‘All is ash, all is ash.’

The nearer the traitors came, the more awful details emerged. They were no longer fit to be called men. Adeptus Astartes once, they had sold themselves to fell powers for reasons no rational mind could comprehend. Diseases of every kind afflicted them. Their stomachs were distended, straining the capacity of their swollen wargear to contain. Where exposed, their skin was inflamed or outright necrotic. Their innards dangled freely from corroded gaps in their armour. Mucous, urine, faeces, blood – every humour of the body dripped from them, all of it stinking and tainted with the hues of illness. Parasites crawled over them, wriggling freely into and out of their never-healing wounds. Their droning spoke of great misery, but on helmetless faces smiles shone. There was a joke they all knew, and they were eager to share it with the rest of the universe.

Though the wind blew away from the trenches, and though the Auxilia’s respirators were manufactured to strain out all atmospheric pollutants, the stink of the foe was overpowering, a charnel smell of rot that made Varens retch into his mask.

‘All is ash, all is ash.’

Nonchalantly almost, the traitors levelled their weapons. Rusting bolt guns and plasma guns whose cracked containment chambers sent out hissing jets of superheated steam pointed at the line of exposed heads at the lip of the trench.

‘All is ash, all is ash.’

As one, they opened fire. The guns banged as they ejected their munitions. A second louder bang sounded as the bolt-shells’ jets ignited and accelerated them well past the sound barrier. The final noise, the one that had the boltgun rightly feared as a weapon, was a flat banging as the rounds slammed into soil and flesh, and there detonated with deadly force.

Varens’ visor spattered with gore as the head of the youthful soldier at his side was obliterated. He’d been with the unit two days. There had not been time to learn his name.

‘Keep firing! Keep firing!’ he shouted, over and over, until he was hoarse, but the blare and clatter of battle was so great he could not hear his own voice.

Then the flies came, despite the rain and the gunfire, and everything collapsed into confusion. They buzzed in swarms so thick they turned the air solid. Varens lost sight of the man nearest him.

For a long second, he saw nothing, then the swarm was away and over him, and Varens looked death in the face.