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Eater of Dreams – Marc Collins

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Solar War’

A Black Library Publication

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EATER OF DREAMS

By Marc Collins

The world was crowned in light, and Fel Zharost despised it.

After so long in the absolute darkness beneath Albia, he had grown accustomed to a life in the shadows – forever shunning even the most meagre of illumination. Now he stood at the pinnacle of such conceits, surrounded by the refracted radiance of marble and gold, knowing nothing but the most profound disconnect from it.

The light had grown more hateful than the darkness and shared none of its honesty. Yet he had no choice but to be led into the heart of it. He noted details as he passed. Fleeting realisations of how desperate matters had grown. Truly, the mind of the grey-armoured warrior who had hunted him had not contained all the petty compromises which now stalked the Imperium. Here and there, glimpsed through armaglass windows or from narrow passageways between crenellations, he had seen the violations forced upon the Palace. The grey gunmetal of weapons platforms, the spires of towers replaced by the vanes of void shield generators. Slowly, deliberately, the grandeur and gilt had been stripped away to be replaced by utilitarian defence. A dream being devoured by degrees.

The Palace was no longer a place of rule, but one of practical defiance.

Is this why it has come to this? Are they so desperate that they would drag vagabond sons and their proscribed gifts from self-made graves?

The thought trembled across his mind. Fel Zharost looked upon Terra’s new works and scented the fear that had raised them. Despair blanketed the world like a shroud, choking all beneath the unremitting weight of it.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked his captor. The grey warrior did not answer. He did not even look back. He had barely uttered a word on the long ascent into Albia, or the sub-orbital flight which had followed. Zharost bit back the urge to skirt the warrior’s mind again. He had seen enough. If there were to be more revelations then they would not be plucked from the ether – they would come to him from knowing lips, laced with lies, and heavy with import.

They passed beneath archways of cold iron and through gates which bristled with servitor-controlled sentry guns, deeper into the undervaults of the Palace. There was no gold now; only the grey stone and the robed adepts who moved through the warrens like a hive’s drones, cloaked in the same shades. When the adepts noticed the grey-armoured figure and the filthy rag-wreathed charge he shepherded, they turned their gaze away in the knowledge that this was not for their eyes.

Zharost was led through a great pair of doors, iron inlaid with gold, and they passed into a long undercroft. Low lumens burned in their alcoves, casting pale light along the marbled walls. Zharost’s breath caught in his throat as he beheld the walls. They bore none of the Palace’s ostentatious finery, but instead had been delicately painted. There were ten murals on each side of the chamber, though two had been covered by thick black tarps – shrouded as if in mourning. As they passed by each of the murals, Zharost was able to pick out details. Renditions of beings beyond mortal ken, clad in armour and raised as figures of martial triumph. Some were clad in gold where others were ensconced in iron. Each of them stared out across the room to regard a fellow sibling.

The primarchs, honoured and lauded, as crisp and pristine as any propagandist’s pict.

His guide stopped just short of halfway down the long processional and then turned to walk back to the door. Zharost watched him go before taking in his surroundings. The low light suited him and allowed his senses to adjust. He gazed up at the proud, sweeping form of the Ravenlord, black armour glimmering with artist’s lacquer, demonstrating a tremendous sense of motion – like the very shadows of the chamber coaxed into movement by the rendered presence. He knew, suddenly and intrinsically, what he would see if he turned and viewed Corax’s opposite. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to turn.

‘It is a hard thing to face, is it not? The sins of the father.’

A voice cut across the gloom and Zharost turned to face it. A shrunken figure stalked from the shadows, having stood so still that even Zharost’s senses – material and supernal – had slipped over him. The figure’s quiet demeanour pulsed with suppressed power, and the former Chief Librarian understood why he had not been aware of his presence.

Malcador the Sigillite, First Lord of Terra, was a thing wrought from strength and subtlety. Even his wizened features betrayed no weakness, merely a resignation. Whatever he had been studying at the far end of the chamber lingered about him, coiling like etheric smoke.

‘Do not speak,’ Malcador intoned. He gestured with one delicate hand and his staff of office snapped from where it had leant against a silver column. The moment Malcador’s fingers closed about its haft, the eagle that surmounted it blazed with sudden light and psychic fire. Zharost winced. His eyes ached. His sharpened teeth throbbed in his gums. Sweat beaded his bare scalp and his breathing came in short, sharp bursts as the unleashed psykana saturated the chamber. ‘Merely… look. Observe, and understand.’

Zharost could barely even struggle as he turned, his body moving to another’s will. He tried to force his eyes closed, but the sheer psychic exertion held them open. He stood, ramrod straight, forced to take in the sullied grandeur of the portrait.

There had been few remembrancers amongst the fleets of the VIII Legion and so what little art had returned to the Imperium’s bosom had been abstract and haunted. This rendition was no different. Even the fawning adoration of mortal hands could only do so much to soften the ghoulish, drawn features of the Night Haunter. The spill of ebony hair, the corpse-pallor of his skin, the eyes the black of deep-ocean predators. Through it all bled the persistent hunger: for vengeance, for vindication, to be lauded in his justified righteousness.

Zharost remembered in that moment what it had been like to see Konrad Curze for the first time. Amongst the Legions only the War Hounds, now the Eaters of Worlds, must have known such disappointment. A broken being, ruling over a world of charnel compliance.

‘He was never my father,’ Zharost breathed. ‘Not truly. Terra was my mother and Albia’s lowest depths were my teacher, but if I had any true father then it was the night – not the thing that haunted it.’

‘We forget, to our cost, that these weapons we cast out into the void are also men,’ Malcador allowed, carefully. The Sigillite’s psychic pressure faded, and Zharost almost stumbled forward as he found himself once again in control of his limbs. Even without his armour Zharost seemed to dwarf the old man, yet the strength that burned beneath that paper-thin skin was enough to cow the warrior. ‘Yet you are a weapon that chose disuse and atrophy rather than unjust use.’

‘There was no longer any justice in it.’ Zharost shook his head in disgust. ‘If there ever was. My war was not their war. Our ways were never theirs. We were dredged up from nothing, with only the iron will of Albia in our veins. They defied Him, and for it they were rewarded – how many Legions lay claim to Albia’s proud sons? From the ironclad guilds and the smog-choked cities, aye, and from the depths. From the darkness. Each weapon moulded by the smelter’s cruelty found its way to the stars, one way or another, and knew its purpose.’

