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+++ THE EMPEROR SEES ALL +++ THE EMPEROR JUDGES ALL +++

The skies of the world known to its inhabitants as the Broken Cage were swirling with the tides of the Warp. The only constant was the point of light that was the system's sun, though even that was twisted by the roiling matter of the Sea of Soul. The storm above was matched below, and the vast black seas that separated a few rocky islands were raging with the same fury they had since long before the coming of the Warp Storm. On one such island stood a tower, almost a kilometer high, anchored deeply into the island's ground against the strong winds. And at the highest floor of that tower, looking at the storm outside through a panel of reinforced glass which outside was dirtied with particles no sane human would ever clean, there was a witch.

The witch's name was Elerika, though few had called her by that name in many years. To the rest of the circle of wyrds she ruled over, she was simply known as the Anointed of the Black Tower, the Lady of Tears, and a myriad of other titles that were only spoken behind her back, and when she was far, far away and couldn't hear them. She still knew them all, of course – her followers seemed to forget that she could hear their thoughts, and did not need to be in the same room as them to do so. But she allowed them to speak ill of her behind her back. It kept them unaware of the full extant of her control over them, and if some of them ever got the idea of betraying her, she would know of any conspiracy long before it could become an actual threat.

To the mundane eye, Elerika had the appearance of a beautiful woman in her early forties, though her beauty was of the rough and unkempt sort – life in the Broken Cage afforded little time to niceties. Her long black hair was bound into a ponytail, and she wore a dress of the same color, decorated with the various talismans she had fashioned from the bones of her defeated enemies. The most recent was a small eightfold star hanging from her wrist, that she had carved out of the femur of Akarath, the self-proclaimed Deceiver of the Eye, after she and her coven had destroyed his coterie of half-mad wyrds six days ago. Seventeen such bone markers were displayed on her body, evidence of her power and cunning to all who looked upon her. She wore no weapons, as was the custom of her people – the only weapon anyone on the planet needed was the strength of their minds.

It was only when looked at through the sixth sense that Elerika's and the talismans' true nature was revealed. Her soulfire burned with a fierce, quiet determination, and every sculpted piece of bone was the prison of a fragment of soul of its previous owner, anchoring it to the world of the living in endless torment. Below the fire of her power and the screaming faces of the damned dead, however, Elerika's psychic visage was that of a withered old hag, her hundred years of life revealed in a way that even her sorcery and the warp energy coursing through her flesh could not hide. According to the stories whispered by her cronies and enemies alike, she was the oldest being in all of the Broken Cage, having survived every danger of the unforgiving world and every attempt to overthrow her hold over the Black Tower. She personally knew better, even if she would sooner die than let anyone else know the secrets she had kept hidden for most of her life.

Elerika finally turned away from the spectacle of the never-ending storm, and returned her attention to the three others who were in the room along with her. All the time she had looked through the window, they had kept their position. One of them was on his knees, while the other two – one on each side of the first – were prostrating themselves at the foot of the stone throne that represented her ultimate authority over their entire existences. She could taste their fear, and they knew she could, just as all three of them could sense the unborn spirits hovering above them, feeding on their unease, waiting with undying patience for the surge of violence that would allow their potential to become true wraiths. They ached to raise their mental defenses, to cast a barrier between their souls and the ravenous half-things, but they knew that to do so in Elerika's presence would earn them death. Here, in the sanctuary of the Lady of Tears, only she was allowed to wield her power.

'Tell me again, Nemos,' she said, her voice harsh and unyielding. 'Tell me again what you did.'

On the ground, Nemos, a man of six decades of age dressed in black, tattered robes, dared to take a quick look up at her face, trying to gauge her expression before his eyes came down once more. As a pure pyromancer, Nemos was unable to use even the passive emotion reading telepaths were capable of, and a lifetime spent in the Black Tower had forced him to develop other means of reading his interlocutors. Whatever he saw on Elerika's face, it only caused his fear to increase, but he managed to speak clearly nonetheless :

'As I told you, my lady, me and my disciples were attacked in the middle of last night. Though we were caught by surprise, we managed to fight back, and forced our attackers to withdraw after we killed three of them. However, unfortunately, in our confusion, the fire from our powers spread out. Before the rain put it out ...'

'... it had spread across three floors, and twelve people had died,' Elerika finished. 'Most of them burned too heavily to be identified, which also included your attackers. I understand that your powers made it difficult to hold back in that situation, Nemos, but it makes my job a lot more difficult.'

'After all,' she continued, her gaze suddenly turning to another of the supplicants, 'it does make it more difficult to prove than those who started the attack were of your own cabal, doesn't it, Arnul ?'

Arnul was the youngest in the room, and fancied himself as the rising star of the Black Tower. In truth, however, his abilities were a little above average at best. A born telekine, he had gathered a small cabal around him not because of any secrets he could teach them, but by bullying those weaker than himself and making promises he had neither the intention nor the means to keep to the rest.

'I had nothing to do with what happened,' grunted Arnul. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying, probably to advance their own agenda against you, my Lady.'

'Really,' said Elerika, making sure that some amusement could be heard in her voice, before turning her gaze toward the last of the three kneeling forms. 'That's not what you told me, Amelie.'

Unlike the other two, Amelie was mostly calm, more fearful of the wraiths circling around her than of her mistress' wrath. That was because she had no stake in the ongoing investigation – no matter what Elerika decided was the truth, she would not be punished for her actions. Amelie did not involve herself in the political games of the other cabals, preferring to focus all her energy on her research in her field – the divination of the future by looking into the tides of the aether.

'I found that fool fleeing from the fire, as I had foreseen it,' said the seer calmly. 'And he was cursing Nemos – quite vulgarly, I might add – for "daring to resist the inevitable".'

'She is lying !' protested the telekine, his eyes darting around the room as if seeking a way out. 'I was in my chambers !'

'Yet five members of your pathetic little cabal are missing,' Elerika pointed out mercilessly. 'Exactly the number of dead attackers.'

'A coincidence, nothing more ! They must have died in the blaze these dangerous fire-maniacs started ! Besides, we only have their word that they were attacked ! Whose to say they didn't start to fight among themselves ? Everyone knows pyros are unbalanced freaks, dangers to everyone on the island ! Tonight just proved that once again !'

A wave of cold, controlled fury rose from Nemos at the provocation, but he kept it under control. Though what Arnul had just said was nothing more than an insulting generalization, there was some truth behind it – but only in that every single one of the inhabitants of the Black Tower was a danger to all those around him. Elerika shook her head in feigned disappointment, even as she gathered her power.

'Arnul, Arnul, Arnul ...' she sighed. 'You are such an idiot. All your life, you have done nothing but cause trouble for those around you with any modicum of sense. I have tolerated it so far because I could not just execute one of the Black Tower's owns without justification – it would have driven the others paranoid with fear of being next. But now ...'

A vicious smile appeared on the witch's face, and the terror emanating from the pyromancer redoubled.

'Now I have that excuse.'

With a snarl, Arnul rose to his feet, his power flaring as flames gathered around his fists. But before he could raise his hands and cast the fire in Elerika's direction, she unleashed her own power. With surgery-like precision, a needle of psychic power pierced through Arnul's hastily raised mental shields and right through his brain meat. His eyes widened slightly as nerves were torn to pieces within his skull, and he fell face first to the floor, the flames around his hands fading away.

