Mechanicum

'Warning: to increase reactor output beyond the current rate of—'

'I don't want to hear any excuses!' snapped Cavalerio. 'Just make it happen!'

The Imperator Titan had not come alone.

Two Warlords and a Reaver marched alongside it like the hangers-on of a scholam bully. Kasim could see no sign of a Warhound picket or skitarii escort, but with engines as large as this, what need had they of any skirmish screen?

The ground shook and cracked at its passing, and Kasim could only watch in mute awe as the mightiest war machine he had ever seen swept past him like an uprooted hive on mountainous legs.

'What do we do?' breathed Moderati Vorich.

What indeed? To fight such a monster was suicide, but its path would see it cross the Tempest Line in a little over nine minutes, and then they would have to fight it. They would be as ants against a bull-grox… but even ants could bring down a larger beast with enough numbers.

As his now active surveyors gathered what information they could on the might of the Imperator, Kasim knew that Tempestus had not the guns to defeat such a terrifying opponent.

'We follow it,' said Kasim. 'And we wait.'

'Wait for what?' asked Vorich.

Kasim looked down at his medallion, again wishing he could touch it. 'To see if this is the day we die,' he said.

Dalia screamed as the howling gale of psychic energy enveloped her, feeling it tear at her like a malicious hurricane. She heard screaming voices that clawed at the inner surfaces of her skull and whispers she could not possibly be hearing, but which sounded as clear as though she heard them lying on her bed in the middle of the night.

White light filled the chamber, the walls blurring in a rippling haze thrown off by the roaring column of silver that flared from the dome's apex and speared down towards Jonas Milus upon his throne.

She heard the metallic ring of the doorway closing behind her and spared a brief thought for Caxton and the others. Her robes billowed in the grip of powerful etheric winds, her skin raw and scoured by invisible energies that passed through her skin to the marrow and beyond.

Billowing ghosts of light swarmed the chamber, fleeting unnatural forms that defied description and which lingered uncomfortably in the darkest reaches of her imagination. Clouds of feelings filled the chamber: thunderheads of anger, zephyrs of regret, hailstorms of longing, hurricanes of love and betrayal.

Emotions and meaning surrounded her, though how such concepts could be given physical, visible form was a mystery to her. Dalia took a step into the chamber, feeling her will erode in the face of the primal energies that surrounded her and infused her at the same time.

'Jonas!' she yelled, the words fleeing her mouth in a gush of red. At first she feared it was blood, but the colour in the air vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. The noise filling the chamber was incredible, like the death scream of an entire race or the birth pangs of another.

All emotion and knowledge was here, and Dalia realised that this was the aether; this was the realm beyond the one her senses could consciously perceive. This was the source of all knowledge and the source of the greatest danger imaginable.

This was what she had allowed Jonas Milus to be exposed to.

The thought galvanised her steps, and she forced her way through the maelstrom of light and colour, feeling the energies unleashed by the psykers in the coffered ceiling bleed off as they began to die. She could feel their lives ending, dissipating into the cacophony of light and noise. She wept with sympathetic pain, feeling each death as a splinter of needle-sharp agony in her mind.

Dalia shielded her eyes as she drew closer to the dais, seeing Jonas Milus convulsing upon the throne, illuminated by the blinding light of the Astronomican. His head jerked spasmodically from side to side, his mouth a blur of motion as he screamed and yammered streams of words too fast to be understood.

She pushed her way up the steps towards him, dropping to her knees to better fight against the gales of energy and howling ghosts that swarmed the dais.

'Jonas!' she called, reaching out to him.

She couldn't reach him and crawled, inch by inch, towards him. His screaming was undimmed, the words flooding from him so fast in an ululating howl of pain. Fire blazed in his eyes, crackling with ancient power, the power of something far greater than anything mankind had ever known.

At last Dalia reached the top of the dais and saw that the storm of psychic energy swirled around the throne, yet never touched it, as though some invisible, antithetical barrier was holding it back.

The throne shone as though illuminated from within by some vast elementally powerful force. Though she and her compatriots had struggled so hard to create it, she now wished they had failed utterly.

She wished to be rid of her gift and the consequences of what it had done.