‘Your purpose…’ Malcador paused and collected himself. The Sigillite’s gaze drifted past Zharost and up to regard again the rendered visage of the Night Haunter. ‘Your purpose was ever known to us. Sanction is a blade, black shrouded and well blooded. The galaxy cannot be won by lofty goals alone. There had to be terror behind the gold, else the stars would never have been tamed.’ He sighed. ‘There were monsters in the darkness and so we required monsters of our own – not merely knights and lords, but beasts in the shape of men.’

‘Wolves and hounds, and the children of night.’

‘Just so.’ Malcador seized upon that thought and leant in conspiratorially. ‘You understand, as I hoped you would. We have always known where you were, Fel Zharost. Though your exile was a silent affair, and the Eighth had taken themselves into their seclusion by then… we knew. We were content to leave you to your self-decided repose. But the galaxy has changed. It has turned upside down, caught fire, and fallen headlong into the shadow. In such times loyalty is as smoke. We turn instead to weapons whose mettle is known and whose strength of character has been tested.’

‘Shadow weapons for your shadow wars. Unaccountable instruments, burning away in silence.’ Zharost let himself laugh. His bare hands clenched into fists, nails tight enough against the skin that he drew blood. ‘You do not care that I die in darkness, so long as to do so serves your purpose.’

‘All things serve His purpose,’ Malcador corrected. The steel had crept into his voice. ‘But know this, Fel Zharost, you shall serve mine – and you shall do so willingly.’

‘And why would I do that, Lord Sigillite? I have seen the mind of your agent, blunt as it was. I understand the stakes that you face. The scale of the rot that was allowed to fester in your ranks. There are few who could stand in the way of what bears down upon you. Upon the entire species.’

‘I do not ask you for this boon lightly,’ Malcador said. The old man’s face was set in a mask of grim determination. ‘You have been ill used in service. Sworn to…’ Malcador gazed back up at the portrait. ‘To unjust masters. You have remained true, though. You removed yourself from the equation where others would have chosen darker ends. Now the dream we have all struggled and bled for withers, and loyalty is not as plain as the sigil worn upon the plate. If you swear yourself anew to our cause, if you choose again to serve, then I will give you what you desire.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I will bring you the justice you seek. I will help you to finally avenge yourself against the past that haunts you.’

‘Do not,’ Zharost hissed, ‘speak so lightly of what you do not understand. You were not there. You were content to cast forth your Edict without care for who was caught beneath its weight.’

Malcador clicked his tongue, momentarily rendered as an avuncular grandparent. It passed almost as quickly as it had appeared, a fleeting affectation, before he was again merely the Sigillite.

‘Tell me of your kinsman, Vathras Kell.’

‘He…’ Words failed him. ‘I could not save Vathras from himself. From the Legion.’ Zharost swallowed hard to dispel the sudden dryness of his throat. ‘Some take too readily to poison. Drink down enough foulness and anything may seem fair.’ He looked down and closed his eyes. He still remembered–

Black eyes narrowed in pitiless hate; the look of betrayal flickering through them. A duty abandoned, left to moulder long before he had ever truly left the Legion. Disappointment and disgust, mirrored in his own.

‘And if I told you that I could give you the closure you desire? That a reckoning could be brought about? What would you say then?’ The base of Malcador’s staff tapped against the floor. ‘Serve and you will have what you require. You will be able to look your past in the eye and cast it down, before you face the future.’

They cleaned and scoured his flesh of the muck and grit of a seeming eternity of darkness. Pale skin shone through beneath the harsh ablutionary lumens, burning as they did with enhanced ultraviolet spectra and cleansing radiation. The sunless pallor did not lessen beneath the waves of light and heat, nor the pressurised chem-wash that soaked him.

Serfs in grey robes and silver masks scraped his skin with cold steel strigils before finally leading him to the close confines of the arming chamber. They worked in silence to armour him, and Zharost heard only the faint clicks and felt the dull throb of interface pain.

It was strange to be clad once again in armour. Not merely because it was an unfamiliar suit but because it had been so long since he had worn it. His nerves fired erratically as they became reaccustomed to the communion. His breath came ragged from between his sharpened teeth and his chestplate heaved with the exaggerated translation of the motion.

They lowered his psychic hood into place with a further click, and it was like a circuit being reignited. His gift flowed, no longer a passive consideration or lacklustre weapon, and was suddenly a taut and coiled thing of shadow and light. The crystal lattice laced to his skull thrummed with captive power. Chemical effluent froze in the air and then boiled away to nothing. He let out a sigh of utter contentment as his mind soared, suddenly free of atrophic shackles.

The door hissed open behind him and he did not look back, expecting it to be the Sigillite or one of his many other functionaries. The silence held, though, until Zharost doubted any scrivener would have held their tongue that long.

‘It must be nice to no longer have to wear the colours of monsters,’ a rough voice scoffed, cutting through the quiet. The arming serfs bowed their heads and hurried away, chastened by the new presence.

Zharost turned, armour purring as responsiveness returned, and found himself staring into a face similar to his own. The warrior was bearded, though he had dark, cropped hair where Zharost was bald. His skin was scarred, a veteran of many battles, but his own grey plate was unmarked. It seemed almost forge-fresh. A power sword was scabbarded across his back.

‘We have all, in our time, done things which others would consider monstrous. What sets it aside from base savagery is purpose,’ he said.

‘The little lies we tell ourselves.’ The warrior laughed bitterly, and then spat. It sizzled briefly on the floor before being washed away by the last trickles of chemical wash. ‘I don’t care if they carry you onwards buoyed up by false piety. I am simply here to ensure that the Sigillite’s will is undertaken.’ He gestured sharply towards the door. ‘A ship has been prepared.’

‘And he has told you of its destination?’ Zharost’s brow rose in bemused consideration.

The warrior’s shoulders rolled in a shrug. ‘Not for me to know. I’m merely to guide you. Watch you.’ He reached back and patted the sword’s hilt. ‘And if need be, to make sure you are put down.’

