It was felt by Solomon Gathandre, clutching at his las-gun and thanking his lucky stars. Posted with the second Dolumar regiment, he’d been in the perfect position to scramble for the deserted reservoir system on Lettica’s eastern fringe when the portals started opening. Armed with his gun, a hipflask of Old-Foiz and a stash of gantha-root rollups, he could wait out the lunacy in perfect contentment.
Away across the shadow relief buildings an almighty fireball clawed its way into the sky, shaking the ground. It looked like the whole of the south side had decided to go skyward.
“Hoooo-aaaaa...” he breathed, impressed.
Then the wreckage started to falclass="underline" vast slabs of blast-melted plascrete and metal tumbling along the slopes of the mine basin, and Solomon began to wonder whether he’d chosen the best hiding place after all.
Crunch.
It was felt by Shas’el T’au Lusha, swooping low across a shattered plaza in the city’s administrative quarter. He turned his — no, the battlesuit’s — fusion blaster on a gaggle of red armoured hulks, carving their way through a knot of screaming gue’la with vast axes that howled and smoked as they cleaved. Watching the glowing-eyed devils smoulder and shrivel beneath the stream of superheated air was, he admitted quietly, immensely gratifying.
One of the battledrones chattered an energy spike warning to his suit’s AI and he was treated to a peripheral view of the boiling smoke cloud twisting and eating itself above the city to the south. He filed the incident away in his memory without comment — unimpressed — and instructed the team to continue with the search. The ethereal must be found.
It was felt by Brother Pereduz, heretic-Marine and veteran of the Iron Warriors, as he eased himself into a cellar-excavation deep underground. Three of his battle brothers, studded armour glimmering with a matt-gun-metal sheen, followed him along the tunnel. They’d been excellent bait, Pereduz judged, laughing uproariously in a fine imitation of demented bloodlust, a convincing characteristic of other, less academic Traitor Legions.
An Iron Warrior rarely laughed.
A relay-trigger, wired to a scan-beam sensor on the surface, blipped.
“Iron within,” he said, voice a monotone. “Iron without.” He pressed down on the remote detonator in his hand and basked in the sheets of cascading dust from the roof as the whole planet seemed to tremble.
It was felt by Sergeant Larynz, Veteran of the Ultramarines Third Company, holder of the Olivius Valoricum for bravery in the course of his duties, as he and the Third Tactical Squad glanced about the crevicelike dugout with a growing sense of impending doom. Techmarine Achellus swept his scanner across a strange device half-buried in the mud.
“Get out!” the vox screamed.
Everything went white.
It was felt by Shas’la T’au Kais, tor’kans distant, and he looked up from prising some strange weapon from the hands of a dead tau fireteam he’d discovered scattered across the street. Scavenging had become a vital part of his role: procuring an undamaged backpack, armfuls of auto-deploy mines, grenades, medipacks, rations...
A hundred-and-one carrion supplies stained with the blood of dead comrades.
Even through the soot and gore tangled and matted across his helmet-optics, the blinding explosion from the south made him wince to protect his eyes. He didn’t have much time to muse upon the maelstrom — something giggled from the shadows nearby and he turned his attention back to the strange gun with professional haste.
It was felt by Captain Jehnnus Ardias.
The streets flew apart: masonry confetti enveloping him moments after the scanner went dead. A slab of girder-striated rubble tumbled horizontally on a plume of flame and splattered the Marine pilot of the land speeder like a bursting bubble. Blood scattered airily across Ardias’s cheek.
Impressions surged past his consciousness: white lights and fire and smoke and, worst of all, the knowledge that he’d been fooled. Sent his men directly into a trap like a first-year rookie on a simulated mission. Suckered. Outwitted.
He’d told the xeno: There are no longer any rules. There are no approved tactics. All you can do is the best that you can.
His best, he reflected, had not been good enough.
The world went sideways, the land speeder’s nose pointed at the ground and the sky both at once, the streets gashed past in a rush of smoke and ruddy red fire and Ardias thought: Aye, straight to hell.
The hunger was almost intolerable. Were it not for the celestial nature of his restraints and the perpetual vitality of his spirit, his own fury and frustration would have consumed him like wildfire long before. Unable to die, his torment was limitless.
The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax raged.
Had he been alive — in the true sense of the word — his vocal cords would have splintered and exploded beneath the force of his ceaseless howling millennia ago. His fingers would have crumbled to ruined, bloody powder at the impotent flexing and scrabbling he subjected himself to. His eyes would be shrivelled prunes, his teeth blunted and shattered, his face clawed apart in self-inflicted flagellation, his bones hammered out of shape by the force of his flexing, gyrating madness, and his mind a maelstrom of insanity.
But he had no vocal cords to shred (and yet still he howled).
He had no fingers or nails or eyes or teeth to abuse, but still he scratched and snarled and glared and spat and gnashed.
He had no face to claw at, but still he twisted his features randomly, inhuman fury segueing seamlessly into childlike mischief.
He had no bones to shatter, but still he clenched his spiny knuckles and shrugged his claw-pocked shoulders in turmoil.
And his mind—
His mind was insane long, long before his incarceration.
As insubstantial as mist, coiling and billowing inside his glowing warp wall cage, he twitched and screamed and howled and giggled, listening intently to the ebb and flow of reality through the tiny imperfections of the gaol. In such a fashion had he wrought his influence, piece by piece, upon Severus.
And others...
The governor was intelligent, at least. He suffered from an unquenchable desire to prove his worth — an insecurity into which Tarkh’ax had gloatingly inserted his insubstantial claws. Initially — after the man first visited the newly unearthed Temple abyss with a xenolinguitor servitor, all interested smiles and academic intentions — Tarkh’ax was barely a whisper: an unconscious demi-urge acting upon the governor’s dreams. The fool’s damnation had been a slow trickle of acquiescence and diminishing resistance, forever convinced that each new heresy was his own idea, forever certain that it was he who stood to gain from the whole convoluted plot.
Tarkh’ax had played him like a puppet, subtle influence growing every day, guiding him through the dark rituals required to break the eldar curse. It was painstaking work, like attempting to move boulders using only blades of grass, and the frustration mounted with every moment.
But finally the seals were breaking.
Sunset. It had to be sunset.
The eldar farseer had been no fool; he understood that even the sorcerous spellsongs of his people were impermanent, transient like every other aspect of creation. Chaos came to all things, eventually. Unable to kill Tarkh’ax, unable even to banish him for eternity, they imprisoned him behind power-bolstered walls, exiled him to immaterial limbo and weaved an elaborate web of obstacles and falsehoods to prevent any but the most determined liberator from countering their efforts.