A Song for the Lost

Robbie MacNiven

666.M41

It was the forty-third Catechism of Blessed Absolution that broke Ulix. The boy had made it through the Rites of Imperial Truth, the Intonations of Saint Ozbadier and the First and Second Orders of Sanctity, but by then the words of the Catechism had slipped from the youth’s mind. He stuttered and faltered, panic only further obscuring his memory of the dusty High Gothic syllables. A few seconds of hesitation were all that Bishop Eziah needed.

‘If you can’t even speak the God-Emperor’s praises, how can you possibly sing them?’ he thundered, a fleck of the old man’s spittle hitting the choir novitiate’s cheek. The boy cringed, and the bishop’s expression grew even darker.

‘If there’s one thing He hates more than a lack of faith, boy, it’s a lack of courage. Hold out your hand.’

Instinct kept Ulix frozen. Eziah snatched his arm and pinned it to the cold slab of the lectern between them, his face a rictus of manic zealotry.

‘We must believe in no one but the God-Emperor, He on Earth, Father of Mankind.’ Like a cruel joke, the words came back to Ulix as the Bishop raised his switch reed, but the hunched old man wasn’t listening. The switch came down on Ulix’s bared forearm with a hideous crack, and the boy’s yell echoed back from the vaulted ceiling of the scriptorium.

‘Your rotten influence has spread to Matthias,’ Eziah spat before landing a second blow. ‘He’s gone mute. I won’t allow your canker to spread to the rest of my novitiates. Pain will earn you salvation.’

Ulix didn’t reply. He screwed his eyes tightly shut, all of his attention focussed on trying not to cry. His defiance only drove the bishop to greater fury. By the time he was done, Ulix’s pale arm was a latticework of raw welts.

‘I’m cutting your vittles for the rest of the week,’ Eziah hissed, panting with exertion. ‘You will return at three bells tomorrow, and you will try again, and if you can’t offer up veneration befitting this holy basilica, I will break either you or this reed. Whichever snaps first. Now get out.’

Ulix fled. His vision was a blur of angry tears, and the lofty corridors of the Basilica of Himaeus the Justicar echoed with his muffled sobs. His dorm was dark by the time he reached it, the rest of the boys already tucked into their sleeping alcoves. Only his own lumen stick still burned, its flickering light barely strong enough to pick out the craggy, bare stone walls and flagstones of the novitiates’ quarters.

He slid into his alcove, fighting back sobs. Across the aisle, the boy who slept opposite him, Matthias, had his back turned and his own lumen stick doused, but Ulix could tell from his stiff posture that he wasn’t asleep. He could sense the boy’s thoughts, could almost hear him begging Ulix to snuff out his stick. Matthias hated her and her visits. But Ulix didn’t care. She would come for him, he knew it. She would help him.

The night drew on. Ulix gripped his forearm, willing the pain to stop. Matthias, though he hadn’t turned, was visibly starting to shake. Ulix closed his eyes and started to mouth a prayer, the one she’d taught him to use in the depths of the night.

‘Mistress of Pain, Master of Pleasure, hear your child’s cry–’

And that’s when he heard it. The soft tap of sandals on stone, passing through the cloisters outside. They stopped at the arched entrance to the dorm, and a shadow fell on Ulix’s alcove. He looked up.

‘Good evening, little brother,’ said Sister D’Fey.

‘I knew you’d come,’ Ulix began to say, but D’Fey hushed him with an indulgent smile. She was twenty-one years Terran standard, dark-eyed, tall and sharp-boned, her pale features accentuated by the long black habit she wore. From what little he knew of girls, Ulix considered her beautiful. Certainly more beautiful than the wizened old matron, Sister Rebocca, or the rotund, scarred crone who served the novitiates their meals twice a day.

It was D’Fey’s duty to visit all the basilica’s sleeping quarters during night cycle and ensure every lumen stick was doused before first bell. Ulix had learned that leaving his lit would guarantee a visit.

