"Thirty percent taxation!"
"How could you do something this monstrous?!"
"You feed on human flesh and drink human blood — you call yourself Emperor?!"
"And you won't even own what you've done. My sons bled to conquer those worlds! You have me collect the taxes, so I wear the bad name — and you pocket every benefit."
"I'm telling you right now. From this day forward, do whatever you want. But if a single Administratum vessel dares set foot in my territory, I will make sure it never comes back."
"If they dare come a second time, I will personally bring my fleet and bombard Terra!"
"Do you think the defence lines I built for you can stop me? One word from me, and right now you and your Imperial Palace are finished. To hell with the Great Crusade!"
"Fine — play it this way. Then I won't bother saving humanity. Take your Custodians. Take your Warmaster. The fleet is no longer yours. Don't even think about asking for the weapons either."
"Does humanity have no future without you? Is survival truly impossible without the Imperium?"
"I don't need you! I'll run my own Great Crusade! With blackjack and hookers! To hell with the human Imperium. To hell with the human Emperor!"
"You deserve to die alone surrounded by people who hate you! If you ask me, Olliophis' blade didn't go deep enough. Why didn't he just give your skull a good stir? Not like there's anything in it anyway!"
"I'll—"
The freshly renovated Imperial Palace was reduced to rubble. Malcador stood to the side, working desperately to keep the mortal attendants, officials, and Custodians from being killed outright.
The scale of the fight was not, technically speaking, enormous — neither Perturabo nor the Emperor made heavy use of their psychic abilities. But this time they had both thrown themselves into it with real fury.
The tactics deployed were of the dirtiest, most ruthless variety either of them could produce.
Both were a ruin of bruised and torn flesh, glaring at each other across the wreckage.
"Those star systems are Imperial territory. Not your personal estate."
"The Imperium needs resources. The Great Crusade needs resources. The Webway Project needs resources. The worlds under your command are part of the Imperium — they are sufficient to sustain its continued operation."
The Emperor held his position. He couldn't for the life of him understand what this insolent son was in a rage about on any given day — but today he was not letting this pass.
"Part of the Imperium? Tell me — what has the Imperium ever provided for my worlds? Technology? Funding? Personnel? Nothing! Not a single thing!"
"Those resource planets — I dragged them back from beyond the light of the Astronomican one by one. Those engineers — I trained them out of Olympia's academies one by one. Those production lines — I designed and built them with my own hands. What right do you have to call them part of the Imperium?"
"What have you, the human Emperor, ever done for them?"
"I'm stating this plainly, here and now. If any Imperial official dares set foot in my territory, the Imperium had better be ready to collect their bodies."
"From this point forward — the Eastern Fringe is mine. I collect the taxes. I run the administration. I administer the justice. You manage your Great Crusade. Manage your Webway. Manage your Terra."
"If you interfere, I will cut off your hands. Let's find out who is stronger — whether your Legions and Custodians are mightier, or whether my Abominable Intelligence armies and my Legions are. If you want to die, come and try me."
"You're trying to fracture the Imperium! This is treason!"
"I am simply sick of working under an idiot like you!"
Perturabo didn't wait for the Emperor to reach full fury. He vanished from Terra. Barring unforeseen circumstances, he had absolutely no intention of ever setting foot on Terra again.
In the Warp, a chorus of terrible whispering spread outward. Those with powerful psychic sensitivity might almost make it out — waves of unrestrained, gleeful laughter.
That day, the War in the Warp between the Chaos Gods burned with extraordinary intensity. Even Tzeentch — who was usually lackadaisical about committing to such things and always trying to play both sides — broke character and threw enormous daemon armies into the fighting.
Kairos Fateweaver was showered in blessings; staff in hand, he drove Skarbrand, Shalaxi Helbane, and other Greater Daemons back step by step.
In the tenth year after Terra's reconstruction, a violent storm swept through the Imperium.
The Emperor and Fourth Primarch Perturabo had broken with each other inside the Imperial Palace — and the Imperial Palace itself had been shattered in the process.
The news was out. Every sector of the Imperium reacted with shock — especially the expedition fleets and Legions still on campaign.
What happened?
Did our brother / his highness snap and decide on rebellion this quickly?
Father lost the fight — but the Emperor is wary of Father, so it doesn't count as treason?
That was the Iron Warriors' working theory.
