The Apostle strode across the desert plain, alone, catechisms of faith hot on his tongue, and smiled with the insane smile of the zealot. The time of ascension was fast approaching. And he had waited an age, longer than it had taken for the tectonic plates to shape the planet upon which he now walked. Now that the time of waiting was almost over, he had to ensure that all was ready.

The Apostle looked once more towards the distant desert city, shimmering in the scorching heat haze, his enhanced eyesight and the systems inside his armoured helm magnifying the vista so that he could see more clearly the black shapes lining the road approaching the walled citadel.

The King's Highway leading to the crumbling city walls was lined with hundreds of crucifixions...

...the wind moaned like a wailing widow through the labyrinthine tunnels of the ice caves. Fleeting images seemed to move within the fractured blue of the frozen walls, and behind them there was a barely visible crystalline glow.

The ice tunnels wound on and down, down into the ancient heart of the glacier, down into the splintered bedrock of the planet. And there, in a vault of ice, glowing with a dull cold blue radiance stood the black stone. It protruded through the drifted snow and fallen icy stalactites, a perfectly carved octahedral pyramid. Something about it suggested that there was much more of the ancient artefact buried beneath.

The gale-force winds scouring the frozen surface of the world above found their way deeper into the ice caves and were channelled into the freezing cold cavern. As if in response, the ice and stone began to vibrate, setting up their own resonances in discordant juxtaposition to the howling of the ice-winds.

The sound of the ice choir and the singing stone were unsettling, redolent with the feral voices of another time, another existence. The throbbing resonances would have felt uncomfortable, exerting unnatural pressures on the human ear, had there been anybody there to hear them...

...things seen and yet unseen. The whispers of the warp. The lies and half-lies of gods and daemons. All things that had already happened, that were happening even now, or that would come to pass when the fates proscribed.

Something moved towards her through the shifting currents of the Sea of Souls. Something black and pitiless.

The entity was as different to the soul-sharks as they were to her. The devilish creature clawed its way towards her through the ether, anglerfish jaws opening wide, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was utterly defenceless against it.

Potentialities and possibilities continued to twist and writhe within the warp in their slithering dance of eons...

* * *

'Your pathetic Imperium is doomed!' the astropath spat, the words uttered in a voice altered by the malevolence that spoke through her. 'The time of the false emperor is at an end. All will perish in a firestorm that will sweep through the galaxy of man when the Eye opens again! Unnumbered daemons will feast on a billion billion souls until the end of all things.'