‘Have you been saying your prayers, little brother?’ D’Fey asked, her voice low and gentle. Ulix nodded earnestly, but his eyes strayed down to his arm. The sister’s expression became one of concern as she noticed his raw flesh. She sat down on the edge of Ulix’s alcove.

‘Did the bishop do this to you?’

‘I forgot the forty-third Catechism of Blessed Absolution,’ Ulix said. ‘We must believe in no one but the God-Emperor, He on–’

‘Yes, yes,’ said D’Fey, cutting him off. She smiled again. ‘Sometimes things happen which cause us pain, little brother. It is important that we don’t allow the pain to get the better of us, even if it seems constant, like these wounds. Learn to channel it towards better things.’

Her slender fingertips brushed against the skin of Ulix’s arm, and the stinging was replaced with wonderful numbness. He smiled with relief.

‘Your prayers,’ D’Fey said again. ‘The ones I taught you to shield your mind from this sort of thing.’

‘If I recite them will you sing for me?’ Ulix asked hopefully.

‘Of course, little brother,’ she replied. Ulix whispered all six to her, without hesitation. D’Fey gave a little clap of delight when he finished.

‘Rest your head in my lap,’ she said. ‘Let the dreams take you.’

Ulix lay down and closed his eyes, and D’Fey began to sing. The words were soft and warm, and though their meaning slipped from his mind as sleep began to take him, the sensations of safety and comfort never left him. In barely a minute he was asleep, his troubles forgotten. D’Fey continued to sing gently, smiling to herself, black eyes gleaming by the lonely light of the last lumen stick.

Across the aisle, Novitiate Matthias lay awake and wide-eyed, shaking with terror.

996.M41

It was Fire Season on Sarnax, and the Angels of Ecstasy were in high spirits. They sang as they climbed the winding dirt pathway up the slopes of mount Tukkua, vox grilles and cacophonic blasters amped to their maximum. The surrounding jungle – fronds and vines stained rusty gold and butcher’s red by the seasonal dustfall from the southern deserts – shuddered at the warband’s passing. Occasionally, one of the fallen Angels, lost in the incomprehensibly complex rhythms of his praise, would unleash his sonic weapon into the trees, shredding leaves and pulverising wood in a disharmonious shriek that echoed back along the path.

One Angel didn’t sing. Ulix the Enthralled, one-time Chapter Master of the Sons of Ulthunas, now Chaos lord of the Angels of Ecstasy and Champion of Slaanesh, never sang. It would be at best a distraction, at worst a betrayal. Certainly an act far more hideous than anything he had inflicted upon the corpse-worshipping Imperium in the centuries since he had joined the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes and his Chapter had turned away from the ruinous path of the False Emperor.

He could hear her. Always, even over the constant mind-fraying audio-praise of his warband. Her words were soft and indistinct, yet always comforting. A gentle thread running through the cold, jagged edges of the Chaos lord’s mind. It was the only thing he recalled of his life before the Space Marines had come for him, and the shielding prayers she – and not the Ecclesiarchy – had taught him had kept her voice safe through the mind scrubbing and hypno-inductions, the blood and the agony. Sister D’Fey’s song had echoed in his skull through all the combat drops and ship actions, the sieges and the frontal assaults, the bloody retreats and the last stands. It had been there, louder than ever, on Ganymethian, when he had finally cast off the falsehood of the so-called Imperium and slaughtered ten billion souls for the only one who could ever understand his pain, the Prince of Pleasure. On that day, the Sons of Ulthunas had become Slaanesh’s Angels.

The Angels had descended upon the Basilica of Himaeus the Justicar, and although Bishop Eziah and all who had known him were long dead, that did not stop Ulix and his brothers from nailing the minions of the Ecclesiarchy to their lecterns and burning their false relics. Ulix had found Eziah’s gilded tomb and defiled it, and all the while D’Fey had sung for him in his head.

