Chapter 24: In the Dark


Twilight couldn't even hear her own shrieks of surprise over the roar from the wall of liquid shadow bearing down on her. For other ponies, that may have been it as they were swept away like a leaf in a hurricane. But Twilight was far from the average pony. Her arcane instinct was drilled into her by years of rote and honed to near-perfection in the crucible of tasks that led to her becoming a princess.

In a flash, she projects a flickering shield as a single coherent thought and shuts out the chaotic storm in the infinitesimal moment before it crashed over her. Her own familiar ruby glow blots out the screeching maelstrom that scrapes past the arcane wall as the icy talons rage against the protective curtain. It screams at her, and Twilight can only hold the little bubble of energy together as the flensing gales rages against her protective sphere. It lasts for moments that seem like hours. The yawning howl of cyclonic winds blister past with a keening scream. But the Alicorn's senses swim as she's pulled into the midst of the abyssal whirlwind and shaken like a well mixed appletini. There wasn't even a ground: no up, no down, just the impenetrable hypnotic miasma of screaming black and purple colour.

When the winds die down and her eyes open again, everything the Alicorn knows is gone.

Where once there was the monochromatic desert, or the shadow draped hardpan, now there's only cold, wet, mildew encrusted cobblestone. Her magic provides that thin film under her hooves that keeps her apart from the slimy rock. But as the Alicorn stands alone in a refuse strewn alleyway, its putrescent stink of rotten offal and wet paper clings to every surface even before she can even dissipate the shield. All above her the skies roil in a blood red ocean, marred by clotted black clouds that she could only hope was all an unfortunate byproduct of the cherry-hued haze. Nerving herself up with a deep breath that turns into a gagging cough, Twilight pops the protective bubble. The fading sound of her protective magic rings with a familiar and almost cheery sound, the only one of its kind as she's greeted by a bleak and faded world.

All around her are towers and spires as far as the eye can see. The skeletal shambles of wildly dissimilar shanty town peaks jut from the skyline as they warp and sag at every opportunity. The mismatched shingles of aged roofs flap and clap in the dying winds that billow from the sanguine overcast sky. Each of the streets twist and wend under the aegis of overhanging wooden balconies that belly under their own weight in mocking emulation of Canterlot's resplendent grandeur. There's no green yards, no beautiful murals or painted walls, just cracked whitewash that flecked off of dull grime encrusted wooden slats. Taking a moment, Twilight swallows the rising tang of apprehension. The air hangs thick with acrid industrial runoff and cloying woodsmoke. All together, the chilly and lonely world sits in a deep and dismal melancholy wallow.

A thin trickle leaks from between her hind hooves, offending her nostrils with its awful stink. With a cringe, she steps out of the putrid rivulet of filth and into a shallow refuse heap. Looking down at some crumpled papers, she spots unfamiliar script in a distinctly different language. But she didn't need to read the message to recognize the eight-pointed star daubed so crudely over the avian emblem stamped on the fibrous parchment. It was the same symbol that etched itself in her book.

"Luna?" Twilight whisper shouts above the ambient noise, hearing only the distant whine of wind as if sifts through gaps in tall spires and meanders through empty streets. The Alicorn glances behind her, seeing shut doors in a winding alleyway. A sagging cart laden with splintered bits, ruined stone, and rotten sacks block her immediate path. Bellying down to crawl under only seemed worse as the bottom dripped stagnant fluids into that sickly stream.

"Princess Luna?!" Twilight's shout rises louder this time, echoing off the warped wooden walls before filtering off into the dim scarlet sky. But another sound greets her. Rather than the lonesome wiles of the unknown wind, a creek of rusty metal and steady clop of shod hooves draws her forward. Somepony else could help.

Darting forward to the mouth of the alleyway where a splintered wooden crate lies in neglect, she peers out into the small roadway that her alleyway had funneled her.

It's a cold and dreary sight as she catches a glimpse of the supposed po- that's not a pony. Two grotesque figures resemble some bipedal human, legs severed and replaced with iron limbs that clap down at every step in pale imitation of hooves. They set their backs low, bent under the yoke of a heavy cart heaped with smoke scarred and cinder-licked lumber. A single brass bell hangs at a jaunty angle suspended from a frayed rope cord. The refuse heap lumbers away before Twilight can find her tongue.

