devoid of warmth. It was anticipation. It was hunger.
"The Angel stirs?" Fulgrim purred, his voice a melody that flayed the soul. He set the chalice down, his six limbs stretching in sensuous delight. An ancient thrill coursed through him.
Even after ten millennia of corruption, something in Fulgrim remembered the purity of that light. And it burned.
"Good," he whispered.
The stage was being set.
Balance was returning to the floor.
"Let the dance resume."