The man in the dark place faced his captives and wet his lips. One of them moaned quietly, chains clinking in the gloom. The man took a deep breath, allowing a predatory smile to spread across his face, and began.

“Now be quiet and pay attention, please. I won’t repeat myself and, let’s be clear about this, one way or another you will listen to me. We can do this the easy way or... the other way. The choice is yours, gentlemen.

“Admiral? Do stop struggling. You’ll miss the good parts.

“Now Where to begin? This is a story, I suppose, so one rather feels the need for a ‘Grand Opening’...”

The man stroked at his immaculately sculpted beard thoughtfully. “People,” he said, with something akin to disgust in his voice, “have skewed views on what makes a story. They forget that everything we do, every day, every second of our small little lives, is part of a story’s middle; its guts, if you like. You’re born, you do things, you die. Where’s the beginning? Or the end? It’s never as simple as it seems.

“Oh, for warp’s sake — Aun! If you don’t stop fiddling with those chains I’ll have your hands removed. You’re putting me off.”

He shook his head, exasperated, and began again.

There was a beginning two days ago, when I captured a high-ranking tau ethereal on behalf of the Imperium. There was a beginning when I contacted Fleet Admiral Constantine to request a squad of specialist troops for that very job. There was a beginning, oh yes, twenty-three years ago when I arrived on Dolumar IV. It hasn’t changed much, this world. Did you know that? Oh, we built the odd factory, the occasional town, that sort of thing. But it’s what’s... underneath that counts.

There was a beginning twenty-one years ago, when Magos-explorator Carneg visited me after a routine survey of the eastern mountains. But that’s a boring beginning and besides... the tedious little man is, I’m sorry to say, no longer with us. So, we can go further back than that.

“There was a beginning, of sorts, in the thirty-first millennium when the Imperium rolled on its belly and realised it had been rotting from inside for years. The Horus Heresy blossomed and caught everyone off guard. Poor little creatures...” He grinned, envisioning the horror and shock that had spread across the galaxy like wildfire.

“Of course your species, Aun, back then, was lurking in a puddle of primordial ooze. Perhaps... Perhaps things would have gone better for you if you’d stayed there.

“But, listen. There’s another beginning. Just over three thousand years ago. The tyranids have not yet reached the galaxy, the orks are busy infesting the Straits of Halk and the tau... well. Maybe — just maybe — they’d mastered the art of simple tools by then. In any case, the eastern fringes were ripe for the taking.

There was an army. A Chaos army—”

The admiral began to thrash and groan, voice muffled behind the gag in his mouth. His face was twisted with revulsion and terror. Severus fixed him with a stare and shook his head.

“Come now, Constantine. You shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Closing your mind is the first step to mundanity, and we can’t have that, can we?

“Now this warhost... This tide of black death, this... this Chaos Undivided... It dragged a net of nightmares across the sector. It toppled a dozen systems, murdered a hundred planets. It spread the Dark Word throughout the Segmentum and doused a hundred cities in blood and plague and stink. It knocked down temples, laughed at the sanctity of Imperial shrines, built statues out of bone and pieces of meat... How does the ancient hymn go? “Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yes, that’s it. Then it reached Dolumar IV.

“Imagine the sight! Black clouds on every horizon! A million shrieking daemon things filling the skies. Drums! Oh, the drums! There were humans, even here. Some forgotten colony, lost since the Age of Apostasy or before, it doesn’t matter. They lasted all of five minutes.

“The warhost ordered their slaves to begin the excavation of a great pit; a Temple Abyss to collect and focus the energies of their Dark Lords. This pit, in fact. Oh yes: it’s still here, all these millennia later. Explorator Carneg stumbled upon the capstone shortly before his... ah... accident. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He spread wide his arms and gloried in the cool darkness of the vast pit, sunlight little more than a distant memory at the top of the shaft.

“To cut a long story short,” he smiled, locking eyes with the deadpan ethereal, “they summoned a daemon. Its name — oh, admiral, shut up!—its name was Tarkh’ax. Beneath the daemonlord’s dominion the warhost went on to greater obscenities, greater carnage, greater Chaos. Nothing could stand against them, and anyone idiotic enough to try was crushed underfoot.

“What’s all this got to do with us? That’s what you’re wondering. Oh, don’t worry, Aun: all will become clear.

“Here’s the thing. Just when Tarkh’ax was at the height of his power, when all the filth of the galaxy was drawn to his banner, when a Black Crusade into the Segmentum Solar seemed unavoidable, the eldar got involved.

“Oh, don’t ask me how or why. Maybe some broad-minded Imperium fop decided that consorting with aliens has benefits over total annihilation. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, how history repeats itself? One way or another the eldar came to Dolumar and began to cause difficulties. They are a shrewd breed; cunning in the extreme and impossible to predict. They harried the warhost and vanished, popping up in strange places. Like ghosts.

“It turns out — and it took me three years of borrowing xenolinguitor servitors to unravel this — that the eldar established quickly that their hopes of annihilating Tarkh’ax and his forces were scant. They opted instead for a sly solution.

“The cartouche they left behind them explains it all, though deciphering its mysteries has cost me much of my life and my fortune. They opened up a sealed pocket of warp-space... part of a ‘webway’, the text says. We can’t even begin to fathom its workings but... I like to think of it as a cage, outside of space and time, cut off even from the warp. They closed off all the exits, detached it from their network of warp tunnels and sealed the gateways behind them.

“The mightiest of their warlocks, commanded by the Farseer Jur Telissa, constructed a ‘songweave’—like a psychic melody, holding it together, stitching the prison closed piece by piece. Out on the plains Tarkh’ax was moments from crushing their forces when the spell was finished and... Hh...A-and every last unit, every daemon and Marine, every warp thing and every warrior in that glorious army — disappeared. The pennants and icons fell. The black heraldry was left to rot, vehicles burning in the deserts. A grim day for the powers in the warp.

“The effort killed almost all the eldar warlocks. Small comfort.”

His lip curled, the unquenchable agonies of his master wracking through his body, filling him with despair.

“Imagine,” he hissed, the sensation too much to bear, “being sealed away for three thousand years, unable to move or think or feel. Cut off from the rage and the power of your gods. Separated by impossible energies from the howling, insane fury of your daemonlord. His cage was — is—the strongest of all.

“It took me three years to discern what those meddling, arrogant xenogen warlocks had done. It has taken me sixteen to work out how to undo it — but I’m close. Oh, terror’s-face, so close! All but one of the prisons are sundered. The army is released. Praise be the Ruinous Ones! Oh, stories can get away with not having a real beginning, gentlemen, but... there’s always an ending.