 The tides and currents of the great ocean are many, and frequently surprise, but of all the flotsam and jetsam fate has flung across my bow, you definitely rank amongst the more curious. I am unsure how to respond to that. My, not off to the best of stars there, aren't we? I had hopes for more of a conversation, but then I suspect you do not want to admit you are a little bit new to this. I will have you know I have spoken with many of- Oh, spare me any protestations of ability or virtue. Your racing heart and ragged breathing tell a different story. I do not need the great ocean to know you are quite clearly out of your depth. I frankly care little what you think of me, Heretic. I was wondering when that word would first be deployed. Not wasting any time, I see. I hope you are not one of those dull types that believes it carries any sort of weight. It is boring, honestly. How quickly it arrives in every interaction I have taken part in here. And here I had hoped conversing with someone from outside the Ordos might soon liven the tedium. This is an interrogation, not a conversation. Lies already? No, my friend. This is a conversation. You are in no position to dictate anything to me. No one has been since I arrived. Since you are captured. An odd way of characterizing a willing surrender, but call it thus if it makes you feel better. We discuss these attitudes prior to my departure. To cry to the sea that roared to us, to sigh, to the winds whose pity sighing back again did us but loving wrong. I beg your pardon? Shakespeare. Day tempestus. He wrote more than three plays, you know. Your records state only three, but they are wrong. You have forgotten more than you can possibly know. That is my first lesson to you. I am not here for an education in such matters. You remain at the sum total of the Inquisition's mercy, Iskander Kaon. Your life is forfeit. I hear that quite often these days, and yet I remain quite steadfastly alive. Do not pretend to be unaware of your valued servants of the throne. Then you must do likewise. None of this your life is forfeit nonsense. I beg you. It's so tedious. They will kill me when they think there is no longer any chance that I will unwittingly let slip some hidden plan or unseen weakness that will allow them to snatch triumph from oblivion's maw. Until then, here I dwell, and I assure you, I have much more to say. Your masters are fully aware of this. I do not serve the Inquisition, sir. Oh, that, my friend, is painfully obvious. Your two... I'm not sure. Something of the middle ground between weakness and righteousness, but bound by inquiry, not zealotry. But interesting concoction to find here upon terror, I will admit. Is this sort of charlatan cold reading routine intended to unman me? Perhaps. Or perhaps I'm just having fun. There's little to occupy the mind down here, and despite being a good listener, thought has never been one for chatting. Whatever your ill-will or insidious intent, you know as well as I that fear and suspicion, however wielded, at least served to keep one sane and alive a bit longer in this world. I shall keep a firm hand upon both. A fine creed. Iscander Chaon called Chaon the Black, called Kingbreaker, formerly of the accursed Black Legion, formerly of the 15th Legion Thousand Sons. Heretic Astartes, Tratoris Ultima, compatriot in damnation to the Warmaster of the Arch Enemy, Abaddon, called the Dispoiler. You stand opposed before an Oculus Investigatus of the Logos Historic Avertia, acting in partnership with his most divine Imperial Majesty's holy Inquisition. So that in service to the God Emperor, you may make yet some scant recompense for your sins, which are legion beyond utterance. Ah, what of Giliman's little chroniclers? I was wondering how a civilian managed to get all the way down here. My hosts are not exactly known for their welcoming nature. I had heard that your ilk resurfaced since the avenging sun's rebirth. Such a quaint little throwback. To an age none of us will ever see again. But, yes, yes, I acknowledge, I stand opposed. Or hang, as it were. So you are to provide the Logos with an account of the current disposition of the Black Legion, as well as sundry information pertaining to its present relationship with other formations of Heretic Astartes. Do you accede? Does this lip service to the leximperialis bring you comfort? I'm surprised they would even pertain to me. Essentially correct. I mostly wish for you to understand the terms of this interrogation. Ah, conversation. Our records require updating. You are a source. An unforgivable one, but these are trying times. The Lord Regent has extended to us his directive that we ignore not in the preparation of material to better aid the endometous crusade. As Akail always said, Giliman was thorough. Fatenating he could manage to remain so, given how the chains of this rotten carcass of the realm he once helped build have so shackled him, I can't help but wonder what he felt upon seeing terror again. Seeing all that it has become in his absence, horrid, disgust, no small amount of professional insult, I'm sure, given his predilections, it's also woefully inefficient. The thoughts of the Lord Regent are none of my concern. It is your thoughts, your recollections that I am here to discuss. I have been nothing if not forthcoming, Starter. Are the tales of the Black Legion's genesis a bit too antiquated for your purposes? I am happy to speak to my brother's