AUTHOR'S NOTE: Okay, so here comes Chapter 3, and this is where the fluff starts intruding on the plotline. I hope I'm doing it justice. I'd be happy to hear any critique on it. I stayed up a little bit too late for this one and my mind was reeling at the end, I might even hate it when I see it in the morning, who knows...


{ ..III.. }

It was almost five years to the day since it had happened. The Great Change. She recalled it as clear and cold as a bolt through the brain.

Katrys is thirteen and happy. Probably the happiest she will ever know. Her family are around her, Mum and Dad either side with the grocery bags going swish-swish against their legs, and her two older brothers racing ahead out into the open air of the rooftop carpark, their arms full of bright, colourful boxes with ribbons. They are rushing to the family car to load up the boot before going home. They even rented one of Katrys' favourite kids-vids for the whole family to watch, though Tamlyn thinks those vids are only for 'babies'!

Dad and Mum are laughing about last night's dinner, how Dad, who had cooked again which was always a gamble, had botched it up big time by putting too much xillimus clove in the curry. The whole family had raced to the fridge to drink milk, or juice, or whatever they could to cool down their palates. They had ended up getting take-away, but Tamlyn and Dad had dared each other to see how much more they could eat without crying. Tamlyn had won.

As they walked out into the open air carpark, the sun beamed cheerfully down on them, and the sky was the most pure blue she would ever know.

That was why it had been so surprising. It had happened on such a beautiful mid Spring day, and with all these people around, wandering in and out of the mall, putting away their bags of groceries and shopping, and chatting as if there was not a single thing wrong in all the Imperium.

Of course she had learned the stories at college of what was out there beyond the fringes of her solar system, and who protected them from it. It had been all over the vid-net about how their world and several others stood on the threshold between the Imperium and the Eye of Terror. But they were well protected by the forces of the Emperor. Nobody ever thought anything would actually happen. Not like it was about to.

A thunderclap!

People jumped. A woman shrieked and her baby, locked in his stroller, began to cry.

Then, looking around at each other, all the people suddenly felt foolish, as though they had all just got a silly scare from the most ridiculous of sounds. Some of them began to laugh in embarrassment, pointing out their reactions and glancing up at the bright blue sky.

"What was that?" A woman asked her mother from the next car over. "By the sweat of His Throne, I almost leapt out of my skin!"

Katrys' mother laughed and nodded her agreement. All the adults seemed to think it was such a silly thing; in their heads they explained it away as the backfire of some old car, or the ancient ventilation pipes popping again in the lower levels of the carpark. The pipes did that on occasion when the gas built up too high.

But Katrys and her brothers were not so easily settled; and neither was the poor infant in the stroller. The kids could feel something awful in the air, though not one of them was able to voice it. It was just a feeling, deep down in your guts.

A foul smell swamped the carpark then, like nothing in this world. It made Katrys gag.

"It's okay, honey." Her father said to her then, ruffling her hair in that way she hated and loved at the same time. Though right now she loved it. Any assurance was more than welcome. "Probably just the gas pipes gone off the blink. What a noise, it even got me jumpin' outta my-"

-He stopped talking. That was the worst part. Because those were the last words she ever heard cross her father's lips.

Another thunderclap! Though this time she saw the lightning, amongst other things. But it was not like any lightning she had ever seen before.

Lightning didn't cut sideways through the air like that. Lightning wasn't supposed to rip through people and cars and reinforced rockcrete walls. But this one did. And it was followed by another and yet another. Other things came with the lightning, bounding and leaping with mesmerizing speed. The sounds ripped through the air and people began to scream.

Real screams. Not like the ones she heard on all those horror-vids her brothers would sneak into the house for them to watch when their parents were away. No, these screams made you sick to your toes. They made you feel the pain of whoever was making such a sad, horrible noise, till you wished you would never hear it again. Bone ripping screams that started off shrill and high, went inhumanly low, and then suddenly cut off with a sharp wet crack!

Then a terrible, hideous roar broke across the city and there was no mistaking it was not of this world. That only a beast larger than the buildings themselves could have the voice to make such a sound.

"Emperor's blood!" a man cried. "Run, everybody ruuuuuuuuunnnn!"

His cries were cut off as a tiny horde of chittering monstrosities fell upon him tearing his flesh from his bones.

Then Katrys watched as her father was catapulted into the sky. Something had coiled around him, a huge black tentacle, and snatched him from the carpark as though he were nothing but a plaything. This man who had been nothing short of a giant to her, so indomitable with his strong hands, big black beard and fierce grey eyes. She remembered his face, floating away from her, racked with pain and white with terror; his arms reaching helplessly out for hers. Then he was gone. Forever.

She remembered seeing blood. So much blood.

It was true. The stories about what lay outside their solar system were all true. They weren't protected like the politicians had promised. There was no protection from something that could just materialize out from a bright sunny day and start devouring people, burning them and tearing them limb from limb.

Katrys was bereft of any sense, left in a mute docility. She knew bad things were happening around her and that people were dying, but there was nothing the thirteen year old could do to assimilate the experience into something cogent for her young, naiive mind. Like her brothers she stood frozen and cold in the sunlight.

All her pretty birthday presents lay scattered across the rockcrete parking bay in pools of blood, and ragged chunks of flesh and bone. She would discover much later that the presents contained everything she had ever desired in the world as a thirteen year old, but she would never have use for them after this.

