The trip back to the Fire Warrior's containment cell was quiet, calm, and… cold. Kais could feel the air growing crisp as ice crystals started to slowly form along the windows lining the corridor. All around him were the remnants of fierce combat, the las scorches along the walls, blood, broken floor and ceiling panels. Yet, it was growing cold, oh so cold, the air in his lungs rasping in pain as it conflicted with Kais's internal body heat.

Then he heard it, a soft humming from a feminine voice as the lights dimmed to a subtle blue. It was coming from up ahead where darkness lay at a hallway t-junction. That was strange, the darkness had just emerged from nowhere within the past few seconds to eclipse the end of the corridor. Kais stopped in his tracks. Something about this made his nerves rattle as a thin wisp of cold hair hazed from his mouth like a morning fog.

Slowly, from the shadows, emerged the transparent form of a female guardsman. She was young, barely more than a child, her body covered in tattered and torn flak armor. It was her eyes, those two dead eyes which haunted the Fire Warrior, like a secretly judgmental Geist reminding its slayer of former past sins.

"Who are you?" he asked while raising his stolen Lasrifle. The young woman halted her approach, extended her arm, and pointed. A single bead of sweet rolled down the side of Kais's face as he slowly turned around. Behind him, standing right before his very eyes not but a foot away… was his father with those two perfect black eyes upon his ancient chiseled face peering into his soul. This was wrong, his father was dead, this wasn't his father. Without knowing it, Kais started to instinctively walk away from his father towards the ghost of the female guardsman. As he did so, the air started to grow warmer, his breath started to become less stale within his lungs, and the lights started to brighten from dull blue to sharp white. And then, just like that, the hallway started to deice and thaw.

As Kais passed the point where the female Gue'la's ghost should have been standing he saw nothing, nothing except for two muddy bootprints. She had been real. The entire encounter had been real, and Kais knew… he knew something was wrong with him. The warp, something demonic, something bad had followed him from Dolumar IV.

In a mad panic, the Fire Warrior ran back to his containment cell. He was frantic. Fear having now claimed his sanity. He felt those dark emotions for the first time since emerging from his deep slumber, the dread, the fright, the noting of his stomach as all-consuming horror wretched away his bowels. The killing came naturally now without the fear, dread, without the horrors of war; but this was different. Kais could feel the eyes upon him, stalking him from every shadow. Something was there, something could see him, taste him. His sweat felt like ice water against his skin staining his clothes as he ran like a man to whom the feeling a noose slowly tightening around his neck was becoming all the more evident.

Kais rounded the last corner and came upon the containment cell doorway. The nurse sat there quietly upon his bed, her face turned slight so that he couldn't see her face as he approached in a frantic shuffle. She never stood up despite the noise he made. Kais waved his hand over the door panel to deactivate the lock. He had to escape. He had to take this woman and run as fast as he could because something else was in this hospital and it was going to kill them both.

The door did not open. Kais tried again and again, waving his hand over the motion tracking locking mechanism. It wouldn't work. It wouldn't open. Once more, and then he turned to face the nurse with frantic horror, and this time she was starring right at him.

Kais backed away slowly. Her eyes, she had no eyes, just two gorged out holes where they should have been and twin trails of blue bloody tears running down the sides of her face. She raised up upon her broken legs, and walked towards the containment door. Kais watched her through the glass panel as she started to bang her hands limply against the glass, trying to break it, trying to get to him. Her hands were leaving blue bloody fingerprints where she tried to breach the glass.

How? How had it happened? She should have been safe, secure. Kais felt his skin chill and saw ice slowly forming along the glass panels of the containment cell. He turned and faced his father slowly walking towards him from the darkness of the hallway, the lights deactivating before him with every approaching step. Quickly, searching for a way to escape, Kais looked down the other two hallways. On was basked in similar darkness, but within the other stood another ghost, another woman… but this one different.

Kais had seen similar clothes before. This one wore the great coat of an Imperial Commissar, but she was clearly dead. The left of her face was a torn ragged mess at the jawline from some sort of gunshot wound. The Fire Warrior watched her nod once and then disappear into a wisp of icy mist. Behind him the cold darkness consumed the hospital, and so… Kais ran. He ran towards the light, towards where the second human ghost had once stood. Behind him the darkness began to race, hospital lights exploding in faint sparkles of ashen filaments, shards of glass falling from the ceiling as the sharp wind of death kept at his heels. Kais could hear it, the thing which wanted his soul, scratching at the borders of his sanity, hungry, oh so hungry. It followed him, even as he ran into the hospitals central plaza.

It was here that the darkness halted against the pyres of burning debris from his prior raid. The icy cold ebbed against the Fire Warriors flesh as the night crept closer and shied away in screeches of pain when confronted by the fires light.

Kais felt his soul churn as his father stepped forward from the darkness, those two black eyes boring into his soul like daggers. Together they stood apart, separated by the boundaries of light and darkness, neither speaking, neither flinching to dissolve their resolve until first dawn.

The night was long and filled with the crackling of burning flames as the wind shuttered the nearby leaves of bushes and trees. The darkness kept its distance in a wash of bitter cold. Something about the fires lighting the area as distinctly wrong. The flames should have died away long ago from a lack of fuel, but they burned on despite it all. Kais dared not remove his eyes from his father less the creature lurch forward to pry the soul from his body.

Together they stood at odds for hours until at last the red light of dawn started to creep over the horizon of the ocean. Kais didn't know how long he had stared down the ghost of his father, or more to the point the thing wearing his father's face, but at first dawn the image blurred in pain and receded back into the hospital. It took Kais a bitter moment to feel the whispering fade into nothingness within his mind. It was gone, vanished, whatever it had been…

For a brief moment of subsiding fear, Kais stood there willing his hands to stop shaking. The resulting shift came quickly, like flipping a switch. One moment Kais was scared, and the next he felt nothing. The hole had returned, and now… he had to know. Kais had to know if it had all been real, or just a figment of his tattered psyche. So, he went back into the hospital, and slowly walked back to his containment room. There was no fear, just the calm, the calm of the dead no matter what he might find.

