He looked up at the tactical display of the approaching Inquisition fleet, and the slowly collapsing vortices. The spinning holes in reality would take whatever they swallowed into the warp, to ride on wild currents through time and space. Under his feet he could still feel the plasma engines fighting to pull the ship clear of the vortices’ embrace.
Slowly he walked to sit on the command throne and spoke his last order.
‘Shut down the engines.’
A moment later the ship went silent. It drifted on through the void, carried by its momentum. Then it began to slide back towards the vortices that had consumed the station.
On the bridge Cyrus rested his sword across his knees. The bridge was changing, cancerous blooms of distorted metal expanding before his eyes as the daemon sunk its claws deeper into the structure. He had no illusions about what he did. He was condemning the ship, the crew and those who had fled onto it in hope of escape. He was condemning them to an accursed eternity riding through time, bound to an abomination.
In the depths of his psyker’s soul he felt the vortices close over the Aethon. The ship had not raised its Geller fields; it was open to the full force of the warp. Raw psychic power washed the through the hull in an invisible wave. Those aboard died a thousand times over, their bodies broken down and remade over and over again before being scattered as dry dust through the halls of the ship.
Cyrus kept his eyes open through it all, holding his body and soul together with the last scrap of his will.
He thought of the signal. The signal that had fixed this fate from the moment he heard it, the signal the daemon had never sent, that no one had ever sent. He closed his eyes and sent his voice out into the warp. His words would become a broken message to trap himself and the daemon, binding their fates together. Somewhere in the bones of the ship the daemon heard his words and howled.
His last unheard confession spoken, he let go and the storm broke his body and soul apart.
The Aethon tumbled on, falling back through time, becoming something new, as was fated.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sarah Cawkwell is a north-east England based freelance writer. Old enough to know better, she’s still young enough not to care. Married, with a son (who is the grown up in the house) and two intellectually challenged cats, she’s been a determined and prolific writer for many years. She hasn’t yet found anything to equal the visceral delights of the Warhammer universe and is thrilled that her first piece of published work is within its grim, dark borders.
When not slaving away over a hot keyboard, Sarah’s hobbies include reading everything and anything, running around in fields with swords screaming incomprehensibly and having her soul slowly sucked dry by online games. Her minimum bribe level is one chocolate orange.
Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he’s become one of the Black Library’s most prolific and popular authors, writing a whole swathe of novels, novellas and short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. His recent works include the Warhammer Heroes novel Sigvald and ‘Sanctus’, a novella included in the Space Marine Battles anthology Architect of Fate.
Author of the Souldrinkers and Grey Knights series, freelance writer Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular SF authors, and has written RPG supplements and comics books as well as novels. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England, where he can sometimes be seen indulging his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics on the local stage.
John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work can be seen in the Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch roleplay games and scattered through a number of other books including the award nominated Disciples of the Dark Gods. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys talking about why it would be a good idea, and making it so with his own traitor legions on the gaming table…that and drinking good wine.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan
Maps by Rosie Edwards and Adrian Wood.
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ISBN 978-0-85787-689-8
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