Her mother was screaming hysterically, crouched down beside the car while her two brother stood transfixed by the things chittering and howling around them. Katrys wondered why her mother was not protecting them. How could she be that way, and not carry them away from all the horror? It had been a selfish thought and one she was ashamed of. But it had marked her from that day onwards.

We are all nothing but buckets of flimsy flesh and blood!

Creatures swooped down from the sky. They landed on people and more blood sprayed the air. Until it was raining a fine, wet crimson mist. The creatures screamed so loud that the impossible harmonics of their daemonic vocal cords made your bones feel as though they might vibrate out of your skin. The sound turned your bowels to water.

It was a dance of utter destruction. Like those old doco-vids she watched with her father, of the wild, with all the animals hunting one another and feasting on each other's entrails. She had always been fascinated by them. But now humanity was on the lower links of a food-chain she had never comprehended and it was indescribable to even imagine the things she saw that day.

They were brightly coloured the Screamers that flew down upon them. So vivid as to seem electric. But if you looked too long at those colours they began to do things to your mind, like making you want to tear your own eyes out from your head in the hope to never see them again.

A Screamer was like a manta ray, maybe a little bigger. But these swam through the air, and their bodies rippled with poisonous spines and bladed fins.

Everyone was falling and screaming and dying. Men, women, children – no one was safe from the daemons.

-Across from her the stroller stands empty, the bawling infant is gone!-

Katrys could not recall when it happened but the sky was one moment blue, and the next full of ships. Drop ships, military transports, Thunderhawk gunships (which she would learn more about later on), and other craft. Great balls of energy shot up from somewhere below and several ships were destroyed by them, careening away in smoke trails across the bright blue sky.

The Thunderhawk gunships, which to her looked just as evil as the daemons around her, circled to land. One of the huge vehicles actually landed nearby squashing the family car as if it were a soda can. She realized then that her mother and brothers were missing.

Something charged toward her. She would have been dead if not for the huge, hull-mounted heavy bolters of the Thunderhawk.

The bolters erupted so loudly that she toppled onto her rump like a rag doll. The thing that had been coming at her, all red spines and long spidery legs, was instantly atomized from existence.

Her ears rang like clarion bells and she felt a wave of nausea overcome her.

A hatch opened in the rear of the Thunderhawk and a squad of gigantic men in silver and white armour stormed out firing into the foul things leaping and chittering around them. Their weapons sounded almost as horrible as the daemons. Plasma guns flared and fired searing bolts of sun-like energy that vaporized everything before them and also sent out waves of heat as hot as a furnace even from behind. Bolters roared like thunder and lascannons howled and whined, obliterating all those around them. A war was waging and it would go down in the annals of Imperial Warfare, of lost hope and a last ditch effort to save the innocent souls of Orphregus from utter annihilation.

Big Silver had grabbed her then. Broken away from his squad.

Her family was gone. Everyone gone. And he held her like a little precious doll in one arm while his bolter in the other bellowed out a mighty disc of flame that sent high-explosive bolts into the rushing daemons. Katrys doubted she would ever get her hearing back. And she was sure this gigantic armoured beast that held her in its whirring mechanical arms was bound to kill her soon enough.

Then something rose up behind them. It was Katrys who noticed it first.

Every day after that one Katrys would curse herself and her infantile cowardice for not warning the Space Marine of the danger. Not that he would have heard her above the din, but she might have at least tried.

Hind sight was a cruel judge and jury.

A great fiend rose up behind them. Katrys helplessly looked up at it, all the way up to its terrible visage. And something inside her collapsed, never to return to her. Just looking at the entity broke her mind apart.

It was all red, ruby red, blood red. Standing upon four mighty hooved legs with bright white spines erupting from its hinges. Its torso was gigantic and shimmered with a virulent energy all of its own. Great arms ending in tremendous saw-toothed blades hung low to either side. And its face, she would never forget that face.

Sweet blood of the Emperor, that horrible face!

It wore a helm of glass, or what looked to be glass, atop its head. You could see right through it. Yet inside there was no ghastly face to be seen, no terrible daemonic features. It was worse, for, crawling wildly about within the confines of that hellish helm were the thousand tortured souls of all those the creature had eviscerated and murdered. Souls that pressed themselves, each as unidentifiable as the next, screaming and howling pitifully against the glass.

But it was the tail that struck the marine. It struck him from behind and with unimaginable force, powered by muscles brutalized from eons spent in the baffling physical laws of the Warp. It ripped right through Big Silver's armour as if it were paper, and though the Space Marine did not make a noise, she felt his body quake and fall slack beneath her.

As they fell to the bloody ground the brave Space Marine turned his bolter on the daemon and fired. Explosions tore across the daemon's mighty frame and it toppled backward with an soul shredding howl.

Then Big Silver had used his gauntlet to tear a hole in the wall of the air-conditioning duct beside them.

"Run and hide, little one!" Big Silver commanded her in a voice as deep and resonant as what she imagined her Guardian Angel's should have been. "And do thus until you find help. Seek out the Guard. They will protect you and get you off this world. Take this." He handed her a round disc of strange golden wood, flecked with black metal. It reminded her of a cogwheel though the grooves were smoother and more intricate. "RUN!"

And he had pushed her through the opening until she plummeted all the way down to the basement…