Her body was dust. Less than dust. Her particles returned to the great cycle of the cosmos, her soul set free from the woes of mortal concern. Yet Zozar was trapped in this realm of life, and while life persisted he could not know peace. It had been hard to find her among the newly created ranks of the necrons. The mass transference had seemed an impossibility when Szarekh had first conceived of it, but the lies of the sungods had settled deep in the king’s heart and he would not be swayed. Zozar had seen how fragile life could be under the unforgiving, dying sun of their world and had been numbered among the first volunteers to lend his scientific intellect to the cause. How vain they had all been, and how naive in their vanity.

He flexed beweaponed extremities and looked at the fortifications raised up before his army. A prison.

His army?

He had been an engineer, and creator of dams and lifting machines and bridges. When had he learnt of war?

Zozar had become a hunter at first, desperate to be reunited with his wife and children. He had never found the young ones – lost somewhere in the innumerable, mindless phalanxes of warriors that had speared the expansion of the dynasties across the stars; resurrec­ted so many times they had been processed out of existence. It was probably better that they remembered nothing of playing in the gardens and climbing the north side of the pyramid. Better that they were soulless, dreamless tools of war than know what they had become, like Zozar.

His wife he had found after seven days. She was one of the ones that had fared worst, her connection to life, her soul-strength so powerful that the transference had driven her insane. She had the artificial body of a queen but her thoughts were locked outside of it, wandering in the bright orchards of her mind, staring at softly lapping seas on golden sands only she could feel – yet knowing the agony of loss, her brightness dimmed, a sun behind the cloud of what had happened.

He had known then that he could not live with the burden of what he had done, what he had helped take place. So many millions of souls destroyed, replaced with facsimiles of life. Looking at her, seeing the puppetry of her body wrought in silver and gold, Zozar had joined her in madness. He had broken her form and smothered her resurrection field, the misery of it stripping away any last vestiges of honour or compassion. He tried to kill himself but awoke again in a freshly forged body, reincarnated in an exact replica.

Zozar had known then that it was only by eradicating all sentient life, by filling the neversea with the souls of all mortal things, would he finally be delivered from his living prison.