Lord of the Night

Zso Sahaal

It was not a gentle awakening.

He arose from the mire of sleep — that psychic trap that the warlock had constructed around him — with red rage in his eyes and every muscle tightening together. He felt the cords stand out on his neck. He felt the knuckles of his hands strain against the flat blades of his claws, brandished before him like a bevy of swords. He felt the talons of his feet — autoreactive pinions studding the periphery of each boot — scratching at the metallic floor on which he'd awoken, pushing him upwards.

All without conscious thought. All at the whim of his fury alone.

He felt the rush of boiling air as his jump pack swooned to life, and the dizzying acceleration as he left the ground.

He felt the soup of hormonal insanity that was his armour's chem-boost deploying into his flesh like a liquid sigh, and for the first time he did not struggle against it. For the first time he welcomed its unsubtle burst, he drew its burning promises into his blood as if accepting a second layer of armour, and he opened his mouth and screamed like a flaming banshee.

There was alien blood patterning his claws before his mind had fully thrown off the shackles of slumber.

They had not expected his revival, that much was clear. He was upon them like a lion before even they, blessed with lightning reactions and impossible grace, could react. The first he clove in two with contemptuous ease, turning away and rolling as he touched down from a shallow swoop, tumbling onto his injured shoulder and springing upright. A second startled xenogen appeared before him, fumbling for its weapon, and he tore through its frail chestplate as he rose. The tips of his claws slipped so far through eldar meat that they cracked the inner orbs of the alien's eye-slits, like branches growing from within. He shook the body away and leapt onwards, luminous fluids drizzling clear.

Somewhere in the crucible of his peripheral senses he registered the tusked inquisitor, standing agog with the Corona clutched in his gloved fingers, and he diverted his aerial leap towards the astonished figure, forgoing the urge to rampage out of control. Beyond, in the decorous shadows of the doorway from the glassy bridge, he could see the witch rise groggily to her feet, held helpless in the ring of vigilant servitors. Inwardly Sahaal spared a curious thought for how long had passed since he was first knocked unconscious. His communion with the young psyker seemed to have lasted a lifetime, whilst in reality scant seconds had passed.

The warlock had not yet placed his elegant fingers upon the horned crown.

Nor shall he!

No sooner had the defiant thought arisen than the antlered fiend itself swept into his path, staff crooked. Sahaal bunched his muscles, preparing to dip aside, to dodge the blast of astral fire the creature was doubtless summoning, when a wall of pain unlike any he had felt before caromed into and through him.

Striking with unerring accuracy, satisfied that its target was otherwise engaged with its warlock master, one of the capering xenos had fired its catapult unnoticed, a spinning shuriken slipping deep into the heart of the grievous wound upon his shoulder, unhindered by armour.

It all but severed his arm.

Howling, struggling to shut out the agony, feeling numbness gripping the dead limb, Sahaal's flight-arc stalled and he twisted in the air, his remaining arm gripping uselessly at nothingness. Thus crippled, slipping towards a ruinous impact, he was ill prepared for the warlock's shrewd intervention.

Lightning engulfed him for the second time. A thick strand of gauss power burst from the creature's blade-tipped staff, needling its way past flesh and bone, sinking dog-toothed jaws into the pulp of his mind. As before, it tweaked at his doubts. It blossomed beneath fields of uncertainty and sadness and urged him to yield, to withdraw, to lock himself away within his own psyche.

It bid him spiral away into blackness.

It stroked at his mind and soothed him, coaxing him to surrender.

Not this time, warpspaum.

This time he was forewarned. This time his mind was not so easily overturned, his vulnerable uncertainties were buried away, and his muscles could no more be overridden than his bitterness could be neutralised.

Above all he was in the grip of a rage of such purity, such strength, that the warlock's machinations could do nothing to deter it.

This time all the psychic tampering in the world could not stop him. He was a juggernaut of phosphorous hate, and he would not be denied his fill of slaughter.

He descended like a swooping hawk, ineffectual psionic incandescence crackling like a halo around him, and punched his remaining claws through the alien's antlered helm with a whoop. Blood and bone scattered like shrapnel, and through its splattered clouds his momentum carried him and his victim's limp body down to the ground, smearing the creature's fluids across his face and his armour.

