“You can kill this clone, if you want?” I said, regrowing the Fulgrim meat puppet to full size as I went back to talking from my illusory self. “I bet it would be therapeutic.”

“Why show me this?” he growled, fingers tightening around his blade, and I could hear he spoke through gritted teeth and clenched jaw. He was restraining his anger, but I could feel that too, like a leashed storm growing wilder and wilder with every second it was kept restrained. “How did you even … ?”

Honestly, I had been expecting a shield bash to the face the moment I showed myself. The only book I’d read with The Lion in it back in my old life was The Son of the Forest, which told the tale of his return in the 42nd millennium. 

But I knew some things about his exploits and personality from before. I had been expecting a paranoid, violent, xenophobic asshole who killed first and asked questions never. 

It was quite a surprise that he was still talking to me. Though probably not. He was said to be one of the best strategists among the Primarchs, so he must have known how futile that would have been. I never showed my real body, and he could tell.

Speaking of, my real body was up in high orbit, floating idly. Well, out of range of anything the Lion could throw at it.

I wasn’t just goading him because I was an asshole, by the way. Showing him my Fulgrim clone was a statement. I already had Primarch genes, and his would only be an addition to my collection, not a massive breakthrough in my power level. 

It was also kind of a test to see how short his fuse was. I was considering showing him around one of my arcologies to maybe get him on my side. But not if he’d have a random murderous meltdown at the slightest offence.

And by ‘get him on my side’, I mean ‘keep him ambivalent to me’. If he left me alone to do my thing and didn’t organise a Crusade to murder me the moment he got back to Imperial space, I’d count my goals fulfilled. The bonus would be grabbing his genetic samples, but it was not at all crucial. 

I’d rather keep him ambivalent than steal a hair from him and enrage him.

Of course, if he accepted my de-ageing rejuvenation treatment, I’d get a hell of a lot more than a single hair. 

“I show you this so you know I don’t particularly need your genes, I’d just be happy to have a sample from another Primarch,” I finally answered, choosing to go with honesty. Who knew how finely honed his instinctual lie-detector was? “And the ‘how’? How did I get this sample? Well, let’s just say Fabius Bile has been a busy little bee, and he left some of his experiments in easily accessible places. They don’t call him the Clone Lord for nothing. I heard he even made clones of Horus and a whole bunch of Ferrus Manus. Though the uncorrupted Fulgrim Clone was likely his greatest work.”

I left out the teeny-tiny part about that Fulgrim clone being perfect. Meaning, it had a true Primarch aura, and likely at least parts of the original Fulgrim’s soul. That was not a nugget of information I was willing to give away for free … or to someone who would likely ignore the possible benefits of redeeming a traitor primarch. Especially when that redemption was handed over to him on a silver platter.

The Lion might have grown more forgiving, but not that forgiving. He still did slaughter every last one of his Fallen sons who had so much as breathed in Chaos taint. Original Fulgrim did something much worse than that … a lot of somethings, many times.

He was still doing it on his hedonistic Chaos World. 

I could almost feel the sheer waves of displeasure and loathing radiate off of him, but they washed over and around me, not aimed at me but at the ancient Apothecary far away, skulking among the stars. Still, some of it stuck with me, but it came with the faintest hint of grudging appreciation.

He must have felt more annoyed by knowing so little about the current state of the wider Imperium than I had previously thought. That hint of positive emotion might as well have been the Lion’s equivalent of a ‘thank you’ hug.

Without another word, his Power blade crackled and then flashed. The bluish energy left behind a trail, lingering as much in my retinas as on the skin of the universe before fading. As it did, the Fulgrim puppet’s head slid off his shoulders and fell on the ground, quickly followed by the headless body collapsing on top of it.

My eyes narrowed slightly as I compared The Lion’s speed and the power he struck my puppet with to what I had seen of Guilliman, and I had to give it to the old man; he was in a league beyond his blueberry boy scout brother. Faster, stronger, more precise. That slash went through the neck, striking the neck between two vertebrae with pinpoint accuracy.

