Athena’s chair slid towards him again, and she held out her hand. The skin was puckered and tight, ribbed with buckled ridges of hardened, discoloured flesh. It was glossy and wet looking, and he hesitated for the briefest second before taking her hand in his own.

‘I’m going to enter a nunciotrance,’ said Athena. ‘You’ll follow my words, but I want you to form the dreamscape. Whatever you normally use to blank the canvas prior to a message, do nothing different. I will be with you, but all we’re doing is forming the dreamscape. We’re not going to send or receive a message. Understand that before we go in.’

‘I understand,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t like it, but I understand.’

‘You don’t have to like it. Just do it.’

Kai nodded and closed his eyes, slowing his breathing and running through the preparatory mantras that would expand his consciousness into the dreamscape. This part was easy. Anyone could do it, even a non-psyker, though all they would get out of it was a sense of relaxation. It was the next part that would be troublesome, and he tried to force down his apprehension.

‘Rise into the dreamscape,’ said Athena, her voice losing its harsh edge and becoming almost pleasant.

A mild sensation of vertigo tugged at Kai’s mind as he let the mantras lift consciousness from his body. He heard the suggestion of singing, like a choir in a far distant theatre. The tower’s astropaths were busy, but that was only to be expected in such turbulent times. A million sibilant voices filled the tower, but the whisper stones kept them separate. Kai dismissed any thoughts of the rebellion on the edge of Imperial space, picturing a soothing light enveloping his body in a protective sheath.

Now he was ready.

He could feel Athena’s presence as her consciousness flowed alongside his own. In such a mental state, there was no such thing as up or down, but human perceptions couldn’t help but shape so formless a space. Each astropath entered a receptive state in their own way, some surrounding themselves with imagery relating to the telepath whose projections they were attempting to receive, others by focussing on the key symbolic elements common to most senders.

Kai employed neither method, preferring to create his own mental canvas upon which to imprint the sending telepath’s imagery. All too often, a message could be distorted by the mental architecture of the receiving mind, and such misinterpretations were the bane of every astropath. In all his years of service, Kai had never yet wrongly interpreted an incoming vision, but had heard – as had all students of the City of Sight – horror stories of telepaths who had misread desperate pleas for aid or despatched expeditionary fleets to destroy worlds whose inhabitants were loyal servants of the Throne.

He felt heat and his skin prickled with sweat.

False heat, but real enough in this place of dreams and miracles.

Kai opened his eyes and the desert stretched out for kilometres all around him.

WHITE SAND SHIMMERED in the heat haze, a vast empty landscape of nothingness that was completely free of anything troubling. Nothing disturbed the achingly empty vista – it was as though all life and character had been utterly erased from the world.

Kai’s dreamscape had been this way ever since his return to Terra.

Hypnopompic drugs had kept him awake aboard the salvage cutter, but the human mind could not long escape the need to dream. Denied such sleep-depriving narcotics in the Castana medicae facility on Kyprios, his first night back on Terra had almost shattered his fragile psyche, before his training had kicked in and he had taken control of his dreaming. Aside from last night, he had come to this place in his dreams and wandered its wondrous emptiness until he woke.

Such sleep refreshed the body, but left the mind without any form of release.

‘This is your canvas?’ asked a voice behind him, and Kai turned to see Athena Diyos walking towards him. Her long robes flowed around her shapely body, and long hair, auburn with a hint of gold red flowed to her shoulders.

‘You look surprised,’ she said.

‘I suppose I am,’ replied Kai, as taken aback as when he had first seen her.

‘You shouldn’t be. This is the realm of dreams after all. You can shape your form to how you wish yourself to be.’

‘But not you,’ said Kai, catching the well-honed deflection. ‘This is the real you.’

Athena swept past Kai, and instead of the medically-prescribed chemical reek of her skin, she smelled of cinnamon and almonds.

‘You are beautiful,’ said Kai.

She looked over her shoulder with a smile, and her face came alive. ‘You are kind. Most people say you werebeautiful.’

‘You’ll come to understand that I’m not “most people”.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Athena. ‘So this is your dreamscape?’

‘Yes, this is the Rub’ al Khali,’ said Kai.

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means the Empty Quarter,’ said Kai. ‘It was a desert of Old Earth that grew and grew until it merged with another great sandscape that eventually filled the mid-terrene oceans to create the dust bowl.’

‘It is the mental mindscape of a dreamer who does not want to dream,’ said Athena. ‘It is not healthy to inhabit a level of cognition that denies the subconscious mind any release. No symbolism, nothing to remind a dreamer of the waking world and nothing to reveal so much as a single aspect of the dreamer.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Kai.

‘We explore,’ said Athena. ‘I need to get a feel for your mind before I can see the cracks.’

‘There isn’t much to explore in the Rub’ al Khali.’

‘We’ll see. Tell me why you are here.’

‘In this trance?’

‘No, in the City of Sight. I read your file. You were attached to the Ultramarines Legion aboard the Argo, a helot-crewed frigate en route to the Jovian shipyards for a structural refit prior to making the translation to Calth. Tell me about why you are here and not en route to Ultramar.’

‘I don’t think we should talk about that,’ said Kai. The landscape on the far horizon rippled as though something vast moved just below the surface of the sand. He tried to ignore it, but the featureless wasteland of his dream shifted to accommodate this new intrusion.

Athena followed his gaze, seeing the cascade of white sand from the ridge above them.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘You read my file,’ said Kai, straining to keep the fear from his voice. ‘You should know what it is.’

‘I want you to tell me.’

‘No,’ said Kai.

Something broke the surface of the sand, something glistening and metallic, cobalt blue and gold, like the scaled hide of a serpent breaking the surface of the ocean. It moved with a hunter’s grace and a killer’s patience before vanishing beneath the surface.

‘We’re very exposed out here,’ said Athena, matter-of-factly.

‘I know that,’ snapped Kai.

‘Don’t you think we ought to find somewhere safe?’

‘Where would you suggest?’ snapped Kai. ‘We’re in the desert.’

His heart was hammering against his ribs, and his palms dripped sweat. His mouth felt dry and his bladder wanted to empty itself. He shielded his eyes from the blazing sun and scanned the horizons for any sign of the subterranean predator.

‘No, we are not,’ said Athena. ‘We are in your mind, sharing your fear. Whatever is out there is part of you, and the only one who will let it hurt us is you. Come on, Kai, have you forgotten the first principles of psychic defence?’

‘I can’t stop it from coming.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Athena, taking his hand. ‘Craft whatever it is that kept you safe before.’

Kai saw the glint of metal breaking the sand over Athena’s shoulders, and all thoughts of even the most basic training tenets fled from his mind. The fear was all-encompassing, and he heard the sound of screaming, a host of terrified voices that seemed to ooze from the sand like the cries of an entire army buried alive.