Inside the tempest, something moved. Malcador had no clear sense of what it was. It stirred the currents of the storm, and it reached out from deeper in the warp. It acted with purpose. It was a dark sentience, a thing whose existence Malcador wished he could deny, yet knew he must face.
Answering the command of a being that pressed against the thinning veil of the materium, raging that it could not yet manifest itself, the remaining human nodes in the storm suddenly redirected all their force. Focused energy blasted out of the storm and into Arkanasia. Her aura exploded with brilliance. It grew, turning her into a colossus of monstrous, coruscating light. The stone around her burst into flame.
She stopped running. She turned around.
Malcador saw the attack to come. He pulled back from the storm, rushing back to protect his body. The tempest dragged at him and he was slow, too slow. Collatinus saw the danger too, and the Custodians trained their bolter fire on Arkanasia. The shells exploded at the edge of her aura. The storm withered further, its remaining fury turning her into a nova of power.
She looked back up at Malcador. Her face was contorted in pain and strength and madness. She stretched her arms towards him, and he knew he could not withstand what was coming.
The moment stretched out, and Arkanasia did not attack. She shrieked a single word, ‘EMPEROR!’ and she looked up. A volcanic eruption of warp flame launched upward from her, directed at nothing, draining her aura.
The shells broke through the thinning energy, and she fell.
Free of the warp, Malcador prepared a retaliatory blast of his own, but when he saw the glow around her fade to nothing, he held back.
‘Cease fire,’ Collatinus said. He joined Malcador as the Sigillite walked slowly down to where Arkanasia had fallen.
The storm was gone. On the land it had concealed, carbonised bodies lay, contorted in the pain that had destroyed them. Their deformities were extreme. One was almost six metres long, another had five arms, and a third had a cluster of skulls sprouting out of each other. There was always just enough of the human form left to show what the dead thing had once been.
Arkanasia’s flesh had burned from an internal fire. Though the bolter shells had hit her, the last of her psychic barrier had been enough to diminish their force – enough that they had not shredded her body on impact. She was, to Malcador’s surprise, still alive, though barely.
Arkanasia’s eyes were blank, boiled white, yet they turned in Malcador’s direction when he knelt beside her. ‘I didn’t want this,’ she whispered.
‘I know.’
A clawed, blackened hand clutched at his robe. ‘I didn’t dream well enough,’ she said. ‘Please, first lord, make a better dream.’
‘Something will be done,’ he told her.
There was no response. Her hand was limp, and her eyes were still.
Malcador stood. He turned around slowly, gazing at the bodies, at the aftermath of the psychic storm. ‘Something must be done,’ he said, this time to Collatinus.
‘Could she have been right?’ Collatinus asked. ‘Would better training have made the difference?’
Or intensified the danger? Malcador thought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He was worried, too, about the fact that it wasn’t discipline that had stopped Arkanasia from attacking. It was religious belief. The very thing he would have had to condemn in Arkanasia had kept her faithful. That was not reassuring. The Emperor was right to command an end to faith. It had too many dangers. What if another kind of faith drove the rebels? he wondered. ‘The decision will not be mine to make,’ he said.
‘It will have to be made soon,’ said Collatinus.
‘So I will urge. I think it will be.’
Collatinus nodded, satisfied.
Malcador looked back at Arkanasia. With the end of the storm, the sun was beating hard down into the gorge, yet all he could feel was shadow.
About the Author
David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.