But nothing came out of Terra. Nothing came out of Olympia. The two had broken with each other, but Malcador had locked down every channel of information. People whispered in private circles, speculation running wild.
It was hard to say precisely what kind of destabilisation this incident introduced into an Imperium already fragile at its foundations — but the Great Crusade continued. The expedition fleets continued carrying out their missions.
Even the Mechanicus — which had been jumping at every opportunity to cause trouble — showed no abnormal behaviour. Production output actually increased. The quantity of weapons and ships being delivered went up a notch.
The expedition fleet commanders found it strange. Had the oil-monks had a change of heart?
The matter quickly settled into silence. No one dared speak openly — because the cost of speaking was more than anyone could afford.
Horus, upon hearing the news, had wanted to be a good elder brother about it — his instinct was to return to Terra immediately and find out exactly what had happened between his father and his brother.
But the Emperor had given everyone an absolute command: no unauthorised departure from the expedition under any non-critical circumstances. Horus was conflicted, and ultimately complied with the order, remaining with his expedition fleet.
He dispatched Sejanus back to Terra to ask questions — at minimum, someone needed to find out what had actually happened.
Guilliman, at Macragge, received the news and wrote two letters through the night — one to the Emperor, one to Perturabo — asking what had happened. He received no reply from either.
Lion, who had returned to his own expedition, heard the news — and a man who had always been among the Emperor's most devout loyalists reacted with remarkable silence. He sent no one to inquire. He made no statement or assessment whatsoever.
The anomaly was striking enough that Kosswain and others began to feel that their father had become somehow different.
Russ laughed a few times and went back to drinking mead with his sons on Fenris. The Space Wolves didn't get involved in this sort of thing. If the Emperor himself wasn't saying anything, the Wolf Pack needed only to follow orders.
The remaining Primarchs each had their own reactions.
Ferrus Manus was the most deeply worried. He actually considered defying the Emperor's order to travel to Olympia and confront Perturabo in person. In his view, this was simply wrong — the relationship between this brother and the Imperium should never have come to this. Some schemer had clearly poisoned their relationship.
It had to be that insufferable old Chancellor!
Magnus the Red Sorcerer had little bandwidth for this. The Fifteenth Legion was nominally on campaign, but in practice they were using the expedition as cover to freely explore knowledge across the galaxy.
The Thousand Sons' flesh-change had grown progressively worse. Magnus had been forced to halt his campaign and return to Prospero, searching for any sorcery that might treat his sons.
But he was running into obstacle after obstacle. His sons' suffering was visible to him, etched in their faces. He considered himself the second-cleverest being in the Imperium — yet faced with his sons' condition, he was helpless.
Prospero was now effectively in lockdown. Imperial news hadn't even reached them yet.
Lorgar, having returned to Colchis and purged it of corruption, had launched his Great Crusade. Following the Seventeenth Legion's renaming to the Word Bearers, they spread Imperial Truth rapidly across the Pax Stellarum.
The Pax Stellarum had no particularly formidable opposition, and the Word Bearers' preaching there proceeded smoothly.
The Emperor was a god. Even if the God refused to acknowledge it, they would fight for his vision for the rest of their lives.
This bone-deep, pathological fanaticism was shaping them into true zealots.
The most furious of all the Primarchs was Rogal Dorn. His loyalty to the Emperor bordered on the obsessive — hearing this news, he nearly dragged the Phalanx to Olympia on the spot to confront Perturabo personally.
Matthias and Plraakus barely managed to restrain their brothers — and then reported the situation to Terra. In the end it was the Sigillite himself who came aboard the Phalanx to hold back a Dorn at the absolute edge of his temper.
As for Jaghatai Khan — upon hearing the news, he gave almost no warning at all, took the Fifth Legion — now renamed the White Scars — and returned to Chogoris.
"Father — are we just leaving like this?"
Jubal Khan felt uneasy.
"This kind of thing — we are never to involve ourselves in it. No matter what becomes of the Emperor and this brother in the future, as long as this brother doesn't go too far, we do nothing."
"But we—"
Jaghatai cut his son off.
"Father himself has no objection. What business is it of ours to go there?"
"Besides — a good half of this Legion's current fleet and weapons came from this brother of mine."
The White Scars fell silent. But among the White Scars — who had already formed various warrior lodges partly due to Horus's influence — a few private thoughts began to form.
Perhaps Father is just uncertain about where he stands with the Imperium.