The remaining eldar reacted as if electrified. They spoke not a word, exchanged not a glance, and fired not a single shot: turning as one and rushing — blurring — towards the bright vortex from which they had issued. It swallowed them and dissolved, a pinprick of suspended flame that dwindled and died in their wake.

Sahaal dropped to his knees and shook the warlock's body free from his claws, exhaustion finally overwhelming him. He felt as if he'd spent an eternity struggling, as if he couldn't remember a time without pain and violence. The wound at his shoulder continued to bleed, coagulation impaired by the sliver of alien metal embedded deep within, and every movement sent daggers throughout his body.

He could see already he would never use the arm again.

And then slowly, eyes rolling in their sockets with planetary patience, he lifted his gaze to find the thief. The villain. The Lord Inquisitor Ipoqr Kaustus.

'Servitors!' the tusked man yelped, backing away, his arms wrapped around the Corona like a child clutching at its favoured toy. 'Protect me! Protect me!'

Across the room the bronze machine-men tilted heads to regard their controller, and swivelled jointed limbs towards him. The witch stood dumfounded as they stalked away from her, released abruptly from their attention.

'Kill it!' Kaustus shrieked, stabbing a finger towards Sahaal. 'Keep it away from me!' He staggered through the machines' midst, racing for the doorway beyond them and freedom, taking the Corona Nox with him.

Sahaal sighed. He should have known it wouldn't be so easy.

Once more, like the bitter twist at the end of a sick joke, he watched his sacred prize dwindling into the distance.

The servitors closed in. It seemed he was not yet finished with the day's violence.

And then the hive shook. From base to tip it shuddered, it creaked and groaned as ancient metals strained, and into its colossal walls there thumped massive, fiery ruinous craters.

It seemed as if volcanoes had opened across the city's flanks. The sky blazed with tumbling fire, every face in every part of the hive tilted up to stare in wonder at the quaking ceiling, and in a ruined chamber near the peak of the central palace a crippled Space Marine of the Night Lords Legion smiled a bloody smile, rose to his feet, and faced the machine aggressors closing upon him with his vigour abruptly renewed.

'They're here,' he hissed, to no one but himself. 'They're here!'

Mita Ashyn

Mita caromed into Inquisitor Kaustus like a vengeful meteor.

She couldn't say exactly what she was thinking. For days her mind had seemed to be a warzone: torn apart, artillery-blasted and entrenched, a ravaged land with its sovereignty contested. If the analogy was valid, then the Night Lord's revelations had been cyclonic warheads, exterminatus missiles to cleanse her tortured thoughts of any rational structure.

If once her mind was a warzone, now it was a wasteland.

The Emperor had betrayed his own son, and in so doing had shown himself capable of breathtaking duplicity. How could she go on now, turning the other cheek at every hateful comment, every declamatory ''abomination!'' or ''mutant!'' hurled at her in the street, no longer safe in the knowledge that the Emperor loved her?

How could she go on with the suspicion that she was being used: a tame little monster, manipulated and abused, only to be cast aside when no longer desired?

The answer, of course, was that she could not. What, then, was left for her?

Nothing. Nothing obvious.

A wasteland.

And now she found herself released from the gunpoint attentions of the governor's servitors, alone in an unfamiliar place, unbalanced by crippling quakes that struck the hive and shivered every centimeue of its enormity, and amongst it all there was only a single detail to which she could cling.

Kaustus.

Kaustus, you bastard.

This is all your fault!

He tried to flee past her, the Corona held to his chest in trembling fingers, and the fact that he ignored her, that his eyes barely dipped towards her, simply enraged her further. She was beneath his regard, clearly: a creature so ineffectual that he barely paused as she stepped into his path and, with a feral shriek, launched herself at him.

She might as well have attempted to tackle a stampeding grox.

Rebounding from his power armour with a thump and a sharp crackle — a rib, she guessed, blinking through sudden pain — she had a brief glimpse of the Night Lord through the smoke and ice, spinning and swooping amongst the servitors. In that blurring tableau he seemed to her to be a dervish, a god of blade and flight, dancing between gunfire and slashing at the unresisting metal of his foes.

She wondered if he would come to her assistance if she cried out.

She wondered if she would accept his help if he offered it.

