[The Sixth Cult Denied] The Faustian Bargain of Magnus The Red
In the short story The Sixth Cult Denied during the course of the great crusade Captain Aqhet Hakoris is attempting to start a brand new Cult of Prospero after discovering that warp entities are intelligent. Attempting to share his discovery with the Legion he gets tricked by Magnus the Red into being put on trial in a mini Nikaea during which his father ends up threatening and intimidating him into silence. Throughout the story there are sections where we are shown someone who we initially are meant to believe is Aqhet Hakoris but turns out to be Magnus making is famous faustian bargain:
No one knew how deep the Great Ocean went. No one had ever tried to gauge how far into the unknown its outer limits might extend. There were those who believed the Ocean to be infinite. Others argued that it did not exist at all outside of metaphor.
Neither interpretation satisfied the seeker of knowledge.
They were intellectually lazy, and functionally meaningless. The knowable universe, too, was often said to be infinite – but what did that mean? What mysteries might be discovered as one approached its non-existent edge? All questions had their answers in the Great Ocean, if one was prepared to risk all to seek them.
He knew that, and had deemed the price of his enlightenment fair.
Only a promise, made to his father, had kept him from shedding his body of flesh and voyaging in the Ocean as long as he had.
But then, revelation always resides in the last place one looks…
.....
The Great Ocean was almost impossible to study directly. In the same way that a quantum particle could not be explained until it was assayed, the Ocean did not exist until it was observed, and it was defined by its observer. He sought knowledge, and so knowledge was what it gave him. Knowledge made corporeal. A maze of it. A labyrinth.
A translation cypher for the infamous Voynich Codex.
An entire missing row of periods for the table of elements.
Thirty-five unknown plays by the Shakspire.
The secrets of the Aeldari Fall.
The knowledge of the Old Ones, lost to the War in Heaven.
The nature of reality itself.
All he had to do was dive into that trove and the knowledge would be his. He could have explored that cavern of wonders forever, but he forced his spirit to look beyond it. There was one treasure that he sought to the exclusion of all others.
Days, weeks, years, endless quanta of infinity, he spent in increasing frustration, discarding lore that would have altered the path of galaxies had it but been known. But the one jewel of wisdom he sought was not there.
The beacon set by his acolytes in the universe of the physical grew faint already, but even as he heeded it he gathered his body of light to go deeper still…
.....
Deeper into the Great Ocean than he had ever gone in the company of his father, a new kind of predator lurked. They looked like nothing at all until he drew close, formless threats until he arrived at the conscious decision to enter their waters. They circled like the sharks of Terra’s prehistoric seas, and more, a protean blending of primeval terrors from the deepest reaches of Old Earth and a hostile cosmos with an inborn antipathy to intelligent life. The seeker of knowledge had studied broadly and travelled widely in coming this far, and few minds were as open to the true nature of the universe as his: he could conceive of horrors that few others would dare apprehend, and the weird plasticity of the Ocean readily obliged the Domains of Life conjured by his imaginings.
Teeth. Frills. Suckers. Barbs.
Spots. Stripes. Exotic chromatophores. Mimetic displays.
There were saurid giants. Club-wielding primates with murderous grins. Carnivorous swarms of insects, piranhas, and psychneuein.
Without the power of his father to repel them, they did not hesitate long before making their attack. The seeker did not command the mastery of his father, but he was not without some might of his own.
Anger rose in his thoughts, and he shaped it into a sword of crimson fire that he swept through a manifestation of hunger with the head and body of a shark and the limbs of a wolf. A squid-like malfeasance spread to envelop him with its tendrils. It was of an order beneath him, and with a thought he made it literally so, reworking their relative dimensions until it was insignificant enough for him to crush in one hand. Like air towards a vacuum the denizens of the Great Ocean rushed at him. Too many to destroy. He roared his frustration into the Ocean, and destruction rolled from him in waves.
Where was the answer that he sought?
He felt the tug on his astral cord as his acolytes, sensing his peril, sought to recall him. His body of light had never spent so long abroad of its physical host, ventured so far or fought so hard.
But to retreat now would be to surrender the knowledge he sought forever. This was a fact that he understood without any grounding in logic or facts. Such was the nature of the Great Ocean. It answered to symbolism, ritual and sacrifice. It rewarded peril.
Brandishing his sword of anger, he armoured himself in hard plates of determination.
He would sooner lose everything than fail here.
.....
Beyond the shoals of carnivorous thought and predatory dreams, the seeker of knowledge found a thing he had not expected – calm. An endless expanse of flat, colourless aether extended out from him in all directions towards eternity’s end. He had braved the hunger and tumult of the Ocean, rejected its false promises, and he had found… nothing. The sputtering fires of determination became the ash of dejection. His body of light flickered, like a candle glimpsed from across light years of fog as he cried out in despair.
And the Ocean rippled.
.....
‘I would have my answer,’ he cried, in a voice manifested by golden will and conveyed by the medium of thought.
The Ocean responded like water in a container when that container had been disturbed.
‘How far must I search? What more must I do?’
Ripples became eddies, eddies became currents, and currents, before one could understand it or convince oneself otherwise, became directed motions.
‘What more must I give?’
The question echoed back to him from the stirring Ocean. The seeker was learned enough to recognise the challenge for what it was, unwise enough to accept it as given.
‘Anything!’ he replied. ‘I would give anything for this knowledge!’
Thunder rolled across the Ocean.
‘Granted,’ it said.
Pain welled up from the position of his right eye, and he screamed, drawing his hand to his face, but immediately after the pain came knowledge. The slow burn of understanding. He gasped in wonder, and the Ocean responded, although not as the usual, passive mirror of his joy. He did not understand it, but past, present and future were all one place in the Great Ocean. Even in the throes of enlightenment, on some level he knew – it was a question that would plague him forevermore.
.....
Sergeant Aqhet Hakoris, warrior of the fire deserts of Oaus and a legionary of the Thousand Sons, awoke aboard the Photep. Medicae equipment blinked and chirped, but in futility, for they had played no role in his awakening. A primarch greeted his return, a demigod whom he had never before encountered except in astral vision, and yet the first thing he looked to was his own hands.
Magnus smiled, the indulgent smile of a proud father watching their child for the first time employ a Palmar grasp on a coloured pencil.
‘My hands,’ said Hakoris. ‘They are my own.’
‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘You have been cured of the Flesh Change.’
The warrior lowered his hands, and for the first time looked in awe upon his sire and saviour.
‘How?’
There were many questions he might have asked, but he was a brother of the Thousand Sons – this was the only one that mattered.
‘Rest now, my son.’
‘I must know how,’ said Hakoris. ‘Tell me.’
Magnus rose without answering. He had defied his father in order to pass His test and seek His answers, but he was Magnus the Red of Prospero, and he knew his limits.
His own sons he expected to be more obedient.
- The Sixth Cult Denied
After reading Magnus' description of believing he got the better of the entity in his bargain in A Thousand Sons I think it's fascinating to get to see the reality. There was no battle of wits over the contract or examining the "fine print" just Magnus in his desperation for answers accepting any cost and fully believing an eye was the only thing that was taken. That or he convinced himself that was all that was lost.