The shuttle landed without incident on the rocky, airless surface, guided by Liriel's intuitions about the source of the Warp presence. Ahead of it was an obelisk, almost half a kilometre high and a hundred metres wide at the base, made of smooth, polished black metal. Its cladding seemed to suck up the light that fell on it, allowing no reflection or detail to escape. The thing radiated menace as no mere structure should.

The aeldar bedighted themselves in shagreen armour, sealed with transparent faceplates. It was not quite state of the art - Tellyth had read records of modern aeldari equipment from when the merchants used to pass by Mathara - but it did enough to protect them from the vacuum and helped regulate their temperature. The suits were much more effective than standard issue armour for the royal guard, but its inability to be manufactured on the planet meant that it was too precious to be used much of the time.

The suit fit strangely at first, too loose and baggy for an aeldar's form. As Tellyth moved, however, it seemed to shrink around him, fitting his body exactly. It was an uncomfortable feeling at first, the slight compression making him feel like he was being swallowed alive, but after a few minutes the feeling left him, and he could not feel the armour at all.

Tellyth led the disembarking, his troops fanning out behind him. They were unused to movement in low-gravity situations, and Hyla nearly fell taking her first step out of the shuttlecraft. The others had similar troubles but swiftly learned to move in bounding leaps that covered ground quickly. The armour was tough enough to take the damage of a fall without worry, but fighting in this environment would be extraordinarily difficult.

They approached the obelisk cautiously, in a wide line. Nothing emerged to attack them. Nothing responded in any way, in fact.

"Do you see any way inside?" Tellyth asked, his voice coming across naturally and unchanged across the communication devices built into their helmets.

No one could. Each of the thing's nine sides appeared to be a smooth slab. He moved closer, walking around the obelisk as he did. Palail moved across the opposite side. There was no difference that he could see; even with the light of the sun falling directly on it, he could make out no detail in the surface of the structure.

"Here! I found something!" A voice called. A ping appeared on the faceplate's internal display.

He hurried to the shadowed side of the obelisk, where a group of warriors were gathered near a door. A door that Tellyth hadn't seen when they had landed. Perhaps the yawning black abyss had simply been hidden in the light-sucking material. Perhaps.

In any case, and with Palail's warning on his mind, entering through the obvious doorway seemed like a poor idea. Tellyth opened a private communication channel to Liriel and asked her, "I've seen what kind of damage that staff can do. Can you make another hole in the wall for us to attack through?"

"Do you really think that would make a difference?" Liriel asked, and despite himself Tellyth felt foolish for asking the question. Gods but he wanted another hit of vosin. Everything was dulled, almost greyed out in his vision. There had been an arweh preparation set in the shuttle and it had taken most of his self control not to partake during the voyage. The Seer continued, "It would be dangerous to do that. The veil is weak here. The slightest pressure could rip it open and unleash the full horrors of the Warp on us."

"Then you won't be able to assist us in there," Tellyth said, concerned. "Perhaps you ought to stay outside, keep watch for us."

"Even without my gifts, I'm still one of the best fighters in this group. Let's get this over with."

There was nothing else for it but to enter the obelisk. Tellyth sent Palail in first. She grimaced at the order, but stepped through the threshold without comment and was immediately swallowed in darkness.

"Palail? Palail, are you still there? Respond!" Tellyth called into the communicator.

Nothing happened. A tense moment passed, the warriors looking to each other and then to Tellyth. Liriel broke their silence by breaking ranks, striding up to the entrance.

"Wait, we don't-" Tellyth called, but she was through before he could complete the warning.

Another silence descended. Tellyth continued to call into the communicator, to no avail. Indecision gnawed at him. Every moment could matter. He stared at the jet-black doorway, fear and urgency battling in his mind, before he snapped to a decision. "Follow me as quickly as you can," he ordered, then leapt through the entrance.

His vision seemed to leave him as he passed through the darkness. It resisted him, slightly. Like walking through a thin sheet of water, an eerie coolness flooded his body through the shagreen armour. Once he passed through, he could still see nothing. No, not nothing; far below him was a dim light. It was approaching slowly, but he could make out few details of the area it illuminated.

He realized quickly that the light below was not approaching, but rather that he was falling, the low gravity simply tricking him with the scale. As he came closer he could see the chamber the light was in; a large, nearly circular room, with walls of strange materials in unnatural colors. There were two figures in the room, one laying prone on the ground.

Tellyth landed hard, flexing his legs to absorb the impact, and rushed to the pair of aeldar. "What happened?" Palail was on the ground, clutching at her foot. Liriel stood above her looking oddly relaxed for being in such a strange environment.