In the aether, the wraiths growled with discontent, denied the bloodshed and open violence that would have fed their power. They still fell upon Arnul's departing spirit like sharks upon a bleeding beast, and all three remaining wyrds had to conceal their unease as they sensed the soul of their dead brethren being consumed by the creatures waiting on the other side of the veil.

'Now that this unpleasant business is done,' said Elerika once Arnul's body had stopped twitching,' we ...'

She stopped. On the edge of her perceptions, near the border of the island, she felt a surge of psychic power and the sudden appearance of new, unfamiliar thought patterns. Almost immediately, the minds behind these thoughts vanished, sheltered from her senses by a cloak of psychic energy. But in those few seconds, the Lady of Tears had been able to get enough of a look at the intruders who had dared to enter her domain.

'We will speak of this again later,' she ordered her surprised servants. 'We have visitors. Gather your disciples and prepare for battle – but do not engage the intruders until I give the order to do so.'

'Invaders from the other islands ?' asked Nemos.

His guess was reasonable. The islands of the Broken Cage were distant enough that the various circles who inhabited them rarely travelled physically from one to another, preferring to communicate through telepathic messages and astral projections. The only way to cross the raging seas was to cut through space itself by using rituals that, while dangerous, were still far safer than attempting to navigate the sea. When such means were employed, the intentions behind the journey were more often violent than not. But Elerika was certain that this wasn't the case here.

'No,' she replied grimly. 'Whoever our guests are, they come from far further than the other islands – far beyond this accursed rock on which we are all trapped.'

There is always a price for power. Such is the law of the Warp, and all those who would wield its might onto the plane of matter have to obey it. No matter their strength, no matter how elevated they might be in the eyes of the Gods of Chaos – all must pay the price for the dark gifts bestowed upon them. Often, that price is a hidden one, and often, those who pay it never realize they have done so. It is, after all, difficult to know the state of one's own soul.

But Asim of the Covenant, Sorcerer Lord of the Forsaken Sons, known among his peers and their minions as the Sorcerer of Blood, did not have that luxury. He knew exactly what the price was for the power he had gained, and for the gifts he had received. After all, he had been told what the price would be upfront, by the daemon that stalked his soul from within the Warp, bound to him as the consequence of his greatest feat of sorcery. And the daemon, to his continuing surprise, had been honest. The Herald of Blood had not deceived him, though the deeds he had performed in return for the favors he had received from the dark powers the Herald represented had often cost him more to perform than he had anticipated.

But there had been no lies from the creature, and that was more than what he had expected when he had first seen its infernal visage instead of his own reflection. That was enough to make the Sorcerer wonder what culmination of emotions, what blood-soaked event had given birth to such a spirit. It called him "father", but that couldn't be true – Asim refused to believe that anything he had done could have created such a malign intelligence that was still aligned with the Blood God. The daemon was simply too intelligent to be that young, timeless incarnation of thought or not.

For all that it had surprised him, he still hated the daemon, of course. That thing had attached itself to him without his consent, and taunted him in his every moment of slumber that wasn't spent in the protection of his meditating circle – and since he had left the Hand of Ruin months ago, that had been every single time he tried to rest. He was often fantasizing about ways to free himself from it, and to punish it for its insolence. But he also remembered the words of Arken : the Herald was an asset to the warband, offering them access to options that would otherwise be closed to them. The torment the Sorcerer endured because of the daemon's presence was the price that had to be paid in return for that.

And it had been these options that had allowed Asim to come to the nameless world the warband's data-analysts had found hidden away in the Sector's archives they had plundered from the Imperial worlds they had conquered. These wretched things, hideous amalgams of cloned brain meat and cogitators, had discovered a strange pattern in the navigation records. This pattern had been brought to light by the frequent dispatch of resources and vessels to a specific region of the Trebedius Sector, which just happened to be centered around a system on which all information had been erased from the records.

It was the belief of the savants that this mysterious system was the center of operation for the Black Ships in the entire Sector, these dreaded vessels that culled the psyker element from Imperial worlds and brought the warp-touched to Terra in chains, where they would either be shackled to the False Emperor or fed to the mechanisms of the Golden Throne in order to keep the wraith sitting upon it between life and death for another day. They went as far as to theorise that, given the maps of aetheric currents prior to the unleashing of the Wailing Storm, this system would have been ideally placed to serve as some sort of generally jail, where the psykers harvested from the entire Sector would be imprisoned until their transfer to the Solar Segmentum through the favourable Warp-routes that were now gone forever.

But even if the savants were right, going in force to the system that they had named Forlorn Hope in some kind of bitter and twisted joke would have been a mistake. It was very unlikely that the containment facilities had survived the coming of the Storm, but it was possible that their keepers had managed to kill them all, using the execution protocols in place in every Black Ship facility that had ever existed. And if the psykers had managed to break free, then there was no telling how powerful they might have gained under the baleful light of the Wailing Storm. So many wild psykers left to their own devices on a world subjected to the touch of the Warp ... It was all too possible that the world itself had been broken to pieces by the unleashing of psychic energy. The Forsaken Sons could not risk sending a ship there – it might find nothing, or never return.

And so it had been decided that Asim would journey to the Forlorn Hope system, using not a spaceship, but sorcery to journey across the Wailing Storm. As the Hand of Ruin had approached the Delenda System, the members of the Coven had gathered, and together the Sorcerers had opened a portal into the deeper Warp, through which Asim and those he had chosen to accompany him had entered. He had only taken a few souls with him – for all his power and mastery of the Warp, he wasn't confident he could keep too many people sheltered during the journey, but going alone just wasn't an option. Only because of a deal with the Herald of Blood that had cost the lives of a hundred prisoners, and a promise that would doubtlessly come back to haunt Asim sooner or later, had the Sorcerer been able to bring those he had with him at all.

The first of these chosen few came out of the wound in reality right behind Asim, the air's temperature dropping by a few degrees as soon as he appeared. The power-armoured, shadow-shrouded creature was a living example that while all power required sacrifice, the price needed not be paid by the one receiving the power himself every time. The Ruinous Powers cared nothing for fairness, after all. When Asim had first accepted the Herald's offer, back during the Parecxis Campaign, he had had to bind the powerful daemon known as the Shadow of Horus to pay for the restoration of his full strength after the tremendous effort of his work on Parecxis Gamma. The price hadn't been paid by him but by that young fool Illarion – though Illarion, in his ignorance, had not considered it a sacrifice at the time. Yet even forcing the brunt of the price on someone else could not fully free Asim from his own part in the bargain, and the very act of creating a Secondborn had left scars upon his soul, through which part of his lingering humanity had slipped away.

'Asim,' growled Illarion, his voice carrying the dual quality typical of so many Secondborn. 'Are we there ? Is this the correct place ?'

'Yes,' replied the Sorcerer, before adding : 'you can put him down now.'

With a grunt, the Secondborn opened his arms and dropped the man he had been carrying all the way through their journey. Balthazar – the man did not appear to have a family name anymore, if he ever had had one - was barely conscious, clinging to his las-rifle like a drowning man to a lifeboat. Which it probably was, Asim reflected. The weapon was touched by the Warp, linked to the hitman who had found it in the ruins of a Parecxisian city. Both bore the mark of the Lord of Skulls, and in their timeless travels, the familiar feeling of the rifle had probably been the only thing preserving Balthazar's sanity. Well, that, and the fact that the human had grown somewhat used to walking through the Warp, having already done so on Parecxis Gamma before Asim had even cast his grand spell there. Already Balthazar was struggling to his feet, his eyes darting in all directions as he took in their surroundings.

