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Fulgrim: The Perfect Son – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

Such wasted potential.

Marduk Tamaris of the Emperor’s Children, knight-commander of the Perfecti and oathsworn blademaster of the Radiant Fulgrim himself, drew his blade more in pity than in anger. The howling rabble on the far side of the battlefield might once have been noble warriors like his own, but decades of misplaced devotion to the god of wrath and ruin had reduced them to little more than ravening beasts. Their leader, a tall warrior with a crested helm, his once magnificent red-and-bronze power armour scored and scuffed down to dull grey ceramite, raised a rusting chainaxe above his head, and bellowed out a wordless roar of fury.

Tamaris waited for the echoes of the cry to fade to silence before he spoke. ‘I am sorry to see you so debased, my kinsman.’

‘Kinsman?’ A snort of laughter came from the Apothecary at his side. ‘That fool is no kinsman of mine.’

Tamaris shook his head in mock reproach. ‘Venakhar. Speak with the courtesy befitting your station. This was once sacred ground.’

Whatever reply Venakhar might have offered was lost as the blood-smeared champion let out another deafening cry. In better days, the broken structure between them had been a proud marble temple dedicated to the pursuit of pain and pleasure, now dragged through an act of worship or desecration into the Maelstrom. It existed beyond the bounds of reality, buffeted by the tides and eddies of the warp, the temple a ruined shell of its former glory, daubed in gore and adorned with skins and scalps beneath an ever-burning sky.

Tamaris drew his sword. ‘Perfecti!’ As if animated by a single will, his battle-brothers stepped forward. ‘Show me your skill!’

The enemy charged. There were no more than two dozen of them, but only half were fallen Space Marines, the rest a rabble of Neverborn: skinless humanoids armed with great swords; four-legged beasts that wore the semblance of hunting hounds and heavy collars of spiked iron.

Tamaris smiled beneath his helmet. It would be a pleasure to send them to their god.

‘The enemy hungers for death, it seems,’ he murmured. The baying mob were closing the distance fast. The air already stank of blood, the sky overhead rippling with the eddies of the warp, the ground beneath his feet moving and writhing as though it, too, were eager for the fight.

It was time to show the enemy what it meant to make war with the Emperor’s Children.

Six needles stabbed in a line down the nape of his neck, bringing a brief, spreading coldness to his limbs and a sudden clarity to his thoughts. Venakhar might lack social graces, but his combat elixirs were without peer.

Suddenly, it seemed as if the enemy were moving so slowly that even the great warhounds, their hindquarters bunching and extending in powerful, propulsive leaps, were barely inching towards them. Venakhar’s hiss of pleasure told Tamaris that he had activated his own stimulant array, and then the entire warband were at his side with blades drawn, his twelve hand-picked warriors, brothers in gene-seed and in faith, his chosen ones.

‘They dare to stand against us,’ he called. Even his own voice was agonisingly slow, his mind stirred to action quicker than his transhuman physiology could match as the huge hunting beasts closed the distance between them. Jaws gaped wide, black tongues lolled over bloodstained fangs, claws raked the earth to bleeding furrows. ‘Let us teach them the error of their ways.’

Tamaris brought up his blade and lunged at the precise moment that the full effect of the stimulants hit his bloodstream. The sword was no longer a weapon – it was a living extension of his will, as much a part of him as the tongue in his head and every bit as quick. He flicked his wrist, and the blade’s glowing edge cut across a monstrous hound’s throat, opening a second mouth that gouted streams of half-clotted black blood. The beast opened its jaws to scream, and he finished it by skewering it through the open mouth, then twisted his blade loose and stepped over it before the baleful light had left its eyes.

A bloodletter charged towards him, its great double-headed axe drawn back to strike, and he stepped aside, waiting until the last possible moment before taking its horned head from its bony shoulders. A bright laugh pealed from his throat at the absurdity of it all – at the thought that these fools should think to stand against him. The Neverborn did not die, of course, no more than they were ever truly alive, but what did that matter? With every blow he struck, every foe he faced, his skill with the blade increased, moving step by infinitesimal step towards perfection.

At his side, Venakhar was also laughing as he fought, the chainknife he favoured carving deep into the throng of ragged cultists throwing themselves at him as though possessed of the ardent urge to die at his hands. Some might even do so, but Tamaris knew his second’s ways of old. He would strike to cripple, not to kill, and when the battle was over, he would take a harvest of still-living flesh to render down in his apothecarion into new and potent concoctions. A distasteful business, true enough, but the results spoke for themselves.

Where is the warlord?

