He remembered the promise that had been made to him: the legacy he was granted, the sacred vows he swore. He'd accepted a holy duty without hesitation, and at the moment of his ascension had stretched out a willing hand to receive it.

The Corona Nox had been his. Briefly.

There had been complications. There had been interventions. Alien interventions.

He remembered, through the riot of chattering bolters and screaming voices, in the rush of a psychic storm, the xenos. He remembered the pain and the confusion. He remembered the burning enemy, that brittle fiend, bright helm arched and antlered, staff banishing every shadow to extinction.

He remembered fleeing. He remembered the trap. He remembered the fissure in the fabric of nothing, sucking him down, swallowing him whole.

He had been caged within a timeless prison, and without hope of escape he had emptied his mind and slept. He'd stumbled through endless dreams, grappled with nightmares, and-

-and had awoken to discover the Corona gone.

The leader, yes. The so-called hunchback. He had taken it.

An hour later, Zso Sahaal stood at the edge of the wreckage and regarded his vessel, the Umbrea Insidior, with a wistful eye.

The last time he'd admired her exterior had been from the cramped cockpit of a shuttle, rising towards her from the surface of Tsagualsa, on the eve of his final mission. Even then, gnawed at by impatience, he'd paused to admire her savage form. Artfully decorated in banks of ebony and blue, picked-through with bronze, her towers and minarets endowed upon her an almost ornate fragility.

It was, of course, an illusion.

Vulture-beaked and weapon-pocked, her generariums hulked from her stern like the head of a mallet, cannons decorating the hammer's grip with all the organic tenacity of barnacles upon a whale. Here and there her changing fortunes were transcribed in scars and healed abrasions; all the arts of the Adeptus Mechanicus focused upon improvement, strength, power. More obvious still were the revisions to her structure made by her latest masters: blades and icons arching from her pitted hull, intricate designs dappling her iron snout, stylised arcs of gauss lightning painted in harsh whorls across the darkness of her intricate surfaces.

She had been a strike cruiser, once. Fast and vicious, a fitting chariot for the mission he'd boarded her to fulfil. A vessel worthy of his captaincy.

And now?

Now she was a broken hag. Crooked ribs slumped from fractured expanses. Crevices gaped like whip-wounds where conflicting pressures had buckled and pierced her hull. Her great spine was broken, crumpled across half a kilometre of steaming waste. Her beak had been thrust with such violence into the earth that her flanks had snapped, reactors sagging then pitching up and outwards, shearing vicious rents before detonating; their colossal energies vaporising what little substance had survived the atmosphere's passage.