'That,' he said as soon as his thought process had realigned itself with his surroundings, 'was unpleasant.'

Asim was forced to admit to himself that he shared the human's thoughts. This journey had taken far longer than anticipated, even if time had no meaning in the Sea of Souls. A great weariness descended upon the Sorcerer as the realization that he was finally out of the Empyrean hit him, and he almost collapsed on the spot out of exhaustion. Only his transhuman physique and the knowledge that there might be many terrible dangers nearby kept him awake and standing.

The unlikely trio had emerged from the Warp portal into a wet and dark cave, lit only by the glow from Asim's staff, still burning with psychic energy. Behind them, the tear in reality closed with a sound of displaced air and something that could only be described as a tormented reality sighing in relief.

'I smell despair and pain,' grunted Illarion, sniffing the air. 'Madness and the yearning for freedom. This whole place was saturated with the Warp long before Arken unleashed the Storm.'

All Asim could smell was the scent of the ocean, but the Secondborn was right. Even though the portal had been closed, he could sense that the veil remained alarmingly thin. That was only to be expected : if this world had truly been used to imprison the psykers of the Trebedius Sector, then no matter the containment measures, their combined emotions and powers would have made the planet closer to the Immaterium. Even during the Great Crusade, there had been rumors of the strange events taking place aboard the Black Ships and on the stations run by these dreaded vessels.

'Wait a moment,' he commanded. 'I shall ensure that we have reached our destination.'

Resting on his staff, the Sorcerer cast his weary mind outward, searching for confirmation that this world was what the data-analysts believed it was. Immediately, he felt the presence of hundreds of other psychically active souls. There was one in particular, high above their current position, whose soulfire shone with confidence and power – undoubtedly the leader. Asim felt the attention of that soul turn in his direction, and he hastily cast a veil on himself and his companions. Though his intentions weren't exactly hostile, it was better to keep them a secret until he had a better idea of the situation here.

So many psykers, so many untamed souls gifted by the Empyrean. For a moment Asim felt as if he were back on Tizca, in the grand chambers where the Legion's aspirants had been gathered for training before implantation. He could not detect any soul that was not psychically active, safe for the presence of Balthazar at his back. This was indeed the world he had sought – there could be no other explanation. A one-hundred per cent psyker rating did not simply happen in a population, even on planets where the conditions were favourable. There would always be some fringe group that, by some genetic quirck that not even the Thousand Sons' extensive research into the spread of the psychic genus had been able to explain, would be psychically mute. But a population made entirely of psykers, breeding on a planet bathed in the warping energies of the Wailing Storm ? That was another story.

'This is the place,' he confirmed for the two others. 'This is Forlorn Hope, and it is what the savants thought it was. Now let's move. If we are to succeed in our mission, we need to find whoever is in charge here.'

The three warriors of Chaos stood in a cavern on the edge of the island, whose entrance was open to the elements. The sea was roiling, and Asim could sense other gatherings of souls in the distance – other islands also populated by psykers. He had to admit that the Astra Telepathica had made the correct choice in using that world for its purposes – there was nowhere to run to for the inmates, even if they had managed to break free from their cells. Even after taking over the entire planet, the psykers were still confined to a world the rest of the Imperium would consider worthless – without the Warp Storm, the Imperials could simply have bombed it from orbit if they had ever lost control of its surface.

They emerged onto a beach of sharp rocks, and looked backward to the island's center. There stood a tower of black stones, standing straight amidst the furious winds. Along its length shone dozens of windows. There were several holes in its exterior where the walls had collapsed – it was impossible to tell whether that was due to erosion, lack of maintenance, or other, more violent causes. But regardless of the damage it had sustained, the tower still stood – even at that distance, Asim could feel the psychic residue that permeated every rock.

'I suppose that's where we are going, then ?' asked Balthazar to no one in particular.

There truly were no signs of life – the entire island, as far as Asim could tell, had emerged from the ocean thousands of years ago due to the planet's tectonic activity. The island had been flattened by the Mechanicum's engines so that it could be used by the Astra Telepathica as a containment facility, but no efforts had been wasted on making it more appealing. On the plain of black rock, Asim felt dangerously exposed, and the tower loomed over them ominously, backlit by the occasional thunderstrike from the storm clouds. They had made it off the beach and half-way to the tower's base when the ambush struck.

It was Illarion who saw them first. The Secondborn barked a warning, and jumped in front of Asim just in time to shelter him from a flying stone aimed right at his head. The rock shattered against the shadows cloaking Illarion, eliciting nothing more than an amused chuckle from the spire-born Unbound.

The attack had broken whatever spell the attackers had used to hide their presence from Asim before, and they suddenly became exposed to all of his sixth sense even as they rose from their cover behind the rocks and revealed themselves to conventional sight.

There were about a dozen enemies, all of them horribly twisted from the human form. Five of them were more beasts than men, their flesh covered in short, mangy fur, their limbs grotesquely muscular and ending with claws, though an all-too human intelligence shone in their crazed eyes as they charged the warriors of Chaos. Though weak, these creatures still possessed some measure of psychic ability, and they were using it to strengthen their bodies further still – unaware or uncaring that as they did so, they were bringing greater genetic degeneration upon themselves as the energies of the Warp reshaped them. The rest, equally mutated but in ways that granted them no greater physical strength, were holding back. Their hands – or whatever they had instead of hands – raised in the direction of those they had attacked, and baleful energies danced around them as they unleashed their weakling sorceries against the trio.

It took only half a second for Asim to raise a psychic barrier in front of the attacks, and the pitiful efforts of the wyrds broke against it like arrows against a wall of adamantium. The barrier was only one-way, and a shot from Balthazar's las-rifle passed right through it and hit one of the charging savages right in the head, vaporizing the skull in a cloud of gas that shone for a fraction of second in Asim's second sight as the soul of the wretch was dragged into the realm of Khorne. The others kept on charging, passing right through the barrier – Asim had made it to protect from psychic projectiles, not physical matter.

Let me help you destroy them, father. These worms are not worthy of your attention !

Asim ignored the daemon and shifted his focus to the consideration of the tactical possibilities. A direct melee was going to take some time, even with Illarion and himself fighting against these creatures. Invigorated with the power of the Warp, there was no telling how resilient their enemies were. And while the end result was not in question – the Sorcerer of Blood refused to even consider the possibility that he would fall to such wretches – there was a high chance Balthazar could get hurt, or even killed before every one of the wyrds was dead. They needed to break their attackers, and for that, they needed to kill whoever the alpha of the pack was. Asim separated his mind in two, using an old trick learned during his Legion days to keep up the shield he was casting around him and his companions while also looking at the surface thoughts of his foes.

It only took him a few seconds to locate the strongest one, hiding behind the others. It was a big, ugly monstrosity the size of an Astartes but about twice as large, its belly bloated and its skin pale and scaled like that of a fish. Chords of black energy, barely visible to the naked eye, sprouted from its atrophied hands as it hovered above the ground, each ending into the head of one of its minions, feeding them power in return for near-absolute control.

'This one,' shouted Asim, pointing his staff in the direction of the enemy leader while pushing another attacker away from him with a wave of kinetic energy. 'Kill him, Illarion !'