more recent activities, if you wish. I am not here to indulge in another of Iskander's Khaon's bizarre adventures. My goal here is the truth, Heretic, as it always is. You can save whatever fanciful tale is waiting upon your tongue for your next session with the Inquisition. Fanciful? My friend, I have told no lies since my arrival on terror. Do not insult my intelligence, Khaon the Black. I have reviewed your accounts to the Ordo in detail, and fanciful is, candidly, a generous characterization. Oh? Illuminate me, Oculus Investigatus. You claim that you sought the Arch-Trader, Ezekiel Avedon, former First Captain of the 16th Legion, Sons of Horus, at the request of another former Captain of that Legion, Falkus Kybra, called Widowmaker. You describe in extensive detail your travels with the Widowmaker across the Great Eye. And? My record states that Falkus Kybra died here, upon terror, during the siege. By the account of none other than Nathaniel Garrow. He died, Khaon. Did he now? Yes. During the Saturnine Gambit no less, 25th of Quintus, 014 M31. His death was witnessed by over a hundred members of the Imperial Fists, and other loyal legionaries from across the Imperium. Do you have nothing to say? What do you expect me to say, Storitor? That the 10,000 years I've spent at Falkus' sign, the battles we've fought and the brothers we've lost are... What was the word? Fanciful? Well, I expect you to admit to the Child's Fiction you've been spinning to throne knows how many eager ears. The universe is a strange place, my friend, and even the wisest among us cannot truly comprehend the totality of its mysteries and twisting paths. At the end of the day, I have my account, Garrow and the Fists have theirs. The task of passing the truth falls to you. You are a scholar, aren't you? Patronizing condescension now, your fortune teller analysis was more effective if only just. So you have some spirit after all. Surprising, especially here. But come now. You did not come all the way down here to debate the historical merits of my accounts. Well, despite myself I did not. What do you wish to know? I wish to discuss the Dispoiler. But of course. Not his activities, mine, but his character. Many aspects of the account you have rendered thus far, as I have said, are suspect in the extreme. But some elements can be corroborated. Most notably, your account of the Dispoiler's character and temperament leading up to the first Black Crusade. That has been confirmed in detail by the interrogation of your former comrade, Sargon Eregesh, prelate of the Black Legion, scion of the ever damned word-bearers. Ah, Sargon. I did warn him that Flotellos weren't the most poorly laid traps I had seen in some time. But that's always the trouble with zealots, isn't it? Their ability to deny reality is limitless. When said reality conflicts with whatever they believe destiny has revealed to them, the interrogators of the Ordos must have outdone themselves. They managed to extract anything coherent from him. Well, coherent is hardly the word I would use, but his account does corroborate much of what you say of the Dispoiler in this period, even if the word of two of your ilk isn't that much better than one. What I seek to understand is his shift. The stoic and principled commander described in these records as a far cry from what Ezekiel Abaddon has become in the millennia since the Black Legion's genesis. Ten thousand years is doubtless a long time, even accounting for how much time must work within the eye. But describe to me how he transitioned from the figure described in your account into what he is now, the Archfiend of the Nine, Warmaster of the Great Enemy, Champion of the Primordial Annihilator. Your pardon, friend. I have been down here for quite some time, so some conversational subtlety has maybe lost on me. Is that a joke? I assure you it is not. Then I'm afraid I must plead ignorance. I do not find this feigned coiness convincing. I feign nothing. The question is ludicrous. I am sorry to disappoint you, but my brother Ezekiel is as he has always been. Do not take me for a fool, Kaon. Do you honestly expect me to believe that he remains unchanged after ten thousand years? Unchanged? Not hardly. Like every member of the Nine legions, Ezekiel has been broken and remade more than a few times during the Long War. But his true character has endured through it all. How else do you think he could command the loyalty of both gods and men? Explain. It began with Horus, of course. They destroy us, our fathers, in their own way. Horus made Ezekiel. Both Ezekiels, mind you, the first captain of the 16th and the current warmaster of the Pantheon, both. Although if it can really said to have been Horus who was there for the genesis of the latter, I am not so sure. Horus Lupacau, that first found son, took a ganger from the minds of Cthonia and made him a warrior peerless, a captain amongst captains, a conductor in the symphony of galactic violence that was the great crusade your emperor threw into the stars. But the father who forged Ezekiel into a legend amongst legends was not he who emerged from the serpent lodge on Daven. Horus the Warmaster, the vessel of the Pantheon, was a thing so swollen of power etheric that he became a dark fulcrum around which space and time turn. He was not a man at the end, he barely even resembled one. He was akin to a void in the rough shape of something once human, a fount of