He felt the urge to look around him for his brothers. Gheer, the Legion Master, who had come in here first when the Emperor had told the War Hounds they must take this duty upon themselves and then taken ship to meet the Thirty-seventh Fleet at Aldebaran. Kunnar, the First Company Champion, who had donned his formal cape, taken up his axe-staff and walked down the steps after the noises coming through the doors had convinced them that Gheer was long dead. Anchez, who had captained the assault echelon, had walked down next. He had joked with Kharn and Hyazn as the doors had been opened for him, despite the blood they could already smell on the air. The man had never known what fear was. Hyazn had been next, and two of the banner-bearers from his personal command coterie had insisted on marching down the steps into the dark with him. They had meant to block the primarch’s fury for long enough that Hyazn could speak with him. It hadn’t worked. Vanche, the master-at-arms to old Gheer, had insisted on being next, even though the next to inherit the Legion’s command, and so the duty of taking up embassy to their lord, should have been Shinnargen of the Second Company. The point was moot now. Shinnargen had met his end in here an hour after Vanche.
...He exhaled, and took another step into the room. For a moment he thought he could hear movement, the padding of feet, a rush of air that felt like breath before everything splintered and whirled and he crashed into a pillared wall to land hard on his back, gasping in pain.
By the time the gasp had entered his lungs, reflex had taken over and he was up on one knee, turning to put his broken right arm and shoulder to the wall and holding and tensing his left arm ready to ward as he scanned for motion, eyes sifting the gloom, pushing into infrared to see the hulking shape hurtling forwards to fill his vision—
Will overrode reflex, and with an iron effort Kharn forced his hand towards his side. Then he was skittering on his back across the floor, breath hammered out of his lungs and cracked clavicle flaring. Unthinkingly he drew his knees to his chest, turned the skidding tumble into a backwards roll. Training, determination and Astartes neural wiring let him shunt the pain to the back of his mind as he came up into a combat crouch.
Then will took over again, and Kharn made himself stand upright and placed his hands by his sides. He looked back and found the spot where he had rested a moment ago, but the floor was empty, no shape or heat-trace.
Was this how it was for the others? He caught himself wondering, and stopped thinking about it when the lapse in concentration started him swaying on the spot. He focused, half-heard movement closing in behind him and opened his mouth to speak, and a moment later was jerked up from the floor, the back of his head and neck in the grip of a hand that felt bigger and harder than a Dreadnaught’s rubble-claw. Will, will over instinct: Kharn stopped himself from kicking backwards, trying to wrench free.
...He was being carried forwards one-handed in long blurring strides across the width of the hall.
‘Fight me!’ With the words, a slam into the wall hard enough to leave Kharn’s wits red-tinged and reeling.
‘Fight me!’ Another slam and the red was shot through with black. His limbs felt sluggish and only half there. The voice was bellowing drowning his hearing, pouring into his head and trampling his jangled thoughts.
‘Fiiight!’ Another steel-hard grip closed about his broken arm and for a brief moment Kharn whirled through the air. Another impact and his back was to the wall, his feet dangling, broken shoulder incandescent with pain as one of the great hands pinned him against the dark marble.
It took a moment for things to clear. Astartes biochemistry stabilised his pain and his cognition, glanded stress-hormones slammed into his system and Kharn looked at his primarch’s face with clear eyes.
Wiry, copper-red hair curled away from a high brow, pale eyes sat deep behind cheekbones that angled down like axe-strokes to an aquiline nose and a broad, thin-lipped mouth.
It was the face of a general to follow unto death, the face of a teacher at whose feet the wise would fight to sit, the face of a king made for the adoration of worlds: the face of a primarch.
‘I am…’ His voice, when he found it, was hoarse and brittle. ‘I am proud of my Legion brothers.’ He swallowed to try and soothe his dry throat so that he could speak again, but before he could take another breath he was pulled from the wall and dropped. Angron’s kick lofted him into the air in a long curve that fetched him up against a cold, torn corpse. When Kharn dragged in a breath it was full of the reek of blood and offal. There was no way to tell whose the body had been.
Bare feet thumped along the stone floor, counter-pointing growling heaves of breath as Angron closed the distance. He leapt and landed in a crouch beside Kharn as he tried to make his body move. The grip damped around him again, around his jaw and face this time, and he was dragged half-upright to stare into the primarch’s eyes again.
...At the mention of the Emperor Angron had begun to shudder and now he threw his head back again, baying like a beast up into the dark, shocking Kharn into silence. Then, snake-fast, his hand closed around Kharn’s ankle and with a single wrench of his body he threw him spinning through the air.
There was no time to twist in the air or curl. Kharn managed to get his arms around his head before he crashed into a chamber wall and dropped limp to the floor. Through the red-grey mist in his head he could hear Angron’s voice, still filling the chamber with deafening, wordless howls. Within his own body he could feel twitching and roiling as his implanted organs worked on his system: somewhere in there Angron had damaged something badly. Something for the Apothecarion to study, he thought. If they’re up to the challenge of identifying which scraps are mine after all this, he found himself adding, and the grim little mental chuckle from that thought was what gave him the strength to push himself, groaning, up onto his elbows and knees.
Angron’s foot landed like a forge-hammer between his shoulder blades and flattened him back to the floor, cracked sternum sending out ripping bursts of pain, feeling the fused shell of his ribcage creaking as he fought for breath.
‘You don’t injure easily, do you, you meek little paperskins?’ came Angron’s voice from above him, the words bitten out in curt growls.  *"After Desh'ea"*