Melchor was a warrior-mystic of the Iron Hands Chapter, endowed with powers and abilities that set him apart from his brothers and that normally gave him some advantage in his confrontations with the enemy. But now these same psychic gifts made him all the more susceptible and vulnerable to the never-forgotten agony of the warp-ghosts assailing the Ajax as the warpstorm blew itself out in a glorious eruption of warp energy.

For carried within the discharging warpstorm were the psychic death-screams of the thousands upon thousands who had lost their lives within the Araken Anomaly, their ships torn apart by the forces of the warpstorm, the psychic agony of their death-throes preserved forever within the supernatural fabric of the nebula.

Locked within his cabin, focussing his mind in an attempt to put up a mental wall to stop the psychic assault, Librarian Melchor became like a ravening, feral beast, his body contorted by epileptic seizures, foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolling.

The Librarian's animal screams echoed throughout the holds and corridors of the ship as Melchor endured his own private vision of hell. Assailed by the screaming skull-faces of the warp-ghosts of the masses that had been devoured by the warpstorm, his mind's defences were stripped away and his consciousness psychically scoured by the tearing mental talons of the entities that had been formed in the warp and of the warp itself.

One by one Melchor's mental defences crumbled, the barriers were broken down, and his naked soul was exposed to the full horror of everything the warp had to hold.

CRUCIBLE

'When there is no other way, the perilous path is the only road to salvation.'

- Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of Ulthwe Craftworld

TEN

CORRUPTER

The Araken System

The Iron Hands' strike cruiser Ajax drifted at the edge of a star system that had been lost to the Imperium for as many eons as it could take for entire civilisations to rise and fall. Its shields were down, its adamantium hull sporting gouged ruts. The largest was sixty metres long and as wide as a Space Marine was tall. These injuries had been caused to the ship by the ethereal talons of warp-born entities that clung to a spectral existence amidst the spaceship graveyard in which the Ajax now found itself. The Astartes vessel wore its battle scars with pride.

The ship looked like just another lifeless wreck cast adrift within the spaceships' graveyard that circled the fringes of the forgotten system. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, had all been lost, Gdolkin guessed, to Warpstorm Araken over the millennia. The wrecked vessels were not only human in origin. There were also the dead hulks of other, alien civilisations. Gdolkin recognised the ships of many xenos races, from his years campaigning for the Emperor, displayed on the main screen of the cruiser's bridge.