Lord of the Night

He was a pathetic thing, she thought, spread-eagled before her.

'This is your mind,' she replied, unable to bring herself to hate him. 'A dream, if you like. You're trapped here.'

'And you?'

She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps I'm trapped too.'

He considered this. For all the surrealism of the situation, for all the horror of finding oneself crucified and stripped of their armour, he seemed remarkably calm.

'The eldar did this?' he asked.

'In a way, yes... They made you do it to yourself.'

He nodded as if unsurprised. 'Yes. Yes, they've done it before. Though not to my mind.'

Mita frowned. 'Oh?'

A distant look stole the Night Lord's gaze. 'At the start,' he said. 'The assassin killed my master. She took the prize, s-so I followed. You see? I took it back from her, but the eldar came.'

'The prize? You mean the Corona Nox?'

'The Corona, yes... Yes, they tried to steal it, but I prevailed. I would not let them have it, witch, you understand? So they tricked me. They trapped me. My ship. All of us, deep in the warp.'

'What is the Corona Nox?' Mita asked, giving voice to the question that had tormented her so long.

For the first time since she entered this weird realm, his face creased in a frown, eyes dipping to meet hers. He looked as if her ignorance wounded him, deep within. 'You don't know?'

She shrugged. 'It... it looked like a crown!'

'Ha! Just a crown?' He shook his head, black eyes flashing. 'No, little witch, it's more than that. Fashioned by the Night Haunter himself, forged from the adamantium core of Nostramo, his birthworld. He wore it through all his life, and when he would have screamed with insanity and terror, it calmed him. When he would have listened to the whispers of the warp, it deafened him. When he burned with vengeance for the injuries his father wrought upon him, then it tasted his anger and stored it away. It's all that remains of my master, witch. Imbued with his divine essence, sealed with a perfect bloodstone. It is no mere crown. It is the captaincy of the Night Lords. He bequeathed it to me on the day he was murdered!'

Understanding came to Mita piece by piece, and with it came disbelief.

'But... but that's... Konrad Curze was killed millennia ago...'

His frown deepened. 'Ten millennia. One hundred centuries. I have been imprisoned a long time.'

And she knew as soon as she heard it that he spoke the truth. She sagged to her knees, astonished, overwhelmed by the ancientness of the creature before her.

He had been hating for aeons.