Not that there was a need for it in this instant, since the Power blade’s molecular disruption field made slashing through human flesh and bones disturbingly effortless. And while Fulgrim was a primarch, he had been built as an agile fighter leaning on his inherently powerful healing factor. He was a bit more fragile than most of his brothers as a result. 

I thought so, at least, based on what I remembered. I knew he had at least once been shot in the head by a sniper and survived, and that was before going balls to the walls on the Chaos ascension, before he turned into an overgrown snake.

“Weaker than the original,” he grunted.

“This one was just a genetic replica, just the body as it was designed and built by the Emperor,” I shrugged. “There is much more to you, Primarchs, than the vessel you inhabit, I’d wager. The … Ecclesiarchy might not be right about the vast majority of things, but naming you demigods might have been the few times they hit the nail on the head. A broken clock is right twice a day and all that.”

His mind was strange. Robust, deep as the abyss, sharp as a blade’s edge, but not defended, not really. No rookie telepath would be able to enter, but a better one would have only some

trouble. A trap, like I had previously observed.

But that didn’t matter for now; what it meant was that his emotions weren’t locked inside his mind, shrouded beneath a layer of shadows and sheltering behind walls of impregnable will. His emotions washed off of him in tidal waves, almost making the Warp tremble in his wake when his rage spiked. 

“You are a strange one,” he said, his voice low and evaluating. I couldn’t see his face, but I could feel his gaze as it bore into me, analysed everything it saw and weighed it, judged it, measured it. “You know things no human should, what no other human I’ve met does. Not in this age.”

It wasn’t a question, but it kind of was. 

“I’m an old soul,” I said, shrugging nonchalantly as I plastered a thin, mysterious smile on my face. A non-answer to his non-answer, only hinting at an answer that was, in truth, quite misleading. “You are the strange one to me, a supposed demigod punching through the Shadow I had plunged this System into, the shield that had been keeping me safe from Greater Daemons and Warp invaders alike. And yet, you just strolled through it, without a Warp-drive, or a ritual, under your own power. Primarch or not, that is stranger than knowing a few tidbits that had long departed mankind’s collective knowledge base, I would say. On that note, might I ask what brought you to this planet? I went out of my way to find the most out-of-the-way hellhole of a dirtball to make into my hideout.”

“I’m searching,” he answered curtly, and I felt his sense of frustration rising. He did not like our situation, the one I had practically locked him in, at all. He couldn’t find me, knew my illusion was fake, and likely thought tracking me down in this thick jungle would be an absolute nightmare with the local wildlife hounding him every step of the way. He couldn’t act, not in a way that would decisively and quickly end this, and so he had to use words. The horror. 

His impatience was obvious, speaking clearly of the fact that he wanted to be here just about as much as I wanted him here. 

Did he get sent on an errand? I mused, wondering what could have managed to drag the Primarch of the First halfway across the galaxy … or who. A divine errand from daddy dearest? Maybe meddling from a Farseer? A deceptive whisper from a Tzeentchian Daemon into the right ear?

I would have dearly loved to eliminate the first idea as outlandish, but I couldn’t, and the more I thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. The Shadowkeeper, that annoying Custodian, Guilliman’s sputtering flaming sword … the skeletal boogeyman had his eye holes on me.

I knew he wasn’t quite there in the head, ten millennia spent on the galaxy’s most horrible torture chair unfortunately tended to have that effect on people, and he had a bit of a shattered soul problem too, which only made his other problems worse. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch, in my humble opinion, to say one of his errant fragments just so happened to notice me, then proceeded to bully a Custodian into annoying me with cryptic dreams. 

When that didn’t work, he might have managed to yank a few more fragments together to step up his game and send me a Primarch on express delivery. 

“Searching for what exactly?” I asked, tilting my head like I wasn’t 60% sure he was here for my ass. The glare he sent my way when I showed my tendrils before was a thing to behold, heavily tinged with recognition. “I just so happen to have been planning on starting to tame this world, but with a Lion stalking its woods, I might have to change my plans. Even if you refuse my offer to rejuvenate you, I’d be happy to help if it gets you back to your likely much more important business elsewhere.”

