‘I sense something, Ingethel. Something down there.’

I know.

‘Do you know what it is?’

The daemon wiped its abused eyes with careful claws. A revenant, perhaps. An echo of eldar life, breathing its last if it still breathes at all.

Lorgar drew his crozius maul, his thumb close to the activation rune. The weapon caught the tumultuous light above, reflecting the storm on its burnished spines.

‘I’m going closer.’

FIVE

ECHOES

GHOSTS WALKED THE streets, wraiths of wind and dust, forming tantalising shapes in the tempest. They lived at the edge of his vision, slaughtered by the storm each time Lorgar sought to see them more clearly. There, a fleeing figure, obliterated back into the breeze the moment Lorgar turned to see it. And there: three reaching, shrieking maidens, though there was nothing more than whirling dust when the primarch turned again.

He clutched the crozius tighter. Ahead, always ahead, there thrummed that aching sense of something barely alive – weakened, trapped, almost certainly dying. The bleak resonance reaching into his mind spoke of something like a caged, diseased animal: something that had been dying for a long, long time.

Lorgar moved with care, stepping around dust-coated rubble, treading through the skeleton of a city. The gritty wind carried distant voices in its grip – inhuman voices, screaming in an alien tongue. Perhaps the gale played tricks of its own, for even with a grasp of the eldar language, he couldn’t make out the words being cried into the storm. Trying to comprehend individual voices merely made the others louder, eclipsing any hope of focus.

As he moved deeper through the emaciated city, Lorgar ceased turning at every half-formed image, unfocussing his eyes and letting the teasing wind shape whatever it chose. In the thrashing gusts, faint spires stood at the corners of his eyes, alien towers reaching up with impossible grace into hostile skies.

The primarch looked back, seeking Ingethel and seeing nothing.

Ingethel,he reached out with his stuttering psychic sense, unsure if the call even pierced the wind. Daemon. Where are you?

The storm howled louder in answer.

TIME SEEMED TO lose its grip. Lorgar’s thirst grew raw, though he never slowed in weariness, all the while walking for over seventy hours beneath an unending dusk. The only certain evidence of time’s passing was his retinal chrono, which degenerated into unreliable fluctuation at the tip of the seventy-first hour. The digital display began to pulse with random runes, as if finally surrendering to the unnatural laws of this warp-drowned realm.

Lorgar recalled Argel Tal’s face: gaunt, almost vampiric in its skeletal ferocity, when the warrior had claimed his vessel had sailed the warp’s tides for half a year. To Lorgar and the rest of the fleet, the Orfeo’s Lamenthad been gone no longer than a few heartbeats.

Idly, he wondered how long would pass in the material universe while he lingered here, walking along the shores of hell.

What little of the craftworld’s architecture remained above ground was a victim of erosion, worn down and scarred by the blistering winds. Lorgar stalked down yet another avenue of dust, his boots grinding down on the ancient rock. Perhaps this had once been an agricultural dome, fertile and forested with xenos flora. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a communal chamber, though. Lorgar sought to restrain his imagination, refusing to let it be stirred further by the dancing shapes in the dust storm.

Another hundred metres, scuffing through worthless soil, and the curious, queasy ache of struggling life began to throb below his boots. To his left, to his right, nothing but the fallen towers of a dead civilisation.

The primarch crouched to grip a fistful of the red soil. As before, he let it fall through his fingers, watching as it was snatched away by the wind. The presence, such as it was, waxed and waned in arrhythmia. Lorgar took a breath, aiming a thin pulse of psychic energy to trickle downward. He felt nothing in response. Not even a tremor of awareness. It could’ve been a metre below the ground, or all the way down to the world’s core. Either way, it was a weak, irregular thing; seemingly untouchable and only barely reminiscent of life.

Sentience resided in hiding, but it didn’t feel alive.

Curious.

He pushed deeper, scenting, seeking, but the same buried core of resistant nothingness met his questing touch.

In grudging defeat, Lorgar withdrew his hesitant psychic probing, curling his perception back into his skull’s senses.

That did it. Even as he was cursing his erratic talents, he felt something stir beneath, burrowing upward. The presence beneath the sand chewed its way up, an icy bloodhound sentience straining to sniff after his retreating psy-caress.

Lorgar recoiled on instinct, shuddering at the sense of desperation wrenching closer from below. With gritted teeth, he forced a blast of repellent thought back at the grasping presence – the psychic equivalent of smashing a drowning man’s fingers as he grasped for a lifeline. The presence ebbed for a moment, regrouped, and clawed upwards again.

Its crest broke the surface: raw feeling crashing against the primarch’s mind in a splash of cold ferocity, absolutely devoid of any other emotion. Lorgar staggered back from the fountain of rising awareness, deflecting its jagged intensity as best he could. When the hand burst from the sand, the primarch already stood with his crozius in his fists.

He watched, shielding his mind from a spit-spray of formless psychic hate, as the statue of a dying god dragged itself from a grave of scarlet soil.

It couldn’t stand. In its struggles to rise, the creature crawled closer, hands digging into the earth to find loose purchase. But it couldn’t seem to stand. The primarch watched it crawl, unable to see any distinct spinal injury along its cracked armour plating. The long mane of hair falling to either side of its snarling death-mask face looked to be composed of smoke. It streamed out, captured by the wind, a slave to the storm’s breath.

Lorgar backed away with slow care, boots crunching the dust, his own features bare of anything beyond curiosity. Whatever the crippled thing was, its wrath poured from it in an aura of physical pressure. Lorgar took another retreating step, still watching closely.

For all the god-statue’s majesty, it was plainly ruined by supernatural decay. A husk crawled where once a great entity would be striding over the land. Lorgar saw its banished glory when he narrowed his eyes, peering at the flickering after-images through his lashes. A being of tectonic armour plating: with eyes of white flame; a heart that beat magma over bones of unburnable black stone; a towering manifestation of incarnate rage and holy fire. Lorgar saw all of this through the swirling sand, and even smiled as the wind formed a false heat haze around the creature – another weak echo of what should have been truly majestic.

Had it been able to stand, it would have risen taller than a Legiones Astartes dreadnought. Even prone and destroyed, it was an immense thing, leaving a wretched trail in the dust.

He almost pitied it, in this devastated incarnation. Its black skin was faded to a greyish charcoal, split in old cracks that bled smoke into the storm. Lava-blood had dried to a sluggish flow of ember sludge; scabby crusts spoke of its own blood cooling, drying as it left its body. Where eyes of witchfire had once blazed, hollow eye sockets twisted in sightless, feral expressions.

‘I am Lorgar,’ he told the crawling god. ‘The seventeenth son of the Emperor of Man.’

The god bared black teeth and grey gums, seeking to shout. Nothing but ash left its snarling lips, spilling onto the sand beneath its chin, while the psychic aftershock of the denied scream battered uselessly against Lorgar’s guarded mind.