Vulkan found the marigold growing in the cargo hold of a refugee transport.
He'd boarded the Kindled Oath at the waypoint station above Nocturne's corpse, stepping through the airlock with his head ducked low because the ship had been designed for human crew and the corridors punished anything his size. The transport carried six thousand civilians from the agri-world of Callisto Tertius, a population that had spent seven months in their planet's storm cellars while a warband of former Iron Warriors shelled the surface flat and moved on. The evacuation had been clean. His Salamanders had dropped, collected, and lifted within nine hours of arrival, and the transport was running on schedule for its rendezvous with the Webway gate convoy at Baal's trailing Lagrange point.
He walked the holds because he always walked the holds. His captains knew this about him and had stopped trying to redirect his attention to tactical matters during the transit windows. Vulkan walked and he looked and he listened. He listened to the way the refugees spoke to each other and watched the way they moved through the partitioned spaces the ship's crew had assembled from cargo containers and plastic sheeting, and he noted which families clustered together and which individuals sat apart. The sitting-apart ones were the ones he stopped for.
He was kneeling beside an old woman who hadn't spoken since boarding when he saw the flower. It sat in a cup of packed soil on the edge of a cargo pallet, three metres from the woman's cot. The cup was stamped metal, military issue, the kind that came in ration kits by the thousand. Someone had filled it with dirt from Callisto's surface before the last shuttle lifted, and the marigold growing out of it stood twelve centimetres tall with a single bloom the colour of a furnace mouth, its petals curled open to catch the hold's overhead lighting.
Vulkan reached over and lifted the cup and turned it in his hands. The flower was small and ordinary and its stem was thin enough that his breath moved it.
"That's from the tall man," the old woman said.
Vulkan looked at her. She hadn't spoken in forty hours according to the attending medicae, and her voice came out rough from disuse.
"He came through Callisto six months before the shelling started," she said. "Gave out seeds to anyone who'd take them. Walked the whole settlement with a bag over his shoulder and didn't say much. Just handed you the packet and moved on. My neighbour planted hers in the yard and they came up in a week. A week, and the soil on Callisto takes three to germinate root vegetables. We thought there was something wrong with them."
She looked at the flower. "Turned out there was something right with them."
Vulkan set the cup back on the pallet's edge and adjusted its position so the bloom faced the overhead light.
"You carried this through the bombardment?" he said.
"I carried it through everything," the old woman said, and then she stopped talking again.
Vulkan stayed with her for a while longer and then he rose and continued through the hold. He thought about the flower as he walked, and about the man who'd given it away.
Of course, Vulkan understood that man.
He reached the end of the hold and turned back and walked the rows again.
Mortarion stood alone in the purification chamber of the Endurance and breathed clean air.
The chamber was bare metal. He'd ordered every surface stripped and scrubbed with chemical agents that left the walls pitted and dull. The original fixtures, the incense burners and the devotional alcoves and the rusted iron that Nurgle's touch had corroded into organic shapes, all of it had been torn out and launched into the nearest star. What remained was a steel box with filtered ventilation and a drain in the floor and nothing else.
He came here when the memories pressed too close.
The wood had been warm. That was what he remembered most clearly from the purification, and his mind kept returning to it. The roots that Hashirama drove into his body had been warm, just warm, and the warmth had spread through tissue that had been cold and rotting for so long that Mortarion had forgotten cold wasn't his natural state. The roots branched inside him and the warmth followed the branching, and as the corruption pulled away from his bones and his muscles and whatever remained of his organs, the warmth replaced it, and for a span of time he couldn't measure he existed in a body that was simply alive rather than preserved.
He'd screamed. He remembered that too. The true soul slamming back into the flesh it had been evicted from and the recoil of a god's grip torn loose. He'd recognized himself. That was what the scream had been.
Mortarion pressed his palm flat against the chamber wall and felt the cold metal beneath his skin and the vibration of the Endurance's engines running through the bulkhead.