"Palail landed badly and hurt her ankle."

Unusual. The scout was as graceful as a cat. Tellyth looked to her for an explanation, and she could give only a half-hearted shrug. "I got distracted just before I hit the ground. My suit ruptured. Don't think I can walk like this."

Tellyth cursed the misfortune. "We need to seal it up immediately. Keep the pressure on until-"

"The air is breathable," Liriel interrupted.

Tellyth realized she was right. There was air in the chamber - he was hearing their voices normally, rather than through the armour's communication device. And according to a readout on the faceplate, it was the same kind of air as on Mathara. "A small blessing, then. But I'd still rather get that sealed just in case."

As the rest of the team landed and formed a defensive ring around the trio. he called to their medic. "Asina, can you rig something up to help her walk?"

Asina sheathed her own weapon as she approached, looking at her patient critically. "Shouldn't be a problem. The medical kit on the shuttle was fully stocked," she said as she pulled a strange metal assemblage from her pack, looking like a strangely elongated folded spider the size of Tellyth's fist. With a few motions, it expanded and unfolded into a simple metal crutch.

Asina first sealed the pinhole breach in the armour with a sheet of adhesive. She then administered a painkiller through an injector port to muttered thanks and stiffened the armour's joints to form a makeshift splint. "That should keep you mobile at least, but you won't be able to fight until you heal up fully."

Palail took the crutch and climbed to her feet. She leaned on it heavily as she tried to walk a few steps. It held, and she nodded to Tellyth. "I'll last."

The immediate crisis dealt with, the group looked around the room. Again, there were nine walls, built out of an eclectic mix of materials all of unique shapes. Tellyth touched one lightly - the armour transmitted sensations perfectly. The wall was glass-slick, with the individual blocks so tightly fitted that a knifeblade could not fit between them. Each wall had a doorway leading to identical hallways.

"This was a trap," Tellyth said quietly to Liriel. "This room was prepared for us."

Liriel simply shrugged. "Then we have fallen into it completely. Our objective is unchanged; find the site of the ritual and disrupt it."

"Did you know this would happen?" Tellyth tried to keep the accusation out of his voice. He was all too aware of how catastrophic his distrust had been to her efforts to unify the people against this threat, and was trying to extend her the benefit of the doubt.

Disconcertingly, the Seer was nonplussed by the implicit accusation. "Of course. Why do you think I insisted that you bring your best troops? I need them here."

Once again, Tellyth found himself thick-tongued in front of the Seer, and remained silent as she indicated one of the exits from the room. "My divinations indicated that we're in the middle of a vast complex. The ritual site is in its center. That path should get us there most quickly. Arrange your forces."

And suddenly he could speak again, the commands coming easily to him. "All together! Hyla and Polus'iar in the lead. Yhunistrar, keep watch over Palail in rearguard. Everyone else, keep in pairs and watch where you're going. Head through that doorway. I don't need to tell you all, we're in hostile territory now. Weapons out and guard up."

Tellyth led near the front, while Liriel stuck near the rear of the group.

The thirty-two survivors of the attack on the palace formed a staggered line about a hundred metres long in one of the hallways, moving slowly enough that Palail could keep up with them. The hallway itself was oblong in cross-section, with a flattened but not quite flat bottom. It was just slightly too narrow to swing his sword in, especially with allies close by. The walls and floor were warm, and seemed to glisten off a light that came from no source anyone could discern. The hallway curved left and right, moved in tight spirals and shallow slopes, and canted such that he sometimes walked with a leg on a wall and the floor. It was more like a tunnel bored by some vast worm than a civilized construction, but stayed too regular for that to be the case.

As the hallway progressed, it narrowed and shortened. At first Tellyth dismissed the thought as an illusion, but soon realized he could no longer stretch his arms out fully to either side. A quarter of an hour later, he could brush the ceiling with his fingertips. An hour after that it scraped against the top of his head. The warriors before him crouched down to continue and he soon joined them.

It had been hours, and the group was crawling on their bellies, their armour scraping against the floor and ceiling. Tellyth could not take a deep breath any more; there was no space. He didn't know how Palail could take it, but could not turn around to check. Iyarie, in front of him, stopped and glanced backwards. "They've found something up ahead." Tellyth passed the message on behind himself, to muffled reply, then squirmed forward. The tunnel began to open up suddenly and he saw…

It was a vast, gaping cavern, filled with the same strange, directionless light that suffused the hallway. The far reaches were shrouded in a heat haze. It might have been kilometres across, but the view in every direction was blocked by vast pillars. Or perhaps pillars were the wrong word? They were not all aligned vertically - each seemed to be canted at a different angle, and huge circular struts connected them. This was what the group was standing on, and it intersected other struts along its length.

