Lord of the Night

They had risen through smoke and gloom, and then the battering flurries of ice that smothered the whole of the planet. Engines whining turbulence rattling at its flanks, the craft had seemed infinitely fragile, an insect at the mercy of a tempest. Sahaal had loomed in the comforting shadows of the bridge, watching the trembling pilot with unhelmeted eyes narrowed, suspicious for any double-cross. Even when Chianni wrenched the steering column from his quivering hands to tilt the vessel towards the broad slope of the tallest peak, the man didn't realise the nature of the journey he'd been forced to undertake.

'There,' she announced with a nod, pointing towards a secondary tower that rose parallel to the central spire, connected at its apex by a narrow glass bridge. 'That's the palace treasury.'

'How do you know?' Sahaal hissed, fingers kneading together eagerly. There could be no mistakes. No oversights.

She'd seemed to bristle, as if annoyed that he still was unable to trust her. 'His collection's famous,' she said. 'Ask anyone in the hive.'

Sahaal had glanced at the pilot, cringing uselessly to one side. If the man had felt at all inclined to disagree he'd hidden it well, and thus convinced Sahaal had nodded his approval at the condemnitor. 'Do it,' he'd said.

Chianni had locked the steering column in position and pushed the pilot back into his seat. The revelation of what was to occur had stolen over the man in crippling increments, and even when the hivewall loomed like some steely god in the viewing port, even when the febrile light of the clouded sky was extinguished by the city's bulk, even when the impart was scant seconds away, still the pilot could not summon a scream.

Sahaal thought it a pity. Nothing soothed his adrenaline like a wail of terror.

He'd ridden out the impact without injury and now, as smoke belched from rained machines and light poured through countless rents in the vessel's shattered sides, he lifted himself to his feet and brandished his claws. He could feel it.

He could feel the Corona Nox, like a beacon lighting his senses.

Oh, my master... I can feel it! It is so close!

He remembered how it had been to awake upon the Umbrea Insidior, that rage-borne half-awareness, slaughtering thieves across the ruined vessel's shanks like a wolf, aware only that it had been taken. For aeons he had sat dormant at the heart of the warp, imprisoned within the cage that the hated eldar had constructed around him, and in all that time the presence of the Corona had given him strength. He had come to feel it as if it were a part of him, a strange connection that seared his psyche and drew a cord between his soul and the item itself. Weeks ago, when it was stolen, he had awoken in the certain knowledge that it was gone, as if a sound that he had heard his whole life — but never noticed — had suddenly fallen silent.

And now... ?

In another ruined vessel, clambering once more through crippled decks, hungry once more for bloodshed and justice, now he could feel it again.

Now he was close.

He left Chianni where she lay — forgotten, beneath his attention — and raced to retrieve it.

At the craft's outer shell a strange process of segueing had occurred: the chasm-wound inflicted upon the hive seeming to knot with the craft that had caused it. In all directions torn sheet metal was bent and buckled, molten steel glistened and solidified in weird formations, cables and hiveducts twisted around hull sensoria like the tentacles of anemones, and everywhere the first gatherings of snow, probing hungrily at the city's injury, was scattered across the devastation. Illuminators flickered and failed, or else burned brightly with whatever electrical surges the crash had precipitated.

Picking his stealthy way through smoky chambers, Sahaal found it hard to say where the shuttle ended and the hive began. He stepped from a torn bulkhead imaging the outer hull of the shuttle to be nearby, only to find himself confronted by soot-charred tapestries and gold leaf pillars. As if infected somehow by a blemish of crudity, the palace gathered its splendour to itself and sulked, disgusted at the invasive entry. Sahaal scuttled across shattered flagstones and crumpled mosaics, following the pull of his heart, the strange magnetism of the Corona. The shuttle had buried itself across three levels of the tower, and at the head of the furrow it had ploughed into the structure Sahaal could stare into each separate room as if in cross-section, amused at the contrast between mangled entry-wound and untouched opulence.