But, as was always the case, he couldn’t quite recall her exact words.

He needed to hear them again. How long had it been? How many years? Or was it hours? It didn’t matter. Either way, it had been too long.

The Chaos lord paused at the side of the narrow jungle track to watch his servants pass. They were too lost in their prancing, discordant passage to notice his gaze. All but one – Equis the Anointed. The possessed Chaos Space Marine’s power armour was warped and distended to accommodate the lanky, slender-limbed changes inflicted on him by the glorious matrimony of daemon and genetically enhanced human. Though his fanged face was hidden behind the pale pink ceramite of his faceplate, Ulix could sense the challenge burning in the daemon-man’s violet eyes.

Ulix returned his gaze, allowing his would-be challenger to observe his many blessings. Ulix’s artificer power armour, once the proud blue plate of the Sons of Ulthunas, was now unrecognisable. It was now the shade of pallid flesh and bruised meat, and was etched with swirling, blasphemously conjoining runes, its studded edges hung with hundreds of multihued silk ribbons and fetishes. From the Chaos Space Marine’s backpack sprouted a towering set of ornate sonic amplifiers, each brass pipe ending in a wailing black vox maw that eternally moaned the Dark Prince’s blessings. Despite such ravages, it was the Space Marine’s facial features that were the most horrific. In place of a mouth, Ulix now bore a vox horn, his jaw permanently distended around the polished grille. The nightmare surgery had left the rest of his skin pulled taut, giving his pale face and unblinking jet-black eyes the appearance of a screaming skull.

Equis could only hold his gaze for a few seconds. Ulix watched him continue to climb the muddy, winding jungle path, the Chaos lord’s hand dropping to the flesh-bound hilt of his daemon sword, Bar’neth. Even without the truths whispered by the lascivious warp entity bound in his blade, Ulix could sense his brother’s dissatisfaction with Ulix’s everlasting quest to hear the song sung again. Equis wanted to challenge him for leadership of the warband. The threat did not concern Ulix. All that mattered was the song.

Just as the Chaos lord stepped back onto the track, Zsyth the Grandiloquent’s head exploded. The gluttonous Noise Marine, pink armour ruptured around his obese flesh, toppled with the leaden force of a downed tree. Only Ulix noticed his brother’s demise. The other Angels were too caught up in their cavorting to pay attention to the swollen, headless corpse sprawled across the track. For a second, Ulix assumed Zslyth had finally overloaded the lobe implants that had been vibrating his cranium with subsonic noise for the better part of two centuries. Then Plinaeus Rawhide’s fleshless face burst as well, and it finally dawned upon the Angels of Ecstasy that they were under attack.

The hunters were here, and right on time.

‘The trees,’ Ulix roared, his amplified bellow cutting through the cacophony raised by his underlings. They needed no further encouragement. Sonic blasters were turned in every direction, chords thrumming with power, sliding scales shrilling at the frenzied finger work of the warp-damned Adeptus Astartes. Within seconds, the surrounding jungle was disintegrating into a pulverised, bloody red mulch, successive shockwaves of raw sound kicking up dirt, splintering bark and shredding leaves.

‘Blastmasters, clear the way,’ Ulix ordered, black eyes scanning the treetops for a sign of their assailants. ‘Advance.’

The warband’s heavy weapons specialists, the triplets known only as the Tricord, unleashed their blastmasters in unison, the synchronised wall of bass demolishing the jungle ahead in a blizzard of mulch, and splitting the winding pathway wide open.

Ulix knew they had to keep moving. He doubted any of the Eldar rangers who had sprung the ambush had been caught by his minions’ wild firing, but that didn’t matter. The light slanting through the red-hued leaves ahead told him the clearing was close, and with it, the alien’s webway portal. They would be forced to go hand-to-hand to defend it, and that was when Ulix would win his prize.