When he reached his cell… there was nothing there. The dead Gue'la troopers were gone, vanished, not even their blood remained. The nurse was nowhere to be found. It was like they had never existed in the first place. All he found… was the second set of bootprints from the ghostly Commissar who had helped him escape the second encounter with his father's specter.

Part of Kais wanted to search the hospital for the woman, but he knew… he knew deep down that he wouldn't find her. 'It' had taken her, it had taken her long before Kais had returned from slaughtering each and every single human in the hospital just to save her. He should have never left, he should have never abandoned her, but he had… He would regret it later, when that switch flipped again and the emotions came back… of that he was certain.

There was nothing left for Kais here anymore. Just the dead… and the ghosts, and regarding those ghosts, he thought it strange… their faces… he was certain that they were not his victims. Why, he wondered? Why had they helped him?

Kais guessed that it didn't really matter right now. What mattered was escaping, finding people he could trust, finding a way to protect himself from the darkness hunting him in the shadows. Out in the city he could find help, he could find…

When Kais heard it, he felt a chill run down his spin. Off in the distance there was a distinct whisper of primitive radio static, and a voice… a Gue'la voice, "Hello, can anyone hear me?"

The Fire Warrior shouldered his stolen lasrifle and started to sweep rooms on the fly, looking for the source of noise. Eventually, he found a dead Gue'la trooper lying face down upon the floor. Upon this man's back was a bulky portable radio, what the humans called, 'a vox system.' Kais knelt upon the floor besides the fallen trooper's body and picked up a crude handheld phone attached to a rubberized cord.

"Hello?" he asked. There was a long delay filled with static, and then he heard a befuddled laugh, "It's you isn't?"

"I… who is this?" asked the Fire Warrior with an incredulous snarl. The Gue'la laughed bemused once again and gasped out of exasperation, "You know?" started the human with a chuckle, "I honestly didn't expect things to playout like this. I thought… I thought I had doomed everyone."

Kais felt taken aback by such a… weird admission, "What are you talking about? Who are you?" asked Kais once again, this time with a mixture of sympathy and sternness. The human gasped shallowly on the other end of the vox and said, "I can't answer that question right now because you honestly wouldn't believe me. Listen, seeing is believing blue skin. If you really want to know what this thing hunting you actually is… then I recommend finding me."

"You know about the darkness?" asked Kais. The Gue'la chuckled once again, "I know that this thing which pursues you can't be slain through force of arms, but it's forced to accept certain rules. If you want to survive another day come and find me. I'll be at the lighthouse along the coastline. But be forewarned… the things here… you'll need to kill them first."

"What things?" asked Kais, rising to the challenge. He human chuckled once more, "Oh… you'll see soon enough," and just like that the line went dead. The Fire Warrior sat there on his haunches considering things. This human, whoever he was, knew what was going on. He knew about this thing hunting him. He knew… Kais knew… that this was a priority. If that thing wearing his father's face found him again… he might not be able to stop it.

The Fire Warrior back-tracked through the hospital and came to a window overlooking the city. The metropolis ran along a coastline shaped like a crescent. Dark black fires forming from the immolated remains of several skyscrapers shrouded the horizon as far as the eye could see. It was dreary, and the sight of the broken city skyline with its tattered remains of fractionally broken spires made the Fire Warrior seethe in disgust. Yet, he knew what had to be done, and so Kais focused his sight along the coastline until he saw it, a small plateau near the far edge of crescent. Upon its ridge rested a small stunted building topped with a light beacon to accommodate aquatic ships venturing the planets oceans into safe harbor. That was the light house, and within it was the human…

Kais nodded to himself, and walked away. Getting to that lighthouse before dark would require a vehicle, and so he back-tracked towards the hospital entrance, past the still lingering corpses of numerous dead Imperial Guardsman. They were real, their broken bodies smelling of rotting meat and sewage. Of this, Kais was certain.

Outside, the hospital was surrounded by a small masonry perimeter wall which could be easily traversed. However, there were 'other' complications. As the Fire Warrior wondered around the building, through numerous exterior gardens and poorly temporary parking fields, he noticed that all the Tau civilian vehicles had been destroyed or were too badly damaged to be properly used.

Thus, he was forced to consider alterative options. Parked around the front of the building were numerous Gue'la Imperial Guard vehicles including several armored transports, but what caught Kais's attention was one of the small scout vehicles. It was a simple ground car upon four rubber tires with a heavy caliber stubber bolted unto a flatbed. Of the assembled vehicles, this one was potentially the fastest, and Kais needed speed more than anything right now.

So, the Fire Warrior clumsily leaned into the vehicle, sitting his body into the driver's side seat. The craft was primitive, but luckily the controls were rather simplistic. Though the Fire Warrior had never driver a human vehicle before, he was quick to figure out the numerous transmission controls of the seat lever, including reverse.

Kais quickly backed the vehicle up using one of the floor peddles and prepared to drive away. As he did so, he made the mistake of looking into the hospital. Lining the windows, looking down upon him from the second floor, were fifty standing Imperial Guardsman and a single Tau nurse. All of them were missing their eyes, scowling, scorning him for his failures. Kais only felt bad for the nurse. The humans, all of them still sporting their physical wounds upon their respective bodied, he personally felt nothing but hate for given the brutality unleashed upon the wounded left behind from the evacuation. Even in death… they could kiss his ass, and so Kais drove away into the city.