He didn't know what to make of Hashirama Senju. The man had walked into a plague hive saturated with the Grandfather's influence, a place where the air itself was a weapon and the ground wept with toxins that could kill a baseline human in seconds, and he'd treated it as a problem to be solved. He'd contained Mortarion, pinned him, pierced him with roots, and then he'd pulled. He'd pulled Nurgle's investment out of a primarch the way a surgeon removes a tumour, and he'd done it alone, and the effort had cost him a nosebleed and some strain in his channels and nothing more.
Mortarion understood power. He'd been raised among it and shaped by it and enslaved by it. And Hashirama had just... shown up and fixed him.
Mortarion lifted his hand from the wall and looked at his palm. The skin was pale and scarred and clean.
He left the chamber and walked to the bridge and gave the order to translate toward the next system on the Scouring manifest. The Death Guard who crewed the Endurance moved to comply, and Mortarion stood at the command rail and watched the void open, and he breathed clean air, and the engines carried him forward.
Guilliman received the latest report from Facility Seven through an astropathic relay that had been transcribed, encrypted, transmitted across four sectors, decrypted, and placed on his desk by a logistics adjutant who had no idea what it contained. The report was fourteen pages. He read it in nine minutes and then read it again.
The fifteenth batch had been initiated. Embryonic modification using Hashirama's genome as the donor template, implanted into surrogate matrices cultured from donated ovarian tissue, with adjusted integration protocols derived from the previous fourteen failures. The adjustments were minor. Timing changes in the gene activation sequence, modifications to the nutrient medium that sustained the gestation tanks, and a recalibrated dosage of the stabilization compound that Hashirama had developed from his own chakra to ease the transition period when the developing pathways first began conducting energy.
Guilliman set the report down and steepled his fingers.
The theoretical architecture was sound. He'd reviewed Hashirama's biological data personally during his last visit to the Webway, spending four days in Facility Seven with the research cadre going over the mapped chakra circulatory system and its genetic underpinnings. The system was elegant. It integrated with the host body's existing structures at every level, from the nervous system to the endocrine system to structures that had no analogue in baseline human physiology, and it did so with an efficiency that came from thousands of generations of inherited refinement.
The problem wasn't the design. The problem was the substrate. Human bodies lacked the developmental context that Hashirama's ancestors had possessed, and every attempt to bridge that gap through genetic engineering had failed at the integration stage. The pathways grew and the tenketsu formed and the core activated. And then the body rejected the system because it had no inherited tolerance for the energetic load.
Guilliman admired Hashirama's persistence. The man had watched fourteen batches fail over five years and he'd adjusted his approach each time and returned to the laboratory floor and tried again.
What Guilliman admired more was the clarity of the man's purpose. The gene-seed project wasn't a weapons program. Guilliman had listened to Hashirama explain his goals to the Emperor in a meeting that Guilliman attended via hololith, and Hashirama had said it plainly: these children are not weapons. They are protectors. And that mattered because the Imperium had built weapons before, tens of thousands of them, and those weapons had turned on their makers and burned the galaxy.
Hashirama called it Ninshū, and when Guilliman asked him to explain it, Hashirama had held out his hand and offered to demonstrate, and Guilliman had accepted, and for three seconds Guilliman had felt another person's interior life.
He'd withdrawn from the connection and sat in silence for a long time after that, and Hashirama had waited without pressing, and eventually Guilliman had said, "If you had given this to the Legiones Astartes before the Heresy, I wonder if the Heresy would have happened."
Hashirama had shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, understanding each other doesn't stop all disagreements. It just makes it harder to kill someone whose grief you've felt from the inside."
Guilliman picked up the report and filed it in the archive beside the thirteen that preceded it. And then he opened a new docket and began drafting the logistics framework for distributing chakra-enhanced agricultural seeds to the colony ships departing from Macragge's orbital yards.
Russ sat on a rock and watched the sun set over a field of dead World Eaters.
