for war unending, until it is done."
This, at last, draws a reaction. Ten thousand hands draw ten thousand blades, raised high and glittering in the dying light, and ten thousand voices roar out the same phrase.
"Until it is done!"
You know this going to be the start of something great when our Legion Battlecry is quoting the original mean, green space marine.
You'd not planned on such a call or response, nor on ending the speech there, but better a quick and clean death than a long and torturous end.
Pft. Of course Mortarion would talk about speeches like a death sentence. I can only imagine how people react to him liberally sprinkling that metaphor into every day mundane things.
"I am killing this conversation."
"Such a toxic ideology must be hung from the nearest tree."
"This is not a war for ideals. I am performing pest control on the parasites within my garden."
"I must strangle your request for me to speak the ceremony, as I am currently regrowing my vocal cords after an accidental self-execution."
finding your eyes straying to the wide windows and the glittering stars beyond. The view is so different from the one above Barbarus, and then again from the skies over Terra, but as always, the beauty remains. That might, you think, be the one constant among all this galaxy has to offer.
For a guy who just wants to farm and play medieval geneticist, I like that he's slowly adapting to seeing things in a new way. Space can't support much life, and it's all just gas, radiation, and loose collections of minerals. Not good for farming. But it is a form of nature, and looking up to a brighter tomorrow is one of humanity's oldest traits.
Rare indeed are the men who can look beyond such singular meanings and grasp the importance of the whole. Men like us, my brother."
You snort, shaking your head. "Will you call us lords next? Rulers of the new age, gazing down from our mountain thrones?"
Potentially getting a head start on a rivalry with Big Boy Blue. But considering last time around we made friends with Guilliman despite a higher bar for distaste, actually meeting him may go well.
Exactly!" Horus exclaims, stinging your shoulder with a punch that could have shattered stone, "I did not realise at first, but then I read the reports and I realised – you saw what most could not. You saw the monsters on their thrones and the poison in the soil not as the separate threats they pretended to be, but the singular foe they always were. One needs the sword, the other a plough, but they're both part of the same great work.
Ah, if only your sons understood that need to make government and you didn't have a manchild-feud with Malcador. But then again, that's supposed to be part of the tragedy. The ingredients all there, but the evil they may wrought only visible in hindsight once better nature is discarded. The ego of Horus is always standing behind the charismatic first-among-equals.
I'd make a joke about getting Horus away from his day job to spend time working as a farmer. But that's probably just result in him becoming motivated to create reforms of having the state maintain a controlling stake in all corporations while pushing for more free market engagement.