‘Do I deserve the name of my would-be executioner?’ Zharost looked at his hands and the grey gauntlets which clad them. When he had been cast from the Legion, it had been with the promise of sinner’s red upon him – to wear crimson upon his gauntlets until Jago Sevatarion finally honoured his word and chose the manner of his death. The idea that this legionary, even an agent of the Sigillite, could end him was an amusing one.

‘Macer Varren,’ he snarled. Varren drew himself up as though to intimidate, but Zharost was far beyond the rank embrace of fear. He stared the other warrior down for a long moment before Varren felt obliged to continue. ‘Once of the Twelfth Legion.’

‘A World Eater lecturing anyone on the morality of combat? Wonders will never cease.’

‘Careful,’ Varren said. ‘You might not make it to the mission if you keep this up. The Sigillite’s remit for the punishment of transgressions is… quite broad.’ He chuckled darkly. ‘A testament, I have no doubt, to the poison of your gene-line and the circumstances of your isolation.’

‘You think my time in the dark has made me deviant?’

‘I think that a blade that goes long without use is liable to break, and hurt those who try to wield it as surely as the enemy. I would end you before you had the chance.’

Zharost was silent and then nodded. He sighed again and looked past Varren. Two of the Sigillite’s arming serfs stood holding a force staff between them. One end was tipped in a sphere of pale crystal, carved into the semblance of a human skull. For a moment Zharost fancied he could see wings splayed out behind it, fleshy and mammalian rather than proud aquiline pinions. He shouldered past the World Eater and took up the staff, as much a symbol of office as it was a weapon. He smiled.

‘Now we can begin. Show me to our ship.’

It was called the Achlys, a sleek void-runner more accustomed to escort duty than as a warship of the line. It would suffice for their undertaking, though.

The warriors avoided each other as much as was possible. Varren stalked the more occupied areas of the ship, a grey sentinel in the light of the lumens. Zharost haunted the darkness. He found his way into crawlspaces and maintenance passageways that wormed through the iron skin of the vessel – from the heights of the Navigator’s eyrie to the furnace-lit depths of the reactor decks.

Alone in the darkness, he tasted the lambency of the crew’s mortal dreams, swirling eddies of fear and doubt. The galaxy was aflame around them and for all their training, they were ill equipped to face down the existential terror that haunted them. Mortal humans were brief candles in the infinite dark and together they amounted to little more – yet here their dreams and fears and voices all entwined.

Save me. Save me from the void. Save me from the warp. Save me from the Arch-traitor. Save me. Save me. Save me.

‘If you cannot save yourselves,’ Zharost breathed into the humid dark, ‘then there shall be no salvation.’

When he next met the World Eater, it was upon one of the vessel’s observation decks, the great shutters sealed against the toxic tempests of the immaterium. This close to the tides of the Ruinstorm, the sea of souls was in near-constant upheaval. The Geller field strained, somewhere beyond, pushed to the limits of its protection by the howling gale of psychic force. The ship’s superstructure quivered and shook and screamed till it seemed as though the roar of the warp were vibrating through it; roaring in the voices of the damned and the Neverborn. It grated against Zharost’s mind. The light of Terra had been blinding in its fading hypocrisy, but the unlight which dwelt beneath reality’s skin was every curdled promise and broken oath. The lightless flame of destruction, unbound and untrammelled Chaos.

‘Tired of the shadows, then?’ Varren asked. He had drawn his sword and leant casually upon it, unbothered by whatever wounds he was imparting to the decking. ‘I’d wondered if you would show yourself.’

‘I have nothing to hide. Merely…’ Zharost shook his head, trying in vain to dispel the pressure. ‘Merely making myself aware of the vessel’s layout.’

‘You sound as though you expect battle to find us here,’ Varren groused.

‘This war, as I understand it, may find us anywhere. If it does then I will be prepared.’

Zharost smiled coldly. They stood, too-similar opposites. Sons of broken Legions clad in the grey of ghosts.

Varren was about to speak when his words were stolen by the sudden hoot of tocsins. The entire ship shuddered and the shutters began to rise with grinding hydraulic motion. Zharost turned and took in the new vista before him.

He sighed. ‘We follow in the footsteps of our sins.’

The outer system was littered with the debris of wars long past. Ships hung in the void, gutted and air-bled. Great streams of torn metal and desiccated corpses garlanded the wrecks, funereal in their decoration. As they passed, they could see the worn details upon the hulls and the midnight blue which shone in the distant starlight, rendered stark against the black.

There was something else. A sour note ringing behind the noise of the ship. Something sharp, but distant, like a muted cry. Zharost shook it away and let his eyes drift again over the wrecks.

‘These were ships of my Legion, once. When they were still my brothers.’ Zharost fell silent. ‘When there were still some who could be considered worthy of the expectations placed upon them.’ He turned away from the vista of ruin. His skull ached, ringing with the same tumult which had plagued the ship. Even here in the materium, it endured, clawing at his mind. He shook it away and gritted his teeth. ‘Why are we here?’

‘Truly? I have no idea. I was told to bring you here at the Sigillite’s orders. One does not question that. To try and understand his mind is to beat yourself against a wall. Futility, Night Lord. You know that, I imagine.’ Varren laughed. ‘This system holds a world called Malec’Nar. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘Some fleeting early conquest. Noted for psy-reactive environmental factors. A footnote by all the standards of the Great Crusade. Marked for Mechanicum investigation and eventual colonisation.’

Zharost nodded absently, his scalp beaded with sweat. He swayed like a drunkard. The distant, muted sound resolved. It became a cry.

The skin of reality was screaming, screaming, screaming.

‘I can feel it,’ he whispered. ‘I can hear it. Wherever we are heading, the entire world is a singular song of agony.’

It was an ugly world. Storm-wreathed, black and grey against that infinite blackness. Lightning rimed it in vast equatorial storms, stirred to furious intensity by some nameless inner turmoil. The Thunderhawk shuddered as it passed into the embrace of atmosphere and the wind clawed at it with avaricious longing. Witch-fire crawled along every line of the proud vessel, bathing it in erratic lambency.

‘No signals,’ Varren muttered as he leant forward in the grav-cradle, trying to catch Zharost’s eye, or at least his attention. ‘Not sent by machine, at any rate.’

