The supplicant watched in silence. The third card was turned.

The Ship.’ - an explorator vessel plying the channels between the stars - 'meaning the wandering traveller or the journey not yet taken. In the quadrant tertius, a quest into the unknown.’

Still the figure said nothing.

'The Space Marine.’ the astropath said, relief evident in her voice, as she revealed the fourth card. The Adeptus Astartes. The sons of the primarchs. The champions of Him on Earth. Opposite the blasphemer in the circle. There is still hope for mankind.’

There was blood red armour now, inscribed with the perverted litanies of the inviolable Imperial creed.

The seer turned her attention to the pair of cards lying at the centre of the circle.

The Daemon Ascendant and the Titan inverted. A card of the Discordia and a card of the Arcana Adeptio together?' she said darkly, her brows knotting. The meaning was unclear to her. The Daemon, representative of the Great Enemy itself, order overturned, bloodshed and slaughter, combined with the god-engine, the card of might and unconquerable power, but turned on its head. It could mean the walls of the Imperium beaten down or indomitable strength in the hands of Chaos.

Unnerved the seer continued.

The only card remaining was the one at the apex of the star of five surrounding the Daemon and the Titan. She lifted the card from the plinth and placed it down on the cold marble again, face up.

A glowering eye, set amidst spiralling crimson-purple clouds, stared back with its baleful, fiery gaze.

The astropath swallowed hard, feeling her gorge rise. Fires, like the fires of a maelstrom that would devour a whole world, blazed within the eye, its malignant gaze boring into her.

'The All-Seeing Eye.’ she gasped and closed her eyes against its malevolent stare.

But the image still swelled before her, until it was all she could see. She was like a tiny drifting speck of dust within a hurricane before the burning stare of the galaxy-sized eye, its surface burning like a sun, the swirling nebulae, the birthplace of dark stars, spinning within the vortex of the Sea of Souls. The howling of an eldritch wind blew right through her, threatening to extinguish the brilliant flame of her soul's fire; it was the only sound she

could hear. The only sensation she experienced was the stomach-knotting nausea of abject fear.

Trapped within the transfixing stare of the warp, her mind opened to all the horrors the future held, like a blossoming rose-orchid...

...as something monstrous fractured reality. In a blaze of sickly light the ruddy-bronze hull of a baroque leviathan re-entered the physical universe. After the hull came kilometre after kilometre of gargoyle-encrusted weapon decks, strike craft launch bays, baroquely ornamented weapon ports as the ancient battleship slipped smoothly from the warp. Finally, the con tower of the capital vessel broke through from the realm of daemons along with the ancient, power plant-sized engines, the method of their construction and even the science-mysticism behind their operation now lost across oceans of time.