It's unclear whether Father is truly on the side of the Fourth Primarch or the Emperor.
Perhaps it will eventually fall to us to give Father a push in the right direction.
"Father."
Ferrix, seeing Perturabo appear aboard his flagship, immediately asked what had happened.
Perturabo didn't hide it. He told them about the Emperor's plan to levy thirty percent taxation on their worlds.
"The Emperor is digging at our roots."
Ferrix's instinct was that this was a move by the Emperor to restrain the Fourth Legion.
"It looks like the Imperium has started to suspect us. Father — should we now—"
Thunk.
Perturabo lightly knocked Ferrix on the forehead.
"What are you talking about? Don't ever say that sort of thing again. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
It seems Father's preparations aren't complete enough yet. The Eastern Fringe must be taken as quickly as possible — and the Shroud Worlds and Storm Zone regions too. We need the capital to stand on equal footing with the Imperium.
That was Ferrix's private thought. It was the private thought of nearly every person in the Fourth Legion.
"Continue the assault on the Maelstrom. Open up the Warp transit corridors between here and Olympia. The Webway entry points have been located — we need to secure them."
"Eventually I'll shift my centre of operations into the Maelstrom. I'll personally oversee things here. You continue your push toward the Galactic Core."
"If those short ones show some sense — spare them. If they're still as arrogant as ever — I hear they have a device the size of a planet, the foundation of how they travel and mine across the stars."
"It would save a great deal of time compared to cleaning up the pulped remains of their bodies after the fact."
"Understood, Father."
"Get back to it. I'll go prepare. Resolve the fighting here as quickly as you can."
"Yes, sir."
"Brother."
Vulkan, eating a slice of watermelon, greeted Perturabo as he appeared at his side.
Vulkan had recently made significant breakthroughs in his research on Wraithbone synthesis and the casting materials required for Webway construction. He was confident — given a little more time — he might be able to create a device capable of drawing psychic energy from the Warp and generating Wraithbone independently.
And Perturabo could provide useful conceptual direction in this area.
The two of them, aboard the Ark Mechanicus, discussed Wraithbone extraction and synthesis devices openly, making no attempt at all to conceal the conversation from the Eldar nearby.
The Eldar themselves had the good sense to drift further away voluntarily. Otherwise the towering Salamanders and Iron Warriors — especially the Castellax and Thanatar automata patrolling the Ark — would have no particular reason for restraint.
The Abominable Intelligence cohorts, almost a natural counter to the Eldar, patrolled the Ark world — now converted into a massive war-fortress. The sheer scale and power of those constructs produced a deep, instinctive unease in the Eldar, something that felt like a fear inscribed in their very genes.
Vulkan and the Salamanders — busy running experiments inside the Webway, the entire Legion operating within it — remained unaware of what had happened in the Imperium.
Perturabo had no desire to deceive this honest, uncomplicated brother. But for now, the matter needed to stay quiet — he couldn't afford to break Vulkan's concentration on the research.
"Brother — there's something I need to tell you."
"What is it?"
"We may need to relocate again."
"Oh? Why — isn't it fine here?"
"You know the Maelstrom?"
"My Legion will have it cleared before long. Several Webway entry points are located there — one of them is deep inside the Maelstrom itself."
"The region has deep connections to the Warp, which may make Wraithbone extraction significantly easier to achieve. The Maelstrom also has exceptionally rich mineral deposits — much better for keeping our Legions equipped."
"I've also been preparing to move on the Galactic Core. The Squats there have technology I want — but I don't like their attitude, so I intend to exterminate them, or let them choose subjugation themselves. Their call."
Vulkan's eyes carried a faint trace of exasperation.
This brother was excellent in every other respect. But the belligerence was genuinely extreme. And the pride — for mutants and abhumans that could have been peacefully reintegrated into the Imperium, he gave them virtually no chance. Just killing.
"You've become increasingly brutal lately, brother. The you of before would never have moved so casually toward the extermination of an abhuman species. What's happened to make you this volatile? Or has the accumulated killing over these years just made you as arrogant as some of our other brothers?"
"I had a falling out with the Emperor. It's a big problem."
"What happened? Did Father anger you, or was it something else?"
Vulkan, by nature, hated seeing family at odds with each other.
Perturabo laid out the full sequence of events, exactly as they had happened.
And Vulkan — who had always been the most merciful of them — chose to say nothing.
