This was not a comms station, it was a temple.

TORGADDON'S FACE WAS ashen and leathery, puckered and scarred around a burning yellow eye. Sharpened metallic teeth glinted in a lipless mouth and twin gashes were torn in the centre of his face.

A star with eight points was gouged in his temple, mirroring its golden twin etched upon his ornate, black armour.

'No,’ said Loken, backing away from this terrible apparition.

'You have trespassed, Loken,’ hissed Torgaddon. 'You have betrayed,’

A dry, deathly wind carried Torgaddon's words, gusting over him with the smell of burning bodies. As he breathed the noxious wind, a vision of broken steppes spread out before Loken, expanses of desolation and plains of rusted machinery like skeletons of extinct monsters. A hive city on the distant horizon split open like a flower, and from its broken, burning petals rose a mighty tower of brass that punctured the pollution-heavy clouds.

The sky above was burning and the laughter of Dark Gods boomed from the heavens. Loken wanted to scream, this vision of devastation worse than anything he had seen before

This wasn't real. It couldn't be. He did not believe in ghosts and illusions.

The thought gave him strength. He wrenched his mind away from the dying world, and suddenly he was soaring through the galaxy, tumbling between the stars. He saw them destroyed, bleeding glowing plumes of stellar matter into the void. A baleful mass of red stars glowered above him, staring like a great and terrible eye of flame. An endless tide of titanic monsters and vast space fleets vomited from that eye, drowning the universe in a tide of blood.

A sea of burning flames spat and leapt from the blood, consuming all in its path, leaving black, barren wasteland in its wake.

Was this a vision of some lunatic's hell, a dimension of destruction and chaos where sinners went when they died? Loken forced himself to remember the lurid descriptions from the Chronicles of Ursh, the outlandish scenes described by inventions of dark faith. No, said the voice of Torgaddon, this is no madman's delusion. It is the future.

'You're not Torgaddon!' shouted Loken, shaking the whispering voice from his head. You are seeing the galaxy die. Loken saw the Sons of Horus in the tide of fiery madness that poured from the red eye, armoured in black and surrounded by leaping, deformed creatures. Abaddon was there, and Horus himself, an immense obsidian giant who crushed worlds in his gauntlets.

This could not be the future. This was a diseased distorted vision of the future.

A galaxy in which mankind was led by the Emperor could never become such a terrible maelstrom of chaos and death. You are wrong.

The galaxy in flames receded and Loken scrabbled for some solidity, something to reassure him that this terrifying vision could never come to pass. He was tumbling again, his vision blurring until he opened his eyes and found himself in Archive Chamber Three, a place he had felt safe, surrounded by books that rendered the universe down

to pure logic and kept the madness locked up in crude pagan epics where it belonged.

But something was wrong, the books were burning around him, this purest of knowledge being systematically destroyed to keep the masses ignorant of their truths. The shelves held nothing but flames and ash, the heat battering against Loken as he tried to save the dying books. His hands blistered and blackened as he fought to save the wisdom of ancient times, the flesh peeling back from his bones.

The music of the spheres. The mechanisms of reality, invisible and all around...

Loken could see it where the flames burned through, the endless churning mass of the warp at the heart of everything and the eyes of dark forces seething with malevolence. Grotesque creatures cavorted obscenely among heaps of corpses, horned heads and braying, goat-like faces twisted by the mindless artifice of the warp. Bloated monsters, their bodies heaving with maggots and filth, devoured dead stars as a brass-clad giant bellowed an endless war cry from its throne of skulls and soulless magicians sacrificed billions in a silver city built of lies.

Loken fought to tear his sight from this madness. Remembering the words he had thrown in Horus Aximand's face at the Delphos Gate, he screamed them aloud once more:

'I will not bow to any fane or acknowledge any spirit. I own only the empirical clarity of Imperial Truth!'

In an instant, the walls of the dark temple slammed back into place around him, the air thick with incense, and he gasped for breath. Loken's heart pumped wildly and his head spun, sick with the effort of casting out what he had seen.

This was not fear. This was anger.

Those who came to this fane were selling out the entire human race to dark forces that lurked unseen in the depths of the warp. Were these the same forces that had infected Xayver Jubal? The same forces that had nearly killed Sindermann in the ship's archive?

Loken felt sick as he realised that everything he knew about the warp was wrong.

He had been told that there were no such things as gods.

He had been told that there was nothing in the warp but insensate, elemental power.

He had been told that the galaxy was too sterile for melodrama.

Everything he had been told was a lie.

Feeding on the strength his anger gave him, Loken lurched towards the altar and slammed the ancient book closed, snapping the brass hasp over the lock. Even shut, he could feel the terrible purpose locked within its pages. The idea that a book could have some sort of power would have sounded ludicrous to Loken only a few months ago, but he could not doubt the evidence of his own senses, despite the incredible, terrifying, unimaginable things he had seen and heard. He

gathered up the book and clutching it under one arm, turned and made his way from the fane.

He closed the door and eased past the banner of the Seventh, emerging once more into the secluded darkness of the strategium.

Sindermann had been right. Loken was hearing the music of the spheres, and it was a terrible sound that spoke of corruption, blood and the death of the universe.

Loken knew with utter certainty that it was up to him to silence it.

THE INTERIOR OF the Isstvan Extremis facility was dominated by a wide, stepped pyramid, its huge stone blocks fashioned from a material that clearly had no place on such a world. Each block came from some other building many of them still bearing architectural carvings, sections of friezes, gargoyles or even statues jutting crazily from the structure

Isstvanian soldiers swarmed around the base of the pyramid, fighting in desperate close quarters battle with the steel-armoured figures of the Death Guard. The battle had no shape, the art of war having given way to the grinding brutality of simple killing.

Tarvitz's gaze was drawn from the slaughter to the very top of the pyramid, where a bright light spun and twisted around a half-glimpsed figure surrounded by keening harmonics.

'Attack!' bellowed Eidolon, charging forwards as the tip of the spear, assault units the killing edges

around him. Tarvitz forgot about the strange figure and followed the lord commander, driving Eidolon forwards by covering him and holding off enemies who tried to surround him.

More Emperor's Children stormed into the dome and the battle at the base of the pyramid. Tarvitz saw Lucius beside Eidolon, the swordsman's blade shining like a harnessed star.

It was typical that Lucius would be at the front, demonstrating that he would rise swiftly through the ranks and take his place alongside Eidolon as the Legion's best. Tarvitz slashed his weapon left and right, needing no skill to kill these foes, simply a strong sword arm and the will to win. He clambered onto the first level of the pyramid, fighting his way up its side through rank after rank of black armoured foes.