The hateful silence was broken by a sibilant moaning, as of a thousand voices trapped in a nightmare they know they will never wake from.
'Holy Emperor, protect us from evil, grant us the strength of spirit and body to fight your enemies and smite them with your blessing,' prayed Pasanius.
'Too late,' whispered Uriel, drawing his sword and standing ready to fight whatever new monstrosity the warp might unleash. 'We failed.'
No… you have not yet begun…
Both Uriel and Pasanius spun, searching for the source of the voice.
'Did you hear that?' said Uriel.
'Aye,' nodded Pasanius, 'I think so, but it felt… felt as though it was inside my head. Something terrible is coming, Uriel.'
'I know. But whatever comes, we will fight it with courage and honour.'
'Courage and honour,' agreed Pasanius, firing the igniters on the nozzle of his flamer.
'Let's go,' said Uriel grimly, nodding towards the dripping platform in the centre of the arena. 'Whatever is coming, we'll meet it head on!'
Pasanius followed his former captain as they made their way across the hideously squelching ground towards the platform.
As they mounted its steps, the source of the sibilant moaning was finally revealed.
Each sleeper laid between the rail tracks was a jigsaw of bodies and limbs, writhing in agony and knotted together by some dark sorcery. They screamed in lunatic delirium, their voices piteous and heartbreaking. Though he knew none of the faces, the cast of their features told Uriel that they were of the stock of Ultramar and that the souls of those consumed by this abominable place were suffering still.
Eyes and mouths churning in the fluid matter of each sleeper gave anguished voice to their suffering before being forced from form to formlessness that another soul might vent its endless purgatory.
Uriel's hatred swelled within him at such horror and he closed his eyes…
Splintering crystals of alternate existences clash and jangle, detaching from the walls of one plane and shifting their position to resonate at a different frequency. Echoes in time allow the planes to shift and change: altering the angles of reality to allow the dimensions to unlock, dancing in a ballet of all possibilities.
…then opened them as he felt a sickening vibration deep in his bones and a restlessness ripple through the air. The jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground retreated into its sanguineous depths and the moaning sleepers wept with renewed anguish.
Where the rail tracks vanished into the walls of this vast courtyard, streamers of multi-coloured matter were oozing from the stonework.
Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the mortar, twisting the image behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming skulls sent out to die.
Warped realms, a universe and lifetimes distant, flow together, joining all points in time on the bronze blood-tracks. On a journey that leads everywhere and begins nowhere, the Omphalos Daemonium pushes itself from nothingness to form. Snaking from its daemonic womb and leaving nothing but barren rape and death in its wake.
And the Omphalos Daemonium came.
Though the cenobite had raved of the might and power of the Omphalos Daemonium's evil, they had been but the merest hints of the thing's diabolical majesty. Roaring from the newly formed tunnel mouth like a brazen juggernaut of the end times, the Omphalos Daemonium shrieked along the bloodtracks towards the horrified Space Marines.
Vast bone-pistons drove it forward, iron and steel flanks heaving with immaterial energies. Bloody steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of tortured souls ground the tracks beneath it to feast on the oozing blood of the dead earth.
Deep within its insane structure, it might have once resembled an ancient steam-driven locomotive, but unknown forces and warped energies had transformed it into something else entirely. The thunder of its arrival could be felt by senses beyond the pitiful five known to humankind, echoing through the planes that existed and intersected beyond the veil of reality.
Behind it came a tender of dark iron and a juddering procession of boxcars, their timbers stained with aeons of blood and ordure. Uriel knew without knowing that millions had been carried to their deaths in these hellish containers, carried to whatever loathsome destination this horrifying machine desired before finally being exterminated. The vast daemon engine slowed, the sleepers driven beyond sound in their torment as the towering machine halted at the edge of the platform.
Uriel thought he heard booming laughter and the grinding squeal of warped timber doors sliding open on runners rusted with gore.
Gusts of blood-laced steam hissed from the armoured hide of the Omphalos Daemonium and malevolent laughter rippled through them as they writhed on evil business of their own. Each tendril thickened and became more solid as they wormed towards the Space Marines and Uriel said, 'Stand ready.'
The tendrils of smoke vanished without warning and in their place stood eight figures, each wearing a featureless grey boiler-suit and knee-high boots with rusted buckles along the shins. Each carried a fearsome array of knives, hooks and saws on their leather belts.
Their faces were human in proportion only, flensed of the disguise of skin and glistening with revealed musculature. Crude stitches crisscrossed their skulls, and when they turned their heads as though hunting by scent, Uriel saw they were utterly featureless save for distended and fanged mouths. They had no eyes, nose or ears, only discoloured swellings that bulged and rippled beneath their fleshless skulls.
'Daemons!' shouted Uriel. 'Foul abominations! Come forth and die on my blade.'
A daemon's patchwork face swung towards him, tumourous tissue in its neck bulging with horrid appetite. None of the foul creatures moved, content merely to watch the two Space Marines as a billowing cloud of steam vented from the side of the vast daemon engine. With a clang of locks disengaging, a thick iron door squealed open and a gigantic figure stepped onto the platform.
Standing head and shoulders above them, the giant wore a clanking, mechanical suit of riveted iron plates and thick sheets of melted, vulcanised rubber. Over its rusted armour it wore a charred apron, and a crown of blackened horns sprouted from a conical helmet with a raised visor. For all its crude fabrication and disrepair, Uriel recognised the armour as impossibly ancient power armour, such as had been worn by warriors of legend many thousands of years ago. The stench of scorched meat enfolded it, together with a crackling sensation of depraved evil and unquenchable rage.
One shoulder guard was studded with star-shaped rivets, the other emblazoned with a symbol of ancient malice that both Ultramarines recalled from the depths of righteous anger instilled in them by Chaplain Clausel's daily Litanies of Hate. A grinning, iron-visored skull that once was the heraldry of a Legion that had fought for the Emperor in hallowed antiquity, but was now a symbol of unending bitterness and hatred. It was a symbol that now belonged to the most lethal foes of the Imperium: warriors of unutterable evil and malice - the Chaos Space Marines.
'Iron Warriors…' hissed Uriel.
'The Betrayers of Istvaan,' growled Pasanius.
The figure carried a long, iron-hafted billhook, the broad, curved blade rusted and pitted with reddish brown stains. A pair of burning yellow eyes, like sickly, dying suns, shone from beneath the helmet as the figure took a heavy step towards them, the skinless daemons moving to stand behind it.