Because in his mind, the Emperor's authority took precedence over his mercy. Olympia had the strength to bear this burden. If it were him, he would comply with the Emperor's wishes. But Perturabo was not him — and he could not be so selfish as to demand his brother accept an unreasonable demand just because he himself would have.
"Focus on your own affairs, Vulkan. What's between us — you don't need to involve yourself. The most important thing for you right now is finishing what you're working on."
"I know. Don't worry, brother."
"I still have things to attend to. I'll leave this place with you. If you run into difficulties, raise them — anything I can help with, I'll do my best."
"Understood."
Deep within the Iron Fortress, Perturabo retrieved what he had extracted from the Emperor — the Custodian enhancement surgeries and the Star Torch schematics.
The primary objective was the Custodian surgeries.
This template for the "perfect human" was the Emperor's own work — built by reverse-engineering the genetic augmentation techniques of the Dark Age of Technology, then layering his own modifications on top.
But it was immediately apparent that the Emperor's technique had room for improvement. The Custodians were perfect by the Emperor's own standards, certainly — but Perturabo could see the limitations in the surgery protocol at a glance.
The Custodian surgeries were numerous and complex. Every Custodian began modification in infancy.
Setting aside what they were required to learn throughout the process — the logistical complexity of the surgeries themselves was already giving Perturabo a headache.
The Custodian surgeries involved total systemic augmentation — every system in the body, modified again. But almost every individual Custodian's surgery had been uniquely customised around that specific person's physiological baseline.
Which meant that while every Custodian shared the same foundational template, the specific details of each one's surgery were different. Perturabo had to work out how the Emperor had been translating each infant's physiological profile into a specific surgical plan.
The workload was substantial. This wasn't something that could be glossed over.
The human body could be simple, in the right context. Take the Primarch surgeries — Perturabo had been able to refine and perfect them almost entirely by reference to his own physiology and his sons' biological data.
But the Custodian surgeries — something the Emperor himself had spent enormous effort on, drawing on technology that predated the Iron Men rebellion — couldn't be approached the same way. Perturabo had no comparable reference point.
Because the template was a chimera: the Emperor's own baseline, fused with ancient genetic augmentation techniques and the ordinary human genome. A genuine hybrid of all three.
Every Custodian was extraordinary. The auramite power armour each one wore was worth enough to purchase a low-output planet outright. The surgeries themselves were even more expensive — the equipment and materials required for each procedure were extraordinarily costly.
This had kept the Custodians at fewer than five thousand in number. The famed Ten Thousand — a name more aspiration than fact — was barely achieved at all, and only toward the very end of the Great Crusade.
The cost was only part of it. The selection criteria for candidates were frankly absurd — even Perturabo found himself questioning whether the elaborate screening process was actually doing what it claimed.
If the Custodians were supposed to be versatile in so many ways, why couldn't he see it?
Perturabo didn't need versatility from the surgeries. He needed the augmentation protocol — something he could apply to his sons and to future enhancement projects.
The Custodians were, after all, genuinely formidable. A single Ten-Thousand cohort was approximately equivalent to two or three Legions at full operational strength.
Perturabo would never admit Custodians were impressive. More impressive than his Abominable Intelligence armies? He'd beat the waste products out of them before they could even process it.
What Perturabo actually wanted was to preserve his sons' lives — and the lives of the Iron Guard who had always stood beside the Legion and beside him personally.
If the Custodian surgeries could be adapted and applied to them, they would be more formidable on the battlefield — and survive at a higher rate.
Perturabo's daemon factory now had over ten thousand Greater Daemon overseers working inside it — and he still couldn't quite work out how, given all the preparations he had made, his sons and the Iron Guard still died in such numbers.
Even though the Iron Warriors had reached a Legion strength of four hundred thousand.
If the Custodian surgery could be applied to his sons, their combat capability would improve further — and their survival rate alongside it.
The daemon factory was no paradise. Even with their souls captured and preserved, manifesting again in realspace after that was extraordinarily difficult. Every time they appeared, the veil of reality had to be torn open — and that was a net loss, likely giving Chaos more to work with than it was worth.
So Perturabo did everything he could to prevent his sons from dying at all — even knowing that in warfare, some deaths were unavoidable.
He looked at the surgery protocol. One hundred and thirty distinct procedures.
He was going to need to spend a long time in seclusion again.