'With pleasure,' replied the possessed Unbound, delectation dripping from his words just as the blood of another wounded wyrd dripped from his claws.

Illarion leapt with unnatural grace, and came down right on the wyrds' leader. The fat psyker yelped and rose its tiny hands, the black chords snapping free from its minions' skulls and wrapping around the Possessed in an instinctive attempt to hold him at bay.

It didn't work. Illarion laughed as he tore through the black tendrils with his claws, and the daemon within him laughed too. He landed in front of his prey with impossible softness, the rock under his feet not even seeming to registering his transhuman weight. Then his claws were in the fat psyker's guts, tearing bloody chunks of entrails free. Around him, the other wyrds, still reeling from the abrupt severance of their connection to their leader, stumbled back, looking at the slaughter with wide, terrified eyes. Even those who had charged first had stopped, turning their bestial heads back toward their master.

The wretch's screams did not end with his death. Asim watched as Illarion tore the soul from the body, and his helmet twisted with a metallic screech as it opened to reveal a fanged mouth into which the Possessed cast the ectoplasm impaled upon his claws. The maw closed upon the ghost, and the scream finally, abruptly ended – though the Sorcerer knew its torment had only begun.

The other wyrds started screaming as well in sympathetic suffering as they felt the agony of their leader, clinging their heads and shaking with pain. For a moment, Asim considered whether to kill them all or not, and whether doing so would be a mercy. Then their heads exploded, and he nearly fell to his knees when the psychic backlash of their sudden demise hit him.

In the days that would follow, the Sorcerer would wonder just what had triggered what came next. Had it been the result of the psychic domination established by the bloated wyrd over its followers ? Had it been caused by Illarion's brutal murder of the wretch, its agony and the terror of the onlookers stirring the denizens of the Aether to the breaking point ? Or had it been a scheme of some daemon or another, seeking a way of entry to a world its kin had been denied too long ?

In the end, it didn't matter. Regardless of the cause, the veil between reality and the nightmare realm of the Warp had been pierced. The wraiths that had shadowed the Chaos warriors ever since they had set foot upon this benighted world began to appear in forms of mists and shadows, and Asim caught glimpse of images in the spilled gore that were different from the familiar silhouette of the Herald of Blood. The Empyrean growled like a beast sensing weak prey, about to pounce in for the kill.

This world will burn, but its death will not pay your debt to us, father !

'No,' Asim growled in reply, both hands tightening around the shaft of his staff as he drove it into the ground hard enough to crack the ground. Sparks of warp-fire flickered along its length and on his armor as he channeled his own power into the weapon. 'This world is not for you.'

Sorcery was the art of weaving the energies of the Warp into patterns that had been refined over the course of thousands of years of trial and error – painful, damning errors. The will of the sorcerer was as important as his knowledge of the appropriate patterns, but in the end it was, like all warp-craft, simply using power that already existed for one's own purpose. Like a dam on a raging river, turning the flow of water into power to light the city nearby.

This, however, was like trying to stop a nuclear detonation after it had already begun. Asim could feel his mind burn as he reached out to grasp the frayed tendrils of reality, forcing them back together with nothing but sheer willpower while also pushing against the tide of Neverborn fighting to enter the breach. If not for the fact that the daemons were slaughtering each other to get through first, he would never have stood a chance.

Slowly, painfully, he managed to slow down the tide of Warp energy, but soon realized that he was stretched too thin. His power was not enough to close the rift – and there was no asking the Herald for help this time. The daemon would never go against its primordial instincts in such a manner – at least not without asking for a price Asim would rather see Forlorn's Hope burn than pay.

And then … something reached out. Another light against the flow of darkness. Like his own, the light was tainted by a life lived under the gaze of warp-born predators, but it was still mortal, still existing in defiance of the malevolent hunger that dwelled beyond. That mind weaved the strings of reality back into place with surprising expertise, as if it had done so many times before.

With this unexpected help, Asim was able to direct most of his psychic power to keep back the tide of Neverborn, until, at long last, enough of the veil had been restored that the rest of the breach collapsed in on itself, unable to sustain its existence.

The breach had been sealed. In the realm of flesh and blood, barely a handful of seconds had passed – but for Asim, it felt like much, much longer. His body was covered in sweat, and he felt as if each of his limbs weighed a ton.

For several moments, all Asim could do was breathe heavily, as his sight cleared and the pounding in his skull returned to a bearable level. He looked around, and saw that a group of twenty-three humans had appeared in the distance. Their forms had been spared the disgrace of mutation that had afflicted those the Chaos warriors had just slain. Leading them was a human female whose soulfire shone brightest of them all, and who wore on her clothes small tokens that were also imbued with the power of the Warp. Asim recognized her as the mind that had assisted him in the suppression of the warp breach.

'More souls to feast upon,' growled Illarion – or was it the Shadow of Horus ? - as he started to advance toward the psykers.

'Illarion, stand down,' commanded Asim, and the Secondborn obeyed, though the Sorcerer could feel his discontent.

Illarion's appetite had been wetted by the soul of the wyrd he had just consumed, and the daemon's hunger was in ascendancy in his thoughts. But they had just barely avoided a full-scale daemonic incursion, and if things were to escalate again, no one would have the time to prevent it from happening until it was too late. Asim had seen worlds submerged by the Neverborn during the Heresy, and he had no wish to ever be on one.

Besides, there was strength and steel in that woman. She was different from the wretched wyrds the Coven had used as fuel on Parecxis. Her mind was strong, as it would have needed to be to survive and thrive on this planet. If she could be brought to serve, then she would be a powerful asset to the warband – even without the hundreds of psykers she commanded. When the ambushers had been revealed, Asim had feared that all the psykers of that world might have degenerated so, and that would have made the planet a poor prize indeed.

'Greetings, my lady,' he said to the leader of the new arrivals, bowing his head slightly – he would have bowed deeper, but the horns of his helmet would have made that both a problematic and threatening gesture. 'I am Asim of the Forsaken Sons, leader of the Coven. My apologies for the death of your kin, but they attacked us first.'

'I am Elerika,' replied the woman, 'Anointed of the Black Tower. And these wretches were not my "kind". There are dozens like them out there, the spawn of those too weak to keep their minds yet still strong enough to escape our purges.'

'Ah. That's good, then. I have come to bring you an offer, on the behalf of my lord Arken the Awakened.'

'Who is this Arken ?'

'The lord of the Forsaken Sons, a powerful warband that has already crushed the only force in this Warp Storm capable of defeating it,' said Asim, gesturing to the roiling skies so that they would understand what he meant. 'Now he and his agents wander the Wailing Storm, seeking those worthy of joining their cause against the False Emperor. I am one such agent, and I have come here because we heard about the children of this world and what they suffered at the hands of the Imperium.'

'Our ancestors left many records on that,' said Elerika. 'Most accounts are … fragmentary, or difficult to interpret. But a common thread is that they were all taken from their own planets – worlds much better than this one – and brought here, with the expectation that they would all be sacrificed to the Golden Throne.'

'I have heard that such is the fate of the gifted in the Imperium these days,' nodded Asim. That was one more proof of how far the empire he and his brothers had built had fallen. 'But you escaped that fate, though it left you stranded on this planet. And this brings me to the offer my brother bade me bring to you : with my help, we shall light a beacon that will call my brothers' ships to this world, and they will carry you and all those who desire it off this rock.'