This... wasn't what she expected of the maze. But something in it felt like it was shaking, sending little tremors through her hooves. Tremors like a mini-earthquake. Twilight glances around, spotting just the wide boulevard illuminated by the dull red glow of the sunless sky.

'How... weird.'

Everything felt off about this world, from the too-warm winds to the unnatural cold of the stone and ever-present stink. But something else underpinned it that she just couldn't quite grasp, like a whisper just beyond hearing.

The Alicorn lights her horn. But the moment the energy focuses on the little grooved channels of her spire, it surges to life. Twilight could hear the crackle and buzz as the arcane powers wrestled with her to expand, to loose itself: and she finds herself fighting it with a shocked eep of surprise. It wasn't hard to compress and focus her rhythms of energy into a particular spell, it was trying to reign in the sympathetic cascade of magic that gathers around her horn like a parasite. With a warbled breath, the air blurs in front of her eyes as the spell takes effect.

'T-this is impossible!'

She was swimming in magic. It looked like air, it felt like air, the stone beneath her hooves was cold. But it was a lie. It was all a lie.

She was encased and surrounded by pure, raw, unimaginable magic. There was no wellfont, no mild saturation from ancient stone circles. No, the world, as she knew it, wasn't made of elemental matter but arcane energy given form. And for the first time, she understood the 'shaping' that Luna could do with dreams. It had to be this. With a slight flicker of focus, the cobblestones in front of her melt and change colour as they're transmuted to polished gold.

"This is unbelievable." she whispers to nopony in particular. Part of her wanted to test more, part of her wanted to just blink away the hideous cesspool of a wasted town around her. But her hackles rise as a familiar snarling yowl breaks the relative silence. It was the sound of the monsters, the shrill scream of something otherworldly.

She turns, losing sight of the lumbering cart, and peering down the opposite roadway. It stretches out in a distant winding cobblestone street, down into some darkened pathway where sickly green encrusted signs swing from rusted chains. But they do creak and rub in the wind. The sound of cawing ravens steals her focus for just a second, long enough to only catch the peripheral glint of ember-lit eyes from several hundred paces down in the shadow shrouded dip.

Red ruby orbs blink and glint for a moment, before the blur of forms catch her eye. The creature that emerges at a headlong rush from the small cobblestone gully was massive: a red dog-like monster the size of the largest timberwolf, made of corded muscle that shift and practically bulges through thin scaly red skin. It bounds towards her, eating up a dozen meters in the time it takes for Twilight's eyes to dilate and her heart to seize in shock. Blood Hounds, Flesh hounds, Hellhounds... paltry names for the predators.

A second enormous creature follows in its wake, much the same as the first, a clattering bone growths jutting from its spine like some mutant porcupine.

A burbling cry of fear looses itself from her lips as the hound's shrill shriek rings across the long overcast street, a pair of massive frills spreading out from under the beast's neck as they lope towards her at astonishing speed. Twilight quickly turns and flaps her wings, aware that trying to fly with so much interference from the snaggled balconies would be difficult, but she doesn't even lift off the ground. Instead, a weight presses down on her, like a couple hundred pound sack was suddenly tossed onto her back.

Her ears flit down, plastered against her skull as she turns to run, only to be confronted by a pair of legs a pace in front of her. Twilight's eyes shoot up, taking in the sudden appearance amid the cry of ravens.

It's a man.

He looks down at her from beneath the brim of a top hat, beady violet and blue hazed eyes peering through crystal spectacles perched on a long aquiline nose. His pale skin pulls tight around his jaw, flashing a close-lipped smile. Between the ruffled blue frock and the bronze cane tipped with a carved silver sigil like that of an eye, he looked like some stallion-cast actor playing Snowfall Frost from an off-Bridleway Hearths Warming Tale revival.

Glancing up from Twilight, he taps the cane to the ground, another soft tremor radiating out from him. "You!" he points to the dogs, which stop and snarl a few dozen paces away. Shaking the brass tipped cane, he growls, "Shoo. Go home! Go on, git!" waggling the cane at the pair. Something clicks a warning in the back of her head, but it didn't quite register.

They bristle and snap at the empty air, strands of drool leaking from lipless maws as infernal cinder-blazing sockets stare hungrily at the pony who backtracks beside, then around, the willowy figure. He reaches down, as if to give her head a comforting pat. But even before his narrow fingers could caress her mane, his hand jolts back and away from her. Twilight could feel it too, a radiating wave of piercing cold.