Hadril paused while his long rifle’s crystal cell recharged, eye fixed to the scope. On the pathway below, the warp-tainted mon-keigh were still advancing, shrieking and screeching their unnatural delight as they decimated the surrounding jungle with blind salvoes of sonic firepower. Hadril had already put down two from his perch in the thick upper branches of a rustbark. His brother, Arrith, invisible among the red leaves above and to Hadril’s left, had claimed three more.

The daemon worshippers could not be allowed to defile the portal. Reinforcements were already on the way, but until then, Hadril and his kin had been tasked with culling as many as possible. The Eldar ranger refocussed his aim on a particularly tainted mon-keigh at the heart of the warband, watching as the thing screeched incomprehensible orders from the plethora of audio units that distorted its body. He let his mind slip once more into the rhythm of the hunter, trusting his rifle and his centuries of experience to align the shot. He took half a breath, and fired.

And missed. As though sensing Hadril’s aim at the last second, the Slaaneshi champion shifted his stance and, rather than vaporise his skull, the bolt of blue energy smacked into his left pauldron. The impact caused him to stagger but nothing more. Hadril felt the Chaos Space Marine’s eyes fix on his position, and his blood ran cold.

‘There,’ Ulix snapped, pointing at the tree the shot had come from. In a heartbeat, a dozen sonic weapons shattered bark and shredded leaves. A figure, trailing a rust-coloured camo cape, plummeted to the jungle floor.

The alien sharpshooter would have added him to its tally had it not been for Bar’neth’s warning. By way of gratitude, Ulix drew the sword and strode along the track to the Eldar’s body, the bound daemon shrieking for its soul. To the Chaos lord’s surprise, the alien shifted beneath him, seemingly only stunned by its fall.

Bar’neth was begging for the Eldar’s sweet blood, vibrating in Ulix’s grip. With the ease of a cruel child snatching a pup, the Chaos lord pinned the ranger against the tree with one hand, his stretched, white features inches from the alien’s face.

‘Sing for me, Eldar,’ he said, the words rasping from the vox horn sutured into his distended jaw. The ranger struggled vainly in the fallen Space Marine’s grip, trying to turn his face away from the black-eyed glare of the Slaaneshi champion.

‘I said sing!’ Ulix screamed. The sonic amplifiers bristling from his back channelled the shriek, causing the Eldar’s eyes to burst and his brain to rupture. Ulix let the spasming, bloody alien slide to the ground, disgusted. He wanted one alive. She preferred them alive.

The webway portal lay ahead, the jungle before the clearing wrecked by the warband’s sonic barrage. Ulix pushed through the shattered tree trunks towards the spear of rock that lanced above the jungle canopy, and that he knew contained the portal. Its smooth, bone-white surface was almost completely covered in blotches of rust-coloured moss. The human savages who inhabited Sarnax believed it was an ancient portal to the realm of the gods, and in a way they were right. Ulix’s vox-maws began to keen as he took a step into the clearing, the Angels fanning out either side of him.

That was when the portal’s final guardians struck. With a crack of displaced air and a flash of light, two dozen slender, crouching figures materialised at the base of the rock. Ulix took in the female warriors’ body-hugging white plate, long, curving blades and tall, red-crested helmets. If his deformed face could have allowed it, the Chaos lord would have smiled. Aspect Warriors, servants of the Eldar’s Bloody-Handed God. Howling Banshees.

The Eldar warrior women attacked without hesitation, energy crackling along the blades of their wicked swords. The Angels of Ecstasy howled with glee as they met them, wild riffs of sonic firepower tearing into the portal’s oncoming defenders. A few went down, brains burst, internal organs liquidised, but the rest leapt through the wall of noise, their charged weapons parting the humid jungle air.

Ulix met the downward stroke of the first one with Bar’neth. The Slaaneshi daemon was screaming for the Eldar’s soul, furious at Ulix’s earlier denial. The two blades rebounded with a shock, the masked Eldar sliding the stroke into a stomach-stab with reflexes no human could have matched.

