They passed through various districts. The temple quarter was the largest of all, and surrounded the centre in a thick ward four blocks in depth. Large swathes of the area had been razed, and there was not an untouched building. The streets were half blocked by the broken chunks of stone effigies and the dented remains of metal statues cast down from their plinths.

As they advanced, Felix’s Scouts and Reivers reported that the temples had been defiled with corrupted blood and fetishes. Always these were made of the vilest substances: mounds of filth and body parts, or bloody bones and the diseased innards of the innocent dead. Felix could not abide to let these things remain, though time was tight. He did not regard the Emperor as divine, but these atrocities were an affront to His majesty, and so Felix diverted some of the men accompanying him toward the destruction of such profanities. Wherever they encountered the marks of the traitors, the Space Marines broke them. Felix had meltagunners or Hellblaster squads obliterate blasphemous symbols, and when they were done he set the buildings that had housed them alight with his flamers. Materials in the city were wet through and resisted burning, but Felix ordered his warriors to persist, and they left a trail of flaming ruins behind them as they continued inwards toward the centrum.

The Cathedra Magnifica had been one hundred and fifty metres tall. One of the building’s twin towers had collapsed. The other stood, and though its steeple was full of holes and its roof had fallen in, it still dominated the centre

The city was eerily silent. The sensation of being watched grew. The deadening of sound was most pronounced around its central square. As the damaged heights of the cathedral loomed ever taller over its attendant churches and governmental buildings, the silence grew deeper, the watchfulness more unsettling

As they approached the square, Felix reordered his force, commanding them to circle the cathedral in mutually supportive fire groups. Together with a Hellblaster squad and a supporting unit of Intercessors, he and Malcades advanced across the open space, the others searching buildings or covering their commander with their weapons.

The state of rot that had hold of the city was most pronounced in the cathedral. Where the tower had collapsed, there was a fan of rubble that stretched halfway across the square. Rotten timbers pointed skywards like black teeth from the broken roof. Diseased plants hung from the crumbling facades. The clouds of flies that devilled the planet had a last stronghold there, and they rose up in droning multitudes from the building, reacting aggressively to the Space Marine’s appearance, obliterating themselves on power armour in their desperate need to bite.