Lord of the Night

'The Night Lord is dead... You are not our enemies... Disperse to your homes... Resistance shall he crushed... The Night Lord is dead...'

Sahaal's empire was crumbling beneath him.

They had driven a wedge into the refugee encampment, lighting fires across rag rooftops and straw walls as they went. A great phalanx of Salamanders and Chimeras bulldozed all that stood before them, crewmen standing brazenly on each one, glossy armour lit devilishly in the flames of the burning terrain. Despite the destruction the vindictors had been careful to discriminate amongst their enemies: assiduously avoiding the temptation to open fire upon the shrieking, fleeing sections of the crowd.

'The Night Lord is dead... We are here to liberate you from your slavery... The Night Lord is dead...'

It was a masterful piece of duplicity. Arranged against the combined strength of the Shadowkin and the refugees, the Preafects knew that they had little hope of victory. But with words alone they could divide their enemies: appealing to the refugees' self-preservation, shattering the bonds of terror that Sahaal had spent so long cultivating.

They fled in their hundreds, past the ravaging tanks and up, up by the long northern road, back into their empty dwellings in the undercity above. Like insects casting off their cocoons they threw off the shackles of alliance that Sahaal had forced upon them, they washed clean their hands of the murders each had committed, they ran into the dark with a prayer of forgiveness and a backward glance, and then they were gone.

The Shadowkin themselves received no such mercy. They had courted the daemon as their own master. No excuses of slavery could stain their lips.

The tanks gathered at the banks of the burning swamp, and one by one their mighty cannons angled, like knights tilting lances, towards the rusted island-drill. The tribesmen knew what was coming, perhaps, and swarmed from their dwellings with empty warcries and holy condemnations, lined across the beaches with guns blasting ineffectually at the distant tanks, calling down damnation and the Emperor's wrath upon their unclean enemies.

Ironic, Sahaal mused, that a tribe so devout could be so defiled. It was not the Preafects who had betrayed their Emperor, after all...

Should he act? Should he attempt to intervene? Would it do any good?

The cannons opened fire, great pounding slabs of sound that echoed about the caverns like the laughter of giants. And like geysers of metal and smoke, like a field of angry mushrooms of bloody-red fire that snarled and blackened as they capered upwards, the island was swallowed whole.

The Shadowkin died like vermin, and as his kingdom was toppled before his eyes Sahaal found himself sinking to his knees, overcome, wracked by such powerful emotions that he couldn't define where horror became grief, where loss became madness, and where insanity became rage.

He stood abruptly, body rising in a single movement, discarding the captive majordomo at his feet, forgotten.

Rage. Yes... He could focus on rage.

He knew where he was with rage.

His claws sprung from their sheaths with a relish he could barely contain, and he threw back his head and screamed: a primal shriek that burned away every thought, that stripped clean his body and his mind of everything but pure, unpolluted, uncontainable fury.

He would kill them all for what they had done to his people. He would rip apart the tanks with his bare hands, he would rise on thermals of death and glory, and show these pitiful humans what it was to cross the Talonmaster! He would—

Would—

It was too much. His brain was not meant for this. His mind had not been shaped to deal with a slumber of a hundred centuries, to withstand the barrage of loss and uncertainty that he had encountered, to feel compassion for the creatures beneath his dominion.

Kill! the voices shrieked. Burn the world! Kill them all!

He was a thing of war. He was a weapon of terror, to be aimed and released. He had never intended to be so lost from his brothers, to grow so isolated from the path of the Night Haunter. He had never been intended to be so subject to human emotion.

He was weak.

He was going insane. And he knew it.

Hidden at the mouth of the secret tunnel, bathed in the shadows of shifting firelight, Zso Sahaal's mind convulsed with the alien sensations — confusion, loss, uncertainty, loneliness — that it could never hope to withstand. His empire had been taken from him, his grip upon sanity had crumbled with it, and he spiralled away into a great darkness without end.

He fell to floor like some contemptible, shellshocked little human — a total breakdown without escape — and unconsciousness devoured him whole.