The hive groaned again, dust and smog loosened from the ceiling as titanic forces shook it, and in his haste to flee Kaustus stumbled. Mita seized the opportunity without thinking, screwing up every last vestige of her inner strength, drawing deep on reserves that she barely knew existed, and lashed out with a pulse of psychic force.

She could not invade the inquisitor's mind. That wouldn't stop her from crushing his body.

The force of her own attack astonished her. The inquisitor was blasted from his feet as if struck by a grenade, shredded chaff from his robes scattered upon the air. The Corona slipped from his grasp and skittered across the floor, skidding in eldar blood. Beneath the torn gauze of Kaustus's cloak Mita could see that the very plates of his armour had been splintered, great cracks scuttling across chest and thighs as if struck by an invisible hammer.

'Is this what I've been repressing?' she wondered, dazzled. 'Is this what my faith has been denying me?'

Unfettered by ritual and prayer, unblinkered by needless devotions, the truth was as radiant as the warp itself.

The Emperor does not give me my power. My tutors lied!

It is my own!

She was on Kaustus in a flash, straddling his wide chest and beating knuckles across his nose. It snapped with an unpleasant crackle, so she punched it again, and again, venting the maelstrom of frustration and resentment that had been building in her soul for weeks.

'Bastard...' she hissed between blows, catching her breath, '...warp damned empty-skulled bastard!'

He recovered faster than she'd anticipated. Stunned or not, bleeding from a dozen rents, he was still an inquisitor. He still wore armour designed for the angels of the Adeptus Astartes. She should have known he wouldn't stay down so easily.

'Fool girl!' he roared, throwing her off. 'Where is it? Where is it?' He dragged himself upright and cast angry eyes across the floor, hunting the Corona Nox. Spotting its oily ring, already gathering a frosty patina, he lunged for it with a cry of triumph, once more forgetting the psyker that had brought him down.

Mita was ready for him. She knew exactly what to do.

One final effort. One final catching of her breath, one final reach down into her soul, clutching for dregs of power. One final attempt at the Animus Motus.

The Corona moved, edging away from the inquisitor's grasping fingers.

'Warp take you!' he raged, scrabbling after it. 'Give it to me!'

Another centimetre... another centimetre...

Klurik.

The crown jolted to a halt at the foot of an exhibit plinth, shadowed beneath whatever priceless relic — a leather-bound book, blasted apart in the earlier crossfire — occupied it.

'Ha!' Kaustus roared, locking fingers around its glossy frame. 'Mine!'

Mita smiled, muscles burning with endless fatigue. 'Not yours, you stupid bastard.'

And the security servitor that hung from the vaulted ceiling above the singed plinth blinked its metal eyes, ratcheted its slave-linked weapons towards the intruder it sensed below, and opened fire.

Kaustus fell apart like rotten meat.

Smoke lifted. Mita stared at the shredded morsel that remained of her master with confused feelings, triumph struggling against shame. Somewhere, out in the smoke and fire, the Night Lord shrieked and another servitor collapsed to the ground, torn apart. Mita barely heard it. Kaustus was still alive. Just.

'C... clever...' he smiled, blood slipping in frothing streamers from his mouth, patterning his tusks like scarlet totems. He winced, pain consuming his ruined form. 'Clever trick...'

She nodded, frowning. Something strange had happened to the inquisitor's mind, like a cloud passing from before the sun, and abruptly she found herself able to feel it, able to skim its surface emotions — pain, mostly — just as she could anyone else. Abruptly she understood.

'The eldar,' she whispered, thunderstruck. 'They've been controlling you from the beginning...'

'Y.-.yes. C-came to me before I recruited you. Did things... hkk... things to my brain. Th-the voices... oh God-Emperor...'

'Why? Warpdammit, Kaustus – why?'

'H...hah... Who knows? S-sometimes... sometimes the control faltered. Sometimes I could think clearly... nnk... hear their whispers... It meant nothing...'

She remembered the moments of uncertainty, the troubling instants in which his mind had seemed to convulse, briefly visible to her psychic senses.

She'd feared for his sanity. If only she'd known the truth. He'd been a puppet, struggling to cut his own strings. 'That's why you let me live...' she said, understanding flourishing. Another blast rocked the hive, tremors slipping through ice and steel. She ignored it: it was all background noise, irrelevant. 'That's why you never had me executed.'

