Lord of the Night

'Now you will be silent,' Sahaal said, backhanding the creature's cheek until its screams were replaced only by the wet gurgles of oozing blood, 'and you will listen closely. And you will struggle, and writhe, and try to escape, and in your mind you shall hurt harder than you have ever felt pain before, but you ca

He spoke of the darkness that haunts youth's fears. Of the horrors that only the imagination of a child may devise. He spoke of bogeymen and spider gods, of scissor-fingered hags and the writhing of snakes. He spoke of faces in the sky and wet-edged lips, like the folds of a great belly, pursing to suck the light from the world.

He spoke of adolescent terror. Of self-harm and religious awakening. Of Imperial dogma crashing the soul, of familial rejection or parental perversion. Of young pain.

There was always reference to pain.

And always the cut, cut, cut.

He spoke of the terrors of adulthood. Of knives in the dark and rape in the light. Of butchers and marauders, of aliens and mutants. He spoke of fires creeping nearer, of quicksand clogging the lungs, of nooses drawing tight. He spoke of death and torture and eyes in the night.

And he cut and he cut and he cut.

He spoke of the warp, and when his victim's larynx burst from the rawness of its screams he spoke of the Ruinous Ones, of the watchers in the void, of the Empyrean swarms. He spoke of prowling madness, of insanity unleashed upon a million worlds, of the Emperor's wounds and the Traitor's joy. He spoke of the Haunter's palace. Of the blood of angels. Of the tentacles in the warp. Of the steel teeth bared in the echoes of eternity.

Of horror and nightmare and terror and venom.

He vented himself. He raged against the astropath's flesh. He diced and cut and ripped. He disjointed and jellified. He lost himself to a haze of red and he spoke of the primal scream, the banshee howl that echoed in the earliest caves of mankind, the feral simplicity of Fear.

And the dam broke open, and the walls of the astropath's resistance crumbled, and the chittering in the warp filled his ears and scratched petulant claws against the man's mind, and as the tumult reached its unbearable climax Sahaal reached through the paste of blood and shit and tears and wrenched away the lead circlet upon the man's brow.

For an instant, the astropath's second sight was returned to him.

He saw a bloodslick daemon with black eyes and claws of lightning steel, that leaned close to his shattered senses and hissed: 'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

And then the astropath was beheaded with a single stroke of the monster's claws.

The swarms of the warp, baited close by such psychic terror as they had never before tasted — an intoxicating fillip that pulsed like a beacon across the ethereum — rushed in to frenzy-feast upon the released soul.

And the warp rippled like a disturbed millpond, and in its clash of hues and flavours it was Sahaal's face, Sahaal's voice, Sahaal's mind, that was borne upon the cusp of the astropath's deathshriek.

Borne outwards, towards eternity.

Mita Ashyn

She was in Orodai's empty office, wrestling with indecision, when it hit.

It broke across her defences like a tsunami upon a beach, surging above and through her, overwhelming every part of her mind, leaving her drowning and gasping for air.

It was a bloody-red dagger, hooked beneath her ribs and rising, rising rising.

It was a branding iron, smouldering with red heat, that scorched her not with a word or symbol, but a vision, an image, an event.

It was a psychic maelstrom that boiled the very air, undirected and all powerful, sent blasting into the void like the cusp of Shockwave, a telepathic exterminatus warhead that swelled like a fattening womb, invisible and intangible but terrible nonetheless. Lost at its centre was a scream — a hidden voice of pain and fear (oh, God-Emperor, such fear!) — that howled its horrors to the warp even as it was consumed: squabbled over by hungry beasts, divided and shredded before its echoes had even died.

It shivered along her spine, it froze her blood and sent her knees buckling, hands grasping for support, and this despite the unhappy truth: that the deathshriek was but a fraction of the surge: a motive force to propel it outwards, a pilot light upon which far greater, and more dazzling, visions had been hung.

Mita fell to the floor with a gasp and Cog, who had not even been aware of the psychic Shockwave, let alone assaulted by its ferocity, was left mumbling his moronic concerns and trying, clumsily, to restrain her flailing limbs.

She bit her lip and bled, and frothed at the corner of her mouth, and in the punctured atria of her psychic mind she suffocated beneath an avalanche of sights and sounds.

'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

The voice was a foghorn, aching her ears (though it had no true sound), a

Zso Sahaal. A name.

And his image — an incandescent pictogram, brighter and more terrible than any auspex, sharper than the greatest sensoria — was scratched upon the raw flesh of her flayed brain and scarred it forever: like an electoo within her eyelids, impossible to escape, even in sleep.

It was him. The Night Lord. Her enemy.

She recognised him, despite the confusion and the whirligig tumult of conflicting senses. His face was rendered in music and the soft scents of ash and incense, his midnight blue body a medley of bitter flavours, and his claws... his claws were the touch of an artist's brush upon canvas, the gende caress of a lover's fingers. All this he was, beyond mere vision, but she recognised him nonetheless. The sallow eyes, with pupils so swollen they were black from edge to edge, the furrowed brow, the hollow cheeks, the pallid pate of a hairless skull. All of it encased in ceramite and steel, flexing plates hung with chains and barbs, marked all over with Legion sigils and dark scriptures.

Zso Sahaal. Night Lord.

'Seek me, my brothers,' the voice purred, and Mita found herself dimly aware of the message swarming past her senses, expanding beyond and through her, climbing ever outwards in a growing sphere. It swept through the hive of Equixus like a wall of steam, and then onwards and outwards, clambering into the void, across the gulf of space. Seeking those who cared to listen.