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From Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum
→Lupercal's Court
The ensuing titanic battle was fought across both the material and immaterial, across time and space and several dimensions simultaneously as the Chaos Gods watched on with glee and excitement. Fully empowered by The Four, Horus was able to match and then surpass the Emperor's own psychic might. What began as a physical contest of sword and maul escalated into a clash across time as they found themselves assailing one another on [[Cthonia]], ancient [[Terra]], [[Ullanor]], [[Gorro]], and even future [[Cadia]]. Horus and the Emperor began to attack one another in their own memories, and finally the battle manifested as a card game with the [[Imperial Tarot]]. Horus utilized his own deck he had been preparing for this, with cards whose creation was aided by the Chaos Gods. At the end of the duel the Emperor played his ultimate card, ''Death'', but Horus countered with ''The Despoiler''. The Emperor was defeated in the metaphysical, and in the material realm he was finally overwhelmed by Horus' barrage of attacks and collapsed.{{Fn|27b}}
[[Image:HorusvsEmp3.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Horus and the Emperor battle{{Fn|25}}]]
Back in the Lupercal's Court, Horus dragged the Emperor towards the 5th throne he had constructed alongside those of the four Chaos Gods. Proclaiming Horus proclaimed that he would punish the Emperor by forcing Him to be his slave. However the Emperor was able to use the opportunity to absorb some of Horus' dark power to launch a vicious counterattack, summoning solid sigils of light in the air and using them as weapons. However, the Emperor had only absorbed a small portion of Horus' power in order to avoid corruption. Thus, Horus was able to overpower the Emperor once more and puncture his throat with a talon of his claw and nail his father back to the throne using his own sigil-blades. Horus then created a crown of red energy and placed it upon the Emperor's head, completing his tableau.{{Fn|27e}} It was then that Horus was confronted by the lone Custodian Caecaltus Dusk, who refused to back down in the face of impossible odds and distracted Horus long enough for Leetu to free the Emperor from the throne. Angered, Horus callously incinerated Caecaltus with a blast of dark energy from the great eye upon the chest of his armour. But this was all the time the Emperor needed to take the crown Horus had created for him and ram it through the treacherous Warmaster's skull. Horus quickly regenerated from the attack and struck down the Emperor once more.{{Fn|27f}}
It was then that [[Ollanius Persson]] arrived in Lupercal's Court, teleported there alongside [[John Grammaticus]] by [[Actae]]. John used a single line of [[Enuncia]] to briefly blow back the monstrous Warmaster as Ollanius tried to wake the Emperor and give him the [[Athame]] blade they had recovered. John was forced to flee but Ollanius stood his ground and unloaded his [[Lasgun]] into Horus. Horus contemptuously swiped his talon, reducing Ollanius to red mist but giving the Emperor the time He needed.{{Fn|27g}}
After killing Ollanius, Horus turned back to the Emperor's body and saw Garviel Loken before him. Loken pleaded with his father to prove that he was always the better man and prove he was not a slave to Chaos as the Emperor had accused. He pointed out that the Emperor had rejected to fully drink from the warp to become the [[Dark King]] and that Horus was the one being controlled by the Dark Powers. Loken appealed to Horus' pride, convincing him to briefly shed off his tremendous Warp powers and finish the Emperor as a mere Primarch. Horus, perhaps in his arrogance, agreed to do so since the battle was over anyway. Horus briefly cast off the powers of Chaos and crushed in the Emperor's skull with ''Worldbreaker'' as the Chaos Gods and Daemons around them angrily shouted and protested, trying to warn Horus of something. Horus ignored them but was shocked to find that this was simply a ruse by the Emperor. Loken and the Emperor's corpse had both been illusions, and the real Emperor launched one last assault upon Horus.{{Fn|27h}}
With Horus briefly depowered and the Emperor greatly weakened, the ensuing contest became purely a physical one but the Warmaster was able to gouge out the Emperor's eye, mutilate his arm, crush his spine, and set his hair alight. The Emperor struck back, using the power of the reactivated [[Astronomican]] to shine its light directly into Horus' brain. Horus The Warmaster fell into agony as he desperately tried to cloak himself in Warp power once more. However much to Horus' horror, he discovered that the Chaos Gods were now teaching him a lesson of sorts by deliberately denying him their power. Horus came to the realization that he had never been in control, and his Chaos masters were treating him as they would a disobedient slave. The realization combined with the brief absence of Warp corruption over his soul saw the old Horus the Emperor had once loved manifest once more.{{Fn|27i}}
Horus pleaded with the Emperor to kill him before the Chaos Gods could fully reassert control. The Emperor initially hesitated, but granted Horus a mercy and stabbed His son through the chest with the [[Athame]] blade Ollanius had given him. The Emperor then channeled all of His might into the blade, obliterating Horus' form and reducing him to a mere skeleton inside charred armour. With the deed done, the Emperor immediately collapsed as the real Garviel Loken watched with horror. Furious and wailing that their pawn was dead, the Chaos Gods instantly retreated back into the shadows. The Warp-madness that had plagued Terra and the ''Vengeful Spirit'' went with them and conventional space-time was restored.{{Fn|27i}}