Both of the creatures do back away several paces, but don't retreat entirely. With a grating caw, several more ravens circle out from the buildings. Only then did Twilight notice the shuffling hop-step movements as a score of the creatures perch on the sway back rooftops or roost on the high aeries of nearby townhouses. Their beady black eyes stare down with unnatural comprehension.

"Thank you." Twilight whispers, but already the stranger was just edging back away from the hounds.

"Don't mention it. I take it you're new to the Eight-points?" his voice rings as smooth and sweet as honey. Twilight merely nods, but her mind races: the maze, Luna's warning that everything meant her harm. Already something was 'wrong', but as he spoke there was still that civility that lingered around him. "As you're new, and a guest, I should welcome you properly to my little town. How about some tea?"

"Tea would be great, but I'm actually looking for somepony." Twilight says with a slow smile plastered on for effect. Part of her mind was already ticking over what he could be. It wasn't helped when a large raven swoops from the tallest perch atop a rusted lightning vein and alights on the stranger's shoulder. The avian parrots him as he looks and watches.

"Well, perhaps we can find them on the way. So, pony is it? Who are you searching for? As the defacto mayor of this little patch of paradise, it's my responsibility to new arrivals." Even through the mirthless smile, Twilight could see the swirl in his shifting eyes, It wasn't unheard of for those with tremendous magical potential, or exposed to arcane power. The Alicorn could feel it.

But she nods while casting a wary glance at the two hounds some thirty paces away. "I'm looking for a deep blue mare just like myself, only... maybe a little taller."

He lets out a huff of amusement, "Well, that shouldn't be too hard to find, miss..."

Sensing the polite hesitation, the Alicorn reflexively blurts out, "Twilight Sparkle."

A satisfactory nod heralds the man's sharp heel-turn. His coat tails flutter as he sweeps his cane towards the open roadway and points to the distance. "Well, miss Twilight Sparkle. Let me see if I can get my friends to find your missing compatriot. But perhaps we should wait for them somewhere more civilized." The raven rotates its head, turning to look back at Twilight. By then the Alicorn was glancing through squinting eyes at the faint shape on the horizon. They were headed towards a tall glittering tower, glinting like a silver obelisk in the vibrant crimson light.


As the howling rage of the arcane maze pulls and sweeps the pair of Alicorns apart, Luna lights her horn and sets it ablaze. The darkness around her physically screams its contempt, buffeting her with cataclysmic waves of enraged sound.

The Alicorn strains right back, feeling her hooves lack any sort of purchase on the ground, or wings any lift in mid-air. The void of magic closes in just beyond the pale lavender rays of light pulsing from the ridges of her horn like a swirling tide. Scintillating crackles of magic sing their cadence just like the vague forms obscured in the darkness. Amid the swirling miasma of dark lights and lightning silhouetted shapes beyond living comprehension, the storm begins to subside. The whine of the wind weakens, and her light grows brighter and reaches further still. Soon, the boiling blackness gives way to monolithic slabs of dusty sandstone as weathered as any architectural dig site.

The darkness relents, having deposited Luna in the sandstone hall. Her soft moonlight rays rebound off hieroglyph carved reliefs covering the walls for as far as she could see. It's wide and tall enough that she could fly with ease, but something felt like she was being shepherded somewhere. Luna takes a breath, resolving to meet it with a degree of stately poise. A single musical bass strum still reverberates through her hooves a moment before distant chanting in some guttural language first pricks her ears. The primitive song beckons her forward down the single lengthy hall.

"I do not fear you." she calls to the empty corridor. It mockingly parrots her back, but that little vibration trembles beneath her hooves. It's louder, more rhythmic, far more definite. Haunting melodies like a mythic chorus filter through the stagnant air.

The Alicorn mutters a few incantations, her horn alight again as she lets her mind drift just far enough to sense another. She expected Twilight's unique harmonic hum, that of the element of Magic. But the rebounding or screams and clawing scrape of vitriolic bile fight her back. But amid the enraged howl was something else striving to emerge from the torrent.

It's faint, quiet, but part of it was imminently familiar. A quiet reflection, a recited mantra, a stilness amid the chaos. The single spot of peace among the sickly tide of rage and madness was just like Cadence's little calming technique. The same she taught to Twilight.

"Twilight." Luna hisses, and suddenly redoubles her pace even before her ears stop ringing.

