Lord of the Night

But, no... No, this was no Chaotic realm. The more she observed its howling skies and its weird tides of light and dark, the more she studied the scenes that shimmered in the surfaces of puddles and the images borne on the crest of rocks, the more she sent feelers from her own mind tasting at the sand itself, the more she came to realise where she was. She recognised its flavour.

As if to double check, she paused and stared at her hand, concentrating, altering her perceptions, working hard to focus her psychic self.

'Sword,' she said.

A bright sabre appeared in her palm. She nodded, unsurprised, and walked on, casting the blade away. It vanished before it landed.

She found the Night Lord, as she had known she would, at the peak of a plateau, ringed by a cauldron of rocky outcrops, set upon a cross of stone. Chains bound his arms to the rock, snaking between his ankles and his wrists, pinioning him like a butterfly upon a page. His armour and helm were gone. His claws had been taken from him.

For the first time, unconcealed by shadow or night, unmoving and unresisting, she saw him clearly. His skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, revealing along arms and legs every blue vein, every inner augmentation, every limpet-like crater where some ancient injury had marked his flesh. Across his shoulders and chest the skin was concealed, hidden behind an exterior layer of black plating that, in places, dipped beneath his flesh, intermingling with muscle cords and bony outcrops.

She had never seen so many scars in her life.

Most remarkable was his face. She had expected a countenance of malevolence. Of unrestrained and unrepentant evil. She had expected snarls and burning embers for eyes, a daemonic visage that brandished its corruption openly, like a festering wound.

Instead she found herself meeting the gaze of a troubled child. Oh, his face was that of a man — sallow and gaunt, perhaps, twisted by too many years of frowns and rages — but his eyes were an infant's. Impossibly old, and yet so full of bewilderment. They were the eyes of a youth that had never been allowed to grow old, that had been plucked from its humanity at an early age and never since allowed to return.

'Where is this?' the crucified man said, and if he retained any sense of trauma from the madness of the gallery room, or the rage that had gripped him at the moment the eldar warlock had attacked, he gave no sign of it. He seemed to Mita to be in shock, his voice monotone, his eyes unblinking.