He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.

‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.

I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.

But there is so little sanity to rip away, and he barely stumbles.

I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.

Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.

I scramble away from him, sprawling face-down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.

I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.

Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.

It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.

It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.

His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.

The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.

Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.

I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.

I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.

That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.

I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.

When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.

ARVIDA KEPT MOVING. The dead city was crawling with World Eater kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal mis-steps.

It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.

His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometricwas still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, though it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.

So. The options were limited, and the odds long.

Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’s power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip-tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.

Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.

He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.

The City of Light.

He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.

Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.

He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.

‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.

Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder-guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.

Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.

THE FACE OF TREACHERY

Gav Thorpe

ARTIFICIAL EYES SCOURED the firmament, seeking a telltale reflection of radiation, looking for a pinprick of light, searching for the merest hint of heat in the coldness. The enemy were out here somewhere, lurking in the shadow of Isstvan VI’s rings. Ice and dust particles provided ample cover for a starship, a hindrance compounded by the residual plasma clouds and radiation from the battle just fought.

Six vessels prowled the void. At their head was the battle-barge Dedicated Wrath, its flotilla of two strike cruisers, one grand cruiser and two destroyers spread across hundreds of thousands of kilometres of space. They approached Isstvan VI warily, unsure how many of the enemy had escaped the initial battle. Plasma reactors on idle, they drifted out-system by inertia; what power they were expending directed to the banks of scanner antenna jutting from their prows.

On the bridge of the Dedicated WrathLieutenant-Commander Nigh Vash Delerax fixed his stare on the main screen. The huge display dominated the wall of the main bridge, covered with an anarchic maze of surveyor data and scanner sweep returns. Isstvan VI loomed large in the display, its gold and blue rings shimmering coldly in the faint light of the system’s star.

‘ Industriousreports possible scanner return in quadrant eight-theta,’ reported one of the aides at the scanning console behind the Legiones Astartes commander. He was non-Legiones Astartes, though his body showed signs of augmetic surgery and his left eye was a bionic replacement that twinkled red in the bright glow of his screen. ‘Too big to be an asteroid, though possibly an uncharted moonlet.’