'The Emperor is with us, yea though we walk in the shadows—' began Pasanius.
The Omphalos Daemonium smashed a gauntleted hand across Pasanius's chin, swinging him wildly around and drawing a hiss of pain from him as the hook in his back dug deeper into his flesh.
'Prayers to your corpse of a god mean nothing here. His power has gone out of the world and nothing now remains of him.'
'You lie,' snapped Uriel. 'The power of the Emperor is eternal.'
'Eternal?' snarled the Omphalos Daemonium. 'You would do well not to use such words so lightly until you have experienced such a span, trapped and helpless and tormented beyond reason.'
The yellow eyes of the Omphalos Daemonium burned into Uriel's and he saw the depthless rage and madness within them. Whatever the malign intelligence that lurked within the ancient suit of power armour was, it was clearly insane, the torments it spoke of having driven it into a depthless abyss.
'What are you?' said Uriel eventually. 'What do you want with us?'
The Omphalos Daemonium released its grip and turned from him as the Sarcomata began gathering up more body parts and carried them towards the furnace, hurling legs, arms and heads into the flames.
'That is unimportant for now,' it said, pulling a thick chain that hung beside the firebox and hauling on a rusted lever with a thick, rubberised handle. 'All that matters is that you are here and that, at this time, our journeys follow the same path.'
Uriel felt the impossible room judder as the lever was drawn back fully, the iron door they had been carried through shutting with a squeal of tortured metal. Pain flared in his back as the hook twisted between his ribs and the massive daemon engine began to move. Cadavers on other hooks swung on their jangling chains and Uriel felt the familiar churning sensation in his belly of a warp translation. Was this infernal engine somehow capable of traversing the currents of the warp? Was that how it had managed to intercept Calth's Pride within the treacherous shoals of the immaterium?
He knew not to dwell too long on such things. The asking of such dangerous questions led to the path of deviation, the very thing that had seen them condemned to this fate.
The churning sensation in Uriel's stomach grew and he gritted his teeth against the growing pain. The Omphalos Daemonium turned from its labours and retrieved its billhook as the Sarcomata continued feeding the fires with corpses.
'Where are you taking us?' hissed Pasanius through gritted teem.
'Where you need to go,' said the giant. 'I know of your death oath and what has led you here. The Lord of Skulls has more artifice to him than simply the art of death.'
'You are a daemon!' snarled Uriel. 'You are an abomination and I will see you destroyed.'
'Your skull will be laid before the throne of the Blood God before that happens, Space Marine. I have already seen the manner of your death: would you know of it?'
'The words of a daemon are lies!' shouted Pasanius. 'I will believe nothing you say.'
The Omphalos Daemonium slashed its billhook around, the blade flashing towards Pasanius's neck. Blood welled from a shallow cut across the sergeant's throat.
'You seek death, Ultramarine, and I would gladly rend and tear your soul. I would rip your flesh screaming from your bones and garland this body with your entrails, but your death is to be far worse than even one such as I could devise. Your skull will be honoured with a place in one of the bone mountains within sight of the Blood God.'
Another shudder, more intense, passed through the chamber and Uriel felt as though red-hot skewers were being pushed through his skull.
'You should honour me, for you travel in ways no mortal has dared for aeons.'
The Omphalos Daemonium raised its arms to the ceiling and laughed.
'We travel the bloodtracks. The Heart of Blood and the daemonculaba await!'
And the daemon engine roared into realms beyond existence.
Uriel screamed.
Space folded, the currents of the warp vanishing: the arena, the daemon engine, the firebox, Pasanius. All disappeared, ripped away as everything around him turned inside out and became meaningless concepts. He felt himself simultaneously explode into a billion fragments and implode within himself, compressed to a singularity of hollow existence.
Faces floated before him, though as a dense ball of nothingness and a fragmented soul he knew not how he recognised them. Worlds and people, people and worlds, flashing past in a seamless blur, yet each as clear as though he examined each one in detail. Time slowed, yet rushed, splintering crystals sounding from far off as fractured realities ground and shifted like tectonic plates.
He saw the daemon engine spiral through the cracks between dimensions, snaking a path that wound through the shifting glass shards of reality, existing outside of everything, travelling in the slivers of null-space between all that was and all that ever could be.
He saw worlds of choking fumes, people in walking comas shuffling from one banal day to another, grey and dead without even the awareness to scream at the frustration of their pointless lives. Worlds where twisting numbers fell upon mountains of implausibility before running in molten rivers of algorithms to a sea of integers. It was gone in a heartbeat, replaced by a towering world of mountains and seas, white, marble and gold. Flames roared and seethed from every surface as the world burned, its people ashes on the wind, all life extinguished. Uriel, though he could no longer be sure he even knew who that was any more, saw with mounting horror that he knew this world. He saw the Fortress of Hera cast down, her once proud walls splintered and broken, the Temple of Correction no more than a shattered ruin. Daemons made sport in the Shrine of the Primarch, gnawing on his holy bones and defiling his sacred corpse.
He wept at such vileness, furious at his helplessness and incapable of wreaking his vengeance upon those who had visited such wrath upon Macragge.
Black, howling things closed on the daemon engine, unseen, slithering guardians of nothingness worming their way through the cracks to close on them.
The daemon engine had travelled the bloodtracks for millennia and knew that these blind sentinels were no threat to its terrifying power. Such guardian creatures fed on the souls of those unwitting fools who breached this realm by accident: madmen who pored over forgotten lore and forbidden magicks to unlock the gates between dimensions. Mortals who dared to travel to realms not meant for souls were devoured and made into yet more of the dark worms. The bloodtracks carried the daemon engine away from the toothless, questing mouths of the guardian creatures, its evil and power burning those that managed to approach too close.
Clockwork worlds, worlds taken by evil, worlds of elemental madness, worlds of chaos, worlds of insanity and worlds of arcing lightning. Everything was here. Every action that spawned a new realm of possibility could be found here and Uriel felt the knowledge of such things fill him as he hung from his hook, bleeding and raw.
The glue that held his fragile mind from sundering into pieces began to come undone, awful knowledge of me insignificance of being and the pointlessness of action tore at his sense of who he was and he desperately fought to hold onto his identity.
He was Uriel Ventris.
He was a warrior of the Emperor: sworn to defend His realm for as long as he lived.
He was a Space Marine.
His will was stronger, his purpose and determination greater than any other mortal man. He was in the belly of the beast and he would fight its corrupting touch.
He was… who…? His existence flickered and despite the protection of the daemon engine, he knew the madness that claimed the minds of the ignorant fools who sought such places out was enfolding him. He struggled to hold on as shards of his life began spiralling away from him, each spawning fresh realities within this terrifying multiverse.