Zharost sat back against the cool metal of the gunship and let the rocking turbulence knock his head against its walls. The pain helped to disrupt the perpetual scream of the wounded world. Otherwise it was carried, uninterrupted, in the wind’s howl, borne up and through the grey vessel as it coasted through the tormented air.

Varren’s vox clicked and he nodded to himself. ‘Our pilot says we have a viable landing site, though. One of the high docks.’

He did not explain further, and Zharost was too distracted to ask. Varren let the silence curdle a moment longer and then spoke again.

‘Why are we here, Night Lord?’

‘Do not call me that,’ Zharost whispered dully. He hunched forward, away from the rattling pain of the walls. ‘We are here because my desires align with the Sigillite’s. He has given me an opportunity to prove myself to him and to settle an old slight. Nothing more.’

A few moments later the ship shuddered with muted impact and the whine of the engines wound down. Their restraints lifted and both warriors rose in the same instant. The rear ramp folded down with a clatter of metal against metal, and they emerged out into the storm-light.

The docking spur was a long, precarious span of metal and stone jutting out from the skeletal half-formed tower which rose from the mountain. When he looked down, all Zharost could see was darkness – the depths lost to shadows and mist – against the black crystal of the mountains. It glistened oddly, wetly, with condensation and trapped light. He did not want to look at the substance of it for too long. Too much focus and the high, hollow screaming reared up again in his mind.

The temptation to let his mind range free was overwhelming. Zharost tasted the resonant air of the world and knew it for what it was. He held his gift tight to himself; caged it in the iron and stone ribs beneath old Albia. A prison of shadows to protect his soul and sanity. He trusted that darkened place more than the storm-wracked open skies of Malec’Nar.

He looked up at the spiralling towers, their frames raised from the black crystal and questing ever upwards in futility – unfinished and uncared for. There was a lesson here, he imagined. Mankind’s limitless ambition had to be matched by the solidity of action. Without it even their dreams would be stillborn.

‘You look more sickly than usual.’ Varren laughed, his voice a vox-amplified snarl. ‘I didn’t think that was possible.’

‘I am fine,’ Zharost lied. He tightened his grip on his staff but did not lean upon it as they forged onwards and off the docking spur. The ground beneath their feet ceased ringing with metal upon metal and instead thudded with the surety of stone. They passed beneath an arch that might once have been golden, though the decades of rain and soot had rendered it as black as old iron.

‘No welcome,’ Varren observed, and Zharost’s eyes flashed to him in brief irritation. ‘Perhaps we’ve been sent on a merry chase.’ He looked around, unsure of his own pronouncement. ‘What do your gifts see?’

Zharost ignored the barb. ‘There is something here. This whole world drowns in it. Agony. Hate. Bitterness branded into the very fabric of the planet. They are here. I can taste it.’

‘They?’ Varren tilted his head.

‘You saw the ships in orbit. Once, long ago, my Legion came here. Now they have returned. In one form or another. We seek a soul amongst them.’

Chains rattled in the storm’s fury, but no one stirred within the docking chambers. Great open spaces yawned, empty and waiting for cargo that would never come. Emergency lumens sputtered, casting low light and long shadows.

The abandoned precincts of the proto-hive yawned like tombs biding their time. It was almost a mercy when the screams intruded once again. This time borne by flesh throats and tortured voices.

They came in a malformed tide, none of them bearing the same scars.

One had been opened with a mortician’s kindness, bearing a forked incision down their torso, before being sewn closed once again. His chest heaved and writhed, as though something within were struggling to tear free. Another had had her arms amputated at the elbow, replaced by barbed metallic claws lodged into the barely healed wounds. Each bore surgical scarification and hideous mutilation. They wore ragged overalls and robes – dockers and archivists, scribes and minor Mechanicum adepts. All were bloodlessly pale, all had eyes that were flashes of pure black, and all screamed with a single voice.

Varren was already firing, bolter raised and braced. The first shots took the rushing vanguard in the centre mass. The thing with the distended chest burst, tumbled back in a spray of black blood, and then began to spasm. Flesh tore and ribs bent back into place with a sickening crack. Its black eyes flashed with sudden inner light and the wounds in its torso knit back together in a flood of glossy black tissue. Lips parted and flashed sharpened needle teeth. It had the look of a deep-sea predator more than a mortal man.

In some ways it is. A swimmer in the deep darkness of the sea of souls. What Magnus’ dabblers called the Great Ocean.

They kept coming. Despite their wounds, despite the hideous damage a mass-reactive shell should do to a human body, they came onwards. Varren clamped the bolter to his hip and drew his blade. The ignition cast a new light, a purer light, and the things were rendered as shadowy suggestions of the human form in its illumination.

Varren bisected a flayed and screaming skull, kicking it back before he spun into another sweeping blow. He snarled and spat as he fought, with the muted fury of his Legion. Fingers worn down to the bone clawed at his plate while splintered teeth crushed themselves to powder as they desperately sought purchase. The ghoulish things were hewn apart in a shower of limbs and heads, spraying the foul and congealed black blood. It squirmed and moved in the light, shifting in and out of reality, seeking to hide.

Zharost backhanded a screaming horror away, its skull face shattering as it was cast to the floor. He raised his staff with one hand and then locked the other about it, focusing his will through the weapon. The lumens around the chamber sparked, flared, and then finally died. The darkness flooded the space, save for the narrow sliver of corposant which danced along the staff and lit the snarling, twisted faces of what had once been citizens.

Reality shuddered. The darkness shook and turned inwards, suddenly barbed and solid. It flowed into their screaming mouths and smothered the cry, drowning it in a rush of dark light and changeling matter. The bodies slumped down and the immaterium bled away with them. Zharost let himself exhale.

The lights rose again as the baleful normality reasserted itself, and Varren looked down at the ruined forms that surrounded them. The void stuff which had held them together had fled, leaving only the shattered bodies of their victims. The slain wore their wounds as though freshly cut – red rimed and weeping.

‘What sorcery is it you wield, Night Lord?’ Varren snapped. He held his sword ready, poised for whatever strike might next loom from the shadows. ‘How is it that you hold such power over them?’

‘The ways of the psyker cannot be a mystery to you, when you serve in the Sigillite’s employ.’ Zharost laughed bitterly. ‘These things were made of the darkness and returned to it… or they were made of the warp, and returned to it. Both are true, just as neither is true.’ He prodded one of the corpses experimentally with the ferrule of his staff. Blood oozed sluggishly from its ruptured carcass, staining the worn plates of the floor.

