'Come on,' shouted Uriel. 'The gymnasia. We need to gamer as many soldiers as we can before it's too late.'
Uriel and Pasanius lurched their way along the passageway, stumbling like a pair of drunks as they fought to hold their equilibrium in the face of this spatial insanity. Screams and roars came from ahead, but Uriel found himself unable to pinpoint exactly where ahead was as sounds echoed and distorted wildly around him. The floors and ceilings of the stone passageways seemed to run fluid, swirling as though their very fabric was being unravelled before his eyes.
The sound of a tolling bell rang out, ponderously slow and dolorous one second, tinny and ringing the next. Using the wall as a guide, though it was a treacherous one, the two Space Marines fought their way onwards, each step bringing fresh madness to their surroundings.
Uriel thought he saw a tall mountain, wreathed in smoke, form from the floor before it vanished and was replaced by a roiling sea of snapping mouths. But even that disappeared like a fever dream as soon as he tried to look upon it. He could see Pasanius was having similar difficulties, blinking and rubbing his eyes in disbelief.
A grainy static filled Uriel's vision and an insistent buzzing, like an approaching swarm of insects, filled his skull. He shook his head, trying to clear the distortion and unable to comprehend the things he saw before him.
'How close are we?' yelled Pasanius.
Uriel steadied himself on a bulkhead, grateful for its transitory solidity, and shook his head again, though the movement made him want to vomit. 'How can we tell? Everything changes the moment I look at it.'
'I think we are almost there,' said Pasanius, pointing to where the passageway widened into a marble-flagged atrium, though at present, it appeared that the chamber had been inverted, its domed ceiling swirling below their feet, its dimensions skewed completely out of true.
Uriel nodded and pushed himself forward, an intense and nauseous sensation of vertigo seizing him as they stumbled into the flipped atrium. Uriel's eyes told him he was crossing the floor, but he could tell that his every step found him crossing the shallow concave bowl of the inverted dome. His booted feet trod the shielded glass of the atrium's dome that was all that lay between him and the warp.
Uriel looked down through the dome, the nauseous sensation in his gut surging upwards, and he dropped to his knees, vomiting explosively across the glass. A sickly mass of bruised colours foamed and swirled beyond the glass, the very stuff of the warp itself, noxious and toxic to the eye. Its bilious malevolence went beyond its simple hideous appearance, violating some inner part of the human mind that dared not comprehend its nightmarish potential.
Uriel found his eyes drawn to a loathsome stain of the warp, a vile, filthy sore of ash-stained yellow, he was unable to drag his sight from. Even as he stared at it, the warp shifted, stirred into life by the mere attention and echoes of Uriel's thoughts. Vile, terrible things began shaping themselves from the foul soup of raw creation and Uriel knew that were he to see what horrific thing would be born from its hateful depths, he would go mad.
Gauntleted hands gripped him and hauled him upright, and he could feel the warp's blind, impotent rage at being denied such a morsel as his sanity.
'Don't look at it! Keep your eyes closed!' shouted Pasanius, dragging Uriel over the surface of the dome. Uriel felt its insistent calclass="underline" the seductions of its fecundity and the promises of power that could be his were he but to surrender to it. His eyes ached to see the awful magnificence of the warp, but Uriel kept them screwed tightly shut, lest they betray his soul to the immaterium.
Breathless and disgusted, Uriel and Pasanius clambered from the atrium and crawled away from the false seductions of the warp, the feelings of sickness diminishing the further they went.
Uriel looked up, coughing stringy, vomit-flecked spittle and said, 'Thank you, my friend.'
Pasanius nodded and said, 'There. The entrance to the gymnasia should be through that cloister!'
'Aye, it should be,' agreed Uriel pushing himself weakly to his feet. 'Let's just hope it is still there.'
Uriel stumbled through the cloister and turned towards the entrance to the gymnasia.
'Oh no…' he whispered as he saw what lay before him.
Where he had expected to find the carven marble archway of the gymnasia, there was now a gargantuan gateway of brazen metaclass="underline" bronze and laced with razorwire that led into a rectangular, earthen arena which was fully a kilomette wide and twice that in length. More incredible still, there was no roof to this arena, simply a lacerated crimson sky, flecked with cancerous, melanoma clouds. What new madness was this?
Screaming, mad and insane like the wails of the damned in torment, echoed from within and pierced Uriel's skull with lancing, glass shards of pain.
His stomach knotted in horrified disgust as the overpowering reek of fresh blood filled his senses.
The soldiers of the 808th Macragge they had come to find were still here, but where there had once been a proud regiment of men and women ready to fight for the glory of the Emperor, there was now nothing more than the screaming, bloody shreds of those yet to die.
Hundreds of soldiers writhed on the ground, splashing great gouts of blood around them as though fighting some subterranean attacker. Fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth, clawing and grasping at their bodies and dragging them below the surface. Uriel ran through the gate, sword in hand, and felt his boots sink into the soft and loamy ground, crimson liquid oozing from the waterlogged earth.
Bones and grinning skulls gleamed whitely through the red earth and Uriel saw that the ground was not waterlogged at all, but flooded with fresh-spilled blood.
His mind reeled at the prospect. How many must have been drained of their life's blood to irrigate such a vast space so thoroughly? How many arteries had been emptied to slake the vile thirst of this dark, dark earth?
Uriel was shaken from his disgust by the nearby screams of a man half submerged in the earth and weeping tears of agony.
'Help me! For the love of the Emperor help me!' he shrieked.
Uriel sheathed his sword and ran over to help the man, who reached up with pleading arms. The man's gore-slick hands slid from his gauntlets, but Uriel gripped his tunic and hauled him clear of the ground, staggering back in horror as he saw that the man had been stripped of flesh below the waist, his entire lower body flensed of muscle, meat and blood. Even as he watched, the hungry earth swallowed what remained of the dying man, unwilling to be cheated of its fleshy morsel.
A sense of utter helplessness filled Uriel as he watched men and women devoured by the bloody ground, the monstrous sound of marrow being suckled from the bone echoing from the monolithic sides of this gory arena.
'Blessed Emperor, no!' wailed Pasanius, fighting to save a howling woman from a similar fate. Laughing shadows ran like black mercury along the walls of the arena, a capering dance of souls that flared into the blood-red sky as the slaughter of thousands concluded.
A sudden silence descended upon the arena as the last of the bloody ground's helpless victims were dragged beneath its thirsting depths. No sooner had the last body vanished from sight, when a throaty gurgling erupted from the centre of the arena and Uriel saw a long strip of rockcrete slowly rise from the soaking ground. Dull, bloody rail tracks arose with it, running across the middle of the arena and ending at opposite walls.