'I wonder often if Corax would have followed me into this same darkness, had the war not come. He and I were so similar, we could have been twins. Of them all, he and Sanguinius were the closest to me – not personally, none of them were my friends,’ Curze said sarcastically. ‘There were never any friends for me. But they were the most alike, though for different reasons. Corax and I, yes, both creatures of darkness, I the murderer, he the assassin, both preoccupied by justice, both raised around criminals.’

He shivered sensuously, and drew black fingernails over his luminous flesh.

‘We followed similar paths. We should have had so much in common, and yet Corax always hated me. He thought I was barbaric, cruel. Him! The noble freedom fighter who incinerated untold thousands in atomic fire to secure his great moral victory. He understood the value of atrocity well enough, even if he pretended not to.’ Curze shook his head and laughed. ‘You see, that’s what I don’t understand. Why did you breed such a clutch of hypocrites?’

He wrapped long, bony arms around his knees, and pressed his face into them. ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ said Curze. ‘I hated him too. You might think I hated all my brothers. I didn’t. They were the ones that hated me. I could not hate them back. Most of them I could tolerate, a few I respected. A couple I loved, though they never returned the affection. But I hated Corax.’ He looked aside in shame and spoke to the wall. ‘I hated him so much. ‘I didn’t hate him for being like me, nor for being better, though if he and I were two aspects of the same principle, he was the better one. Everything about us was so similar, to your design,’ Curze said significantly. ‘Was he not born into awful straits? Was he not victimised? Oppressed? But he did not murder like I did. He used passion and argument where I used blood. I hated myself for not being like him, but I couldn’t despise someone for being what I was not. Why would I hate him for any of those things?’

He looked back at the statue and cleared his throat theatrically. ‘Was it that he failed like I did to fully tame his world, meekly handing it over to the Mechanicum? Did I hate him because he was weak?’ He pressed his face hard into his updrawn knee. ‘I couldn’t hate him for that either.’

He sneered, gnawing at his skin until blood ran. ‘I’ll tell you why. Envy of his mastery lay behind my hatred. I haunted the night, but Corax owned it.’ Breath hissed through dagger teeth. ‘He owned it. My stupid, short-sighted sons thought the Ravens’ abilities came from technology given only to the Nineteenth. I saw it was innate. Imagine what I could have done had you given the same gifts to me? How much more perfect a monster I would have been had the shadows loved me as much as they loved Corax!’