Despite the welcome news of contact with a loyal Legion, Sarashina couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a harbinger of something so terrible that it was beyond her ability to understand. She knew she was being melodramatic. After all, any event of such magnitude would have seen by the Vatic. Future-scrying was an imperfect discipline, but could anything as bad as she feared have escaped the notice of her viewers?

She didn’t know, and that scared her more than anything.

Sarashina felt something wet on her top lip. She dabbed the skin and her fingertips came away sticky. Blood was flowing from her nose in a steady stream, and Sarashina let out a small moan as she tasted it on her lips.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered as the steadily building pain in her head flared to a white hot spike of agony rammed through the frontal lobes of her brain.

Sarashina’s blindsight distorted like a static-filled picter held too close to a powerful magnet, and she staggered as her balance was thrown off. The world tilted crazily, and she fell to the mosaic-tiled floor as an incomprehensibly vast tide of psychic energy surged into the mindhall.

THE CATACLYSM UNLEASHED by the arrival of the Crimson King and the breaking of the mighty wards around the golden gateway in the dungeons spread through the mountains like the blast wave of an atomic detonation. A tsunami of psychic force thundered upwards from the bowels of the palace in a raging torrent that touched every mind on the surface of the globe.

The gilded towers of the palace shook with the force of it, and priceless, irreplaceable statuary toppled from plinths as the shockwave trembled the very rock of the mountains. The madness, fear and panic that hung over the palace roared back to life like a resurgent wave of pestilence.

Mobs of lunatics bearing cudgels and brickbats laid siege to columned palaces and clashed with other mobs for no reason any one person could adequately explain. Blood flowed on the marble paved thoroughfares and golden processionals, madness stalked the illuminated galleries and insanity held court all across the roof of the world.

Yet as quickly as it began, the insanity of their actions became clear to the mobs, and they guiltily slunk from sight to lick their wounds, nurse newly-acquired grievances or shut themselves away from revenge attacks. Within minutes of the psychic shockwave, it had passed from the high summits of the palace and spread across the globe like the fiery advance of a plague.

Those on the dark side of the world suffered nightmares the like of which had not been seen since the bleakest watches of Old Night. Genetic memory of that horrific time of madness surged to the fore of sleepers around the world, bringing dreams of blood drenched metropolises, planetary exterminations and species slavery.

Entire cities of Terra awoke screaming and millions died by their own hand as their minds fragmented in the face of such psychic assault. Others awoke with their minds altered in fundamental ways that rendered them into entirely new individuals. Fathers, wives and children forgot one another as mental pathways were erased or rewritten in vulgar ways that wiped entire families from existence.

In places where the barrier between the material realm and the warp was already thin, manifestations of dreams and nightmares stalked the landscape. Black-furred wolves with burning lights for eyes descended from the mountains to devastate entire communities, and no weapon could slay them. Entire populations vanished as their towns and burgs were swallowed whole by catastrophic overspills of warp energy, leaving nothing but eerily empty buildings in their aftermath.

All over the globe, the people of Terra suffered for Magnus’s hubris, but nowhere felt the shockwave of his return more powerfully than the City of Sight.

SARASHINA CLOSED HER mind to her abilities and threw up her psychic defences as colossal amounts of raw, unfettered psychic power bloated the chamber, like an overloading plasma reactor in the instant before its coolant system failed. She felt the tsunami of psychic power roaring over the mountains, a horrendous outpouring of warp energy unleashed from the very heart of the palace.

Even disconnected from her higher powers, Sarashina felt the searing wave of psychic energy trapped in the mindhall find earthing conduits through the astropaths of Choir Primus. Five hundred died instantly as their minds were reduced to blackened cinders by a flash of supercharged psychic energy.

Choir Primus shrieked in unison, each suffering the agony of a slow, searing psi-death. Fully aware of their brains being seared from their skulls, the astropaths howled like wounded animals as their higher functions were burned away, until their crazed autonomic functions spasmed and broke limbs, spines and fractured skulls as they literally thrashed themselves to death.

Sarashina’s mental defences were among the strongest in the City of Sight, but even she strained to hold back this unknown attack, her layered wards like a levee pounded by hurricane-driven waves. A cramping pain seized her gut, and Sarashina howled.

When the permeable wall between realities was torn aside by a starship’s warp engines, every psyker within ten light years would feel a measure of discomfort.

This felt like she was chained in the terrible heart of a warp engine.

The pain was intense, translation pain, but there was no reason for it.

It felt like Terra itself was about to plunge into the immaterial chaos of the warp. The thought was ridiculous, but it lodged like a splinter in soft skin. In the instant of the thought forming, Sarashina felt a fiery sickness build in her stomach. She cried out and grasped her stomach as hot bile and the partially digested remains of last night’s hastily snatched meal erupted from her mouth in a tide of acidic vomit.

The maelstrom of psychic energy raged around her, ravaging the minds and bodies of Choir Primus with its towering, elemental fury. The life-lights of the astropaths were being snuffed out one by one, as easily as a man might snuff out the candles of a mourning chamber.

But the choir did not die easily or quietly.

Sarashina tried to shut her mind off to the death-screams of the astropaths around her, but such a feat was impossible in the face of so unified a death cry. Memories dying, lives left unfinished and the terror of knowing that everything you were was being slowly, agonisingly, destroyed. The horror of your brain disassembling, and knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it. Every defence you had against it was futile, every mantra you had been taught to ward against such attacks useless.

Sarashina felt it all, every emotion, every horror, every last iota of loss and desperation. It flooded through her, permeating every cell of her body with anguish. Yet even as the astropaths died, they fulfilled their last duty. The surging, killing brightness of the psychic energy fuelled their powers to unimaginable heights for the briefest instant, making them – for a last shining moment – the greatest astropaths in the history of the galaxy.

Like madmen and prophets, the dead and the dying, they tapped deeper into the well of infinite knowledge contained in the warp. To the shape of things that had been, and were yet to come to pass. What a radical adept of Mars had sought to harness through technology, they broke open with the very power that was killing them.

It was intoxicating and numbing, overpowering and deadly.

The message from the Salamanders was obliterated, and their song immolated Abir Ibn Khaldun in a thunderclap of psychic discharge. Vast and incomprehensible power was distilled by the last breath of Choir Primus and shaped into a singularity of psychic energy that blared from Ibn Khaldun’s last scream and burned with the light of a thousand suns in the heart of the chamber.