Galactic Core region.
The Iron Warriors' First Fleet had arrived.
Thirty star-fortresses. Five Abyssal-class battleships. Ten Queen of Glory vessels. Close to five thousand capital ships.
A fleet capable of flipping half the galaxy appeared here — because bringing the entire Galactic Core region under control needed to be as easy as possible.
The Core's mineral wealth exceeded even the Maelstrom's — and every species in the galaxy coveted it. Yet the ones who actually dominated it were these colonisers and miners from humanity's Dark Age.
Ferrix also knew that these short ones had an unusually close relationship with Abominable Intelligence. The Ironkin had been treated as true brothers by the Squats — indistinguishable from family in day-to-day life.
And this species was exceptionally cohesive and exceptionally good at holding grudges. That was exactly how they had survived in this brutal galaxy for so long.
But now Ferrix wanted to find out — when death was genuinely on the table, could they truly be as unbending as the stories claimed?
Let's see whether their backbone is harder, or whether the Fourth Legion's guns are stronger.
Remembering how those short ones had struck a victor's pose even in defeat, Ferrix was certain this was going to be a hard fight.
He was already itching to personally grind them to dust.
When the fighting broke out, both the Squats and the other xenos in the Core were completely disoriented.
How did these humans get here? And what is this firepower? Where is this coming from?
The star-fortresses and their savage guns set the Core alight in moments.
Because Ferrix had already broadcast a warning to every faction in the Galactic Core: from this point forward, this region falls under Iron Warrior jurisdiction.
If you want to live — serve under the Iron Warriors. If not — extend your neck and let him take your head. Otherwise, the Iron Warriors' fleet will exterminate every hostile faction in the region.
No mercy. No regrets.
The Iron Warriors' bluntness was on full, unmasked display across the Core. Not just the Squat federations — even the xenos couldn't tolerate someone this brazen.
So virtually every major faction dispatched its primary fleet to teach this "arrogant newcomer" a lesson.
The moment they did, the despair began.
Nobody could understand how weapons from that distance were already firing on them. The opening salvo — covering almost every ship in their combined fleets simultaneously — communicated the disparity in a single exchange.
This wasn't the same tier of warfare at all. The Iron Warriors' previous restraint had been the absolute ceiling of their patience. These xenos had walked into their own destruction — and if they wanted to blame something, they could blame the fact that they had been born as xenos and mutants.
And they had dared attack the Iron Warriors.
This was no ordinary xenos threat. This demanded overwhelming force.
So wherever the Iron Warriors' fleet passed, the homeworlds and outposts of exterminated xenos were too numerous to count.
Ferrix genuinely enjoyed driving powered gauntlets into xenos — burying them in the ground like nails. The Squats in particular — their curses and threats right up to the moment of death made the sensation of pounding them into the earth with a fully-charged gauntlet especially satisfying.
There was something Ferrix and the others — and even Perturabo — had not yet noticed:
In a remarkably short span of time, the entire Iron Warriors Legion had been comprehensively spoiled by the limitless fire support Perturabo had given them.
Perturabo didn't want his sons to take casualties. And the Iron Warriors — having grown accustomed to overwhelming fire superiority — had started bringing a certain callousness and arrogance to everything they did.
They were still Iron Warriors — iron within and without. They would still die loyal on any given battlefield. But they had drifted significantly from what Perturabo had originally envisioned the Iron Warriors to be.
In the same way that Ferrus Manus had encouraged a kind of internal culling philosophy — almost social Darwinism — among the Iron Hands, and the Iron Hands were evolving in directions that gave him headaches: his intent had been that humanity, empowered by increasingly advanced machinery, could accomplish what flesh alone could not — and that tools should remain tools, with the human being the truly capable party.
But the Iron Hands had misunderstood completely. Their obsession with mechanical augmentation had progressed to the point where they were beginning to view flesh itself as weakness — and it troubled Ferrus deeply.
He had mentioned it to Perturabo in letters, explicitly describing the problem — but Perturabo hadn't known how to advise him. What did he know about something like that?
If it were his own sons, he'd use a father's authority and simply tell them to respect their own bodies. But Ferrus — an introverted engineer type — clearly didn't operate that way.
He also wasn't comfortable communicating with his sons on this level. If not for the relentless pace of the Great Crusade, Ferrus would have returned to Medusa long ago to try to recalibrate his sons' thinking.