Local gravity here was strange; it pulled "down" relative to the pillar they had exited, but a few steps beyond that seemed to center on the strut itself, allowing traversal around the circumference. The feeling was deeply disorienting, and the pull of the strut was weak enough that Tellyth was sure a strong leap would send him sailing out into the void, to collide with another strut or pillar eventually. The half-dozen warriors in the van huddled in a group in front of him, staring out at the structures.

"This cannot be real," Tellyth said, a chill creeping up his spine.

It only took a few minutes for the majority of the group to arrive. Each new arrival stood awestruck by the immense scene before them. Liriel crawled out of the hole last. She barely glanced at the cavern around her, instead heading straight for Tellyth.

"Where are Yhunistrar and Palail?" he asked. No one had followed her out of the hole.

"There were noises behind me. Some kind of attack, I think. I couldn't turn around to check on them," Liriel replied.

Tellyth started for the pillar again, but stopped when Liriel gripped his arm. "There's nothing you can do."

"They might be dying!" he replied furiously. A pit of anxiety had opened in his stomach.

"Soldiers die. The mission is more important. If you cannot understand that-"

"Incoming!"

Tellyth turned to the source of the cry, further up the strut, to see one of his soldiers disemboweled by a scuttling monster. It was waist-high to an aeldar, held up on nine slender double-jointed legs that ended in razor-sharp talons. Each triad of legs was connected to a segment of the thing's main body, a fat, disk-like thing covered in rattling scales. The think was trilaterally symmetrical, with a central eye along the rim of each body segment and their intersection on the bottom of the thing's body contained a circular mouth much like a leech's. It was pure white, tinged purple underneath the scales.

There were dozens of them, scuttling along the strut towards the aeldari.

Sorsin tried to leap away from the onrushing monsters, but misjudged the gravity of this place. He sailed into the space between the struts. Before Tellyth could order anyone to throw a rope to him, two of the spider-things leapt at him, impaling him with their talons and carving away at his flesh. His screams echoed around the group as the spiders crashed against their line.

The rest of the force grouped together quickly, forming a ring around their pillar's exit. The spiders moved erratically, dodging most of the strikes aimed their way, but a single sword blow or spear thrust, aimed true, would cripple them and leave them easy to finish off. The aeldar were a coordinated unit, well drilled to fight alongside one another. Each did him proud, despite the unfamiliar environment.

Still, the spiders were fast and agile, and fought unconventionally. They would dance between each other to attack their targets, their limbs somehow not ending up a flailing tangle. Tellyth held two at bay, six limbs from each deflected by his flashing sword, while his comrades secured kills. Every parry was accompanied by a white appendage sailing into the void, curling into itself. Blue-purple blood whetted the ground as the aeldar's attacks showed through, and the bodies of the spiders began to pile up before them.

Then Turin, to Tellyth's right, overextended himself. His thrown dagger sank deep into a spider's body and he stepped forward to secure the kill as it hissed in pain. A trio of them leapt at him as the others charged recklessly forwards. Tellyth could not help him as the first laid open his thigh and the second scrabbled at his face. The last he managed to bat aside with a lucky, blind strike with his sword, and then Hyla was on top of him, clearing away his attackers with deft strikes of her ancestor's blade.

Their section of the strut was clear a moment later. The aeldar panted with the exertion of their battle, and more than a few bore gouges in their armour.

"Report! Injuries?" Tellyth called out.

The troops were organized and efficient, even in the aftermath of the surprise attack. Asina came to him quickly. "Mostly minor injuries; we have six walking wounded. We lost two people, including Sorsin. And Turin is…"

The warrior's skin was pale, blood leaking from his open wounds and pooling strangely on the surface of the strut. The stab to his thigh had pierced a major artery, and the cuts to his face had blinded him. One of the medics was trying to tend to him, but Turin thrashed on the ground, his mouth foaming. He was trying to speak, but no intelligible words emerged.

Tellyth crouched by his side, speaking in a low and urgent tone, trying to comfort him. "You're going to be okay Turin. Stay conscious, stay with me. Focus!"

"They had some kind of toxin in their claws," Asina said. "It's short-acting. Most of us can fight it off, but he was hit badly. His mind is seizing uncontrollably."

Tellyth said nothing at first, staring at Turin while the other medic applied disinfectant gels and muscle relaxants to his twitching body. It was Liriel who broke the silence.

"Tellyth, we need to go. We could be attacked again any moment."