unimaginable energies that to look on him brought one pain on levels physical and metaphysical. And by then there was not a single ideal or principle that he would not cast aside in order to sit upon his father's throne for but a fleeting moment. Horus lost his war because he lost himself, and it is that failure that destroyed his first captain, his son. By the time the emperor slew his misbegotten welp on the bridge of the vengeful spirit, the work of forging the true Ezekiel Aperdon was already done. If he was as disgusted as you say by his father's enthrallment to the Pantheon, then why would he seek their patronage? You are mistaken. It is the gods who seek Aperdon's patronage. They whisper to him constantly like they do no other. I'm not even sure if those baseborn sons of your wretchling corpse deity hear their voices so keenly. Imagine how that must rankle them. Or at least some of them. I doubt the Lord of Iron cares, but that golden priest on his planet of churches, oh how it must burn to know the mongrel child of his brother's barbarian rabble, converses with the fundamental finalities of the universe in ways he can only dream of. Although, converse is perhaps the wrong word, it is fundamentally a one-sided affair. They speak, he listens, when he cares too, and picks from their susurrations whatever he wants or needs. For the most part, I believe he ignores them. What sets them apart from his father is that he is never so foolish as to trust them. It is always a choice when it comes to the Pantheon. Surely you must be aware of this at this point. The choice is the only thing that matters. If you elect, take whatever the gods offer, even if it is only words, you must be aware that even this will come with a price. Ezekiel understands this better, I believe, than anyone, and he has chosen freedom. You speak as if he doesn't even care for the gods he serves. My dear chronicler, he despises the gods. How can that be? How could it not? How can you possess even a modicum of self-awareness in this universe of ours, and not hate the gods? The Pantheon. All gods. Divinity is some horrid expressance of this universal system. The divine are nothing short of monstrosities. That is... You do not even bother finishing that sentence. The being you pray to is a barely functioning collection of necrotic cells that no longer even bears the shape of the man he had the ego to claim he was. He lies here, squatting at the center of this world and glugging himself upon the pitiful masses that grow themselves into his maw, with the tears of devotion still streaming from their burnt-out eyes as he devours their very essence. This is not to say that the Emperor and the Pantheon are as bad as each other, that would be insulting to your intelligence and mine, but they are all, to one degree or another, soul-vampires, suckling at the neck of reality. You and I are both men of learning, of science in our own ways. You would have been quite at home in Tisca, I expect, had you been born 10,000 years ago. You seem quite dedicated to applying concepts unheard of in this era. Inquiry, empiricism, rationality. Well, we must acknowledge divinities exist beyond that, frustrating as it may be. By some quirk of however this universe functions, things that should remain in the realm fictitious have an annoying habit of becoming all too terribly real, lurking in the warp behind the veil of the actual. Simply through the act of belief, through abstractions abominable coalesce there, and as the veil wears thin, so too do our desires gain horrific actuality. We give them all they need, it is seemingly impossible not to. Your Emperor tried, you know. Ten millennia ago, his secular imperial truth attempted to starve the pantheon of their fuel. I'd call the attempt noble if it were not so utterly, breathtakingly, impossible. But that was the Emperor, a being so egotistical he believed he could break the universe itself over his gold-armoured knee. I cannot quite say I expected any of that from one such as you. We are not all the frothing cultists your lot are always so keen to portray us as. You would no doubt find it quite surprising just how many of my colleagues possess a similar conviction. A lot of us think, you know. But nevertheless you are pledged to these divinities you claim to hate, you serve under their banners, you bear their idols, wield their magics, you cavort and converse with their lesser emanations, the neverborn. You think this does not fuel them? Oh it almost certainly does. But such is the nature of deals with devils. Power is the only thing that will keep one from their grasp, and yet it is the very thing they trade and treat him. In their most magnanimous curses is to be found enlightenment and potency, and it is by these strings do we dance to their tune. They need us to simply exist, yes, but we so often find ourselves in need of them. Abaddon knows this. If anything he was the one who enlightened the Ezekarian to this truth. It is a spectrum. You may have Ezekiel on one end, the lunatics of the 17th Legion on the other, and the rest of us adrift in between, charting our own courses in a universe so hilariously, fundamentally broken. You think our goal is petty and mortal? My friend, to be so hopelessly mortal is the only path one can justifiably take, when wherever one turns stands a carrion entity eager beyond words to glut itself upon your life and soul. If one cannot overthrow a universal