Tamaris leapt onto the toppled remains of an ancient statue and surveyed the battle from above. The Rhino-sized xenos face beneath his boots was still possessed of an eerie, eldritch beauty where it protruded from the bloody ground, but there was no time to admire the age-old craftsmanship. The battlefield stretched out around him, the movements of each of the combatants as clear and predictable as though their paths were drawn in lines of fire. There was the enemy champion and a pair of bodyguards, the horned head thrown back and howling as the chainaxe swept clumsily back and forth to hold off the three Perfecti who beset him.

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for–’

Tamaris sprang. A consummate athlete, he would have covered the distance effortlessly even without his armour or the stimulants, but the presence of both turned him from a superlative warrior to a living missile. The champion’s hideous face turned, bloodshot eyes widening, and Tamaris smiled. The world around him was trapped in crystal, his every movement clear, precise, perfectly calculated. The monstrous warlord bellowed a challenge, brought the axe around in a two-handed sweep designed to take the head from Tamaris’ shoulders… and missed.

‘Back!’ Tamaris’ order was for the Perfecti, not the enemy. They stepped back obediently, but there was no matching courtesy from the World Eater’s bodyguards. Tamaris laughed again. Three of them would be barely more of a challenge than one. He could predict the fool’s every movement and those of the Astartes who fought with him, dodge chainaxes and swords, and the sparking blade of a power glaive of markedly superior design.

He paused, corrected his balance by the necessary infinitesimal degree, and thrust upwards, skewering the World Eater on his right through the soft seal where gorget met armour, and used the Space Marine’s own momentum to lift him from his feet and bring him into the arc of his master’s chainaxe. Blood and bone fountained into the air. Tamaris stepped back to avoid the filthy spray and killed the second of the warlord’s bodyguards with a well-placed strike to the breastbone. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy the look of dawning realisation in the man’s eyes – the knowledge that a thousand years of cruelty and wrath were ending at the hands of the Exquisite Blade – and then pulled his sword free and stepped back. The light in the eyes went out.

Tamaris adjusted his stance, watching the warlord mirror his movements, the axe held low, the knees in the battered armour bent in a warrior’s crouch. The World Eater was studying him, as though the mere act of observation might make equals of them.

‘Did you offer up your own skull to your Blood God, brains and all?’ Tamaris asked, and brought his blade up into a high guard, the fire at its tip casting shadows across the twisted face, giving it the semblance of a play-actor’s mask. ‘Or were you chosen for your stupidity even before your gene-father had the iron nails driven into your empty cranium?’

The World Eater’s reaction came as a disappointment. Tamaris had hoped for a howl of rage, a brutal charge, but it seemed the creature was possessed of some modicum of self-control after all.

‘Popinjay,’ the twisted mouth growled. ‘Dancing fool. Son of a Legion of slaves and failures–’

It was opportunity rather than anger that drove Tamaris’ blade into the open mouth, a single swift blow that brought the tip of the sword punching out through the back of the World Eater’s skull in a mist of blood and fluid. When he thought of it later, he remembered only the sense of that perfect moment, the certain understanding of the precise angle from which to strike. His eyes were locked with the warlord’s as he pushed the blade in deeper, until the quillons distorted the mouth into a wide, leering smile. He kicked the axe from the World Eater’s flagging grip.

‘My brother.’ Tamaris shook his head. If his eyes could still have produced tears, he might have shed them for this poor wretch. ‘You could have been so much more than this.’

The crimson eyes stared back at him. Tamaris tried to pull his blade free, but the World Eater’s teeth were clenched tight around the metal core at its centre, crisping and shattering in the power field’s glow but still somehow managing to hold it in place. A huge armoured hand closed over his own, crushing his gauntlet into the hilt of the blade. Tamaris shot a desperate glance at his sword – was it possible that the power field had failed? – but the activation rune was still glowing a steady green.

‘You are weak.’ The words came from the World Eater’s throat in a wet rasp – impossible, surely, given the damage to his mouth and gullet, to say nothing of the energy cooking his skull from within. ‘And until you understand the path to glory’ – their faces were close now, so close the flaring power field of his own weapon was overloading the lenses of his visor; so close that the smell of rancid meat was filling his helmet, the mouth with its broken teeth opening wide as though to engulf him – ‘you will always be weak!’

The World Eater’s head exploded in a flare of violet light. The unyielding pressure on Tamaris’ wrist went slack, his sword suddenly free, relief and confusion swiftly banished by an unwelcome realisation.

The witch bolt could only have had one possible source.

‘It seems my arrival was a timely one.’ The sorcerer Mauvais stepped out of the shadow of a broken pillar and straightened his exquisite purple-and-gold robes. They hung in heavy velvet folds from the shoulders of his power armour, framing the palatine aquila across his chest like the curtains of some majestic operatic stage. His long black hair was bound to his pale brow with a golden circlet said to be a gift of the Phoenician himself, spilling in night-dark waves across his pauldrons. A bone amulet scrimshawed with ornate arcane markings hung on a heavy adamantine chain around his neck, violet smoke drifting in lazy plumes around his feet filling the air with the scent of incense.

