Lord of the Night

Their grasp upon the future, upon the vortex of chance and event that was borne on the warp like froth on a sickened ocean, was unrivalled.

Kaustus had known somehow that the Corona Nox would arrive on Equixus.

It had been foreseen...

He'd been in league with the xenos from the beginning...

There seemed to be eight of them, although it was difficult to say with any certainly, they moved like liquid light, capering and bounding, never still. She thought she could make out weapons clutched in their long limbs, flat-headed catapults like the fruits of an exotic tree. They slipped from their portal — an entrance, she guessed, to their famed ''webway'' of tunnels and paths that circumnavigated the warp itself — like a knot of frail decorations swept upon the wind: armour of blue and yellow laced by a billion engravings, a myriad of serpentine runes and glowing sigils. And at their head, burning Mita's psychic gaze like a phosphor lamp, their leader.

He dealt with the striking Night Lord with a single swipe of his staff, wyrd lights flaring between its glaive-pommel and the robed creature's antlered helm. Watching it all, probing the Night Lord's astral self at the moment of his defeat, she felt his collapse as though struck herself.

Somewhere, in another world, the eldar gathered around Inquisitor Kaustus. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the tusked man stretched out his hands towards the warlock, the Corona Nox held firm in his grasp. Somewhere the antlered xeno reached out to receive it.

Mita regarded it all as if it were a dream, spiralling away from her at the moment of awakening, and it was only as blackness closed in upon her that she came to understand what had happened.

She had been inside the Night Lord's mind when the eldar lashed out. The Traitor Marine had been knocked down, his senses overwhelmed, his certainties pulverised. He'd been crippled by the strength of the warlock's attack, and as he crashed to the floor and lay still, as his mind shut down and entered a troubled, enforced slumber—

—Mita's mind was dragged down with it.

She found herself immersed within a world unlike any she had seen before. Purple skies raged like bruises, tormented clouds swirling and gathering together — defying the logic of what little breeze there seemed to be. Faces leered from their gaseous topography: half-seen grotes-queries that Mita neither recognised nor cared to see fully.

The ground itself seemed little more solid: a porous sheet of sand and rock that, against all sense, felt spongy to the touch. A charge filled the air, a greasy static that clicked in the ends of her ragged hair and oppressed her skull, like a coming storm.

Nothing seemed real, here. Distant mountain peaks wavered like uncertain mirages, wobbling in their foothill roots, vanishing and reappearing at the whim of...

Who?

For a fearful instant Mita wondered if she had somehow travelled to a world of daemon world. She had heard of such places: confused realms where physics held little sway, where every aspect of every molecule was inseparable from the stuff of Chaos itself. Such worlds were the dreaded rumour of the Inquisition, and as Mita stumbled across fractured landscapes, negotiating ethereal gorges and sudden rivers that oozed from nowhere, the fear that she had somehow been transported to one lay heavy in her mind.