Slaanesh.
Khorne.
Tzeentch.
Tarkh’ax, warp preserve his malevolent name, would make obeisance to them all. His sustenance was derived from the Changer of Ways — Tzeentch — but he was a being of rare cunning and understood the importance of union. By supplicating to each of the Dark Gods he would be gifted with strengths and powers beyond the remit of his sorcerous patron, sealing his ascension and anchoring him, immovably, into the realm of mortality and material.
It appeared to be working.
The plague priest to Severus’s left shrieked, fluids dribbling copiously from its hood, dropped its gnarled cane and scrabbled at its own chest, apparently arresting the spread of an intolerable fire that only it could see or feel. It gave a final pitiful squeal of agony and broke apart, scabrous residue splattering to the floor in a torrent of decayed flesh and bile.
The shrine to Nurgle’s pestilent pleasures, at the periphery of Severus’s view, illuminated with a vomit-green cast, bloated statue idol staring mutely.
Slaanesh’s hooded painbringer cried out next, pied cloak seeming to constrict and dissect its wearer, dissolving the figure with acidic slowness. The thing screamed and groaned in equal measure as its flesh peeled away.
Then the butcher priest of Khorne, erupting in a column of writhing flesh and blood, like chunks of abattoir meat.
Then Tzeentch’s sorcerer-devotee, amorphous form shifting and melding with growing speed until it oscillated and flexed alarmingly, breaking down in fluid disarray to dribble and puddle on the floor like melted ice.
As each priest willingly — if painfully — gave their life, the terrible features of their patron idol statue, constructed millennia ago before Tarkh’ax’s imprisonment, was cast in the ruddy light of its vile deity.
Four shrines of darkness and death.
The two prisoners had lost consciousness long ago, slumping against their restraints to hang limply, wrists bleeding at the tightness of their bonds. Severus dismissed them from his mind and concentrated on the surging warp-tides in his skull.
Only he remained to witness the final stage of Tarkh’ax’s release.
A surge of energy formed from the centre of the star; a glowing spine of blue white plasma that lifted high above the abyss, penetrating the clouds above and rising: a shifting spirit beacon to welcome the daemonlord back to reality.
Severus glanced at his timepiece again. 18.59 hrs. Twenty minutes left.
Tunnel gave way to tunnel. Catacomb to crypt. Withered chamber to spiral stairs. Always downwards, air growing thicker and greasier with every step, slurry underfoot growing more and more sludgelike. Like wading in glue.
“Descend here,” Ardias had said, pointing to one slipramp that coiled its way over the lip of the abyss and into the darkness. “I’ll find another route — we have more chance of recovering the prisoners this way. Do what you can. Keep them busy, make a diversion. Severus is mine.”
He’d racked his gun meaningfully, nodded once with something similar to professional respect, then jogged away across the blasted landscape, disappearing from view behind the coils of sulphurous smoke and jagged rock. A labyrinth of walkways and tunnels peppered the plunging surfaces within the pit: choosing to begin from opposite sides seemed to make the most sense.
Kais simply couldn’t bring himself to care.
Once every few raik’ors his mind would remind him — insidiously, he thought — of the ethereal Ko’vash languishing somewhere below. But all consideration of goal or purpose was quickly eclipsed behind the hissing of the rage in his mind, storming and shrieking, hunting down enemies to pulverise. Just as his descent was measured in a coagulation of the air and an impalpable sense of growing monstrousness, so too did the Mont’au-whisper flourish. With every tor’lek he walked, it grew louder, more urgent...
Killing was his reason, now. Violence was his rationality, carnage his sanctity. Equilibrium found in disharmony.
The walls moaned at him, half-formed somethings twisting and sucking at the moist earth; repugnant embryos locked in amniotic sacs of filth and disease. Kais had already exploded some, just for the sake of it. The exercise lacked gratification. He’d found gibbering daemon things and Chaos Marines instead: real prey that ran or fought back or at least reacted satisfyingly when he punched high-velocity munitions through their leering toothy faces.
He imagined how he must look now. A shadow thing of muck and flesh. Human blood going rust-brown as it dried across his armour, oily Chaos fluids staining him with an unclean patina, the asymmetry of his armour compounded by the ragged wounds and scars he’d received. His helmet was a misshapen cyclops visage, the single baleful eye of the bolter shell glowering down from above his brow.
The railgun had ceased to be a thing of grace and cleanliness long, long ago. Now it hung with chunks of gore, matted hair and filth staining every surface, viscous liquids dribbling slowly from beneath its stock.
Vhol, fastidious in his care of technology, would not approve.
If, that is, he was still alive.
If anyone Kais knew was still alive.
As if it mattered.
He rushed across a walkway that arched unexpectedly across the chasm of the pit, uncomfortable at the exposure. A bright blue lance of light, like an inverted sunray, punctured the abyssal airspace from below. He resisted the urge to look down into the murky depths and moved on, fingering the railgun’s trigger hungrily, waiting for a target.
As if to answer some unspoken prayer a shriek rang out from nearby: a protracted shrill of avian fury. Kais spun in his spot, gun raised and ready, a guilty smile smearing itself across his face.
There were two, and they came at him together. Sleek perversions of the hulking Chaos Marines, their aerodynamic bodies tapered into fluted talons that snapped apart mechanically and grasped for him as they dropped from above. Like swooping vultures, arcane jet packs disgorging a miasmic haze of fuel and smog, they ululated as they plummeted, slicing through the air with scalpel precision. Ducking hardly seemed worth it. He did it anyway.
A claw parted the flesh of his shoulder like jelly, making him cry out. The impact dragged him forwards and briefly he was certain of tumbling over the edge of the walkway, flailing downwards into the pit. But the raptor thing was gone in a flash, a sticky trail of cyan blood hanging threadlike in the air behind it, and Kais had just enough presence of mind, even through the haze of pain, to tumble aside as the second shrieking creature gusted past to finish the job.
Its talons — expecting the soft bite of flesh — instead clawed impotently at the slippery rock of the walkway and sent the creature toppling forwards, overbalancing with a shriek. Kais pumped a vengeful railgun shot into its tumbling back, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and watched with no small satisfaction as its jetpack ignited messily.
It rained corrupted blood.
The surviving raptor howled indignantly above; a babyshriek eulogy for its dead comrade. It came at Kais in a flurry, knife claws an iridescent smear of reflected light, fluted wedge beak keening and howling. He watched it with something like fascination, drawing himself up to his full height like a cat arching its back, and didn’t raise his gun until the thing was almost upon him, yowling and screaming in fury.
Kais knew how it felt.
He fired and dropped onto his back in one smooth motion, senses too overburdened to pick out any confirmation of his shot having found its target. The dagger-like shape rocketed past overhead, more felt than seen, flashing claws dangerously close. His stomach turned over with the frustration of failure, his enemy still very much alive. A slick confetti of debris and fluids followed it past, and Kais rolled onto his front to prepare for the inevitable follow-up attack.