The snow around the bodies had melted from the heat of combat and refrozen into a crust that crunched when his wolves walked across it. Freki nosed at a fallen chainaxe and sneezed at the blood on its teeth and moved on. Geri lay at Russ's feet with his muzzle on his paws, eyes half-closed.
One of his Wolf Guard approached and stood at his shoulder, waiting.
"Say it," Russ said.
"Lord, the serfs are asking about the prisoner. The one in the hold."
"Yeah, feed him. Water him. Leave him in the dark."
The Wolf Guard nodded and withdrew.
Russ looked at the sunset and thought about the last feast he'd attended in the Webway, three months ago, when Hashirama had somehow acquired enough ingredients to prepare a meal for forty Astartes and served it himself. The man had cooked with focus and the result had tasted better than anything the Hrafnkel's kitchens had produced in a century of operation. Russ had eaten four portions and asked for a fifth, and Hashirama had laughed and given it to him, and they'd drunk together afterward, though the shinobi's alcohol tolerance was appalling.
What Russ respected about Hashirama was simple. The man fought, and he fought well, and he didn't apologize for fighting, and he didn't dress the violence up in philosophy or pretend it was something it wasn't. But when the fighting was finished he put the violence down and picked up something else. He cooked. He planted. He built furniture. He sat with children. And the transition between the two was seamless, and Russ recognized that seamlessness because it was the thing he'd always wanted for his own sons and hadn't quite managed to teach them. The Wolves were warriors who celebrated their warrior nature, and that was fine, but Hashirama was a warrior and a gardener and a teacher and a cook, and none of it seemed to compete.
Russ picked up a stone and turned it in his fingers and threw it down the slope, and Freki's head came up to track it, and the sun dropped below the horizon and the dead World Eaters darkened beneath the snow.
Corax received the intelligence packet in a dead-drop on a station orbiting a star that had no name in Imperial records. He read it standing in a corridor that was dark because he'd disabled the lights, and the information it contained was useful, and when he was finished he burned the packet and scattered the ash.
He thought about the shinobi often, in the quiet hours between operations. Of all the primarchs, Corax had understood Hashirama's methods the fastest. The clones, the substitutions, the misdirection, the patient approach, the explosive exit. Hashirama was a shinobi first and everything else second, and the fact that his power operated at a scale that cracked planets didn't change anything. You observed and planned and struck and vanished.
Corax respected that discipline. He respected it more because Hashirama applied it in defence of people who would never know his name. The civilians sealed into scrolls during the Siege, the thousands extracted from hive cities that had been written off as lost.
He stepped back into the deeper darkness of the corridor and let his presence collapse inward, the way it always did when he chose not to be found, his armour's systems layering their own dampening over the absence he'd already become, and he moved toward the next objective. The station's crew never knew he'd been there.
The Lion reviewed the tactical assessment of Hashirama Senju's combat capabilities for the third time and closed the file.
He sat in his personal quarters aboard the Invincible Reason, the desk before him cleared of everything except the file and a cup of water he hadn't touched. The quarters were ordered and spare. A cot, a desk, a weapons rack, and a door that locked from the inside.
The file contained everything the Imperium had compiled on Hashirama's observed combat performance: the Perturabo engagement, the Fulgrim duel, the Mortarion purification, the Thousand Hands deployment, the final combined strike against Horus. Each engagement had been reconstructed from witness testimony, sensor data where available, and Hashirama's own account as relayed through Batu's communications.
The Lion's assessment was clinical. Hashirama Senju operated at a power tier comparable to a fully empowered primarch, with tactical flexibility that exceeded any individual combatant the Lion had studied. His durability was extreme, his regeneration was slower but functionally limitless, and his ability to produce constructs of arbitrary size and function from biological material gave him a logistical capacity that no other single combatant possessed. His weaknesses were finite chakra reserves, as Hashirama himself admitted, and an emotional commitment to civilian preservation that created exploitable patterns in his decision-making.
The Lion closed the file and drank his water.
Somewhere in the vast darkness, something incomprehensibly ancient felt the presence of chakra and stirred.