TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold

billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody

regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much

has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the

promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim

dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst

the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and

the laughter of thirsting gods.

OCULARIS TERRIBUS

'All the stars in the sky cannot blot out the hateful glare of the red moon's eye. The birthing place of the Great Enemy pulses with all the malice of a daemon that is dreaming, casting its shadow over all we have ever done and all we ever shall'

- Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of Ulthwe craftworld

PROLOGUE

THE ALL-SEEING EYE

Incense smoke curled through the sickly sweet-scented processed air of the reclusium chamber in a fug of sparkling coral mist, rising into the gloom of the chamber's distant, vaulted dome. Hovering candles created bobbing islands of hazy yellow light amidst the pink-tinged fog of the darkened place. It was silent other than for the crackling and popping of the resinous coals in the braziers.

The astropath residing in the centre of the chamber was trance-dreaming.

In the unreality of her dream the universe was a pleasant place to live. In her half-waking reverie she could use her legs. She ran through meadows of verdant flocktail grass under a sky that was crystal blue, studded with puffs of white cumulous cloud, not discoloured by a permanent sickly brown smog, even though the only planet she had ever known was an over-industrialised hive world. She had never even seen a meadow, so the green of the rippling grass and the blue of the sky were too vibrant, too brilliant, overexposed in their intensity.

The flocktails brushed against her smock and her bare legs, as she exhilarated in the feeling of being free of the strategium shell. The air was fragrant with the heady scent of rose-orchid pollen; the sun's rays beat down on the skin of her uncovered arms and shoulders, warming her skin. She had hair in this existence too, luxurious auburn tresses that cascaded like fine-spun silk to the middle of her back. And in this world she was beautiful and young again, as if the decades of imprisonment had never occurred, as if time had wound back to an instant that had never in fact existed.

How was it, she wondered sleepily, that she could dream of things she had never seen or experienced? But of course it was thanks to the same psychic awareness that allowed her to perceive the fluctuating currents of the immaterium, and read the future that was written there for those who had the eyes to see it.

With the hiss of compressed gas, the bulkhead door to the reclusium irised open, rousing the dreamer from her hypnotic reverie. A figure stood-silhouetted in the aperture, tall and robed, surrounded by a nimbus of muted backlight. With a whirring of neck servos the astropath looked up. There was very little of her that had not been augmented or adapted in some way.