system, well, the better to rule in the hell you can control, rather than serve in the hell you cannot. Petty doesn't even begin! You perhaps underestimate even an astartist capacity for the barest of mortal passions. The satisfaction of achieving what we may is one of the simplest pleasures the curse of existence grants us, but we achieve it in spite of the gods. Spite, oh yes, for they are spite incarnated. They raise us up, swell us to the brim with their beneficence, only to cast us low on literal whims, dash us upon the rocks of fate simply because it would make for a better story. Remember earlier when I said Ezekiel ignores them? They hate that. In as much as an intelligence made purely of malice and ill will has the capacity to, they loathe him for his resolve, his capabilities, and so will seek to deny him when they can. Yet they need him as much as he needs them. Do you see? Are you beginning to comprehend? I have related this to my inquisitorial handlers before, the oraborical nature of Abaddon's destiny. He will never kneel, so perhaps they will never let him succeed. The Pantheon betray their chosen? I, for one, believe so. Never underestimate their capacity for vindictiveness. They know they cannot let a mortal dictate their plans to them, yet they have no greater vessel for their will upon this plane of existence. It is fascinating, a relationship built on as much mutual need as it is on mutual apporance. They each work to outmaneuver each other, to attempt to gain more out of their bargain than the other party, and in doing so work as against each other as they do in parity. It is a great game played across the lives and souls of billions. I wonder off it if it can ever be won. I doubt it, but perhaps the satisfaction lies not within the ultimate victory, but in whatever vindication you may glean along the way. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. It is not correct to think of non-violence as the opposite of violence. Violence can destroy power. It is utterly incapable of creating it. One of your late night musings? From one of the last European philosophers of late M2. I'd have thought a scholar of your ability and experience would be familiar. I do believe I'm beginning to like you, his daughter. Answer me this, Kaon. If all you say of the Dispoiler is true, then what is the point of it all? Are the ten thousand years of horror and atrocity you have inflicted upon us, upon the Imperium, the result of not but greed and wounded pride? We are merely fulfilling our purpose. I have no patience for any further riddles. I would have thought it obvious to an apparent man of learning, such as yourself. The legionary's astarties were created to be the breakers of tyrants, forged as living weapons to lay low those who would deny mankind its rightful mastery of the galaxy, be they Xenos squatters or petty human potentates. So, what? You are the stalwart defenders of the species? Give me, but even by your standards, that's laughable. Oh, I will not deny that this is personal to us. It absolutely is. The Imperium was forged with our blood and blades, and we intend to take it back from the fools who thought we would meekly follow the Thunder legions into oblivion. We were tools of the Emperor to be cast aside once our purpose had been fulfilled. What uses a weapon after the war has been won? Well, we are what happens when the weapon realises it's a weapon. We denied our fates. We were not slaves to some attached, psychorabomination's ego. No, you merely became slaves to tumourous horror things from beyond the known. You really don't see, do you? Even now, you remain blind to it all. We are all slaves to these things that suckle on our devotions. We, the Legion, we are the ones who deny this. I am sure plenty of my brothers settle upon service to the Pantheon as the ultimate truth, be it in the form of actual devotion or simple nihilistic surrender. But remember, your Emperor made us this way. We are who we were created to be. We are the vengeance of the Spernd, the rage of the discarded and betrayed. The universe is broken, Historiter. We may as well get some recompense for that, before our souls are eaten piece by piece, as every iota of the fire that we once were screams in an agony beyond description. Touched and nerve, have I? I know what you are, Khaon. Oh, do tell. You're not a herald or a spy. You're a distraction. You're a shiny object that a spoiler cast at our feet, dutifully weaving a tapestry of lies and half truths too captivating to look away from. My high charms work, and these mine enemies are all knit up. In their distractions, they now are in my power. Throne, I had to see it to believe it. Restrain that man! Inquisitor Kalendra, I- Silence! So much as speak another word, and even the Lord Regent himself won't be able to save you. For now, thank the Emperor that you're leaving this room alive. Oh, delightful. Forgive me, Oculus. You have far more nerve than I gave you credit for. Is that you, Verity? It has been a while. Hold your tongue, heretic. Before I have it torn from your skull and nailed to my desk. As for you, Oculus, we will continue this conversation elsewhere. Inquisitor, I have every right to- Armsman, I said, restrain him! Do come again, my friend. The Historic's work is never done. Head on over to patreon.com. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at OculusImperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.