Why was I so conflict-averse? Well, because while I still didn’t have hard evidence of the existence of Fate and Plot Armour … Primarchs canonically were favoured by both. No Primarch could die a lame death. That was a fundamental law of the universe. 

So, no chucking him into a star, drowning him in an ocean, harassing him until he collapsed in a war of attrition. Somehow, he would turn the situation on its head and make my life difficult. At least, that's what I suspected true Primarch Tier plot armour worked like.

I so didn’t need that shit in my life. 

He didn’t answer for a moment, but the deep look he sent my illusion, like he was dissecting every last shred of energy and smidge of colour making it up, was answer enough. Especially when combined with the reaction he had to my tentacles … did those Shadowkeeper bastards get to him and fill his head with tales of me stealing their precious artefact?

“Nothing concrete,” he said eventually. “But there is only one thing I’ve seen so far that would have warranted my presence.”

“I shouldn’t have shown the tendrils,” I said with a weary sigh, already preparing ideas and plans for the eventuality of dealing with him. I couldn’t fight him head-on, and that meant I couldn’t kill him, since I couldn’t make the fight ‘epic’ enough. But that didn’t mean I had to roll over and die; far from it, there were a lot of options open to me that didn’t include fighting him face to face. 

“How did you get your hands on them?” He asked, his voice still steady even as his body shifted into a relaxed combat stance. He likely caught some micro-expression in my illusion that showed my shifting plans. 

“Funny story, that one,” I said. “One moment I’m dead, the next I wake up possessing a creepy mass of tentacles in a dilapidated building. Imagine my surprise when I found out forty thousand years had passed since my death.”

“A far-fetched tale,” he said, though I felt him to be more thoughtful than doubting. “So you claim to have just … woken up ‘possessing’ the artefact?”

“Well, I did feel something tugging at me, likely whichever idiot thought it was a good idea to shove a slumbering soul into a bioweapon.” I shrugged again. “It is mine now. I have fought every hound that’s been sent after me since and hid away here in the hopes that I could be finally left alone. Tell me, Lord Lion, will I have to run again? Will you chase me across the stars with that strange power of yours? Will we play an interstellar game of cat and mouse? Waste possibly years of our lives? … or would you be open to being convinced to let me be?”

“I hardly have the capability to chase you if you escape with a spaceship from wherever you are hiding,” he said, only a bit sourly.

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “I felt you breach the Shadow in the Warp under your own power, and felt the traces of your passing stretching deep into the Warp. For all I know, you could take a step and appear before me, not before my illusion, but face to face with my true body … which is why I am floating in high orbit above this planet. It’ll be a long way down from here for anyone who can’t fly under their own power.”

He didn’t say anything for a lengthy five seconds, the heavy weight of his gaze somehow pressing down on my shoulder despite not being physically present. He had an edge even Guilliman lacked, an edge that made me wary, despite knowing that I could probably take him out.

If nothing else, I could teleport him deep into interstellar space or maybe throw him into the depths of an ocean. Though who knew how his Forestwalking worked? Maybe he really could just pop into the Warp, then pop out with his boot already halfway up my ass.

Indecision brimmed in his aura, spite warring with impatience as he considered my words. I could tell he would have loved nothing more than to wring my neck and be done with this posthaste, but he didn’t … perhaps he couldn’t.

I had said that bit about him appearing before my ‘true’ body — my avatar, that is — and I felt a mix of annoyance and frustration when I did. 

I noted that down, speculating that his Forestwalking probably wasn’t capable of that level of accuracy. Still, I would take all due precautions. It was just speculation without hard proof, after all.

“I’m listening,” he said. Reluctance, determination, annoyance, irritation, resolve. 

I couldn’t help but smile. Now I just needed to come up with a way to convince him to sod off and let me be. I mean, convince him that the ‘artifact’ was in the best possible hands and that I, too, worked towards the betterment of humanity. 

Maybe I’d get to play tour guide again. I’d just have to make sure no one mentioned the Imperial fleet or the salvaging efforts currently in progress.

That could complicate matters.