‘But all this is known to you? These… things?’

‘No.’ Zharost shook his head and moved away from the corpses. ‘Not the… method itself, but I think, perhaps, the hands which wrought it.’

They moved deeper into the structure, past the signs of old atrocity.

Bloodstains became more prevalent. Great arterial sweeps of blood decorated the floor and walls, arcing up onto the ceiling. In places, bones had been nailed into the metal of the corridor’s walls, pinned there like anatomical specimens or shaped into crude totems. Ragged cloaks of human skin hung over doorways. Familiar horrors. So played out as to be rendered banal. He had turned from such senseless desecration long ago – the actions so divorced from purpose as to have no meaning.

Barrack halls had been converted into makeshift vivisection rooms. Storage rooms held the myriad dead, piled high like cordwood. Some had been executed while others had taken time to die, subjected to torture and experimentation.

He pushed on past all of them, dogged by Varren’s silent glare of judgement. The World Eater had barely spoken since the initial slaughter. His distaste was evident. Even one of Angron’s butchers would turn up his nose at the excesses of the VIII.

The two warriors emerged out into a central chamber, a great hollow at the structure’s heart. Benches and tables had been shattered and piled about the edges like so much kindling. The walls had been gouged away, reduced to splintered steel, and the crystalline fabric of the world had been coaxed through, extruding in questing fingers like obscene black coral.

A table remained at the heart of the chamber, like a temple’s fane, and a knot of figures crowded around it – hunched and hushed like medicae students. They paused and turned, almost with one mind. He was not surprised to see the livery of the Night Lords upon their plate. Zharost was, however, surprised to see the one who led them.

‘Vathras.’

Epistolary Vathras wore the unkindness of time upon his skin like a brand. A pale reflection of Zharost’s own pallid strength, he was utterly hairless, his skin marked with lines as though he had aged centuries in the time since Zharost had last mentored him. The Librarian laughed darkly and shook his head. The others with him held their peace. Cyfan, with his dark hair and sharp eyes. Dimav, still bearing the inked chain of skulls about his throat – a Nostraman gang mark he had carried from childhood. The last was not known to him. They burned bright, but compared to Zharost and Vathras they were lesser lights.

‘They said there would be trials… I did not expect that it would be you.’ Vathras laughed again. ‘Are you some shade, dredged up from the deep shadows of the warp? Are you judgement, Fel Zharost? Or is it guilt that summons you now?’ He looked askance at Varren. ‘And you bring a pet? He has the stink of a dog of war about him.’

‘Mind your tongue, before I take it from your head,’ Varren muttered.

‘There does not need to be enmity here,’ Zharost said calmly. ‘Not if you explain. There is a chance now. As there was not before.’

‘Explain? What is there to explain? You abandoned me!’ Vathras snapped. Black lightning crackled about his gauntlet. The chamber shifted. The black crystal danced with refracted light, alive with the sudden resonance of thought and emotion. ‘Long before you ever scuttled away under whatever rock held you. You turned from me, Zharost. Judging me by your own demented metric, measuring me against whatever standard you hold the world to. What gives you the right? What purity was there beneath Albia’s ruin that was held to higher regard than the slums of Nostramo? We watched it die together, and I knew… I knew that in your hearts you considered it a blessing.’

‘It was. That world had no right to exist as it did. All it served to do was poison our Legion and the galaxy. The crusade deserved better than its gutter leavings.’

‘And so you left. Left all the students you still favoured to the whim and will of the Legion. No Chief Librarian to guide us and with our gifts shackled, while they brought mortals to leech the primarch’s fitful mind. While you chose exile over duty. Forsaking your responsibilities. We were made sport of.’ Vathras slammed his fist against his breastplate. ‘Doubted our hearts. Our appetites. Those of Terran stock especially. We were not all as fortunate as you, to run into the dark. We were traded like cattle. Bartered away. We saw the claws of the Seventeenth, then. Knowledge to scar the soul! After that there was only service. We bound the things they taught us to summon. There is power here, for those with the strength to rule it.’

‘We were never lords of the night, merely slaves to darkness,’ Zharost said. There was sadness in his pronouncement. ‘Forgive me, brother.’

Zharost raised his hand, called forth his gift and a lance of pure psychic energy earthed itself into the stranger’s skull. The psychic hood bolted to his scalp detonated, showering them in shards of crystal and bone. Vathras’ kindled anger flared forth and he raised a long, jagged dagger from his belt, lashing out physically and psychically as he advanced on Zharost. The blade cut a ragged scar into the grey plate. Zharost fell back, raising his staff in a meagre attempt at defence.

Varren hurled himself forward in a sudden rush of motion, sword up and swinging. In that moment he seemed the consummate warrior; entire Legions could have fallen before him. His opponents moved off in different directions: Cyfan to the left and Dimav to the right. The World Eater turned one way and then the other, before his blade swept round towards Dimav.

The blade’s edge gouged into the Night Lord’s pauldron, spinning him about. The Librarian threw up his hands and black fire coiled around his wrists before vomiting forth. It wreathed Varren. His armour snarled as servos threatened to seize, as plate threatened to buckle, but he shouldered through the fire and drove his blade into the other warrior’s chest. Momentum carried them both to the ground. Zharost could hear the echoing war cry of the World Eater as he pulled himself up with the blade and then slammed it back through Dimav’s tattooed throat with a snap of vertebrae.

Cyfan moved swiftly, far quicker than his armoured bulk would suggest was possible, and his hands wrapped around Varren’s helm. Unbridled psykana saturated the air and the black crystals sang – alive with resonant energy. Zharost tasted the intensity of the exertion, even as he fought and struggled with Vathras. He saw the other warrior through a sheen of black fire and lightning.

Varren was screaming in rage, bellowing his hate into the air as the Night Lord’s quicksilver mind coiled about his. Zharost saw, with his mind’s eye–

The cool, clean angles of an apothecarion, spattered with lifeblood and butcher’s leavings. Varren pinned to the table like a specimen as saw blades bit and drills incised. The coiled menace of metal as it slid beneath bone and tasted brainmeat. Teeth gritted, blood-flecked where he had bitten his own tongue. The looming shadow, hands vast against his shoulders, almost closing around his throat, as it leered with predatory glee – scarred lips parted over iron teeth.