Perturabo hadn't noticed the Legion's own problem yet. But someone had noticed it before him.
Dantioch no longer knew how to describe what was happening among his brothers.
Had decimation become a leisure activity for the Iron Warriors?
Had Father ever taught them that? Their approved pastimes were supposed to be casting and art, weren't they?
Was the fact that xenos had to be exterminated sufficient justification for torturing them with no apparent limit?
If the accumulated pressure of years of campaigning was being vented through this kind of sadistic release — the Legion was going to have a serious problem, and sooner than anyone wanted to admit.
Dantioch wanted to address the culture. But he didn't know where to begin.
In matters of command, his brothers respected his authority — his strategic competence was unquestioned. But setting rules around private, off-duty behaviour that the entire Legion was apparently participating in — that felt like overreach.
With no other option, Dantioch consulted Perturabo directly, laying out precisely how serious the potential damage was.
He also sent Perturabo footage from across the different warbands — brothers engaged in the prolonged torture and killing of xenos.
This is wrong. It had to be addressed at the first sign of the problem, before it calcified into something that could never be fully removed.
The worst offenders were Ferrix and Toramino — the Commander who had long suppressed his own instincts, and the Warsmith most fanatically devoted to siege warfare. Both of them were genuinely disturbing in this domain.
Burning xenos children alive with melta fire until they were ash. Competitions to see whether a powered gauntlet could drive an xenos into the ground like a nail without visibly damaging the surface of the body—
Dantioch wanted his brothers to run over xenos with tanks — cold, mechanical, impersonal. Not to be satisfying twisted desires that were growing inside them.
This is not Iron Warriors — iron within and without.
Meanwhile, Perturabo — who had relocated both Olympia and Nocturne to the Maelstrom — was beginning a comprehensive transformation of the region.
He was also putting the finishing touches on the Custodian surgery modifications.
The Custodian surgeries did indeed need to begin from infancy — that was a function of allowing the body to gradually adapt to the intensity of modification over time. But the version Perturabo had now worked through could, with some adaptation, take an existing Astartes through the Custodian enhancement protocol.
However, the success rate was no longer guaranteed at one hundred percent.
And the procedure was extraordinarily selective. Willpower. Physical constitution. Depth of loyalty.
Every single parameter had to be near its absolute ceiling — and very few Astartes met all of them simultaneously. Even Iron Warriors who had already undergone the Primarch enhancement surgery might not qualify in sufficient numbers.
This was not at all what Perturabo had initially envisioned.
But looking at the first subject lying on the surgical table — who had already successfully completed the procedure and become a Custodian — he felt something.
Gino Constant. Commander of the Iron Guard. He had been with Perturabo since the conquest of Olympia.
Already significantly beyond Astartes-level by virtue of Perturabo's own surgical modifications, his body had grown noticeably more powerful again after completing the Custodian enhancement. Three metres tall — and he was having genuine difficulty controlling his own strength.
Perturabo's moment of satisfaction was short-lived.
Dantioch's report and recommendations arrived on his desk, and his expression fell.
He had genuinely never registered how serious the Legion's problems had become.
Looking at it now, it resembled something like a Slaaneshi curse taking root in his own Legion — and the crow-headed one had clearly had a hand in it somewhere as well.
But after careful scrutiny, Perturabo was certain: there was no hidden Chaos corruption at work here.
His sons had genuinely drifted toward decadence. And their own strength had produced a set of psychological pathologies that were potentially lethal to the Legion's integrity.
This Perturabo could not tolerate. You can be proud. You can be arrogant. But becoming addicted to torture as a method of stress relief — what is that?
He knew: it was time to recall his sons.
Left unattended, without the Primarch's presence, there was no telling how far a Space Marine Legion could drift.
And conveniently, the Custodian surgeries were complete. A selection of candidates could be put through the procedure. As for the armour — his own refined Terminator plate was not obviously inferior to Custodian power armour anyway.
The immediate priority was to find the right moment to bring them back, run them through intensive retraining, and restructure the Legion from the inside.
He needed people to watch over his sons. Without him watching at every moment, some of them were at risk of walking a very dark road.
And in thinking about this, Perturabo's mind went to Lorgar.
More specifically — to a system Lorgar had been in the process of implementing within his Legion.
He had never given it serious attention before.
He hadn't expected it to matter this much.
The iron of the mind must never be allowed to rust.