He struggled to speak, blood puddling beneath him. 'I th-thought... I thought I could overcome it... The voices — Emperor preserve me — I... I thought I could resist. I— I was wrong. But sometimes... nn... sometimes I could... could fool them. I made them think you would be a help. I... I recruited you. They wanted me to kill you b-but... But I knew... I knew you'd be the one... to set me free...'

The light went out of his eyes. The Corona fell from his hand and rolled, slick with blood, wobbling as it tumbled, and she lifted it as it passed her, blinking tears from her eyes.

Such a simple thing. Such a little thing.

And then the world went white, and the gallery room pitched like a sinking ship, and the wall beside her was torn away like paper, crumpled in hands of razor steel.

Ice swarmed in through the rent, and with it came a wave of such agony that she screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.

Pain filled the universe. A shrieking like a million banshees drowned her senses, and clouds — worlds — of darkness stormed into the air. The warp lazed into reality like a descending blade, and every light that had ever existed was snuffed, every happiness was shredded, every quiet joy and instant of ecstasy was swallowed up and burned away.

A giant stood at the threshold of the shredded wall. It folded wings of tattered leather, wings that slipped between material and ether as if on fire, venting smoke and ash. It moved on legs of incorporeality, it bled across the spaces of the cavern like an echo of a figure.

It was not real.

It was more than real.

It was Chaos given form.

And through psychic torture that blinded her, through the shrieking of warp-beasts that exploded her ears, through coils of darkness that snared her soul and promised damnation to all who felt their touch, she saw the Night Lord Zso Sahaal stagger from the smoke and frost, arm hanging limp, face bleeding from a dozen cuts, and stare up at the vision of terror incarnate that had defiled reality with its presence.

'It's been a long time, Acerbus,' he growled. 'I barely recognise you.'

Zso Sahaal

He was too late.

He knew it the instant his ancient brother insinuated himself upon the chamber, like an infection taking root. There was no place for focus, here. No hope of reclaiming his master's legacy. No hope of inflicting order and control upon a creature so utterly lost to Chaos.

The daemon prince that had once been Krieg Acerbus paused, shadows shifting despite its stillness, and eyes that had once been human glared down upon Sahaal and narrowed.

'You're smaller than I remember...' it said, amused. Its voice was a thing of mingled screams and the echoes of tortured souls, harmonised and directed. It bypassed sound and arrived fully formed, like a migraine, in the centre of Sahaal's brain.

He fought the urge to vomit. The creature radiated despair as a fire emits heat, and he felt it coil through his senses, churning his confidence to paste, reducing every triumph he had ever enjoyed to failure.

That the creature was Krieg Acerbus was beyond doubt. He was changed almost beyond belief, but still there remained about him some essence of self, some expression of his eyes, perhaps, that betrayed his identity. He had always seemed monstrous to Sahaal: now his outward appearance had merely altered to reflect its inward counterpart.

He had grown massive. Where once there had been armour now there was iron flesh, living warpstuff that writhed and tightened, swarming with wicked runes. He was no longer a thing of corporeality, that much was clear. In every dimension he ghosted and hardened, then faded to smoke, as if uncomfortable with solidity: burning with immaterial energies that flared not with light, but with dark. Smouldering emissions poured from his long limbs like steam from a smithy, tentacles of shadow bulged from his spine, and when he moved, when he unfurled the shadows that crooked upon his shoulders like a vulture's wings, it was as if the existence of light itself was forgotten. It was as if perpetual night had arisen, and morning would never arrive.

At the tips of arms so long they plucked at the floor, claws glittered and spat sparks: forged not from flesh nor metal, but from the raw stuff of darkness itself. They made the air bleed.

'Where,' Sahaal said, pushing down the stifling failure, denying it for a sweet second longer, bolstering himself with foundationless courage, 'is my Legion?'

The beast crooked its pale face, sneered through lip-less jaws, and aimed a smoking talon at the rent in the wall.

Sahaal approached the torn metal like a cripple, limping from more wounds than he could count, wincing at every movement, his dead arm hanging by a nerveless thread at his side.

The skies of Equixus were on fire.