Ulix, however, had not been human for a very long time. He turned the lunge aside and, with a speed belying his size, back-cut to open the Banshee’s guts. The white psycho-sensitive bioplastics were no protection against Bar’neth’s razor kiss, and the daemon’s lustful shrieking turned to a sigh of contentment as it finally tasted blood. The Eldar crumpled, its soul drained, spirit stone dull.

Around Ulix, the Angels were struggling to match the finesse of their master. The Eldar were a blur of movement, swords slicing and stabbing, the crackling energy sheathing the blades parting the battle-plate of the Noise Marines with ease. Kavixs was on his knees, screaming with pleasure as he tried to hold his spilled intestines in. Sarth the Smiling had lost an arm and was attempting to work his sonic blaster’s scales with one hand, laughing as he did so. One of the Tricord pulped a Banshee in mid leap with a bass thud of his blastmaster, but a second had slid in behind and parted his skull with a downward stroke before he could retune the weapon. Equis ripped his serrated, crab-like claws through the throat of another, bleeding purple ichor from a wound across his thigh.

Sensing victory, Eldar rangers darted into the melee from the surrounding trees, sniper rifles discarded in favour of long knives and shuriken pistols. One came at Ulix, his face a mask of grim determination beneath the red cowls of his camo cape. The Chaos lord let his armour take the first thrust of the Eldar’s knife, the runes coiling along his chestplate’s warped surface glowing with sickly energy as they deflected the blow.

A few more minutes and the aliens would have won. The last of Ulix’s minions would have been cut down, their vox amps smashed, their cacophonic praises finally silenced. But the Banshees were too eager to cement their victory. They wanted to cleanse the vile stain that Ulix’s encroachment represented. So they unleashed their sonic scream, and turned the tide in favour of their enemies.

The amplifiers built into the helmets of the Aspect Warriors channelled their shrieks and war cries. When they unleashed them in unison, most enemies would have been left disoriented and clutching bloody ears. But for the Angels of Ecstasy, it was a revelation. Inured to sonic bombardment, they found that the Banshee’s unique method of attack was a sensation none of them had ever experienced before. Their reflexes doubled as they shuddered with delight, lent vigour by the passion of new sensation. Suddenly, it was the aliens who were being pushed back, their speed no longer an adequate defence against the Noise Marines.

The Eldar ranger sensed the tide of battle turn and hesitated. The Slaaneshi lord swiped the ranger’s knife aside with a contemptuous flick and stepped inside his guard, laughter rasping from his voxes. He had found his victim.

Arrith, Hadril’s brother, was dead. Somehow Hadril had managed to keep his grip on a branch as the firepower of the Chaos warband had torn apart the rustwood perch, but Arrith hadn’t been so lucky. He’d fallen into the undergrowth and Hadril, ears ringing and bloody from the sonic storm, had watched him crumple before the amplified scream of the Chaos lord, pinned to the trunk below him.

When the pathfinder had ordered them to go hand-to-hand and assist their sisters, Hadril had gone straight for Arrith’s killer. The rashness of that decision now hit harder than the hilt of the Chaos Space Marine’s sword into Hadril’s gut. The ranger went down on one knee, the breath driven from his lungs. Overhead, he heard the tortured scream of a mon-keigh shuttle as it banked towards the clearing, its shadow falling across the swirling melee. Hadril looked up into the bottomless orbs of the Chaos lord’s eyes.

If the creature’s face had allowed it, Hadril supposed it would have been smiling.

The Praise Eternal had once demolished capital ships and levelled cities in the name of the Imperium of Man. For three thousand years, it had served the Emperor and brought righteous, unbending fury to its enemies, from one end of the galaxy to the other. Now it was a beacon of damnation adrift in a sea of sin.