'And what will you ask in return ?' asked the witch, the wariness in her voice as clear as the hope that flared in her soul.

'That those of you with the skill and will to do so fight alongside our armies, lending their abilities to our cause. And from you, particularly, I would ask a single boon, as a proof of your agreement.'

'What "boon", Astartes ?'

Asim tapped his staff on the ground.

'Deep below the surface of this island, a very special prisoner is held, bound by the servants of the False Emperor when they still controlled this world,' he began. Immediately, he caught a flash of recognition on the witch's face. 'I ask that you lead me and my companions to this cage, that we might crack it open and release the captive within.'

The witch – Elerika – led the three warriors down the island's tunnels. She had accepted Asim's offer – both because of her own desire to leave this forsaken rock, and because her own servants would have turned on her had she refused. Her presence as they descended was enough to send back the rest of the wyrds they crossed, though Asim could sense their curiosity and fear at the sight of him and Illarion. Balthazar's presence caused much less interest – which only reminded the Sorcerer not to fall into the trap too many of his kind had, to underestimate those without psychic abilities until it was too late.

On their way, they passed great water reservoirs in which thousands of fishes were being kept, fed by the moss that grew between the rocks. This, then, was how the population of the island had kept itself from starving to death after the initial stores of foodstuffs had run dry. Asim had been worried that they would had degenerated to cannibalism – something he had seen entirely too much of in the darkest holds of the Hand of Ruin. Eating your own to survive was a sign of corruption both physical and spiritual, that led to genetic instabilities and the ruin of the mind. Perhaps being forced into such a practice by their exile had accelerated the degeneration of the wild psykers that had attacked earlier. If he could, he would arrange for a few of the more intact corpses to be brought to the Fleshmasters, so that they could study that hypothesis.

They went deeper below the earth, until all signs of human activity had faded away. This, then, was what Elerika had called "the pit". The light bulbs on the ceiling were even sparser here than they had been in the rest of the building, but Asim's altered helmet showed him everything perfectly clearly.

In the pit, all sounds were muffled, as if underwater. The temperature was barely above freezing, but physical discomfort was nothing compared to the yawning spiritual abyss that came from deeper into the tunnel. Asim could feel it as a drain on his soul, and knew that if he took but one more step, his every instinct as a psychic being would force him to turn back and flee.

This wasn't the first time he had experienced such a psychic vacuum, and the memories of the last time he had were bitter indeed. When Prospero had burned under the wolves' wrath, the curs of Fenris had not come alone. The golden, emotionless guardians of the False Emperor had fought at their side, and the soulless spawn of the Sisters of Silence had also been unleashed. These genetic abominations cast in the form of female warriors had reaped a terrifying toll upon the Fifteenth Legion, their mere presence causing the sons of Magnus to lose their psychic powers and tremble in all but forgotten fear. Asim had fought against these perversions of nature then, in the ruins of Tizca. They had killed three of his brothers, and he had personally taken the lives of six of them, relying on blade, bolter, and gene-bred instincts when his mind had failed him. But even the psychic void cast by the Sisters of Silence paled in comparison to the emptiness that laid ahead. If the Sisters' blankness had been the darkness of a starless night, this was a black hole, hungry for souls.

A handful of corpses were laying on the path, decay having barely touched them despite the years they had spent here. Not even the tiny agents of the God of Plague could come nearer than where the party of renegades was standing, and thus the bodies had remained intact, beyond the desiccation that gave them the same aspect as the dried husks of lost travellers in one of Prospero's deserts. None of the dead had been able to get halfway to their distant goal, but how they had even been able to get that far at all was beyond Asim. All of them were natives of this world, and thus had been psykers of some level – the void must have affected them just as badly as it did him, if not worse.

'Five hundred years,' whispered Elerika, 'and according to the records, twenty-nine attempts – all ending in the same way. The last one was a century ago, just before my predecessor decided to close the entire level to prevent any more pointless losses.'

'Do you have any idea as to what exactly is being held back down there ?' asked Balthazar, fiddling with his las-rifle nervously.

'None,' the witch admitted. 'The records kept by our ancestors' gaolers were destroyed during the initial fighting or the chaotic times that followed.'

'But ...' she added, her expression twisting with fresh unease. 'Whatever it was, it's still down there. I can hear it whispering in my mind, meaningless as it might be for now. According to my predecessor's notes, it's what drove all of these poor fools to make the attempt, so that one of them will free the source from its prison – but their souls were snuffed out long before they could fulfill their goal.'

Now that she had mentioned it, Asim could hear it as well. It was truly barely a whisper, but it carried within it great strength, like a distant shout heard over impossible distances. A cold feeling of dread crept over him, distinct from the one born of the psychic void, as he considered the level of power it would take to be able to reach beyond the null field in even such a limited manner. Not for the first time, he considered the wisdom of doing as he intended. But then he remembered the deal he had made with the Herald, and what the consequences would be should he renege on that pact.

Do not think you can avoid this, father. You will pay your debt to us, or share the fate of your lost Nostraman cousin.

'Thank you, my lady,' said Asim, very deliberately ignoring the daemon's threat and taunt. 'You can leave us. We will come back to you in a moment to conclude our pact.'

Elerika looked as if she was going to protest, but after one last look in the direction of the psychic void, she instead chose to take the opportunity and left. As soon as she was out of hearing range, Asim turned to Balthazar :

'Balthazar, get down there,' he ordered, 'and destroy whatever is creating the null field.'

The former hitman looked at Asim in nothing less than shock, his mouth open, staring at his master in incomprehension. His hands tightened around his rifle, and despite the nearness of the psychic void Asim felt the murderous thoughts coursing through his servant's mind – they always did, in response to almost every stimulus. Balthazar was able to ignore them and function as a normal, non-psychotic human, but the mark of the Blood God was strong upon him. In the end, rather than attacking his master, the survivor of Parecxis Gamma asked :

'My lord, have I ... have I offended you in some way ?'

Had the null field not set his mind on edge, Asim would have chuckled at that.

'No, Balthazar, you have not. But you are the only human on the planet bereft of psychic powers. As such, you are also the only one with the ability to walk into this field without dying or going insane and then dying. I cannot do it myself for the same reasons these wyrds could not, and Illarion ... well, I don't need to explain to you why he cannot do it.'

The Secondborn growled at the mention of his name. Between the Possessed's twisted helmet and the aura of darkness that clung to his frame, it was impossible to guess at his expression, but Asim knew that inside, both the spire-born Unbound and the daemon that called itself the Shadow of Horus were uneasy. Entering the psychic void – something they were even less likely to do of their own volition than Asim was – would quite literally rip them apart, tearing the daemon from the mortal soul to which it was bound. It was possible than Illarion would survive the brutal separation, but even if he did, it would only be as a wretched, soul-broken thing. As for the Neverborn, well ... Asim admitted that he was curious as to what its fate would be, to be cast from its mortal host in a place where any connection to the Warp was severed. It was quite possible that the immortal, unliving creature would actually be destroyed in such an event. Perhaps one day he would have the occasion to test that theory, but for now, there were other things to do.

'You should probably leave your weapon behind, though,' Asim added as an afterthought. 'It would not enjoy being near the source of this either, I think.'