‘Lord sorcerer.’ Tamaris shook the remains of the corpse from his armour, and straightened his back. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?’

Mauvais’ upper lip curled. ‘I should have known better than to expect thanks from you.’ He held up a hand for silence, theatrically forestalling any potential interruption. ‘Doubtless you had the matter entirely under control.’

The battlefield fell silent. Tamaris allowed his irritation to break through his usual courteous veneer. ‘Out with it. Why are you here?’

The sorcerer’s beautiful face creased in a smile that left his jet-black eyes entirely untouched. ‘Am I not welcome amongst my brothers of the Third?’

Tamaris gritted his teeth and waited.

‘I come bearing a message,’ Mauvais said after a long silence, his elegant head tilted to one side. ‘Our lord wishes to address his Legion. All are summoned to attend upon him aboard the warship Vexation.’

‘Vexation? Our lord has taken a new flagship, then?’ The name of the vessel was unfamiliar to him, and his gene-father’s use of it a surprise. He had thought Fulgrim beyond the need for flagships. The Pride of the Emperor had been the primarch’s fortress and home during the Heresy, but if it still existed, drifting and deserted in the void, or seat of power to some petty warlord, Fulgrim seemed neither to know nor care.

Mauvais snorted. ‘Hardly. The Vexation serves his purpose for now.’ A smile flickered across his lips. ‘Its prior owner has no further use for it, after all.’

Tamaris tried not to show his surprise. The primarch Fulgrim rarely summoned his gene-sons into his company, allowing them to pursue their own path towards perfection while he attended to matters more befitting his station. ‘You are his messenger boy now, then, Mauvais? What honours our lord heaps upon you.’

‘Any duty in our lord’s service is a privilege.’ Two points of colour flared in the ancient Space Marine’s cheeks, his shark-black eyes glinting with kindling rage. ‘It is honour enough to serve, Marduk Tamaris.’

Tamaris extinguished his blade’s energy field and wiped the core clean on a fold of his robes. ‘And for what reason does Lord Fulgrim summon us into his transcendent presence?’

‘Your duty is to obey, infractor, not question,’ Mauvais said. He raised a shapely eyebrow. ‘Attend or do not, the choice is your own. I hardly think your absence will be noticed.’

Tamaris let the jibe slide, his skin prickling with anticipation. To receive such a summons was thrilling enough. To stand in the presence of his divine lord might be too great a pleasure to bear.

‘Perfecti!’ His voice rang out across the maelstrom, clear and sharp as a blade. ‘We are summoned to our lord’s side! Make ready, for the Vexation awaits!’ He turned to Mauvais. ‘And will you travel with us, sorcerer? I would be glad to offer you the hospitality of our vessel.’

‘I think not.’ Mauvais gave a bitter laugh. ‘I should sooner brave the warp itself than set foot on that rusting abomination you call a voidship.’

He raised his right hand, spoke a word of power, and a mote of sickly violet light appeared in the air before him. Its glow spilled out as it widened until it was large enough to admit the sorcerer, power armour and all.

‘As you prefer,’ Tamaris said. He turned to Venakhar. ‘Instruct the void-captain to send the gun-cutters with all haste.’

‘We shall meet again, infractor.’ Mauvais stepped into the portal and stood there, haloed in immaterial radiance. For a moment, Tamaris thought he saw something move in the purple light: impressions of hands reaching out for the sorcerer with infinite yearning; unnatural shapes flickering and capering in the darkness, their forms elongated beyond the limits of human biology. Then the portal closed like the blinking of an inhuman eye, and vanished entirely.

Venakhar snorted. ‘The old fool always did have a taste for the dramatic.’ He slapped a hand on Tamaris’ shoulder, and something of the tight knot of humiliation in the knight-commander’s gut eased. ‘It must eat away at him, to have been our gene-father’s favourite, now to be nothing more than his messenger boy.’

Tamaris allowed himself one regretful glance over the burning ruins of the twice-desecrated shrine. There would be no reconsecration today, no feast of ecstatic agonies to dedicate to the Lady of Pain and Pleasure.

As if reading his mind, Venakhar tightened his hand on Tamaris’ shoulder and shook it playfully. ‘Come, brother. If our lord sees fit to summon us, surely an opportunity lies ahead. Only the weak waste time dwelling on the past.’

Tamaris nodded slowly. Venakhar was right.

The past was nothing. Only the future held perfection.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

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