He ignored her at first, but steeled his resolve after a moment's pause and gestured to a pair of warriors. "You two, take your spears and make a stretcher. Keep him in the middle of the formation."

"There's no point," Liriel said in a low voice as the warriors scurried to follow his orders. They ripped apart a pack for the raw materials. "All we're doing is reducing our effectiveness."

Tellyth whirled on her, his intent to smother his distrust forgotten and his voice raw, "Then what would you have us do? Leave him here to be devoured by those things? Mercy kill him?"

Liriel stared at him unblinking. He slowly realized her meaning, staring back in horror.


There were nineteen aeldar left.

The attacks were incessant now. On an ashen plain of uncountable aeldari skulls lit by the searing brilliance of a black sun, in labyrinthine halls of faces stretched across the walls that screamed abhorrent lies and unbearable truths in equal measure, beneath the branches of trees where the dead hung like strange fruit and knew the deepest secrets held locked in his mind.

His warriors fell. Many to the multitudinous creatures of the chaotic realms they trudged through, and others to the twisting knowledge of the place. They froze, listening to the maddening whispers uttered from dead men's lips or wandered away raving about the truths revealed to them. Tellyth saw them, sometimes, further on. Part of the ranks of the ghosts that taunted him here.

"We can't keep going on," someone growled.

Tellyth took another few steps before he even realized that the speaker was talking to him. He turned to find Hyla with half a dozen of his men behind her. She was looking at him, but there was something wild in her eyes; fear and anger, he was used to. But the trembling madness that shook her, he had no answer to.

"Hyla," he said, but she cut him off.

"There's nothing here for us, Tellyth. It was a trap. We need to escape."

"There's nothing for us back on Mathara. We need to find the source of the ritual. If we stop it, they'll be saved. We'll be heroes-"

"Heroes?!" Hyla spat. "You're the only one who needs saving! You convinced us all to follow a traitor to a trap, and think there's anything here but death? Look around you, Captain! We're dying, for nothing!"

"We're close," Liriel said, her voice a sibilant whisper. "I can feel the ritual site already." If Hyla heard her words, she gave no sign.

"Captain, give it up. We can still get out of here. If all of us go together, we can make it back to the ship." The group behind her adding their own pleading to her words, but the greater number were silent, waiting on his word.

He wavered for only a moment. The memories of the fallen rose up within him, striking at his heart. He looked to the Seer for guidance, and when his eyes met hers, it was as if a shadow passed over his mind. He turned back to Hyla, his voice cold and angry. "Leave, traitor. There is no place for anyone so terrified of death beside me."

Hyla's expression turned stony at his proclamation. She left without another word, many of the warriors following her. Tellyth did not care. If he had to die to save his people, he would.


There were six aeldar left.

They fought as separate beings of one body, tempered by the horrors of this place to greater skill than ever. As though champions of the oldest aeldar tales, they moved in synchrony, breaking through waves of chaotic horrors as a proud ship through icy waters. Through the worst of the daemonic scourge, they prevailed.

Tellyth could not remember the names of the warriors who fought beside him.

The blood ran thickly to the ground, soaking into parched and dusty soil that shifted in mesmerizing patterns as they swept across it. Tellyth knew not to look at the patterns, or at his companions. He knew that if he did, the lies would start. The voice in his mind wasn't to be trusted, nor were his eyes windows to anything but artifice. Everything here was deception.

The last time they had looked at one another, they had known, somehow deeper than their bones, that one of them was a traitor. Hyshe, her name was. They had fallen upon her before she could twitch, six swords cutting her into bloody ribbons. It had only been in that single awful moment, her gaze locked onto his, that he realized his madness.

They had not spoken since. Their bond was deep. It was the only thing keeping them alive. And if sometimes they cried out in pain, and a foe snuck between them to land what should have been a lethal blow, and its victim rose again to fight, it was only as it should be.

They were close, now, the Seer promised. Tellyth did not know what they were close to any more. But he still fought.


There was one aeldar left.

Tellyth had long ago lost track of time. His gaze never wavered from the step of the Seer before him. He had forgotten her name too, forgotten everything but the endless march, the feel of his sword in his hand, the fiery pain of his wounds.

He had no past, no future. Everything was focused in the eternal present. He moved to stay near her, because if he lost her, there would be nothing left.

"We're here, Tellyth. Are you ready?" she asked.

Tellyth did not look up. He did not understand the words. But the Seer had stopped, and so did he, collapsing to his knees in exhaustion. A hand touched his chin and pulled his head upwards gently. He looked into eyes that were almost an aeldar's eyes. Behind them, something terrible and cold watched him.

"Yes, I think you are," it said.