Balthazar hesitated for several seconds, his gaze going back and forth between the darkness ahead, his master, and the monster at his back. Finally, he reached the only decision he could possibly make, and after carefully laying his weapon against a wall – Asim noted that leaving it seemed to cause his minion actual, physical pain – he began to walk into the corridor, passing by the corpses of those who had come before him. He went further than any of them, wincing and stumbling, and then turned down the corridor and out of both of Asim's sights.

All that remained to do for the Sorcerer and the Secondborn was to wait, and prepare themselves for whatever would come.

Be cautious, father. The Dark Gods demand that the prisoner be free, but they care naught for what happens after.

They never do, Asim thought bitterly to himself.

As he went deeper into the old complex, Balthazar's mind felt clearer than it had in years, despite the cold and the horrible feeling of emptiness surrounding him. At first, it felt as if his entire soul was burning, as pain he was unable to locate tore into his mind, forcing him to the ground several time as he writhed in silent agony. But the pain had passed eventually, leaving in its wake clarity.

The constant pressure and stress he had felt ever since he had woken up one day surrounded by the guns of Parecxis' law enforcement had vanished, as had the regular urges to commit violence that had started during his time as an inmate. For the first time in years, he felt like the assassin who had been the terror of crime lords across the underhives of an entire planet. Not like a junkie in need of a fix whose particular drug was the shedding of blood and the taking of skulls as trophies.

Doubts began to form in his mind as he went down a flight of stairs that seemed to go on forever, the light of his torch seeming more frail than it ought to be. Images flashed in his mind's eye of the things he had done, of the lives he had taken. After he had been freed of Parecxis Gamma by Asim's grand ritual, he had killed dozens of people in Hive Anaster, hunting them down like animals, enjoying the challenge of the pursuit just as much as he had enjoyed the actual execution. Looters, PDF troopers, Arbites, innocents – he had killed them and taken their skulls, using them to build small monuments to the Blood God.

That was not the attitude he had had before being captured, and he found it doubtful that prison alone could have changed him this much. How had he even known about the Lord of Skulls' existence and power ? It wasn't as if there had been preachers of the Dark Gods in Parecxis Gamma, yet when he had finally met some aboard the Hand of Ruin, what they had told him of Khorne had all seemed familiar to him.

There was only one possible conclusion : his mind – his soul – had been messed with, altered by the touch of the entities that dwelled in the Warp. From a man who took pride in the clinical precision of his hits, he had been fashioned into a serial killer obsessed with taking trophies and paying homage to some dark and twisted deity. And it had all happened so subtly that until that moment, with the influence of the Warp completely removed, he had been utterly unable to see it.

He did not feel horror at the revelation, nor did he fall to his knees in despair, begging for forgiveness. Balthazar had never been a man prone to such dramatic reactions, and he suspected that the null field dampened his own natural emotions, reduced as they might have been compared to those of other, more mentally healthy humans. He did feel anger, though. Anger at having been manipulated in such a fashion.

At the same time, he suddenly understood better why Asim had kept him close. Long ago, during the war for Parecxis, he had asked the Sorcerer the reason for his employment as a personal thrall. At the time, Asim had told Balthazar that it was because he wished to study the effects of the dual influence of Khorne and Tzeentch upon the hitman. Balthazar had been satisfied with the knowledge that he wasn't going to be sacrificed in some ritual or cut apart to see what made him tick, but he had paid little further thought to the explanation. Now, however, looking back at what the master of the Coven had told him, things made much more sense.

Perhaps Asim was aware of the influences shaping Balthazar's mind. Perhaps he feared that such influences were also affecting him, and the other Astartes in the warband. Even transhuman killing machines had to be afraid of losing their identity on some primitive level. Asim claimed to serve Arken the Awakened One while also walking the path of the Changer of Ways, that had been set for his entire Legion when their legendary Primarch Magnus had sold his and theirs souls centuries ago. But could it be that the Sorcerer, even subconsciously, was searching for a way out, a way to preserve his soul from the shaping hands of the Great Mutator ?

If such was the case, then such a way had just been found, for by entering the null field, Balthazar's mind and soul had been cleansed of the touch of the Ruinous Powers. The process had been painful, yes, but it had worked. Yet this solution would be entirely useless to Asim, for entering the null field would kill him just as it had the other psykers who had walked this path before.

But the question remained : what should Balthazar do with that knowledge and newfound clarity ?

He could turn back and return to Asim, but what would he say ? What would happen to him the moment he stepped out of the null field ? Would he still be himself, or would the changes he had been freed of suddenly return, and he would wonder why he had turned back in the first place ?

His knife still hung from his belt. Balthazar supposed that he could always use the blade and cut his own throat, ending his life before the Dark Gods could reclaim it. Here, in this place, perhaps his soul would even be able to escape the torment reserved to all those who died within the Wailing Storm without a patron to protect their spirits in the Immaterium. But death felt like giving up, and if there was one thing that had always defined Balthazar, it had been that he had never given up, no matter the circumstances.

And so Balthazar kept going on, descending ever deeper into the prison complex, feeling the last touch of Chaotic corruption burned away from his soul as he drew nearer to the source of the psychic void. He fancied that he could feel his own soul start to wither at the proximity of the source, and wondered if Asim had been wrong after all – if even a non-psyker such as him could not get close enough without being snuffed out of existence. But still he kept going, determined to at last see what it was the Imperium had constructed so deep below the surface of this accursed world.

After what felt like hours of continued descent, the stairs ceased, and Balthazar found himself in a vast chamber, shaped like a dome carved into the earth. Statues of female warriors in strange armor, the likes of which he had never seen, were carved into the walls in silent watch. At the center of the room laid an enormous machine that still hummed with active power, despite all the centuries that had passed since the last time any tech-priest had come here.

Balthazar approached the device carefully, his lamp casting a beam of light upon components whose function eluded him completely. Nothing he had seen on Parecxis Gamma or in the hives of the capital world had ever come close to this machine. Then, he saw what was laying at the center of the countless tubes and cables, and he stepped back, true horror coursing through his mind for the first time in his entire life.

The hitman had seen many unnatural sights in his life, most of them in his time as a thrall of Asim, and most of those in the laboratories of the Hand of Ruin, in these handful of times he had lost his way aboard the ship and ended up walking in on one of the Fleshmasters' experiments. But what he beheld now surpassed them all, if not in sheer grossness and heresy, then in the scale of the torment it implied.

The desiccated body of a human female hung in the machine, held up only by the cables connected to its shaven head and into the few remnants of flesh that were still attached to the head. All four limbs were gone, as was much of the torso and the lower half of the body's jaw. The eyes were gone, and patches of skin had fallen away, revealing a skeleton of bone and metal alike. In truth, Balthazar was only guessing that the creature was female from the statues on the side of the room – there was no outward sign of the mutilated body's gender remaining. Yet despite the horrific treatment, the body still held some spark of life. Red liquid poured through some of the translucent tubes and into the brain of the wretch, then back out, to be filtered and returned in order to prolong the nightmarish existence of the machine's host.

As he drew nearer in morbid fascination, Balthazar noticed that the sensation of emptiness grew even worse. This, then, was the source of the null field. The still-living corpse was the source of the psychic void, and the machine had the dual function of keeping it from death and amplifying its unnatural trait. He had no idea whether or not the thing was still aware of its situation, and he did not want to know.

