Liriel's eyes snapped open as the ship rumbled again, some distant quarter spasming in pained desperation. Blood washed the floor of the chamber, sloshing around the piled bodies of the IllMureead dead. The ship tilted, sending the viscous fluid across her legs.

She wiped away the smeared blood from the visor of her helmet with her left arm. Her right was dead to her. She breathed in deeply against the dull, thrumming pain, and felt her ribs slide across her lungs. Several of them were broken. She tried to climb to her feet atop the pile of corpses and hissed in pain when she moved her left ankle.

Distantly, she could hear the clash of claw against hell-forged blade.

So.

The ship was crashing.

The aliens and daemons were still fighting.

Her weapon was destroyed. Her allies were dead. Her body was broken.

This is how I die.

The shuttle was half a kilometre away. Still functional. She remembered the whine of the engines and the hole she had blasted on the way in.

Impossible. Pointless.

She remembered the route, every turn and path. The daemons would have flowed outwards from this point. Nothing in her way.

I can't. I won't.

Silence. Then, that tiny ember of rage. The rage that had sustained her when her family had withered into broken husks. The rage that had compelled her to survive when she was cast out of her home. The rage that had driven her to master her own mind and body. The rage that had warmed her in the coldest nights and bolstered her against the deepest wounds, awakened within her and said, simply, You will.

Liriel crawled, one hand trailing useless beneath her and one leg uselessly behind. She crawled through blood and pus and viscera that pooled up to her neck. She crawled up slopes made sheer by the madly tilting ship. She crawled until she could pass out from pain, refocused her will, and kept on.

The image of the shuttle flickered in her mind, but it was crowded out by others, brought by the rage. Every snub and betrayal paid to her by other aeldar. Every time she had been made to be a tool, used and discarded by those that thought themselves her betters. Even the suffering at the hands of the daemon on the moon could not do more than sharpen the edges of her anger.

Pain beat a steady drumbeat across her body, and she welcomed it like an old friend.

And then she was there.

The airlock door stood open. She crawled inside with a pained burst of speed as the ship shook again. Whatever force was keeping it aloft above the planet was failing. She felt a momentary weightlessness as the ship began to freefall before gravity reasserted itself. It tilted again, and she slid forward, nearer the cockpit. So close now.

The final few metres were an exercise in frustration as she forced spent muscle and sinew to serve their turn. She could not make it into the chair, but propped her torso atop the central column and grasped the control orb with a trembling hand. The shuttle came to life at once. As she eased the orb back, as controlled and precise as she could manage while staving off the steely pull of unconsciousness, it forced itself back through the tender hole it had carved into the hive ship's flank.

The transparent screen coated itself in more viscera in its exit, but it slowly began to clear itself, materials and machinery of the ancient craft diligently performing their duties in clearing the view for the passengers within.

And staring at the slowly clearing blood, a discordant thought came to her. Had she left the airlock open when she had left the shuttle? She couldn't remember.

Liriel had only a fraction of a second to react to the form of the alien that appeared in the corner of her vision. A small, sinuous form, leaping at her. It sank razor-sharp teeth into her shoulder. The wound burned. Poison.

She screamed and grabbed the thing by its tail. She snapped it forward, slamming the thing's oversized head against the raised console, then again and again until its carapace cracked and it sprayed its vile-smelling ichor across the cockpit. The poison burned its way through her shoulder, galaxies of pain flaring and dying away with every heartbeat that carried traitorous blood to the rest of her body.

"Even this? Even this, you could not grant me?"

She stared into the vast vault of stars above her, corrupted in their turn by the vast scar spewing the taint of Chaos throughout the galaxy, and felt her lip curl into a sneering grimace. The familiar words of her mantra came to her, and she spoke them with all her usual hate.

"Asuryan, Phoenix King of the gods, ruler of fire and light, damn you to the blackest pits of hell. May your soul freeze in eternal torment, charlatan. What use an impotent, vacillating jackass of a phoenix? Well that She Who Thirsts slew you and consumed you - no better did you deserve. No torture would equal the what you have robbed us of.

"Gia, whore and ruler of whores, who now do you spread your legs for? Did it please you to be impaled on a Chaos God's cock? Did it finally satisfy you, oh divine slut, to be gouged from the inside out? Have you filled of yourself what Asuryan and Khaine together could not provide?

"Hoec, wayfinder, lost and ragged wanderer, were you able to lead yourself to safety when your doom came? Can you find a path out of She Who Thirst's stomache? Blinded and deafened you were to the suffering of our people, the screams of our dead. Blinded and deafened you were at your end, when She finally ended your torture.

"Cegorach, fool of the gods, piss-stained coward and madman, what has your art given? You laughed at our depravity until it ended us. What have you to laugh at now, imbecile? What petty revenge does the pettiest god plan from his cave, masturbating to dreams of glories that were never yours, the dog who always begged for the scraps of his betters' table.

"Khaine, torturer, kin-slayer, arrogant thug. Your end was too kind for you. War god, slain by a newborn babe, saved from annihilation only at the grace of an anathema. Here, your prophecied end; though you slew ten billion men your better to avoid it. Pawn, weakling, idiot! Your very existence was a blight upon our kind. If only your suffering could be commensurate with your crimes.

"Lileath, whose domain is dreams, what dreams now are left? Where do we live, but in the realms of nightmare and shadowed despair? What have we left to live for, but the hope for a swift death? Sweet maiden, did you suffer when your flesh was torn asunder? When your divinity was defiled? When the dreams of the aeldar died?

"Morai-Heg, the first Farseer, whence your vaunted foresight when the Fall came? No, your betrayal came earlier. Were you not the spark that lit the Heavens asunder? Your end, too, was justly deserved. The betrayal you delivered us, we deliver unto you, blind seer.

"Vaul, traitor and liar, craven, crippled wretch. All of your craft and invention at the end lay as broken and useless as you yourself. Broken upon your own anvil, your vaunted armoury turned into a breeding pit for the horrors that plague us, are you satisfied with your legacy?

"Kurnous, our great and noble father. Made a bitch for his own hounds at the pleasure of the Prince. Behold the fate of your get. Behold our fallen empire, our fallen people. All nobility and strength stripped from us, as they were from you. What pride you must have felt, knowing that we would follow in your path to oblivion!

"Isha, soft-headed, selfish slattern that you are, mother of a damned, doomed race, what good were you when the aeldar needed you? Did you weep for us, when our race died? Did you ever do anything but weep? Useless and helpless to the very end. How dare you bring us here! How dare you weep, when we fought and died for you! How dare you die, after all that we did for you!"

Nothing answered her but the laughter of thirsting gods.