An orbital bombardment had been the first step. Great glittering teardrops of incandescence flared below the clouds, hurtling down at impossible speeds to inflict ruinous tears across the city's surface. Those few defences untouched by the Shadowkin attacks were picked clear one by one, gouged from the surface like tumours, and with each impact shredded metal churned up and out, the hive wobbled as if shaken to its core, and thousands upon thousands died.

The Raptors followed the bombardment, and in the face of their dizzying descents Sahaal's hopes were crushed further. These were not the agile warriors whose kind he had created. These were not the assault squads he had formed and trained an aeon ago, spreading amongst the other Legions as their successes became legend. These were not the Raptors he knew.

They came like daemon vultures, chainswords snarling, pistols flaring in the snow-choked sky. They whooped and cackled and shrieked, and their twisted armour shimmered with unholy light, like an ember's dying glow. Ghastly deathmasks patterned ancient helmets, crooked forwards in beak-like snarls and aquiline grimaces. They flocked above the hive like carrion birds, gathering for a feast, and when they dived together the sky was filled with their ululations and the hissing of whatever unnatural forces buoyed them up. They were a plague, Sahaal thought, and as they vanished one by one inside the wounds of the hive's surface he slipped to his knees, his mind rebelling against what it witnessed.

And then the warriors themselves: a rain of drop pods and assault craft that vomited from the heaving stormclouds, smashing against the city's shell like hammers pounding anvils. In lightning-flash tableaux and the stolen flare of detonating munitions Sahaal could glimpse the ranks of his so-called brothers as they fell upon the crowds within.

Blue and bronze whirlwinds. Without grace or poise. Frenzied. Out of control. Utterly Chaotic.

The Night Lords descended upon Equixus like a bloody rain, and the screams of the population drowned out even the howling of the perpetual ice storm. Oh, my master... What have they done? What have they become?

The failure was a firebrand, slipping into his eyes. It was a tidal wave, the bow-blast of a supernova, rolling and boiling to devour him whole. It settled on his shoulders like the weight of the galaxy itself, and he felt every bone in his body splinter to dust, every blood vessel burst, every atom of every part of him split and die. He was too late.

He wondered if he'd already known, deep within himself. Perhaps he had always known, since awaking in the ruptured belly of the Umbrea Insidior. Too long had passed. Too many centuries had glided by, bereft of his influence and leadership. His master had chosen him as his heir to bring focus to a Legion in peril, to unite a body that threatened to tear itself apart, to offer some measure of temperance against the whispering seductions of power and rage. He had been selected as the Legion's deliverance from corruption, and he had not been present to fulfil his vows.

One hundred centuries — unguided, unprotected — was more than long enough to succumb.

The Daemonlord Acerbus hissed behind him, delighted by the carnage enacted below. Howls rose like smoke: the shrieks of dying men, the moans of tortured women, the tears of youths.

'This is without purpose...' Sahaal whispered, gazing down into the flames. 'Where is the sense in this? Have you no worthier targets than women and children?'

'Every target is worthy,' the Daemonlord breathed, waves of despair carrying his voice. 'And the purpose...? Little Talonmaster, do you not remember our master's lessons? The purpose is fear. It is always fear.'

Sahaal turned to face the abomination, tears in his eyes, and above him it drew sensuous claws across its incorporeal chest, eyes closed, face upturned, as if savouring a fine scent.

'Do you taste it?' it whispered. 'Do you taste the terror of this world? It is... mm... it is intoxicating.'

Sahaal felt disgust engulf him.

'You dare to lecture me on the Night Haunter's lessons?' he snarled, anger gripping him, breaking through the shame and failure like a hatching beast. 'You dare, when you've fallen so far from his wisdom? Fear is the weapon, fool, not the goal!'

The devil crooned, maw spreading in delight.

'Ah... Righteous little Sahaal. How I have missed you...'

'Look at you! Look at what you've become! You've spat in the face of his legacy. Have you no shame?'

'Our master's legacy lives, little Sahaal.' The beast brandished a fist, clenching claws together. 'Through me, it prospers!'

Sahaal's bolter was in his hand before he had even considered drawing it.

'You are not fit to call yourself a Night Lord,' he said, and squeezed the trigger.

The Mordax Tenebrae spat shells like a hateful dragon. With every blast he saw his master's haunted features, heard his soothing words. With every shell he whispered his master's name.