‘My son…’

Zharost shook aside the looming presence of Varren’s delirium, the cloying toxic echo of what might once have seemed inevitable, and blocked another strike from Vathras. Another followed it. His staff rang with each impact, turning the blade aside. They seemed almost evenly matched, though he could feel Vathras’ strength flowing with the strange psychic tides of the damned world. They had perverted it; let the madness of the warp coil through it. Such bargains had their gifts just as they had their price.

The world shuddered and convulsed around them as they fought, as they drove each other from one end of the chamber to the other. Their minds warred, burning with ghost-light, their thoughts manifest upon the air as each tried in vain to gain advantage. He caught Vathras’ knife hand by the wrist and yanked him forward, aiming to brain him with the glittering length of the force staff, but instead Vathras’ fist knocked him sprawling. He spat blood as he looked up.

They were no longer in the ritual chamber. He was sprawled in the primarch’s audience chamber, and for a moment Vathras was the looming silhouette of the First Captain, glaive raised. He bared his teeth and hurled himself back up.

The glamour shuddered and spasmed. It ran like wax and became something else. He saw the hate in Vathras’ eyes, yet softened by time. He was younger then. They both were. Struggling to find their place within the VIII. To understand their purpose. Zharost had clung to his own, but he had been forced to watch as Vathras’ had slipped away. Subsumed by the poison of the new Legion. The ways of the gutter, where still they whispered half-meant prayers to rope and razor.

‘I cannot stand with you, Vathras. Their ways are not our ways, and without that purpose we are nothing. You are nothing.’ His own voice whispered from the shadows, rich with disdain.

‘You cannot use my past against me,’ Zharost snarled. ‘I am not as chained by it as you are.’

The illusion dissipated, swallowed up by the spiralling shadows which now danced about them. The psychoscape responded to his hate and his frustration, and so they staggered as they fought, as the black deeps of Albia reared up about them. The vastness of the chamber became claustrophobic with the suggestion of tunnels, with the idea of crippling isolation. Zharost bludgeoned his brother with the weight and heft of their origins – with the muck that still clung to them.

In the night beneath the world, death had not come clad in black, but in grey. The grey of creeping plague or stone-slip and tunnel collapse. Zharost was armoured in that grey. Like a phantom. Like an omen of mortality.

He brought his staff round and the skull focus at its tip gouged across Vathras’ cheek. He staggered back and tried to drive into Zharost’s thoughts once more. Zharost raised walls of adamantine within his skull… and then let them shatter.

They stood upon the broken earth of a dying world and felt it quake beneath their boots. Fire poured from the heavens and the planet’s inviolate skin tore – hurling great gouts of volcanic blood skyward as it did. The streets of the city were in upheaval as the spires collapsed and scythed through the macro-transit highways. For the first time on the surface of the sunless world, there was light. All-consuming, piteous, terrible light.

Fel Zharost burned with the light of the dying world, crowned in the final illumination that had consumed Nostramo. His hand shot out from the fire and fury and grasped Vathras’ head. He could feel the dome of his skull between his fingers, as precarious as the tectonic plates of the ailing world.

‘This… is not judgement. We have passed too far beyond that,’ Zharost growled. ‘Everything you have done has been without purpose. Without meaning. To end you is not justice.’ He let his fingers close. He could feel the hardened bone begin to break under the effort of his gauntlet. Not clad in sinner’s red, but daubed in killer’s crimson.

‘This is vindication.’

The illusion broke with a snap of displaced reality, and the conduits broke with it. Vathras screamed as his skull shattered and his life ended, echoing with the forever-scream of the warp. Ringing with the symphony of horror he had conjured forth and slaved in human skin.

Shards of black crystal filled the air around them as the great spars broke apart. Zharost strode through it as though through a light rain, unbothered and unafraid. He lashed out, forcing Cyfan to his knees. Zharost’s mind reached out and seized the lesser consciousness, dwarfing light and darkness both as he drank his thoughts and devoured his dreams. The warrior could only spasm and whimper, caught in the same web of focused terror and predation he had tried to trap Varren in, before falling dead.

The World Eater threw himself up, eyes wide with bleary panic. He brought his sword up and stopped only when he realised that it lay against Zharost’s throat.

‘Is… is it over?’ the World Eater asked uncertainly.

Fel Zharost simply smiled. A cold and unpleasant thing.

‘It is over,’ he breathed. The dark weight of the place was gone. Earthed in death and sacrifice. They would no longer trouble the Imperium, no longer sow madness at the behest of Warmasters or false gods.

The Sigillite had delivered him a gift, a boon. He had held out the throat of the past and allowed Zharost to wield the blade.

Whatever the future held, now it could be faced down without doubt.

About the Author

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Grim Repast is his first novel for Black Library. He is also the writer of the short stories ‘Ghosts of Iron’, ‘Respite’s End’ and ‘Champions, All’ for Warhammer 40,000, and ‘Cold Cases’ for Warhammer Crime. When not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

An extract from The Solar War.

Terra

On the first of Primus the sirens rang across Terra.

On the myriad worlds conquered and ruled by the Imperium of Man, they talked of year divisions, of time sliced into a thousand equal slivers. First division, second division, third, and so on, without variation or character, until the weight of counting reached a thousand, and one year tipped over into the next. On worlds of endless night or blinding days, a year was the same. In an empire spanning a galaxy, anything else would have been meaningless.

0000014.M31 was how surviving records would mark the first moment of that day, stamped and corrected for temporal accuracy, standardised and stripped of any meaning. But, here, on the world whose night and day and seasons had given mankind its concept of time, the old counting still meant something and so did the moment that one year died and another was born: the Feast of Two Faces, the Day of New Light, the Renewal – on and on went its names. But for longer than memory it had been the first of Primus, firstborn of the three hundred and sixty-five days that would follow, a day of hope and new beginnings.

The turning of that year began with snow on the northern battlements of the Imperial Palace, where three brother demigods watched the night skies above. It began with the dawn light and icy chill reaching into a tower-top chamber and stirring the painted cards dealt by a man who was older than any knew. It began with the sirens calling out, one at first, high on the Palace spires, before the cry was picked up by others, on and on across the turning globe. The sound echoed through the mountain-sized space ports and rasped from vox-horns in the deep strata of the Atlantean Hives.