Luna stumbles forward, at first in a disoriented trot, then turning into a full gallop that echoes off the oppressive wall. Slowly, lit brass braziers give a faint glint in the distance. They line the walls, one after another, capped in a crown of sharpened thorns. Each casts a ruby red glow, and the foul scent of copper wafts in from further in the distance. She hadn't smelled this in ages... no, no that wasn't quite right. She had. Alongside Horus, on the red fields in the tower of fallen stars the stink had made itself known. And more than that, part of her couldn't help but feel the sickly mire as it clung to her hocks on the boiling black sands of Istvaan.

Blood.

It was the smell of a charnel house; not rot and suppuration, but simply an ocean of blood that assaults her senses. She can hear the crash of iron, the sound of rising chants. Soon, the formless guttural grunts and words begin to decrypt themselves as she approaches an opening into some greater chamber.

'Gather your arms and armour. Let loose the argonauts of the New Epoch and let them set adrift to begin the journey in this, our third age of mythology. Let the warrior creeds ring to the highest halls of Valhalla, of Folkvager, of Elysium, of Tor Na Nog, of Irkallu, of Tian, of Duat, and of Tartarus.'

Luna freezes, the familiar invocation chills her veins. But as the entrance to the chamber looms up, she ungainly steps forward.

The world expands into a vast concentric ring of caves leading down into the very depths towards a barbaric congregation. Each layer of the spiral is ringed with stone walls adorned with brazen spikes, upon which skulls had been staked in wanton abandon. Each spiraling level led to the one below on great wide walkways spouting out from crenelated towers surmount by a burning pyre. From the ceiling hang stalactites of beaten brass, each pointed and barbed like spears. But at its core is a beating, milling, barbarian heart. Thousands of mortal humans and bestial Ibixian Minotaurs mill about a great central dais while chanting formless oaths and loosing bleating howls. Each of them is bare-chested and clad in layers of thick iron and bronze, wielding a motley assortment of martial weapons. Some bear strangely embossed shields, others bang spear butts against the sandstone floor in a primitive display or might. And through it all, they shout at a figure, though it's not one Luna had expected.

Red wolf pelts hang wreathed across narrow colonnades or stretch between braces of spears. A single creature was stretched in chains between two enormous pillars. Bronzed skin poked through in the few places where layers of shredded flesh allowed. Blood drips off chains that cut cruelly into wrists and ankles. Stripped naked, she could see small metal pits, gouging out flesh like bites from a lamprey. He was large for a human, though Luna had now gotten a good idea of just how big the Lupercal and Alpharius were. This one hearkened to that infernal Erebus in more ways than one. A slick bald head, slightly flattened face, though it was too far to see his eyes or any brand on what was left of his flayed skin.

A creature strides from the crowd. It's a sickly skeletal thing of vibrant red with a rack of twisting black antlers. Around its waist jangles a layered tasset skirting of golden skulls that jostles against a massive barbed greatsword slung across its broad back. Something else is clutched in its free hand, though she can't quite see what from that angle.

It holds a clawed hand aloft, dangling a tangle of wolf heads by their blood soaked manes. It strides to the centre where the man is lashed, and tosses the bundle of heads at his feet. Luna could see what was coming, but didn't expect the deep and resonating voice that issues forth from the skeletal figure. It wasn't the sinister rasp of a serpent, but the bombastic bellow of a born orator.

"Hearken to me, son of the Crimson King! Where as your packs and mighty kin fell before the blades the Blood Host, I shall offer you the same glorious end. It is unfitting that the brave should be strangled under the masses of the unworthy. It is unseemly that they should die choking on their putrified lungs in the gardens of the Plague Lord. It is wretched that they should instead fall to the depravity of the prince of pleasure. No, I offer you greatness, oh scion of scions. Though you may be a witch, perhaps you yet have enough mettle to face your death in courage and fire!"

The roar of the crowd ever cheer as the creature turns to face them, and even as it does, Luna took a diving leap from the precipice hundreds of meters above them.

"I will not change. I will not submit to your games." The chained astartes spits a gob of blood with a weak and mirthless laugh of contempt. "I deny you."

Luna plunges through the aetheric impregnated air like an arrow, wings tight to her body, eyes focused on the deathly avatar. But even in her peripherals she catches the glimpse broods of winged creatures clinging above the brass spikes, staring blankly at her through unblinking eyes. She'd seen the monsters before in the towers of Erebus's dreamscape city. The fury and hatred of the gargoyle-like apparitions were still there, still apparent.

