The darkness gathered. The red cloud surged towards the Argolike a gaping maw and the spiralling arms of the black vortex clawed at the shields with ever greater ferocity. To his untrained eyes, it was as though a gross and malicious sentience guided their fury, for what else could explain the predator’s glee he felt from the ugly stains that surrounded the vessel?

He wanted to turn from the horror, to shut himself off from a firmament awash with nightmares, half-glimpsed visions of hungry eyes and mountainous bodies the size of continents shifting in the depths. Yet he had not come here to turn away from this. He had been blind to the reality of the Argo’s death for too long, and no matter what, he was not turning away from it now.

Roxanne was right. This had to end now.

One by one, he watched the shield vanes collapse, and the warp poured in like a polluted sea through a disintegrating dam. Immaterial energies bathed the vessel, and Kai saw barely visible shapes as they swam into existence within the bounds of those shields that still functioned. Scaled red beasts like skeletal men with long curling horns and clawed arms that flashed like swords. Monsters dredged from the deepest nightmares of the crew spun like smoke as they revelled in their newly birthed forms.

The hull was no barrier to them, and they passed through the metres of adamantium to manifest within the crew compartments and companionways of the ship. Formless spawn roamed the hull, their very touch disassembling the solid matter of its gun ports, commandways and c argoholds. The vessel groaned and more compartments blew out into space as its collapse continued at a geometric rate. Cathedral-like holds imploded with soundless screams of tearing metal, and Kai wept as he saw thousands of men and women pulled out into the void.

The screams echoed in his skull, but there was nothing he could do to block them out, no fortress of Arzashkun and no Rub’ al Khali in which to shut himself away from everything. Here, Kai was forced to face his daemons, and he watched the death of the Argowith a heavy heart, knowing it was doomed, but pledged to honour its last moments.

Then, just when it seemed as though the vessel must surely break apart and be claimed by the void, a slender thread of golden light penetrated the darkness. Little more than a sliver against the raging inferno of colour, it was nevertheless a lifeline, and one the Argoflailed for in desperation. The ship turned its collapsing prow towards the light, lurching with the last of its strength as a drowning man grasps for an outstretched hand.

Where the golden light shone, no storms could touch, and where it surged strong, they were driven back. A narrow channel of dead space opened up in front of the Argo, and Kai’s heart soared as the last gasp of the vessel’s engines saw it slip into this miraculous channel.

Broken and torn into a raw, ragged shadow of its former self, the Argofell into the fragile gap in the tempests. All around it, blistering squalls of impossible light and sentient cyclones battered at this corridor of serenity, but the light was inviolable and held firm against the warp’s every predation. He gasped as his mind was filled with a vision of the greatest mountain on Terra, a hollowed out peak of sadness and service, where the most glorious and most powerful beacon in the galaxy was born.

Kai had never been told how the Argohad managed to return to realspace after the monsters attacked. He had assumed the captain had been lucky enough to find a warp gate that led back to the Sol system, but he saw how naïve such a belief had been. The captain and all the crew were dead, and the only two people left alive within the dying vessel were Kai and Roxanne. Had Roxanne found this wayward strand of the Astronomican and pulled them to safety? He knew such an analogy was crude, but what other way was there to explain it?

Even though this was a memory from another mind, Kai felt an inordinate sense of relief as the empty corridor of calm space enfolded the Argo. The vessel was plummeting through a web of sticky strands that fought to cling onto its prize, but the power of the Astronomican was at its strongest here, and the Argowas dragged back into the material universe.

Kai’s stomach sank, and he swallowed a mouthful of bile as his body shifted from one plane of existence to another. Translating from the warp to realspace was never easy, but to do it while looking into the heart of baleful storms was even harder. He fought to hold onto consciousness, and let out a shuddering series of breaths as the sickening colours of the warp faded and the distant sprinkling of diamond stars against the darkness of realspace swam into focus.

Now subject to the principal laws of the universe, the Argotwisted as gravity tore at it with jealous claws. Portions of the ship buckled inwards, and others tore away in the violence of translation. How galling it would be to have survived such violent warp storms only to destroyed by the very laws held in abeyance beyond the veil of the Immaterium.

Yet Kai knew they had not been destroyed, they had lived.

He remembered the salvage crews cutting him from his astropath’s chamber. He remembered screaming and clawing and biting at them, raving and demented from his nightmarish solitude. He had heard the crew die, their every last thought and final moment of agony, and it had driven him to the brink of madness. To have lived through so horrendous an ordeal was more than most minds could survive, and Kai knew that a man of lesser mental fortitude would have died along with the crew.

For the longest time he had derided himself as weak and foolish, haunted by his own survival and blaming himself for every death to which he had been forced to listen. He knew now that his survival was only thanks to his strength and ability to shut off that part of him that could not hope to deal with such a trauma. Enough people had told him that the death of the Argowas not his fault, for good reasons and for bad, but only by seeing it for himself could he truly accept the truth of it.

And with that truth came revelation.

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor.

The delicious treason of it. The punchline undelivered. Words from another time and another mind. The warrior of the new moon will say it and it will sound like a joke, but it will soon be ashes in his mouth, a bitter memory he wishes he could erase. It is both true and false. Blood spilled through misunderstanding.

Kai sees the Red Chamber.

Crimson light spills over him like oil: thick, slow and choking. It envelops him until it seems there is nothing left of the world but blood.

He is disembodied, or his body has been destroyed. It is impossible to know which.

The Red Chamber is like the interior of a diseased ventricle, pulsing with ruddy light and weirdly angled, as though the fundamental laws of physics no longer apply. Lines and curves intersect and diverge, forming decks and walls and ceilings at impossible angles to one another.

Everywhere drips blood, or is that his imagination?

Red-lit hololiths on one wall show a gently spinning orb of silver and blue, a haze of fire rippling the lower levels of its atmosphere. This world burns with war, and it does not surprise him when he sees the familiar outlines of the Nordafrik continental mass emerge from the storm-lit clouds that gather like gnarled fists over the landscape.

This is Terra, and it is under attack.

Kai has no sensation of form, nothing to give him a clue as to how he can be in this place. Is he a fragment of soul, a sliver of consciousness? A passive observer or a shaper of events yet to come? No matter how he shifts his awareness, there is no sensation of weight or substance.