I shake Yumia hard and she snaps out of it with a snarl. When I take hold of Zoric’s arm to do the same he tries to shrug me away. He shouts about Idoney and Tian and how they are alive. How they need him. I have to roll my fist and hit him to make him stop.

‘Stay with me,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not real.’

He blinks and takes in the apocalypse all around him. The mirror-thing, circled by the Sisters. The ruin and warpfire. Yumia, staring at him. His pale eyes clear and he nods.

‘It’s not real,’ he says back to me.

As we run through broken glass and hellfire towards the Chamber Awaiting, I can’t help but pray that the words are true.

Evangeline

EVANGELINE

Every breath burns.

The air is scorching and dry and soured by the taste of warpfire and wrongness. It makes my eyes sting as I fire my bolter one-handed at the devil that has manifested before me. This conjuration of wickedness and hate. This monstrosity of mirrors. The daemon is vast. Swollen to fill the space, its mirror-bulk grazing the vaulted ceiling of the Navigation quarter. Its body is a coil of bloody crystal and its wings are faceted, fractured glass. Four long arms erupt from it, ending in colourless glass talons. Where they touch the deck they set the marble alight.

But the daemon is alight, too. Blessed promethium clings to its limbs and its thick, serpentine tail. The daemon thrashes in the heat and the purity of it as Ashava angles her flamer upwards, directing the jet of fire up and across its body. The rest of my Sisters are firing on it, too. Dozens of bolt shells detonate against its crystal hide, sending a fine, glittering powder into the air. The thing does not break, though. It does not shatter, it just continues to grow and swell, and the whispers grow with it.

Deathiscomingdeathiscomingdeathiscoming!

It moves, then, more quickly than anything of such a size has a right to, propelling itself forwards on the coils of its body like a great glass serpent. Warpfire winds around its claws and its many mouths open wide as if in hunger.

‘Do not let it break through!’ I shout.

We stand together as the daemon rears, lashing out with its claws. Eugenia blasts holes through its faceted wings even as Qi-Oh tears one of the daemon’s claws away with a volley of bolter fire. Haskia roars as she fires her own bolter, the shells impacting against the creature’s bulk and scattering clouds of glittering glass mist. Beside me, Ashava turns her flamer on the daemon and burns it anew. Lightning flares and arcs to the deck where her blessed promethium meets the creature’s warpfire.