What he had to do, however, was clear. Slowly, Balthazar's hands rose and tightened around the frail neck of the creature. The hitman knew that, whatever the consequences would be, this act was one of mercy. Considering the nature of what the device likely held at bay, this would likely be the last action he ever took, and surely the last he freely chose to perform. That knowledge brought a strange kind of peace on his mind, and he smiled at the eyeless body.

With the practiced moves of a seasoned killer, Balthazar twisted the frail spinal column, and the life of Illiana Sevesteros, Oblivion Knight of the Sisters of Silence, scourge of a thousand feral psykers and the one who had volunteered for a duty that was as horrible as it was necessary, ended. The machines that had kept her alive for hundreds of years sparked and died as their core component ceased to function. Across the entire island, psykers felt the null field vanish – even those who had never known of its existence felt as if a distant buzzing, the sound of which they had grown used to the point of forgetting it was even there, finally went silent.

And deeper still within the complex, the thing that had been held back by this living martyrdom was freed from its prison.

Once upon a time, there was a child who dreamt of wonders while laying down on a field beneath a clear sky, the light of the stars illuminating her smiling face as he slept. That child had not known then that there were horrors lurking beyond the stars she so adored, nightmares from the deepest recesses of the souls of all species who had ever lived in the galaxy. All the child had known was the peace of her homeland, where farmers tended the fields to feed their families, untouched by war or strife for countless generations. She had vaguely known that there were other places among the stars, where other people lived very different lives, even though the rest of her kind were blissfully ignorant of such things – but she was too young to truly understand what it meant.

Then one night, as on the other side of the galaxy the skies above a beautiful city were filled with treachery brought forth by ambition and lies, her dreams turned dark and terrible. She dreamt of armored warriors fighting their own kind, dreamt of a ground poisoned for all eternity by the horrors of war, and she beheld the dark faces of the madness that had brought such horror into being. She dreamt of an empire burning and heard the laughter of four great and terrible voices. She awoke with the images of loyal sons dying looping in her shattered mind, her mouth screaming the screams of the betrayed dead.

From her spread a wave of madness that caught the minds of everyone on her homeworld, and in their madness they slaughtered each other, seeing their own families as the butchers who had rained death from the sky upon their own brethren. And from the carnage and the broken bodies rose other, malevolent things that stalked the land in search of the child, who even then was fleeing, though she knew not from what.

They found her eventually, and she fought back, fire and death surging from her fingers. But even as she fought, the powers she unleashed thinned the veil, making it easier for more of the creatures to manifest, and so the vicious cycle went on and on, dragging the planet ever closer to the abyss. For years and years the child did fight, her grow stunted, her mind burned away until nothing remained but the impulse to fight back and an innocence stained with unwilling treachery.

Yet before the cycle could finish in damnation, the soulless ones came. They tore a path through the infernal hordes that surrounded the child, and when they drew near her, her scream was finally made silent. But even surrounded by dozens of the soulless ones, her power was still too great for her to be killed, as she must be according to the laws of the soulless ones' master. Once the soulless ones would have had the ability to destroy her – they would have sent her to burn into the belly of a star, surrounded by a sacrificial circle of their own so that she would have been contained till the end. But their order had suffered much in recent years, their numbers reduced to a fraction of what they had once been and their power broken with the eternal silence of their one and only lord.

Yet the child had to be contained, for her power and the echoes she carried within her soul were too dangerous to let loose upon a fractured galaxy. And so, the Sisters of Silence made a decision, the only decision that would enable them to fulfill the spirit of their orders, if they were unable to fulfill them to the letter.

They brought the child to a world that had been marked as part of their dark dominion of prisons and black ships. There, with the help of the machine-lords who had sworn the same oaths as they had, built a device that would keep the child's power sealed away, at the cost of one of their own. They dragged the child in the darkness below the earth, and trapped her behind hundreds of tons of rock, with the dread device denying her the power she needed to break free. But even that terrible engine of pain and sacrifice could not fully suppress her awesome might, and the child survived in the darkness, alone, sustained by the unnatural energies that coursed through her very soul, broken and despoiled as it might be.

For a long time, the child was trapped alone, unable to hear anything but the echoes of her own screams. Then something changed, and she began to hear other voices, whispering from afar. These voices were like hers, though much, much quieter. She cried out for help, calling out to these distant voices, begging and threatening for release. But time passed, and no help came ...

... until now.

Now the last of the soulless ones was gone, and her powers had finally returned. Now she was caged no longer, and her screams turned to laughter as she began to wave through the rocks that had kept her trapped so long. The stone burned and melted around her, or was cast aside like toys picked up by a vengeful god. She arrived into an open space, far larger than the hole into which she had been consigned. Before her was a great construct of twisted metal and failing power, and through the fog of madness she recognized it as the source of her torment. She leashed at it with animal fury, tearing chunks of it away and sending them to crash against the walls, pulverizing the statues of the soulless ones as she did so.

In her rage, she did not even notice that one of the fragments tore apart the human male standing on the other side of the device. Balthazar Mernas, killer for hire in the Parecxisian underhive and once soul-marked by the Blood God, died quickly if messily, long before the roaring tides of the Warp could re-establish their hold over his soul. His shade dissolved into the aether in a matter of seconds, leaving the daemon who had hoped to use him as a gateway shrieking impotently in the Sea of Souls.

Several kilometers away, the las-rifle that Balthazar had left behind him sparked and detonated, sending burning fragments of shrapnel that ricocheted against Asim's and Illarion's armor. The Sorcerer sensed his servant's death, but his mind was entirely focused on the storm of psychic power that had suddenly erupted below with the null field's dissolution, and paid the demise of the mortal no heed.

After several minutes of vengeful rampage, nothing intact remained in the room, and the child's fury was slightly calmed down. She turned her attention to her surroundings, and felt the presence of two other entities nearby. One was similar to her, shining to her perceptions, though there was a darkness to its fire. The other was a mix of two different flames, bound together in a self-destructive union that would, eventually, destroy one or the other.

Curiosity was an emotion that she had had no occasion to indulge in decades, but after all that time with nothing but her own thoughts for company, she hungered for anything new and unknown with childish intensity. She began to walk, her limbs propelled by a strength that had nothing to do with her atrophied muscles. Then, she started to run. After a few seconds, she started to fly, and a few minutes after that, she was ascending right through the stone toward the two soulfires, her body out of phase with reality until it emerged from the floor right in front of the Sorcerer of Blood and the host of the Shadow of Horus.

The first thought to register to Asim's mind as the prisoner appeared before him was that it wasn't human, contrary to what he had expected (rather foolishly in retrospect, as the Herald of Blood had not told him anything that could have been interpreted as such). It was a xenos, member of one of the countless species of sentient aliens encountered by the Imperium as it spread across the galaxy like a canker. Its body, clad in dirty rags, was thin, with the skin clinging to the bones. Though he knew nothing of its physiology, Asim knew that it was only alive now because of the immaterial energies coursing through its every cell. It was humanoid in shape, barely more than a meter high, with pale purple skin and four glowing red eyes staring at Asim from a hidden face. Its legs bent backward, its arms ended in four-fingered hands, and it didn't walk so much as it floated a few millimetres above the ground.