And then the smoke cleared, and he saw that he'd barely scratched the monster's skin. Through boiling frost clouds and shifting shadows its eyes burned, and before Sahaal had even registered movement its great paw slipped from the smog and swatted him like a fly. His armour cracked. He crossed the room on his back.

'You,' Acerbus said, pouncing across him at a speed inconceivable in a creature so massive, holding him down with invisible cords of warpstuff and poking with child-like interest at the wound on his shoulder, 'should have more respect for your lord.'

His whole body burned. Each vicious slash-stab, each playing prod of the daemon's claws, was a universe of agony compressed upon his brain. Acerbus ate his fear and crooned to himself.

'You'll never be my lord!' Sahaal stormed, reserves of rage spilling through the cracked edges of his soul. 'The Haunter chose me! I was the heir to the Corona Nox!'

'Little Sahaal. Little Sahaal...' the beast shook its head, smoke oozing from burning eyes. 'So foolish... You were never its heir. You were merely its keeper'

'Spare me your lies, scum! Let me up! Fight me!'

'Ha... Have you never considered, little Sahaal, that Konrad Curze intended all of this?'

'How dare you speak his n—'

'He had seen his own death. He had tasted the future. You know that. It plagued him all his life.'

'W... What of it?'

'Do you truly believe, foolish little Sahaal, that he had not foreseen your disappearance? Do you truly believe he did not know you would be lost to this galaxy for ten thousand years? Have you never asked yourself why he would allow such a thing?'

'I... I...'

Lights bulged before his eyes. His world quivered around him.

It couldn't be true. The Haunter had never foreseen it!

Acerbus's voice was a poisoned needle, pumping toxins into his brain. 'Of course he knew,' it hissed. 'He understood his own soul better than anyone. He understood the division in his heart. He understood the choices before him.'

'But he chose me... he chose me!'

'He chose me, Sahaal. He knew that he was two men. One was... just and righteous — ''the daemon spat the words, disgusted'' -whilst the other... mm... the other had felt the kiss of Chaos all its life. One thrived on focus. The other ate fear!'

'And he chose the first, damn you! He spurned Chaos! He chose me!'

'No.' The claws scooped at the flesh of his shoulder, igniting every nerve in his body. The voice was relentless, crumbling every bastion of his resistance. 'He fooled himself. He was divided, but the dark side was strongest. He had foreseen the fate of the Corona, so he bequeathed it to you. He set you to chase after it like some vapid dog, doomed to an era of sleep. He sent you away, so your... ha... your worthy witterings could not obscure his vision. His vision of a Legion that sowed fear in his name. A Legion to eat the terror of the Imperium. He knew you would never accept such a thing. He knew you had to be removed.' The beast leaned down, so close that its fanged maw all but touched Sahaal's cheek. Hot breath washed over him. 'He condemned you to your prison, little Sahaal. He exiled you!

'No! You're lying! If that were true he would have simply killed me!'

'And leave the Corona unguarded? Leave his killer to steal it? Use your sense, Sahaal.'

'But he told me everything! The... the sanctioned genocides! The Emperor's betrayal! The assassin before the Heresy!'

'Lies. The whispers of his Chaotic side, pouring poison in the ear of his virtuous self. Perhaps... hah... perhaps he even believed it himself.'

Sahaal's brain collapsed upon itself. This would not stand. He could not allow himself an instant's doubt. He could not permit the suggestion — the suspicion — that Acerbus spoke the truth. To do otherwise would be to make a lie of everything he had ever believed, and everything he had struggled to achieve.

The Daemonlord was wrong. That was all there was to it.

'You're lying, warpshit!' he snarled, spitting in the creature's face. 'The Corona is mine! He gave it to me!'

'Ah... ah yes, the Corona. I have been without it long enough. I think I should like to have it now.' The creature dug claws further into Sahaal's wound, twisting with a vicious grin. 'Where is it?'

A voice spoke from nearby. 'It's right here, you bastard.'

It was the witch. Little Mita Ashyn, the woman who had set Sahaal free. She stood with blood pouring from her eyes, legs shaking at the tumult of psychic revulsion pouring from the monster, the Corona brandished before her like a halo of darkness. She looked on the verge of insanity and death, and were it not for a single detail, a single redeeming facet, Sahaal might have cursed her for all of eternity, for presenting the prize to the Daemonlord.

