Lord of the Night

'Now you will be silent,' Sahaal said, backhanding the creature's cheek until its screams were replaced only by the wet gurgles of oozing blood, 'and you will listen closely. And you will struggle, and writhe, and try to escape, and in your mind you shall hurt harder than you have ever felt pain before, but you cannot switch off your ears, my friend. You cannot help but listen. 'And feel, of course. Always feel.' And Zso Sahaal began to cut. To draw slivers of flesh from arms and legs. To glide artist's strokes of tip and blade through unresisting skin and muscle. To sever sinews at knee and shoulder, at groin and ankle. To pluck arrowhead wounds across fatty chest meat, to scrape skin layer by layer from the belly's bulge. To drag deep plough-furrows across yielding buttocks and meaty loins. To cut and cut and cut and cut. And as he cut he spoke. He spoke across every scream and cough, ignoring inarticulate pleas and wordless prayers.

He spoke of the darkness that haunts youth's fears. Of the horrors that only the imagination of a child may devise. He spoke of bogeymen and spider gods, of scissor-fingered hags and the writhing of snakes. He spoke of faces in the sky and wet-edged lips, like the folds of a great belly, pursing to suck the light from the world.

He spoke of adolescent terror. Of self-harm and religious awakening. Of Imperial dogma crashing the soul, of familial rejection or parental perversion. Of young pain.

There was always reference to pain.

And always the cut, cut, cut.

He spoke of the terrors of adulthood. Of knives in the dark and rape in the light. Of butchers and marauders, of aliens and mutants. He spoke of fires creeping nearer, of quicksand clogging the lungs, of nooses drawing tight. He spoke of death and torture and eyes in the night.

And he cut and he cut and he cut.

He spoke of the warp, and when his victim's larynx burst from the rawness of its screams he spoke of the Ruinous Ones, of the watchers in the void, of the Empyrean swarms. He spoke of prowling madness, of insanity unleashed upon a million worlds, of the Emperor's wounds and the Traitor's joy. He spoke of the Haunter's palace. Of the blood of angels. Of the tentacles in the warp. Of the steel teeth bared in the echoes of eternity.

Of horror and nightmare and terror and venom.

He vented himself. He raged against the astropath's flesh. He diced and cut and ripped. He disjointed and jellified. He lost himself to a haze of red and he spoke of the primal scream, the banshee howl that echoed in the earliest caves of mankind, the feral simplicity of Fear.

And the dam broke open, and the walls of the astropath's resistance crumbled, and the chittering in the warp filled his ears and scratched petulant claws against the man's mind, and as the tumult reached its unbearable climax Sahaal reached through the paste of blood and shit and tears and wrenched away the lead circlet upon the man's brow.

For an instant, the astropath's second sight was returned to him.

He saw a bloodslick daemon with black eyes and claws of lightning steel, that leaned close to his shattered senses and hissed: 'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

And then the astropath was beheaded with a single stroke of the monster's claws.

The swarms of the warp, baited close by such psychic terror as they had never before tasted — an intoxicating fillip that pulsed like a beacon across the ethereum — rushed in to frenzy-feast upon the released soul.

And the warp rippled like a disturbed millpond, and in its clash of hues and flavours it was Sahaal's face, Sahaal's voice, Sahaal's mind, that was borne upon the cusp of the astropath's deathshriek.

Borne outwards, towards eternity.

Mita Ashyn

She was in Orodai's empty office, wrestling with indecision, when it hit.

It broke across her defences like a tsunami upon a beach, surging above and through her, overwhelming every part of her mind, leaving her drowning and gasping for air.

It was a bloody-red dagger, hooked beneath her ribs and rising, rising rising.

It was a branding iron, smouldering with red heat, that scorched her not with a word or symbol, but a vision, an image, an event.

It was a psychic maelstrom that boiled the very air, undirected and all powerful, sent blasting into the void like the cusp of Shockwave, a telepathic exterminatus warhead that swelled like a fattening womb, invisible and intangible but terrible nonetheless. Lost at its centre was a scream — a hidden voice of pain and fear (oh, God-Emperor, such fear!) — that howled its horrors to the warp even as it was consumed: squabbled over by hungry beasts, divided and shredded before its echoes had even died.