'Are you in there, Onyx?' asked Honsou.
'For now,' answered Onyx, his voice little more than a rasping whisper.
'What happened to you?'
'The monsters…' hissed the creature, only just holding off its dissolution. 'They unfleshed me, gave the daemon in me nowhere to hide. It fled and left me like this…'
Cadaras Grendel joined Honsou and said, 'This the daemon thing you wanted me to watch out for?'
'Aye,' nodded Honsou.
'Don't look like much now.'
'No, he doesn't, does he?' said Honsou, turning away and limping towards the centre of the chamber.
'What you want me to do with it?' shouted Cadaras Grendel after his retreating back.
'Get rid of it,' said Honsou with a dismissive wave.
He clambered painfully over the many piles of rabble and bodies that littered the cavern, hearing the hot flash of Cadaras Grendel's melta gun and knowing that Onyx was no more.
The centre of the cavern looked like the epicentre of some great orbital bombardment, the ground torn up and gouged with the fury of the battle that had taken place. Bodies and wreckage filled the place, so smashed and unrecognisable as to give no clue as to what they had been in life.
A shorn suit of power armour, gigantic in its proportions, lay at the edge of a deep crater and before it lay the Heart of Blood. The massive daemon's body was a dull, smouldering red, the colour of threatening embers that can leap to life in an instant. Its chest heaved with sated lust and as Honsou watched, the fiery streaks of its veins pulsed with renewed life.
The axe lying next to the daemon was twice as tall as Honsou and though he knew it was unfeasible, he felt an undeniable urge to try and lift it. His own axe growled in his hand and he knew that it was the daemonic presence within the Heart of Blood's weapon that was calling to him.
Honsou marched over to the Heart of Blood's recumbent body and delivered a thunderous boot to its horned skull.
'Come on!' he yelled. 'You are free now, and there are sorcerers to kill! Up!'
The daemon's lava-hot veins flared and its eyes flickered open, a soulless white fire, like dying suns, burning from its skull. Shaking off the satiety of its victorious engorgement, the Heart of Blood raised itself to its full height, its gargantuan axe and whip leaping to its great, taloned hands.
'That's better,' snarled Honsou as the daemon towered above him.
'Who dares rouse me from my blood-reverie?' bellowed the daemon.
'I am Honsou. Half-breed. Master of Khalan-Ghol.'
The colossal daemon loomed over Honsou, but he stood his ground, determined that he would show no fear before this creature.
'You are touched by the warp,' said the Heart of Blood. 'You have been flesh for one of my kind.'
Honsou nodded. 'Yes, I was once briefly blessed with the touch of a daemon of Chaos.'
'I still smell sorcery upon this place,' growled the daemon.
'You do,' said Honsou. 'My enemies wield powerful magicks against me and seek to destroy my fortress.'
'You are the master of this place?'
'For the moment, yes,' confirmed Honsou.
'Where are these enemies that stoop to the use of foul sorcery?' demanded the daemon.
Honsou looked out through the great breach torn in the side of the mountain and pointed to the crackling blue fires beyond.
'Out there,' he said. 'The warlord who commands the host that attacks my fortress is a sorcerer and has many magickers attending him.'
'I will kill him and rend his soul for all eternity!' promised the Heart of Blood, turning and smashing its way through the tear in the mountain of Khalan-Ghol before disappearing from sight.
Honsou clambered over to the crack torn in the rock and looked out over the smoke-wreathed mountainside, watching with undisguised amusement as the unstoppable daemon smashed into the front line of Toramino's army.
'Yes,' he laughed. 'You go do that…'
EPILOGUE
The sanctuary echoed with the ghosts of the dead, its empty blockhouses and bunkers deserted and abandoned. It had been that way when they had first found the place of course, but now it felt truly empty, as though the warrior band's brief occupancy had been nothing more than its last gasp of purpose.
Ardaric Vaanes knew they could not stay here now.
This place was forever tainted in his memory.
It had been here that Ventris had foisted his lie upon him and his men.
The lie of honour. The same lie that had seen him cast from his Chapter in the first place. The same lie that had almost seen him dead on this bleak, miserable shithole of a world.
Honour… What was the use of such a thing when all it got you was death and suffering? Thirty warriors had lived and fought from this place, fighting their enemies and surviving… always surviving.
Until Ventris came.
They had not had much of a life here, but it had at least been life.
'You killed them all, you bastard,' hissed Vaanes, his hatred for the Ultramarines captain burning like a slow fire in his heart as he traced spirals in the dust with his lightning claw.
Svoljard, tall and wild in his grey Wolf Brothers armour and leffar San, the proud and haughty White Consul, were all that was left of his warrior band, and Ardaric Vaanes knew that they would be lucky to live through the next few days.
After leaving Ventris and his ragtag band of monsters and misfits, the three of them had made their way through the mountains to the sanctuary, watching the great battles around the fortress from afar.
The spectacle had been magnificent, and during the incredible attack up the great ramp, Vaanes had unaccountably found himself hoping against hope that Honsou would see off his enemies.
When the ramp had collapsed and the army of Berossus had been all but destroyed, he had wanted to cheer.
But as spectacularly destructive as that had been it was as nothing compared to the chaos and slaughter that followed it.
The streaming pillars of blue fire that had surrounded the fortress for days now hammered it mercilessly, tearing the mountain apart piece by piece. Storms of magickal energy bludgeoned the rock with unimaginable force, smashing impregnable towers and bastions to dust in the blink of an eye. Vaanes had never seen anything like it and though the destruction was awe-inspiring to watch, he felt a flicker of regret that Honsou had not managed to pull off one last trick to defeat Toramino.
Then the Heart of Blood came, and everything changed.
It had come from the depths of the mountain like a red whirlwind of death, killing and destroying everything before it in an orgy of destruction that was staggering in its violence. Nothing could stand before this avatar of destruction - not men, not Iron Warriors, not tanks, not even Toramino's daemon engines.
Everything that came near the colossal daemon died, butchered by its screaming axe or crushed beneath its monstrous bulk. The slaughter had gone on for days, but in the end, Toramino's army had broken before the Blood God's favoured avatar, the shattered remnants quitting the field of battle while they still could and abandoning the smouldering wreck of Khalan-Ghol to the half-breed.
Honsou was still the master of Khalan-Ghol and though Vaanes had been pleased that the arrogant Toramino had been brought low, he felt an icy shiver of apprehension.
He knew that the half-breed would surely wreak a terrible vengeance on those who had attacked him. Vaanes knew that that was exactly what he would do and, from what little he knew of Honsou, he suspected that they were not so different in that respect.
That had been a week ago, and with nothing left to them, he, Svoljard and Jeffar San had remained at the sanctuary as they tried to come to terms with their new circumstances.