Qi-Oh brings her chainsword down, plunging it deeply into the sorcerer’s chest. It sticks, still churning as the sorcerer bellows and hurls her against one of the crystal claws around the edge of the dais. Qi-Oh lands hard and goes limp. Joti empties her bolter’s magazine into the sorcerer’s chest and wings only for him to answer in kind with a blast of warpfire that shatters the Simulacrum Imperialis, and my Sister with it. Eugenia cries out, picking up the verse along with the snapped remains of the banner pole.

‘O God-Emperor, who is valour,’ she sings. ‘I devote this life to you.’

Eugenia drives the banner pole into the sorcerer’s crystal flesh like a lance. He conjures a blast of warpfire that hurls her backwards, her armour smouldering.

Ashava roars the words of the hymnal at the heretic as she turns her flamer on him, washing the sorcerer with a stream of holy fire.

‘O God-Emperor, who is light,’ she shouts. ‘I devote this life to you!’

Ashava’s flames stick and cling, making the sorcerer’s crystalline skin flow like molten metal. Making him scream. He lashes out at my Sister even as he burns, sending Ashava crashing to the dais. I stagger forwards on my broken legs and fall to my knees beside her. Ashava is breathing fitfully, her armour crumpled and split.

‘All this way you have come,’ the sorcerer says, as he approaches me. ‘Only to find yourself back at the beginning.’

‘Eva.’

I glance to my side to see Ashava looking at me through lidded eyes. Her pupils are dilated, what little remains of the whites of her eyes flooded red by trauma. She reaches up and takes hold of my arm. Puts something in my hand. Something wrought from gold and steel.

The hilt of my broken sword.

‘Be swift,’ she murmurs, as her eyes slip closed.

‘Ashava,’ I say to her. I shake her, but she does not stir. Her breathing is so shallow I cannot tell if it has stopped. ‘Ashava!’

I hear the sorcerer laugh. He drops to one knee before me, stinking of corruption and magicks. He reaches out and tilts my head up with a clawed hand.

‘You sing of your so-called God-Emperor, but He does not care, Evangeline of the Order of Our Martyred Lady. He does not love this Imperium He has built, nor those who exist within it. He does not love you.’

‘You are wrong,’ I tell the sorcerer, my scars burning and my fingers curled tightly around the hilt of my broken sword. ‘The God-Emperor loves all martyrs.’