On and on it went, stilling the hands of people as they ate and worked. They looked up. In caves beneath the earth, and hive vaults, and under the smog drifts, they looked up. Of those that could see the sky, a few thought they could make out new stars amongst the firmament and froze at the promise of each pinprick of light: a promise of fire and ash and an age of loss. And with the sound of sirens, fear spread, unnamed but still spoken.

‘He is here,’ they said.

Prison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit

‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face. She breathed, and pulled the blanket over her from where it had slipped onto the floor. The air was cool and dank in the cell, scented with the tang of air that had been exhaled too much. She blinked for a second. Something was different. She reached out a hand and touched the metal wall. Moisture clung to the rivets and rust scabs. The thrum of the ship’s engines had gone. Wherever they were, they were stationary in the void.

She let her hand drop and let out a breath. The tatters of the memory-dream still clung to her eyelids. She focused, trying to pull back the threads of the dream even as they slid into darkness.

‘I must remember…’ she said to herself.

‘The prisoner will stand and face the wall.’ The voice boomed out of the speaker set above the cell door.

She stood instinctively. She wore a grey jumpsuit, worn and faded. She put her hands on the wall, fingers splayed. The door unlocked with a clang, and footsteps sounded on the grated floor. The guard would be one just like the rest: crimson-clad and silver-masked, the humanity in its voice concealed by vox distortion. All the gaolers were the same, as constant as the ticking of a clock that never struck the hour.

Small spaces, locked doors, questions and suspicions – such had been her world for the seven years since she had come back to the Solar System. That was the price for what she had seen, for what she remembered. She had been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.

She heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth before she could stop it.

Silence.

She waited. There would not be a punishment for her asking, no beatings, no withdrawal of food or humiliation – that was not how this imprisonment worked. The punishment was silence. She had no doubt that other, more visceral methods were used on other prisoners – she had heard the screams. But for her there had only been silence. Seven years of silence. They did not need to ask her questions, after all. They had taken the memory spools out of her skull, and those recordings would have told them everything they wanted and more.

‘We are still in the void, aren’t we,’ she said, still facing the wall. ‘The engine vibrations have stopped, you see. No way of missing it if you have spent any time on ships… I spent time on a warship once. You never lose the sense of it.’ She paused, waiting for a response, even if it was just the sound of retreating footsteps and the door shutting.

Silence again.

That was strange. She had tried talking to guards in the early years, and their response had been to leave her without reply. After a while, that had felt worse than if they had struck a whip across her back. They had never beaten her, though, or even touched her. Even when they opened her skull to remove the memory spools, they had sedated her, as though that made the violation that followed more acceptable.

She supposed that such small mercies had to do with Qruze or Loken. The former Luna Wolves had watched over her as much as they could. But that had still left her a prisoner of the greatest and darkest prison in the Imperium. Loken had said that he would free her, but she had refused. Even while it pained her, she understood why she had to remain locked up. How could she not? After all, had she not seen the true face of the enemy? Four years of life on the Vengeful Spirit amongst the Sons of Horus, in the shadow of their father, who now had set the galaxy alight with civil war. What other reward could there be for remembering those days? A galaxy shrunk to silence and plasteel walls, with only dreams and memories to speak to her.

She had begun to dream memories after a few months, dreams of her home on Terra, of the sunlight shattering across the edge of the Arcus orbital plate, her mother laughing and calling after her as she ran through the hydro-gardens. And she had dreamed of her time amongst the Luna Wolves, and the Sons of Horus, of people now long dead. She had asked for parchment and pen, but none had been given to her. She had gone back to the old games her mind-nurse had taught her, ways of tucking memories away when she woke from sleep, ways of remembering the past even as it fled into the distance. In the silence, she had found that memories and dreams were all she had, all she was.

‘Are we still somewhere in the Solar System?’ she asked, and twitched her neck to look behind her. Why was she still talking? But then why had the guard not left? ‘The ship doesn’t feel like it’s preparing for translation. Where are we?’

They had come for her in her cell on the Nameless Fortress three nights ago. They had loaded her into a box barely big enough to stand upright in. She had felt the box judder and sway as machines had lifted it and her. They had let her out into this cell, and she had recognised the vibration of a void-ship under power. It had been comforting at first, but her dreams had not been, and now the silence of this moment was feeling stranger with each elongating second.

‘Why was I taken away from the fortress?’ she asked. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Where we all wish we could go, Mistress Oliton,’ said Garviel Loken. She whirled, and the end of her cell was gone and a wolf was rising from a pool of dark water beneath the moon. Its eyes were black spheres, and its bared-teeth grin was wide as it spoke. ‘You are going home.’

In the dark of her cell, Mersadie Oliton woke to silence and lay still, waiting for the dream to fade or for herself to wake again.

Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf

The first ship of the onslaught died as it breached the veil of reality. Streams of plasma reached out from gun platforms. White fire smashed into the ship’s prow. Lightning and glowing ectoplasm streamed behind its hull. Macro shells detonated amongst the molten wounds already cut into its skin. Turrets and spires sheared from its bulk. Towers broke from its spine. It kept coming even as its bows were torn apart. The burning wreck struck the first of the mines scattered across the dark. Explosions burst around it. The front portion of the ship sheared from the back. Prow and gun decks hinged down. Atmosphere vented from the exposed interior. Debris scattered, burning for an eye-blink before the flames ate the air trapped in the wreckage.

‘Ship kill,’ called a sensor adept from across the bridge of the Lachrymae.

Sigismund watched the intruder’s death as it spread across the pict screens above the command dais. He was armoured, his sword chained to his wrist and resting point down on the deck at his feet. He did not blink or move as the dying ship tumbled across his sight. In the still depths of his mind he heard the words that had brought him to this place and time.

‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

Around him the command crew was silent. Eyes fixed on instruments and screens. This was the beginning of the moment they had all known would end the years of waiting. Some, perhaps, had thought or hoped that it would never come. But here it was, marked with fire.

I chose, Keeler, he thought, and in his mind, he heard again the words that Dorn had spoken in judgement of that choice.

‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

‘As you will, father.’

