The others start to move, but I find that I can’t. That I am made still by a prickling awareness of imminent threat that is immediately justified when something drips from the ceiling and hits my armour plate. A fat drop of dark liquid. I put my fingertips to it and then look up. We all do.

‘Oh, shit,’ Zoric says.

Above us, clinging to the rafters and the tops of the pillars, are dozens of shadow-black beasts with balefire eyes. They bare rows of needle teeth, all strung with blood and sinew.

Death is coming, whisper the words in my ears.

‘Purge them!’ Sister Evangeline shouts, loud and clear, as the creatures snap their leathery wings and descend on us, a storm of claws and teeth and shrieking rage. My threat-sense flares, and I turn to meet one of the creatures as it lands heavily and lunges at me, claws outstretched and jaws wide and waiting. I slip its grasp, and then sever its head with a clean strike from my main-hand sabre. The creature roars and screams and then discorporates with a deafening bang.

Around me, the Sisters are an inviolate wall of faith and hate. Sister Ashava burns the things from the very air with her flamer, while Sister Qi-Oh cuts left and right with her chainsword. The others fire their bolters, the muzzle-flare illuminating their snarling, war-torn faces. In the midst of the melee, Sister Evangeline carves one of the daemons in two with her power sword. The ashes burst against the blade, burning away to nothing.

‘The Navigators,’ she shouts to me. ‘Go to them! We will hold them off!’

I nod and push on through the press of wings. The storm of teeth. I am constantly moving. Turning. Leaping. Spinning. It is the way I was trained. The way of the Marleyan sword-song. I cut and cut until my blades turn black. Through the press I see Zoric shoot one of the creatures out of the air, the high-powered lasfire shattering its elongated skull. It crashes to the ground, still trying to claw its way towards him. Still snapping its mangled, broken jaws. He fires again and again until the creature’s skull shatters. Until I shout his name.

‘Danil!’

He looks at me, his eyes filled with an animal kind of dread. I know that it’s because of the breach. Because the creatures we face are of the warp. Daemons. Zoric has spent his life killing for one master or another, but this is more than killing. This is a violent enlightenment of the worst kind. It’s the reason that I have had Efrayl remove every previous encounter with creatures like this from his memories.

The more you know, the more you risk madness, or worse.

‘Stay with me!’ I shout to him, as I cut another of the creatures from withers to hips. It falls tumbling to the deck, smoking and snarling and coming apart at the seams.