Lord of the Night

The illuminator landed amidst the Preafects like an asteroid, splintering the rock floor and engulfing a section of the black-clad ranks in fire and shrapnel. Twenty men died in an instant, and like all those around her Mita surged outwards on the crest of a wave: a tide of broken metal and whirligig sparks. At its heart a sooty fireball rolled and blackened, tumbling upwards into a tall plume of black smoke, plucked-through by rushing figures and shouting voices.

And from the gulf above them, before they could regroup, before their dazzled senses could recover, throaty shots rang out through the shrill whoop of an airborne howl. Mita recognised the roar of a bolter: barking over and over, muzzleflash flickering on high.

Picked out in the haloes of the vindictors' flashlights, burning like phosphor in the sudden storm, the plummeting Night Lord rushed towards them — a thing of midnight skies and lightning bolts, able somehow to exude an impression of shadowed malevolence despite the brightness around it.

Its shriek cut the air keener than any knife.

Bolter shells struck each flashlight dead in its centre: unerring accuracy from a creature moving so fast. Angry eruptions shuffled shadows and shrapnel into the air, warheads blasting each torch to shredded metal, slicing exposed skin all around.

And then there was only darkness.

Total. Complete.

Endless night.

But not silent. The shrieks of the Night Lord became the whole world: a sonic vista of frozen screams and blood-chilling yelps. Others rose to join it — the moans of terrified vindictors, the shouts of confused and panicky men, corralled together with fingers on guns, the pained grunts of those who imagined themselves slashed, ripped and torn by the unseen monster...

It was chaos.

Here a Preafect would cry out: the sharp tug of an impact against shoulder or thigh preceding a hot burst of fluid, a slow swell of creeping pain, and then the piece-by-piece revulsion as the amputated limb failed to respond. Most never even felt the cut.

Here a sergeant's head thumped into the ruck like a moist bomb, parted from its body on the other side of the room, deposited from above by the unseen devil.

Here a gun hand was abruptly missing, here a slice of armour and skin was peeled back and gone in an instant, here a man hollered as his scalp was taken and his eyes filled with his own blood. Here a man tripped on his own guts.

Here a man tried to shout, and found his jaw and tongue ripped away.

Mita felt it all closing around her, a dizzying kaleidoscope.

The Night Lord was everywhere all at once: circling above, swooping to cut and kill with delighted impunity. He dipped down here and there, he sliced and he slashed and he shrieked. Blood splattered like rain, warm drizzle without direction or colour.

In the blackness, every shape was a threat, every voice a scream.

The rational core of Mita's brain understood all too well what was happening. The beast was not indulging in genocide, nor establishing a massacre. The odds were against it, and yet it had refuted the threat, stared it down, and turned it on its head.

It had coaxed forth panic from disciplined minds, and like a dam bursting its banks, like a stampede that could not be contained, those same minds turned in upon themselves, cut away any bonds of comradeship that they felt to those around them, and devolved, in an instant, into self-concerned, self-protecting, self-trusting beasts. They became molecules at the heart of a storm: packed together, chafing to be free, and yet repelling every other particle — be it friend or foe.

Shotguns rang out in the dark. Randomly fired, aimed at nothing but the night. They were killing one another.

There were too many of them, Mita understood with a jolt. Mustered from the precincts of Cuspseal and its surrounding cities alike, the vindictor force had been presented with simple orders: enter the gateroom. Kill anything that moves. Allow nothing to escape.

They had followed the commands with commendable efficiency, but in his haste to destroy the monster haunting his city Orodai had overlooked a simple factor. He had poured his ranks into the narrow chamber like sand filling a grail: piling through the narrow doorway, packing tightly together as they assumed firing positions. It was true that their quarry could never hope to escape this sea of aggressors, but the realisation that was rapidly stealing over each and every Preafect, marooned in a world of lightless fear, pushed forwards from the rear even as they turned and forged back towards the entrance, was that they were as incapable of exit as was their prey.

They were stuck inside their own trap, with a maddened devil.

It was not a pleasing revelation.