‘I am not your father!’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’

‘I chose,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and here I stand at the end.’

The fire from the dead warship spread across the displays.

‘If they come at us like this, the slaughter will barely be worth the sweat,’ growled Fafnir Rann.

‘They will not give us that luxury,’ replied Boreas from further back on the platform. Sigismund did not look around at where the holo-projections of the Assault captain or his lieutenant hovered at his shoulders. Each of them stood on the command deck of one of the Lachrymae’s sister ships.

Rann wore void-hardened Mark III armour, with reinforcing studs bonded to his shins and left shoulder. The scars of battles fought here, at the edge of the system, ran beneath the fresh yellow lacquer. His tall boarding shield hung in his right hand, the twin axes mag-locked to its back echoed in the heraldry painted on the shield’s face. Sigismund imagined he could see the warped smile on Rann’s face as he turned to Boreas and shrugged.

The holo-image of the First Lieutenant of the Templars did not move. Unhelmed, his face was a single twisted scar, and if there was any emotion beyond cold fury behind his eyes, Sigismund could not see it. Boreas’ sword of office stood almost as tall as he did, its guard the cross of the Templars, its blade etched with the names of the dead.

‘All ships, stand by,’ said Sigismund softly, and heard the orders ripple out.

The vibration in the deck rose in pitch. The dull ache that had been building in his skull for the last hours was sharpening. He noticed one of the human deck crew shiver and wipe a hand across a bead of blood forming in her nose.

‘Hold to our oaths and the strength of our purpose,’ he called.

Whispers buzzed at the edge of his thoughts, razor tips scratching over metal. They had needed to sedate every astropath in the fleet two hours before, as a wave of psychic pressure had sent them babbling and screaming. It had become more intense with every passing moment, and it presaged one thing: it was the bow wave of a truly vast armada coming through the warp, bearing down on the Solar System like a storm front. Horus and the traitors were coming.

‘Etheric surge detected!’ shouted a sensor officer.

‘Here it comes,’ said Rann, and brought his fist to his chest. ‘Honour and death.’

‘For the primarch and Terra,’ said Boreas.

‘For our oaths,’ said Sigismund. The images of his two brothers blinked out.

He reached down and pulled his own helm from his belt and locked it in place over his head. ‘May my strength be equal to this moment,’ he said to himself as the helm display lit in his eyes. The data of the battle sphere overlaid his sight.

The Plutonian Gulf glittered with weapon platforms, torpedo shoals and mine drifts. Together they formed a great web, tens of thousands of kilometres deep, stretching from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun’s light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress that could have stood against a fleet.

The sheet of stars erupted with lightning. Rents opened in the vacuum. Nauseating colours and dazzling light poured out as ship after ship surged from nothing into being. Tens, and then hundreds. The sensor servitors in the Lachrymae twitched and gabbled as targets multiplied faster than they could vocalise updates.

Mines detonated, explosions leaping from one to another in chains that stretched across the dark. Gun platforms opened up. Macro shells, rockets and plasma struck metal and stone, bored in and exploded. Ships died even as they tasted reality, armour stripped by fire, guts spilled into the dark. In the first ten seconds, over a hundred vessels burned to wreckage. Most had been former warships of the Imperial Army, crewed by humans who had given their oath to Horus and been rewarded with the honour of being the first to draw their blades in this battle. They died for that honour, burning too in the ruin of their ships, hulls shredded around them.

But they kept coming.

Ship after ship, tearing reality like flags waving in front of a gun-line. The first Legiones Astartes warship surfaced from the warp. It was named the Erinyes, and it was a bombardment galleon of the IV Legion: a five-kilometre-long hull wrapped around a trio of nova cannon barrels. She loosed all three shots as the void kissed her skin. Each nova cannon shell was the size of a Battle Titan, its core filled with unstable plasma. They had no target, but they needed none. They ran straight into the heart of the defences and exploded with the force and light of a star’s birth. Gun platforms vanished. Mines lit off in spheres of red flame. Fire poured from the defences as more ships rammed past the debris of their dead kin.

The light of the blaze flooded through the Lachrymae’s screens and viewports. Sigismund’s helm display dimmed.

‘Engage,’ he said, and the Lachrymae leapt forwards. Twenty strike cruisers and fast destroyers followed in tight formation. Lance fire speared out from them, slicing into ships as they cut across the front of the enemy fleet. Plumes of ghost-light and ectoplasm stretched like arms through the dark as more ships punched through from the warp.

A backwash of etheric lightning struck the Imperial Fists cruiser Solar Son. It spun, its hull cracking and crumpling as the laws of reality went into flux. The Lachrymae and its sisters did not pause but plunged on. They had one purpose in this moment: to kill as many of the enemy as possible while they clawed from the warp onto the shore of reality. For the moment, the Imperial Fists’ prey was vulnerable, and the First Sphere fleet were predators.

The Lachrymae’s guns found the skin of the gun-barge Fire Oath before it could light its void shields. Macro shells punched through gun decks and exploded. Munitions cooked off in loading hoists. The Fire Oath’s hull bulged, then burst. Building-sized pieces of hull scythed out, caught the flank of a battle cruiser as it emerged from the warp and tore its command castle from its back. The warp breach it had emerged from pulsed and swallowed the wreckage.

‘Hold,’ called Sigismund, his voice passing through the ships of his command via crackling vox-link. ‘For our oaths, we hold true.’

The Lachrymae sliced on while its mortal crew screamed as ghosts and nightmares flooded their sight. Reality in the battle sphere was now little more than tattered scraps blowing in the night. The Lachrymae rolled, her guns finding enemy after enemy. But for each one that died, another three came from the warp.

Deadfall torpedoes set in the void triggered and speared forwards. Carcasses of ships split and burned. Pluto’s fortress-moons found their range to the first of the invaders and spoke. Newly lit void shields flashed as they collapsed. Volleys answered. The reserve fleets holding close to the moons powered forwards and began to kill and die. The light of battle swelled, blurring with the glow of thousands of warp transitions, until which side was firing and which was burning was lost in a rippling blaze tens of thousands of kilometres across. Hours later, the light of that fire would glimmer in the night above the battlements of the Imperial Palace as the sirens called and alarums rang to tell that Horus had, at last, brought his war to the birth system of humanity.

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