The venerable machine spirit that inhabited the ship’s adamantium walls and armoured bulkheads had turned to the Prince of Pleasure with almost indecent haste, as though bored of the monotonies of loyalty. For such eagerness, Slaanesh had gifted it with a voice of its own, a howl of relieved pleasure that echoed eternally through the minds not only of its twisted crew, but through the Immaterium itself. Beyond reality’s veil, the creatures of the Dark Prince thronged to its siren song, covering its hull in an undulating sea of distorted, heaving flesh.

The muffled screaming of their damned souls had long ago slipped to the back of Ulix’s mind. The Praise Eternal’s cavernous, musk-stinking holds and bristling, brass-mawed weapon batteries were no longer of any consequence compared to the chamber at the ship’s corrupt heart. That was where he led the survivors of the raid on the webway portal, through a maze of marble corridors and garishly furnished suites. Traversing the Praise Eternal was never without risk – lesser daemons would penetrate the ship’s screaming corridors and attack the crew, while the structure of the vessel itself was beset by hallucinogenic fogs and lilting cadences that led the unwary deep into her sickly-sweet bowels, never to be seen again. But Ulix, better than anyone else, knew where his path was leading him. He was so close now.

At the heart of the phalanx of Noise Marines was Equis, gripping the Eldar prisoner. The alien had been blindfolded with a strip of black silk, his other senses already on the verge of being overloaded just by the Praise Eternal’s madness.

‘We could have taken the webway portal,’ Equis hissed at Ulix’s back. ‘We had broken them. We could have carried the fight deeper into their realms.’

He knew the Chaos lord wasn’t listening. His obsession with the song of his daemon mistress and her vile collection of tokens had completely consumed him. They came to a halt outside the rune-etched blast doors that marked the entrance to the daemon’s lair.

‘The prisoner,’ Ulix demanded. Equis hesitated. The urge to snap the Eldar’s scrawny neck and deny Ulix his greatest desire was overwhelming. For a moment, the daemonic Noise Marine indulged the sensation, revelling in the power at the tips of his claws. Even with the ship’s presence in the warp, Ulix’s mistress wouldn’t be able to materialise unless the Eldar was taken over her threshold. Equis could break the Chaos lord’s will with a single action.

Then Ulix’s hand strayed to the hilt of his daemon blade, and the thought of Bar’neth snatching his soul into oblivion finally made Equis release the alien.

Without another word, Ulix took the ranger by his cloak and punched in the blast door’s entry code.

‘We’ll be waiting for you when she sends you out again,’ Equis said as the Chaos lord disappeared into the cloying darkness within.

For a second, even Ulix’s senses, already stretched by centuries of abuse, failed him. The shadows were impenetrable. The velvet drapes he brushed through made him flinch. The sickly sweet stench of stale perfume set his flesh tingling. Briefly, his hypersensitive hearing thought it caught the whisper of a voice, singing softly. It was gone as soon as he tried to focus on it. The blindfolded alien, still silent, was shuddering in his grip.

Ulix pushed through the final set of curtains and found himself blinking in the flickering light of lit lumen sticks. He was standing in a narrow stone room, its flagstone floor swept bare, alcoves carved into the walls on either side. In an instant, he felt over three centuries of pain and anguish drain away.

Sister D’Fey was waiting for him. She’d been sitting on the edge of one of the alcoves – his alcove – but stood as he entered.

‘I’ve been waiting for you, little brother,’ she said, embracing him. ‘Welcome home.’

‘I brought you a gift,’ Ulix said, shuddering slightly as her touch spread salving numbness through his ravaged body.

‘And for that you have my thanks,’ D’Fey said. ‘The other sisters will take him. Come, little brother.’ Ulix was vaguely aware of two more sisters, both garbed in black like D’Fey, taking hold of the shaking Eldar. The alien’s existence melted from his thoughts as D’Fey took him by the hand and led him down the dorm to his sleeping alcove. She sat, motioning him to do likewise.

