His books, his scrolls and every single note he had ever assembled on the Pattern was here, and the letters shimmered as though embossed with luminous gold script. The walls of the chamber oozed light into the motionless forest of pages, and as each word bled into the air it was lifted from the page before dissipating into the aether.

As each one vanished, Gregoras subsumed its meaning and assimilated it into his understanding of the Bleed. He knew that his greatest work was dying around him, but it was a small sacrifice to unlock the elusive meaning that danced around him.

The lattice above him pulsed with light, but it was light that neither illuminated nor warmed the skin. It was a gateway to the nightmares of a city of telepaths, stored and tapped and dissected like an anatomist with a hitherto unknown form of life. The worst of the nightmares were gone, purged by the diligent and methodical work of his cryptaesthesians, but the core of it… ah, the heart of the nightmare… he had kept that here, wrapped in such complex allegory, tangential metaphors and obscure symbolism that only one as versed in the Pattern as he would ever know it for what it was.

Thiswas what Kai Zulane knew, this was the secret he carried within him that only he could understand. Thiswas what Sarashina had thought was so important that it could be trusted to no one else. Nothing of such power could pass through the Whispering Tower without leaving a bruise, and if you knew how and where to look you could reform the source of that impact.

Like a forensic chirurgeon reconstructing a murder weapon from the damage done to the victim, so too was Evander Gregoras assembling the billion fragments of information that had been hidden within the mind of the tower’s greatest failure.

Its pieces were cohering, but too slowly…

He had seen tantalising hints… word shapes, expressions that meant nothing to him, but which were redolent with the promise of grim darkness in a far future…

An age of war in a lightless millennium…

Great Devourer…

Apostasy…

The Blood of Martyrs…

The Beast Arises…

Bloodtides…

Times of Ending…

Over everything, he heard the dolorous sound of marching feet, of armies going to war in an endless parade of slaughter and mayhem that could only end with the extinction of all things. These armies would never surrender, never forgive and would only ever lay down their weapons when death claimed them at the end of war itself.

Was Kai foreseeing the end of the Imperium? Had he seen the ultimate victory of Horus Lupercal? Gregoras did not think so, for these words and images were heavy with age, dusty and burdened with a weight of history that could only be earned after the passage of millennia. Little more than fleeting glimpses, they nevertheless left Gregoras in a state of dreadful terror, like a man trapped in a nightmare of his own making and from which he knows he cannot ever awaken.

‘The truth once learned, cannot be unlearned,’ had been a favourite aphorism of his teachings, but oh, how he wished it could be…

Each piece was a horror of war and destruction, of stagnation and doom. As his notes dissolved around him, they fed new morsels of information into his head in an unstoppable and inevitable torrent. It was coming faster now, each unlocked piece of the puzzle adding a piece to another, larger image, until the entirety of what had come to Terra in the wake of Magnus’s foolhardy intrusion began to emerge.

It rose from the patterns of light like a black colossus, a destiny and a nightmare all in one. His mind tried to grasp the full scale of what he was seeing, but it was too large, too monumental and too terrifying to ever be contained within one fragile mortal skull.

Gregoras screamed as he saw a dark world of teeming insects, clad in black and grey, toiling endlessly in darkened hives and subterranean nests of squalor and misery. This was a world where nothing ever changed, nothing grew and nothing of worth was created. And yet, this was a world where such horror was not seen for the nightmare it was, but as a victory, as an existence to be celebrated and rendered magnificent.

Gregoras could not imagine how the insects could bear to live such terrible lives, never knowing the glory that could be theirs, never understanding that the horror of their daily lives was unendurable. Not only did the insects exist in such stagnation, they actively fought to preserve it. Inexhaustible armies poured from this world to drive back invaders and outsiders, but instead of reforging their destiny anew on the worlds they claimed, they willingly recreated the lightless hell world from which they had come.

He knew this world, just as he knew that these insectswere not insects at all.

The Pattern filled the chamber, pouring in with geometric accumulation of all that had passed through the whisper stones and the minds of the dead and dying. Gregoras could not bear it all, falling to his knees as the last of his books burned to ashes in the fire of truth that consumed them and poured into his mind.

‘Take it back!’ he yelled. ‘Please, take it back! I don’t want this, I never wanted to see this…’

Gregoras fell forward onto his hands and knees as the dream of the red chamber and its fallen angels filled his mind with all its awful truth. He saw everything Sarashina had seen, the clash of blades, the offer and the sacrifice, the honour and the evil. He saw it all in a blink of an eye that went on for an eternity.

And towering over it all was a seated giant atop a monstrous throne of gold, a nightmare engine constructed by lunatics and sadists. The giant’s flesh was withered and long dead, a living corpse of metastasised bone and endless agony. Invisible light poured from this giant, and the torment behind his eyes was the purest pain in the world because it was borne willingly and without complaint.

‘Oh, no…’ whispered Gregoras, as the last fraying thread of his sanity began to unravel. ‘Not you, please not you…’

The giant turned its gaze upon him, and Evander Gregoras screamed as he finally understood how this nightmare had come to be.

ATHARVA RAN TO the doorway of Antioch’s lean-to, searching the darkness for sign of the new arrivals. They weren’t hard to find, and were making no effort to conceal their approach. Every third man carried a lit torch, and the flames glittered on the ironwork crows that stared down at the unfolding drama with sculpted indifference.

Atharva counted thirty of them, tall men armoured in contoured plates of beaten iron shaped into a form that was at once familiar and yet subtly different. It took a moment for Atharva to recognise the shapes before him, for their armour was an almost perfect representation of a form of war plate no longer manufactured, a style that had not been worn in battle for hundreds of years and existed now only in revisionist history books and the dusty annexes of the Gallery of Unity. They carried guns that Atharva recognised as a kind he had once touched in that same gallery, weapons that were no less deadly for their age.

Anger touched Atharva, for the appearance of this rabble ran roughshod over the honour of the Legions, whose appearance was openly mocked by such accoutrements of war.

That they were not Legiones Astartes was immediately apparent, but who were they?

‘Who in the name of all that’s perfect are they?’ asked Kiron at his shoulder.

‘I do not know,’ said Atharva, ‘but I intend to find out.’

He closed his eyes and let his mind drift beyond the confines of this squalid refuge. He felt the glaring mind presences of the men, recognising the touch of bio-manipulation in their inflated physiques and gnarled genetic code. They were freaks, abominations against humanity crafted by a geneticist with no sense of beauty or the natural workings of a body. The Pavoni bent the base codes of physicality, but even they were bound by the fundamental building blocks of life.