The rings and metal spires rush past, a few wingflaps only carrying her faster and further out towards the horned figure. A whispered command materializes the blade of shadows she had nearly grown unfamiliar with. Ceifador's hazy outline boils into existence, sending crackling eldritch sparks across its lusterless blade. If the gargoyles saw her, they paid her no mind. All eyes are on the pair of creatures in the centre. The ground rushes up to meet her, but already the skeletal creature shrugs its shoulders, letting the sword slip to a point where it can be grasped. As it unsheathes the red-metal blade, time invariably, runs out.

She inhales, feeling the roiling charge course off her horn in eldritch sparks as she looses a coursing fork of scintillating blue lightning at the paragon of death. It crackles through the gap and ripples across the creatures back, reducing the surface to blackened char as it vents a bloodcurdling yowl. It lunges to the side, weapon upraised in one hand and looking on as Luna slams into the dais. Hard. Spidering cracks and concussion rings spread out from under her hooves as she stands atop the solid stone in the midst of a now-silent horde.

"Witch fire!?" it spits while turning to face Luna, "You dare to blight me with witch fire?!" What skin it has is pulled taut over its skeletal features. The creature circles, ember like eyes peering at Luna as impassively as any other ancient revenent of evil as the crown erupts with hollars of rage as swords and spears drum against the edges of shields.

Her back faces the jeering crowd, the thunder of weapon hafts crashing on shield edges drowns out the bass note underlying the maze and sets her ears to ringing. She flattens them back to her skull, certain of this creature's primacy among the congregation. "Now that I have your attention." Luna gestures to the chained astartes hanging between two posts, "Free him."

The astartes head rises enough to see her, and a look of confusion cuts across his chiseled features. He mouths 'Tutelary paragonis?'

The creature nods, and as swift as a thought, brings the greatsword singing across in a single feathery sweep. The crowd cheers. The daemonic beast doesn't so much as pause, slicing through sinew and bone, and swinging back around in a completed circle like a dancer's pirouette before the astartes head had struck the ground.

Luna meets the lipless smirk with a snarl of revulsion.

The creature faces her, arms outstretched. "And thus I have done so. He is free to go to his pyre. And now that I have your attention, Antithesii-"


"Garviel, I hate to say it."

"Then just don't, Nero." Loken snarls. The thunderous crack of boltguns blazing on full automatic drowns out every other infernal screech and shout in the interior halls of the Delphos. Muzzle flashes light the dreary black basalt steps as tongues of flame lick across the intricately wrought rails and glint off tall gothic columns stretching to to the vaulted ceiling. Squad Locasta gathers in the hollow at the very center of the V-shaped defile between temple and tower. The sea-green knot of warriors cover every angle as screeching furies and hundreds of cult-like disciples descend from their darkened alcoves and hidden warrens. The human tide callously throws themselves forward, screaming garbled canticles of fell powers only for their unnatural wails to be overwhelmed by the thunderclap of legion guns.

Between Marcellus and Basek, mass reactive bolts sweep across the gantries and up the steps to the high landing connected to the temple itself. Scads of thronging creatures, half-rotted and foul, tumble and plunge from unguarded ledges as rippling bursts of gunfire shred putrid flesh and turn it to a sickly slurry. Dozens on the high gantries wielding ancient flintlock rifles had painted the black walls a ghoulish pink, misted with splotches of arterial red.

But the multitude that hurtles down the narrow causeway steps falls in heaps as Loken and Vipus focus their weapons straight ahead on the two meter wide passageway. Each bolt punches through two or three bodies before exploding outwards in flashes of grey-green pulp. And even then, some still didn't go down despite fist sized holes.

"Well, I feel I need to: Garviel, we'll be down to blades if we don't push through now!" Vipus spits into the vox link, the sergeant's harsh Cthonic lilt peeling away the stately Imperial Gothic cadence expected of a legionnaire.

"Then we'll be down to blades!" Marr seethes, his longsword held in both hands as he stood in the center of the group, as much to control his pacing as anything else. The rattle-crack of another musket shard bounces off his pauldron leaving a long thin line and small black crystal tip embedded in the ceramite.

Marr snarls at the unseen assailant in the high gantries, crouched and ready to spring like a savage wildcat. Torgaddon looks back towards the doorway that they'd emerged from. "Oh, for Lupercal's sake, Garvi, she's back. Again."