‘Would you like me to sing for you again, Ulix?’ she asked sweetly. Ulix found himself unable to speak. He nodded, tears blurring his vision. Smiling again, D’Fey gently took his head in her hands, and began to sing him her song for the lost.

The daemonettes cut Hadril’s tongue out first. One swallowed the bloody muscle while the other reached round and slipped the black silk from the Eldar’s eyes. They didn’t want his screams interrupting their mistress’ recital.

And Hadril would have screamed. At first glance, the chamber he was in appeared to have been carved from a solid block of multi-hued gems. Towering pillars of glittering pink and red supported a vaulted ceiling of sparkling blue and purple, the illumination from a dozen burning braziers dancing hypnotically from the jagged surfaces.

But Hadril knew immediately that he wasn’t just looking upon some garish display of opulence. The chamber hadn’t been built with pretty bits of rock. It had been constructed from spirit stones. Tens of thousands of precious Eldar soul shards had been beaten and shattered, split, smashed and melded together to form a blasphemous temple to the damnation of Hadril’s entire race.

The daemonettes grinned at the ranger’s voiceless anguish, needle teeth gleaming in the light of the broken stones. One tugged Hadril’s tattered cloak back to expose his own amber spirit stone, set into the abdomen of his breastplate. The daemonette’s tongue, purple, veined and hideously long, darted out to caress the precious surface. Hadril shuddered uncontrollably, knowing the warp creature was tasting his soul.

As its sister played, the second daemonette grasped Hadril’s jaw with slender talons and gently raised his head to look directly at the chamber’s centre. In it lay a dais of more crushed stones, arrayed to form the vile rune of the Prince of Pleasure. Upon the raised platform, the damned mon-keigh warrior slumbered. Despite the depraved beast’s size, it had curled into a foetal position, its tortured, deformed head cradled against the breast of the thing now embracing it. Hadril shook again as he took it in – a vast, serpent-like creature, pale as old corpse meat, its thick, fleshy body coiled around the mon-keigh’s ornately armoured form. Its head was bowed beside the warrior’s ear, and Hadril could see a forked tongue darting from between thin lips. Whatever it hissed was swallowed up in the chamber’s soul-ravaging horror. As though sensing the Eldar’s gaze, it tilted its head slightly, one black, nictitating eye looking at him with a gleam of sickly humour.

A sudden burst of pleasure in his right side drew a moan from Hadril’s bloody lips. He realised that one of the daemonettes had slipped a thin blade between the joints in his armour. He watched a trickle of blood run down his leg, even as the unnaturally gratifying sensation made him gasp for breath.

The other daemonette had finished savouring Hadril’s essence. It pressed one claw against his spirit stone’s smooth surface, tapping at it gently but firmly. And that was when the pain started.

The last thing Hadril saw was the mon-keigh, over the daemonette’s shoulder. The Chaos lord was still wrapped in the white coils of the serpent-daemon, and though the Noise Marine’s eyes were now closed, its lock-jawed features were twisted into what could only be described as pure contentment.

666.M41

Matthias could sense it in the dorm. It couldn’t come here uninvited, he was sure. But Ulix kept calling it back. He’d begged him, and when the boy hadn’t listened, he’d been too afraid to tell anyone. He was sure it would come for him too if he spoke a word.

He didn’t turn. He’d made that mistake before. Hunger emanated from it as surely as the sibilant hissing that put Ulix to sleep every night, and kept Matthias tense and shivering until the chiming of the first bell. He’d seen it once. He knew what it was doing right now.

Coiled around Ulix’s body, hissing in his ear, singing a song Matthias prayed he’d never hear.

About the Author

Robbie MacNiven is a highland-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. His hobbies include reenacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000. 'A Song for the Lost' is his second story for Black Library. The Deathwatch short story 'Redblade' was his first.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-025-3

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o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.