In her spare hand she held a melta gun — prised, no doubt, from the dead fingers of a broken servitor.

She smiled.

The melta-stream hit Acerbus full in the chest, and he barrelled away from it as if struck by a rogue meteor. The indistinct tentacles that held Sahaal down whipped away, tangled amongst the devastation of the tumbling beast. It roared so hard that the hive seemed to shake, flexing and mewling at a wound on its front, as if a great scoop had been plucked from its flesh. Raw warpstuff — liquid gore that glimmered and dissolved even as it touched the air — geysered from the crater, becoming smoke and ether before even hitting the ground.

Sahaal was on his feet and sprinting before the beast's collapse was complete. He had no energy to speak of, his mind was a wreckage without hope of salvage, and every truth he had every believed had been stolen from him. In all the world, in all the brutal realities of the galaxy, one thing alone held any meaning.

'The Corona!' he roared, leaping towards the witch. 'Give me the Corona!'

Acerbus was faster.

Like a striking crow, like shadow-wreathed lightning, he was on her, swatting Sahaal aside with a deft flick of his midnight claws and pinioning her to the floor, great tendrils of smoke and shadow tightening around her arms and ankles, wings opening like a canopy of perpetual night. The melta gun crumpled in his grip. She screamed and screamed and never stopped. The Daemonlord leaned close to her face, running a broad tongue across her cheek. 'Mm...' he mewled, intoxicated. 'Her fear is... exquisite...'

Sahaal leapt at his brother with a wordless howl, stabbing out with claws outstretched, hacking through semi-real pseudopods of smoke and dark. The Daemonlord spun to face him, spined shoulders glittering in constellations of darkness, amused at the crippled warrior's truculent attack.

Claw met claw like the peeling of razor bells, and for long instants the pair slashed and stabbed, parrying blows that would split a man in two. Sahaal found himself dancing between bloody-tipped blurs, leaping above vengeful thrusts and spinning through blows like hail, never more than a moment ahead of his foe's attacks. Acerbus was playing with him. Let him.

Sahaal changed tack with a feral growl. Twisting his body, wincing as wounds reopened and ribs crackled at unpleasant contortions, he slipped away from the savage blades and pounced towards Mita. Blows landed on his back, gashing him open, flooding his senses with fire and fear, but none of it mattered. Only the Corona.

He cut the witch free of the boiling limbs that held her and dragged her to her feet, gore pouring from his wrecked body. Holding her tight against his shoulder with his one useful arm, he staggered with her towards the great rent in the wall and stared out at the shifting tempests of Equixus. Ice bathed him: a frozen baptism to cleanse his tormented mind. Somewhere behind him the Daemonlord realised what was happening, howling at the thought of his prey's escape. Sahaal bunched his legs, final reserves of energy pushing him out into the void.

Let the storm swallow him. Let the ice enfold him.

Let the darkness claim him as its own.

He had the witch. The witch had the Corona. Nothing else mattered.

And then the daemon oozed from the smoke at his back with a roar, fire spouting from hate-filled eyes, and snatched at the witch's arm.

The limb parted from its shoulder with a wrench and a sticky slurp.

The Corona Nox tumbled from slack fingers and spun, tilting and flipping over, catching the firelight of a dying world in a single glorious reflection—

—and then it was gone: tumbling end over end into the smoke and the fire and the ice, dwindling away along the sides of the hive until darkness swallowed it.

The witch screamed, blood pulsing from the open wound. The Daemon Prince Krieg Acerbus roared so loud that the windows of the gallery room burst, like droplets falling from a fountain.

And Zso Sahaal, the Talonmaster, heir to the throne of the Night Lords Legion, pushed himself out into the void — his jump pack flaring in the endless dark, the witch howling from her perch upon his ruined shoulder — and chased his legacy down into the abyss.

He would not give up.

The Corona Nox would be his.

He would bring the vengeance of the Night Haunter upon the heads of those that stood in his way.

One day he would kill Krieg Acerbus. He would lead his Legion once more.

One day he would descend from the skies of Holy Terra, and set his claws upon the bulwarks of the Palace itself.

One day, in the name of his master, he would have his revenge upon the Traitor Emperor. Ave Dominns Nox!