The second thought was a growing sense of regret at his own stupidity as he beheld the power radiating from the thing standing before him and watching him with an expression that could only be curiosity. He had seen more psychically powerful beings than this, such as his Primarch Magnus, and Lorgar after his illumination – but even they, he believed, would have had a fight on their hands if pitted against this creature. By the standards used by the Astra Telepathica, this was an alpha-plus psyker – the kind of being whispered of in legends dating back to the Age of Strife, when entire worlds had been lost to a single wild psyker losing control of its powers.

In the Great Crusade, the Legions had faced such beings many times, often with entire worlds enslaved by their will. The Thousand Sons had been one of the Legions best prepared for facing them, though in most cases the task had fallen to the accursed Sisters of Silence. Whether human or xenos, sanity was a distant concept to these psychic gods. They saw the universe around them in ways as different from those of other psykers as the psyker's own senses were different from those of the "blunt" humans. And now this one was free as a result of his own actions.

Behind him, he sensed Illarion tense, the Secondborn's instincts pushing him to fight or flee, while his human mind had already reasoned that both of these actions would only spell his doom. That led to the third thought of the Sorcerer – that he was impressed at such a level of control. Clearly Illarion had taken the lessons of his loss of ascendancy on Parecxis Alpha to heart. It spoke well of the Unbound's future, if they survived this confrontation.

Illarion's self-control brought Asim's focus back. His deal with the Herald of Blood had been that he would free the prisoner held beneath the Black Tower, and he had fulfilled it – already he could feel the chains of that particular pact fall off his soul. At the time he had made the deal, he had believed that the prisoner in question could be turned to the service of the warband. Perhaps that could still be the case. Allying with a xenos was still a distateful notion to most Forsaken Sons – but after the Sha'eilat, this creature should not be a problem. All that remained was to see if communication was at all possible, and then if the former prisoner could be brought to the fold.

If Asim failed, then given the level of power of the creature, every soul on the planet would be doomed to whatever fate it designed, including his own. If it tore the secrets of warp-walking from his mind, then even the rest of the Wailing Storm would not be safe. Arken himself might be threatened, though after what the Awakened One had done to Serixithar, Asim doubted the warband's leader could be truly threatened by anything.

No pressure, he told himself with bitter humor, before tentatively reaching out with his mind. As he did so, he was mildly amused by the fact that the Herald of Blood's presence had all but vanished – even the daemon was wary of the creature it had arranged for him to free. That was … both worrying and promising.

+Greetings+, he pulsed wordlessly, transmitting an impression of cautious welcome and peaceful intent.

+Hello+, came the reply, and Asim shivered as his mind interpreted the thought-pulse from the creature. In his head, the alien's psychic voice was that of a female child, and it only took a moment to his transhuman memory to recall from where in his mind that particular voice had come : it was the voice of a Tizcan child, the daughter of one of the Legion's scribes in the City of Light. +Have you come to play with me ?+

+I have come to bring you a message+, he sent, trying very, very hard to keep his disgust from his transmission. +An offer from my brother+.

+Brother ? You have a brother ?+

+I have many brothers, though none of them are here … Except for this one+, he gestured toward Illarion with his head, +and he is more of a younger cousin than a brother.+

+Those who have imprisoned you are also our enemies+, he continued. +The creatures that captured you are also responsible for the death of my own world. Join us, help us with your strength, and we will provide you with all the playmates you could ever want … as well as a chance to make those who hurt you pay for their crime.+

It was better to keep the offer as simple and honest as possible. This creature was powerful enough to destroy him without even really trying, and its mind was too childlike to risk angering it by using concepts it could not understand. Revenge and joy, two concepts most sentient beings understood almost as soon as they became sapient, would have to be enough.

+What do you think ? Will you come with us ? There are a lot of other people upstairs, who are probably eager to see you.+

+ … Yes. I don't like that place anymore. I want to leave. I will talk to your brother.+

Asim sighed, deeply relieved. That had been the hardest part of his mission on Forlorn's Hope. Now all that remained was bringing the other islands under control, either by making their rulers the same offer he had made to Elerika, or through force. Then, he and the most powerful psykers would call for the fleet of the Forsaken Sons, their psychic voice clearing the path through the Warp so that they could come without taking too much risks.

There remained a question, though – one last detail to take care of. A mere formality, which had little meaning in dealing with a being such as the one in front of him, but it was important nonetheless.

+By the way, my name is Asim. What is yours ?+

+My name ? My name …+

There was a long moment of silence. Given how long that creature had been imprisoned, it wasn't surprising its memory was a mess. But having a name for it would prevent Asim or the other Forsaken Sons who would later interact with it from accidentally angering it by revealing their true feelings toward it. If it couldn't remember, then Asim would have to give it a new name, but he knew that names had power, and such an action would create a bond between him and the creature – and that was something he wanted to avoid if at all possible. He was already locked in a relationship with one inhuman creature of unknown power and motivations, and that was more than enough.

+I remember it !+ sent the alpha-psyker after a few seconds, clapping its hands in joy. +I am not sure if that's my name, but that's the only name I can remember, so it must be mine, right ?+

+I would think so+, replied Asim, and the xenos giggled again. Its next transmission, however, sent a shiver of ancient, primeval dread across the spine of the Tizcan scholar :

+My name is Carthago.+

AN : Happy new year, everybody ! Here is a new chapter, written much more quickly than the previous ones. Thank the sudden inspiration that struck me after a very interesting role-playing session involving some fascinating mutation rolls and the ascension of a player's character into a Daemon Prince of Nurgle for that ! Well, that and the excellent novel Primogenitor from the Black Library. I loved that book and the glimpse it gave me into Fabius Bile's motivations.

Back on this chapter. Did you think it would be Isstvan ?

Full disclosure : so did I, actually. That was my original intent. But at the very end, when I decided to have the line of the name being the last of the chapter, a flash of inspiration struck me. I went back to my description of the cataclysm whose warp echoes had driven the psyker mad, and then I realized that with a few modifications, I could set up a twist here. The more I thought about it, the more the destruction of Carthage by Rome seemed fit for the job - it became creepier and creepier the more lore I remembered from my highschool history and Latin lessons. Especially if you remember the Aeneid of Virgil, and how Aeneas, the ancestor of Rome's founders was commanded by the Gods to abandon his lover, Dido the first queen of Carthage, driving her to suicide as she cursed him. Then, hundreds of years later, Roman armies (which would in time become the foundation of an empire feeding upon never ending conquest and war) came and razed the entire city, salting the ground so that nothing could ever live there again (at least in their own perception of it). The Aeneid is probably not historically accurate, but by the Warp does it sound like the kind of tragedy the Dark Gods would set up and enjoy immensely, and we all know the Greek and Roman gods were all bastards.

By the way, when Asim thinks that Arken wouldn't have trouble dealing with the prisoner ? He is dead wrong. Arken would be torn apart by that creature if he ever were to be caught unprepared. Now, with enough forewarning and time to plan a counter-attack, things might be different, but it's essentially the same debate as Batman/Superman (though in this case Batman is a cruel, bloodthirsty lunatic and Superman is the broken child of a world murdered by a cataclysm beyond its understanding ... so, more Snyder's Batman and Superman than the comic ones).

As usual, thank you all for your reviews. Please tell me what you thought of this chapter, and what you would like to

That's all for now. I have started working on the Salamanders Index for the Roboutian Heresy, but it's possible I will release something else before that. See, I am taking my time with them, mostly because I have yet to come up with an origin story for Vulkan that would explain the complete monster I have made of him in the other Indexes.

Zahariel out.