He had never thought to leave the Eye of Terror. It amused him that he had. It was good to be abroad again.

The armourglass dome still covered the top of the tower, though the petal-shaped panes that made it up were broken in several places, and one was missing entirely. This did not affect the poisonous atmosphere, nor the temperature. Rather than the killing cold of space, the dome retained the chill of high mountains: unpleasant, but not deadly.

If one looked past the reality-defying properties of the horarium, there were four items of note in the chamber. The first was its vast array of clocks. They hung from every part of the walls below the glass of the dome. They stood in tocking ranks upon the floor. Small carriage clocks and giant gilded edifices under glass domes occupied dozens of tables. Their ticking resounded loudly. A new chime went off every second, for the clocks ran asynchronously, marking as they did the time of many layers of reality. Every few minutes, the ringing of many bells would coincide, and sound as a single deafening round of mismatched peals.

The largest of the clocks was the second item. Occupying the central portion of the room, and twice the height of the daemon primarch, it had three faces and stood on three legs worked with the tripartite symbol of Nurgle. The legs did not obviously represent those of any kind of beast, fantastical or otherwise, but were made so that it crouched over the floor, giving the impression it was about to strike. Its faces were a metre across, and each had seven hours and three hands with pointers made in the shape of flies. The time was approaching the clock’s midnight. A massive scythe on a chain served as a pendulum. It swished across the space beneath the clock. Reality sighed as the blade cut into the very stuff of creation, and every tick-tock was the death of something fine.

The third item was contained within the great clock. Atop the timepiece was a huge bell jar, covered all over with arcane symbols. The lower half extended into the space between the triple faces. The upper half made a lesser dome below the greater. There was something inside: a prisoner. Its presence explained why metal tubes were attached to glass valves in the jar. They allowed certain poisons to be introduced, though not to kill. The jar was a device of torment.

The thing inside the jar was no longer alive, but it could suffer. Streamers of corposant moved behind the glass. As Mortarion entered the room, they coalesced, becoming a monstrous alien face. Even in death, the soul’s psychic potency was great enough to stop a mortal man’s heart by sight alone, and then raise up his corpse to serve the creature, but to Mortarion the killing scorn it broadcast was a balm.