On Calondria, two Death Korps troopers disposed of their dead comrades. They grabbed a corpse by its hands and feet. This one was a Calondrian volunteer. He'd died wearing his IG Greens. So many had died plainclothes. So few had even seen the Aquila on a uniform.

The Kreigsmen lifted the dead volunteer. On the count of drei, they heaved him off a ledge. His limbs splayed.

Abel woke in flight. At the apex of his arc, his eyes opened, and he saw the gas masks of his space friends. Then he landed hard on his back. Indifferently, the korpsmen turned away, and lifted another body.

Abel tried to breathe, but the air burned like a diesel fire. The next body hit his chest, and the impact made him cough and wheeze. The heat kept rising.

Hans and Fritz stopped their work. Their gasmasks turned back to Abel, and they stared. Abel wheezed on smoke. His senses returned, and he realized he was in a pit of burning bodies.

Hans turned away and called, "Kommisar! Abel ist wieder auferstanden!"

Commissar Brant pushed past them. The hat of his office appeared over the ledge, and he leaned in to grab Abel by his Guardsman kit. The three of them dragged him out of the fire, and Abel looked back to see the rest of Calondria 1st Volunteers dissolve in their own smoke. They dumped him on his butt beside the mass grave.

Brant was ecstatic. "Abel! You're back!"

The commissar gave him a warm hug. Through three years of radical and clandestine extremism, Brant had been the abusive uncle Abel never had. Now he was like a loving brother. Brant kissed him on the forehead. "Abel, remember the first time we met? I was pretending to be a Tau, and I said I'd kill you if you didn't renounce the Emperor. Remember what you said?"

Abel had yet to get his bearings. He rubbed his face.

Brant answered himself, "You wished you could be reborn eternally for nonstop martyrdom just to spite xenos. Remember that?"

Abel nodded.

"By the Holy Throne of Terra, boy, I have good news for you, haha!" Brant, Hans, and Fritz all happily cuffed Abel across his helmet.

Abel coughed. He looked around and realized, finally, where he was.

A slope made of glass, descending into a pool that stretched past the horizon. The sand had melted and the ocean had boiled. This had been his favorite beach, a temple to eternal summer, the place where Abel had squandered his youth in monastic aestheticism, studying waves and women. Now clouds of tritium sulfide pooled where cool water used to break.

The bombardment was everything Inquisitor Halbert had promised on the TV. If one space priest could call down fire like that, what could the God-Emperor do?!

Brant's excitement soured. "Look, I'm sorry about your home world, Abel. And about our comrades."

Abel looked down into the fire pit. Kreigsmen and Calondrian volunteers lay together in the flames, sacrifices rendered meaningless. Abel held his face in his hands.

"I promise you it doesn't usually go this way," Brant lamented. "We all hoped your world would share in the glory of the Imperium."

Abel couldn't muster an emotion. He felt like he'd risen from the dead. He could barely stand when it was time to send off the lost.

Commissar Brant prayed in High Gothic. Hans and Fritz seemed bored. They stood at attention when ordered, but loitered when released. The Kreigers had a casual attitude towards death. It had offended Abel once, but it was a sacred indifference; they came from a culture of martyrs. Brant had explained it once: Everyone the Kriegers had ever known or heard of had died this way, and everyone else was a traitor.

Still, Abel had wished so much better for his friends, and for their efforts. The volunteers had given up everything this life promised them, and they had all perished in the same fires as their sinful ilk.

This only felt wrong because he'd been raised among heathens. It was not his place to question higher powers: not the cattle stampede that had trampled his mom, not the riptide that attacked him as a child, and certainly not the Exterminatus of the Master of Mankind. Abel blew away his sorrows in a long, forced sigh. If he cried now, he'd be the kook caught in the closeout.

Commissar Brant sensed the onset of despair. He smiled. "How about those fireworks, huh? It's a fearsome thing, to serve a god."

Abel swallowed and nodded.

Brant asked, "What was that word you use?" He extended his thumb and pinkie and waggled them in the surfer's shaka.

Abel croaked, "Cowabunga."

"Cowabunga," Brant laughed.

Abel grinned. He had to admit it was intense. "Crazy we survived," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

Brant squinted, but his smile sharpened. He didn't answer.

Abel asked, "What?"

Brant mushed his lips tighter. "Abel, things might be a bit strange today, but we have work to do. Hold to your faith and stick to your duty, and we'll walk you through this."

Abel asked "What work? Calondria's donezo, man." He gestured at the husk of his planet.

The Commissar nodded inland. "Remember that bunker the politicians built? We have to go make sure it cracked. First, we have to find the Leman Russ."

"The Russ, the uh- uh- the- the comfy wagon."

Abel gestured to Hans, who corrected, "Russkampfwagon."

"Yeah. The tank. Where'd we leave that thing?"

They had a day's march from the beach to the mountains. Calondria had once been nice. An entire planet where snow, surf, and onsen were always at hand. As they rucked to their old base of operations, Abel could see magma where his favorite geyser used to be.

The walk was quiet. Hans and Fritz were good friends of Abel's, but they didn't know Calondrian, and Abel had only figured out a few words of Krieg. Brant could translate when he had spare time, but he hated doing it. And besides that, he'd insisted Calondrians should learn something called Gothic, which Abel had never heard a lick of besides Spaceman Halbert's homilies on the TV.

They were marching in line when they crossed the sable of a low hill. Fritz gestured halt and then waved everyone forward. Hans had scopes, and tried to find them on a map.

Brant, Fritz, and Abel stood tall and enjoyed the view.

Brant frowned at it all.

Abel lined up some peaks and realized, "I know where we are." He pointed to a barren obsidian mountain. "That was a ski resort, man. Me and Tristan shredded the getaway on the governor hit. Those Tau laser drones couldn't keep up with us on the double-diamonds. The aesthetics were sick, brah."

Those days had been erased, he remembered. His joy was neutered. He swallowed his smile. The valleys wailed as high winds pushed glowing fog through them. Petrified trees stood where once was rainshadow.

Fritz said, "Krieg ist so. This. Like home."

"Sorry, Man," Abel lamented.

Fritz turned his gas mask at Abel. "Krieg ist good. Now Calondria ist good, ja? Übermenschraum."

Abel stared at him. The Kriegers had always come across as insane. Every time he got along with them, he took is as a sign that he'd gone crazy, too.

Fritz extended his pinkie and thumb, then rotated the gesture robotically. "Good, ja?"

There was no point teaching him to do it right. Everyone who cared to hang-loose was dead.

Abel shook his head. "Whatever. Different strokes for different volks."

He asked Commissar Brant, "Any chance Tristan made it?"

Brant shook his head. "It's just us."

"Was he in the burn pile?"

"Tristan was aboard Litany."

Abel took a moment to remember. "The spaceship?"

"They're called voidcraft," Brant answered, "and Litany Against Xenos is a battlecruiser."

Abel looked up at the firmament. All this time, he'd thought it was night. But the sun was up. There just wasn't enough atmosphere left for the sky to be bright. That wasn't the only thing that had changed.

The whole of the Milky Way was blotched by a red smear, like the galaxy was bleeding.