The squirming, hulking abomination pulls its massive bulk from the entrance as blubbery fat scrapes against the wide doorposts, propelled by dozens of human legs melted along its corpulent frame. The mass of interlocked and squirming human arms reach out from her maggot-like body, stretching towards the astartes like a silent multitude asking 'why'.

"I think this might work a little better," Torgaddon reloads his bolt pistol and hands it over to Kamphaddon. The legionnaire grunts from his kneeling position, chain-bladed boltgun braced on one knee as he picks his shots out, dead arm hanging at his side. With the pistol proffered by the captain, he nods some appreciation and quickly tosses the front-heavy weapon upward for the captain to catch. Which, Torgaddon effortlessly does; revving the chain-bladed attachment as Kamphaddon put four bolts down range in half as many seconds. The sharpshooters crumple from the high balconies and tumble to the sluice gutters alongside the towering staircases. Each new corps splashes into the pooling sludge of stagnant water and blood.

Torgaddon sights in the bolter as the engorged mass of motley flesh stumbles to the top of the landing a full hundred meters from them. The bolter's bark is short and staccato. The scrambling mass of limbs propelling the slug-like creature explode into bloody chunks as he scythes them out from under it.

"You heard Sergeant Vipus! Forward! Forward and fury! LUPERCAL!" Marr shouts as he shoulders Vipus and Loken aside. While they shoot each other a sharp look, the green clad figure of Tybalt Marr picks up speed, his thunderous strides taking the stairs five at a time as he barrels up the steps at the encroaching tide of filth.

The flurry of sharpshooter shots pings off his armour in a stone deluge, shredding flexsteel hoses and drawing a snarl of agitation. Marr tucks his chin tight against the gorget ring as a spidering crack bursts across his armourglass lens. Ten, twenty, thirty meters of space disappears as the milling horrors stumble down the steps.

"Locasta, kill for the living!" Lokan's amplified shout bleeds through the vox net.

'Kill for the dead!' come the responses from half a dozen throats.

By now the voices, identities, didn't matter. A haze of anger and indignation swims over the captain who hurtles up the steps like a dark comet, attention fixed on the bestial faces of snarling simian Davinite tribals and sluggish one-eyed Cyclopian horrors.

"Watch it Tybalt, those bastards are stronger than they look!" Torgaddon's warning goes unheeded as Marr shoulders his way into the mass with a crunch of pulverized bones and squelching flesh. His longblade flashes, lopping off limbs in a single arcing sweep. A shove overbalances one of the cyclopian creatures behind a milling Davinite, sending them both over the stone railing and spiraling fifteen meters to the ground.

A rickety limb grasps Marrs and halts the Cthonic blade's recovering swing. The captain stares into the milky eye of one of the unnatural dark spawn that, with an obscene strength belying its malnourished limbs, forces his left arm down centimetre by centimetre. Other hands scratch and claw at his armour, nails cracking and flaking off as they rake across ceramite plate. The milky-eyed cyclops groans, wetly licking its chops as it strains against the legion captain.

"LET, GO!!" Marr's right hand lets go of the blade and he lashes out with an armoured punch to the beast's face. It cracks under his blow. A second pulps the bone in its cheek and bursts its eye. A third shatters its needle-like teeth and finally breaks its hold of his blade. The forth bursts its head into slopping viscera as it begins to wisp away in a foul breeze.

With a roar of latent rage, the captain slams his blade through the guts of one Davinite, plunging it up to the hilt and wrenching it sideways with all his genhanced might. The Davinite's gurgling rasp melds with other sharp voices of disbelief before flesh and bone yields to Marr's strength. The blade drags through half a dozen figures sending slick ropes of split entrails showering across the stone steps.

Bolt shots whistle by less than a meter from Tybalt Marr's head, crunching into bone and bursting among the horde. Between the captain's violent assault and the steady thunder of mass reactives, the swarming host thins and allows Marr the chance to resume his upwards slog.

"Setar, get up here!" Loken's static vox click echoes in Marr's head.

The roar of a chainsword joins the harsh growls as Marr slams his elbow into another Cyclopian face and brings his blade down in a murderous chop that split a second beast from clavicle to groin. A green bladed chainsword jabs by, hooking a Davinite and roaring to life in a fountain of red. The bark of a bolt pistol and muzzle flash from next to his head dims Marr's vision, but it did focus his gaze to the stop of the steps. The stone doors were starting to close. They were just ten meters from the landing, the horde was thinning, and the Astartes were gaining momentum.

