Lord of the Night

She should be ru

She was not.

Panic gripped him, cold beads of sweat prickled at the skin of his pale temples. The condemnitor stood exactly where he had left her, the obsidian crown clutched in her pale hands, unblinking eyes fixed upon him through the shifting smoke.

'Run!' he roared, twin hearts throbbing in his ears. 'Run!'

Time slowed.

The inquisitor stepped from the smoke and placed a fond hand on Chia

'Thank you, dissimulus,' the inquisitor said, lifting the Corona Nox from her unresisting grasp. 'That will be all.'

She nodded, eyes vacant. 'Very good, my lord.' Her voice changed even as she spoke, deepening to a throaty bass, and before Sahaal's horrified eyes her skin writhed like a clenching muscle, swarming across bone and cartilage like molten rubber, dipping away in cheeks and eye sockets: changing.

When she spoke next her voice was that of a man, matching the unremarkable — but clearly male — features of her... his... its face. 'And my ration, my lord?'

Inquisitor Kaustus nodded, meeting Sahaal's eyes with a smug wink. He dipped a hand into the folds of his robes and produced a leather case, passing it to the newly transformed male at his side.

'Polymorphine,' he explained, smirking. 'You just can't trust an addict, eh, Night Lord?'

Sahaal's world fell away beneath his feet.

The battle in the Steel Forest. She'd been wounded — no... no, she'd died. She had died and this thing, this morphic obscenity, had staggered down into the rust-mud caverns to take her place.

Another betrayal. Another reason never to trust a soul.

He had nothing. He could rely upon no one.

All that was left to him was the rage. His master's genetic gift: focused by pain and insanity.

The dissimulus hurried from the room with its poly-morphine fix clutched to its breast, and in its wake Sahaal pointed a claw at Kaustus's heart, eyes smouldering with the hatred of centuries.

'You die,' he said, and he kicked off from the ground, jump pack screaming at his back. And then everything changed.

Even as the distance between him and his target fell away, even as he imagined the inquisitor's smug face torn apart beneath his claws, even as the prize that had been snatched and regained and snatched again was within his grasp, light distorted the world.

The air opened up. Perspective struggled to translate what human eyes could never hope to comprehend, dimensions writhing upon each other, and in a rush of stale air and the bitter tang of ozone a blazing doorway crept open into reality.

Still Sahaal bounded onwards, claws outstretched, the ground blurring beneath him.

Figures danced from the swirling portal. Lithe forms of fluted limb and gaudy colour, tall helms and plumes of hair blurring at the speed of thought. And amongst them there came a robed prince, a runic demigod, antlers ablaze with electric fire, staff of office humming with uncontainable power.

Sahaal recognised him from his dreams.

The warlock...

The staff flared across every spectrum, crackling gaussfire enveloped him, psychic horror guzzled him whole, and as he fell to the floor with blood in his eyes, Sahaal's final thought was: They have come to finish what they started one hundred centuries before.

They have come to take what they could not take then.

Xenogen scum!

The eldar have come for the Corona Nox!

And as Inquisitor Kaustus turned to their shimmering leader with an ebullient bow, holding the crown like some royal offering, needles of doubt and horror punctured Sahaal's brain, seizing his muscles and crippling his rage.

He crashed to the ground insensible, and knew no more.

Mita Ashyn

It was all happening too fast.

The inquisitor's admission of guilt, the arrival of the Night Lord, the unveiling of the Corona Nox. Held at the point of a gun by her former master, pushed and shoved like some dismal piece of meat, Mita had seen it all.

Something had changed about the nightmare Marine. The sight of him no longer filled her with unspeakable dread, his mere presence no longer wrapped cords of corruption and filth around her heart. No longer was he protected by chittering underlings, invisible and malevolent. No longer did the warpspawn of the Dark Gods gather around his soul like flies around a light: a living armour that she could never hope to penetrate.

Had he, she wondered, somehow escaped the predations of Chaos? Had he somehow cleansed himself of the taint that had threatened to smother him?

Was he now, like her, simply another pawn in this obscene game of manipulation and conquest?

Whatever the reason for his abrupt purification, its effect was pronounced: where previously her psychic senses could no more approach and delve into his spirit than she could swallow hot coals, now she had found herself free to explore. Now she could see his true self.

It was almost too much for her to bear.

It was a thing of such sadness, such loneliness, such suspicion and guilt and paranoia, that it almost tore her heart apart.

Pain, rage, ambition, sorrow. Distrust. Isolation. Bitterness.

His mind was like a reflection of hers, magnified a billion times.

She'd felt his brief victory — a surge of joy — at reclaiming the Corona. She'd spiralled with him into despair as the victory crumbled. She'd shared his pain as the servitors tore him to shreds, piece by piece, and she'd risen like a float upon the crest of his triumph as he entrusted the crown to his aide...

The aide, whose mind she had recognised. A swirling psyche without centre, without certainty or solidity of ego. She had seen that mind once before.

The unveiling of the dissimulns had come as no surprise to Mita, although she shared the Night Lord's horror from within his coiling spirit.

And then she shared his revulsion and his awe at what had followed.

The eldar came in a storm of warp-forces so focused, so potent, that Mita slipped to her knees and bled from her ears. Kaustus had left her beneath the guard of his four gun servitors — toys, no doubt, of the murdered governor — and even as she stumbled at the astral crescendo dizzying her senses their guns remained focused intractably upon her head. She didn't care. They were a side-show, an insignificant concern when placed beside what was now unveiling across the smoke and devastation of the room.

Kaustus, you bastard. You made a deal with the devil...

As part of the Ordo Xenos, Mita knew more than most of the alien scourge that was the eldar. Ancient and technologically superior, that their bodies were ostensibly similar to humans' was the one aspect of their race that could be considered familiar. They thought differently. They moved differently. They lived lives of carefully partitioned vocation: monkish existences devoted utterly to a single pathway.

Humanity travelled in the warp like trees casting seeds arbitrarily into the wind, placing trust in providence, guided only by the most rudimentary of navigatory processes. To humanity the warp was an untameable ocean, in which only the foolhardy dared to swim.

The eldar had built roads across it.

They grew old at the speed of stars. They fought like ghosts. Where the teeming masses of the Imperium struggled with crude senses and ugly language, the eldar burned bright with thought: a level of astral awareness and psionic capability that reduced Mita's talents to those of a child. She was a beast compared to them: a primitive fool, barely able to remember to breathe.