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'Fool girl!' he roared, throwing her off. 'Where is it? Where is it?' He dragged himself upright and cast angry eyes across the floor, hunting the Corona Nox. Spotting its oily ring, already gathering a frosty patina, he lunged for it with a cry of triumph, once more forgetting the psyker that had brought him down.
Mita was ready for him. She knew exactly what to do.
One final effort. One final catching of her breath, one final reach down into her soul, clutching for dregs of power. One final attempt at the Animus Motus.
The Corona moved, edging away from the inquisitor's grasping fingers.
'Warp take you!' he raged, scrabbling after it. 'Give it to me!'
Another centimetre... another centimetre...
Klurik.
The crown jolted to a halt at the foot of an exhibit plinth, shadowed beneath whatever priceless relic — a leather-bound book, blasted apart in the earlier crossfire — occupied it.
'Ha!' Kaustus roared, locking fingers around its glossy frame. 'Mine!'
Mita smiled, muscles burning with endless fatigue. 'Not yours, you stupid bastard.'
And the security servitor that hung from the vaulted ceiling above the singed plinth blinked its metal eyes, ratcheted its slave-linked weapons towards the intruder it sensed below, and opened fire.
Kaustus fell apart like rotten meat.
Smoke lifted. Mita stared at the shredded morsel that remained of her master with confused feelings, triumph struggling against shame. Somewhere, out in the smoke and fire, the Night Lord shrieked and another servitor collapsed to the ground, torn apart. Mita barely heard it. Kaustus was still alive. Just.
'C... clever...' he smiled, blood slipping in frothing streamers from his mouth, patterning his tusks like scarlet totems. He winced, pain consuming his ruined form. 'Clever trick...'
She nodded, frowning. Something strange had happened to the inquisitor's mind, like a cloud passing from before the sun, and abruptly she found herself able to feel it, able to skim its surface emotions — pain, mostly — just as she could anyone else. Abruptly she understood.
'The eldar,' she whispered, thunderstruck. 'They've been controlling you from the begi
'Y.-.yes. C-came to me before I recruited you. Did things... hkk... things to my brain. Th-the voices... oh God-Emperor...'
'Why? Warpdammit, Kaustus – why?'
'H...hah... Who knows? S-sometimes... sometimes the control faltered. Sometimes I could think clearly...
She remembered the moments of uncertainty, the troubling instants in which his mind had seemed to convulse, briefly visible to her psychic senses.
She'd feared for his sanity. If only she'd known the truth. He'd been a puppet, struggling to cut his own strings. 'That's why you let me live...' she said, understanding flourishing. Another blast rocked the hive, tremors slipping through ice and steel. She ignored it: it was all background noise, irrelevant. 'That's why you never had me executed.'
He struggled to speak, blood puddling beneath him. 'I th-thought... I thought I could overcome it... The voices — Emperor preserve me — I... I thought I could resist. I— I was wrong. But sometimes...
The light went out of his eyes. The Corona fell from his hand and rolled, slick with blood, wobbling as it tumbled, and she lifted it as it passed her, blinking tears from her eyes.
Such a simple thing. Such a little thing.
And then the world went white, and the gallery room pitched like a sinking ship, and the wall beside her was torn away like paper, crumpled in hands of razor steel.
Ice swarmed in through the rent, and with it came a wave of such agony that she screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.
Pain filled the universe. A shrieking like a million banshees drowned her senses, and clouds — worlds — of darkness stormed into the air. The warp lazed into reality like a descending blade, and every light that had ever existed was snuffed, every happiness was shredded, every quiet joy and instant of ecstasy was swallowed up and burned away.
A giant stood at the threshold of the shredded wall. It folded wings of tattered leather, wings that slipped between material and ether as if on fire, venting smoke and ash. It moved on legs of incorporeality, it bled across the spaces of the cavern like an echo of a figure.
It was not real.
It was more than real.
It was Chaos given form.
And through psychic torture that blinded her, through the shrieking of warp-beasts that exploded her ears, through coils of darkness that snared her soul and promised damnation to all who felt their touch, she saw the Night Lord Zso Sahaal stagger from the smoke and frost, arm hanging limp, face bleeding from a dozen cuts, and stare up at the vision of terror incarnate that had defiled reality with its presence.
'It's been a long time, Acerbus,' he growled. 'I barely recognise you.'
Zso Sahaal
He was too late.
He knew it the instant his ancient brother insinuated himself upon the chamber, like an infection taking root. There was no place for focus, here. No hope of reclaiming his master's legacy. No hope of inflicting order and control upon a creature so utterly lost to Chaos.
The daemon prince that had once been Krieg Acerbus paused, shadows shifting despite its stillness, and eyes that had once been human glared down upon Sahaal and narrowed.
'You're smaller than I remember...' it said, amused. Its voice was a thing of mingled screams and the echoes of tortured souls, harmonised and directed. It bypassed sound and arrived fully formed, like a migraine, in the centre of Sahaal's brain.
He fought the urge to vomit. The creature radiated despair as a fire emits heat, and he felt it coil through his senses, churning his confidence to paste, reducing every triumph he had ever enjoyed to failure.
That the creature was Krieg Acerbus was beyond doubt. He was changed almost beyond belief, but still there remained about him some essence of self, some expression of his eyes, perhaps, that betrayed his identity. He had always seemed monstrous to Sahaal: now his outward appearance had merely altered to reflect its inward counterpart.
He had grown massive. Where once there had been armour now there was iron flesh, living warpstuff that writhed and tightened, swarming with wicked runes. He was no longer a thing of corporeality, that much was clear. In every dimension he ghosted and hardened, then faded to smoke, as if uncomfortable with solidity: burning with immaterial energies that flared not with light, but with dark. Smouldering emissions poured from his long limbs like steam from a smithy, tentacles of shadow bulged from his spine, and when he moved, when he unfurled the shadows that crooked upon his shoulders like a vulture's wings, it was as if the existence of light itself was forgotten. It was as if perpetual night had arisen, and morning would never arrive.
At the tips of arms so long they plucked at the floor, claws glittered and spat sparks: forged not from flesh nor metal, but from the raw stuff of darkness itself. They made the air bleed.
'Where,' Sahaal said, pushing down the stifling failure, denying it for a sweet second longer, bolstering himself with foundationless courage, 'is my Legion?'
The beast crooked its pale face, sneered through lip-less jaws, and aimed a smoking talon at the rent in the wall.