The light whir of a flamer's pilot light teases the odorous air. "Captain Marr, careful!" Calls a deep-throated Cthonic voice. Marr leans to his left towards Loken, sweeping the sword down just as a jet of incandescent white flame spits close enough to bubble the paint on his right pauldron. His armour's prey senses warn of the blistering heat, but Setar had leaned out from the railing and swept it across the sides and up to the landing with a roaring gout of liquid fire.

The screams of those caught in the flamer's stream mix with the crackle of scorched flesh. But there's a sudden sharp ping and high pitched squeal of pressure. Marr glances back just to get a peripheral glance at Setar as he looks down to the mist spraying from the punctured fuel tank on his flamer. Wet mists of pressurized promethium spray just next to the super heated brass nozzle, and with a whining roar, it bursts.

The sheeting curtain of flame billows from the side of the weapon, consuming the operator and much of Locasta in a wickering fireball.

"Report!" Lokan rasps into the helmet vox even before the flare of orange and red clears.

Setar's bass growl responds a moment later. "Unit destroyed, sniper got the tank. I might have lost a few fingers."

"Kamphaddon, still here."

"Marcellus, clear."

"Basek, all good, captain."

"Vipus, clear."

"Well," Torgaddon coughs once, barely holding back a laugh. "Looks like we're fine, Garvi. Got a little singed but it looks like those little cretins don't like fire much either. Oh, and watch the edges. That wormy abomination went over the side a few seconds ago. There's a lot of corpses down there, so we shouldn't be."

"Understood, Tarik." Loken's voice chimes through the vox, "Marr?"

But the other captain sprang straight back up, pushing back up and charging his bulk through the stepped causeway. A few hacking strokes of his blade drops anything not smouldering on the steps. Each footfall crunches blood and bone into paste as the others of Locasta follow shortly after. With a sharp growl, Marcellus drops near the rear of the file. A sniper's shard opening up the flexsteel at the back of his knee sending a trickle of blood down his greaves.

"Right, up ya come." Tarik hefts up the Legionnaire by the power pack and pulls him along until the warrior can find his footing.

Two point blank shots from Loken and Vipus scythe down the pair of Davinite priests trying to shut the stone door, letting one slump across the black stone leaving a wet smear as it closes, while the other is pitched against the wall and crumples in a mangled heap.

"Keep going!" Marr darts to the opening, wrenching the door open and slipping inside with Loken and Vipus immediately behind him. The rest of Locasta follows, with Torgaddon taking a glance back despite more shots from the galleries rebounding off his armour. Aside from the gory trail left behind them, there's no sign of the two other legionnaires or the ooze-like abomination. With a grunt, he turns back and redoubles his pace through the door and into the temple proper.

Loken growls as Marcellus and Torgaddon heave the stone slabbed doors closed behind them. A low rattling crack echoes in the deep, further up the main chamber, but is swiftly plunged into onerous silence as the darkened labrynthian corridors of the temple yawn before them. Marr stands at the front of the little unit, gore slathered sword held in both hands as he stares into the single empty hallway. The rest of Locasta forms up swiftly, Loken and Tarik both to Marr's left and right respectively as they take in the darkness.

"Anyone get the impression that no one in the lodge got to know about this part of the temple when they cast their votes?" Nero Vipus grumbles, though his speech had slipped back to its proper mien. Still, he was alert, head constantly swiveling as he sweeps his gaze across the ancient stone all around them.

There was nothing modern, nothing enlightened, it was an occult catacomb. The enlightened of the Emperical truth would never decorate their hallways with the bones of fanatics, laying them in receded ossuary cells and etching the walls with runic marks. It was a fane of the occult, and every cloying sensation of dust and rot struck like a hammer blow.

"Likely not, Abaddon might find an excuse, but I don't think Aximand would stomach it." Loken mutters as Marr takes the first step forward.

"That's a bit harsh, Garvi." Torgaddon muses aloud, "Abby's stubborn but he's not stupid. This, well, this is stupid." he gestures to the entombed bones of some long-forgotten martyr wrapped in rotted green rags.

The rest of the squad forms a shallow V behind him, fanning out and scanning the sharply cut alcoves filled with stacks of skulls cemented in with black igneous rock, unaware of the momentary red mechanical glint of light behind armourglas lenses emerging from the martyr's empty eye sockets.