‘In His name,’ Adelynn cries.

We echo her together, and we charge into the tide.

In. His. Name.

I raise my bolter and fire it into the swell of horrors. The holy shells impact one of the creatures and detonate with bursts of flame. Daemonflesh disintegrates with a hiss and a spray of glittering ashes. The horror comes apart at the seams, unravelling until it is extinguished altogether, like a candle flame. The laughter only seems to grow louder. I turn and fire again as another of the horrors conjures a boiling tide of warpfire. It spills across my armour, stinking and burning. For a moment, I cannot breathe. Despite that, I fire on the horrors again and again, my bolter kicking in my hands until the magazine empties with a cough. Several of the horrors unravel, torn asunder by my bolter fire. Yet more are banished by the crackling edge of Adelynn’s power sword as my Sister Superior cuts open a space around me.

‘It is not time, Evangeline,’ she says to me.

I eject my bolter’s spent magazine and replace it with the last spare that I carry.

‘No, it is not,’ I say, and plunge back into the fray.

Amid the tide, my Sisters fight and bleed with me. Isidora’s meltagun gasps with pure, cleansing heat, tearing horrors asunder. Gytha is bellowing scripture. She has one hand on the banner pole of the Simulacrum Imperialis, curled tightly around the fingerbones of martyrs. The enemy cannot touch the standard, nor can they touch Gytha. She fires her bolter one-handed, obliterating them before they get close. Ashava lays about herself with her chainsword. She uses the churning blade with deft strokes, so quick they are hard to see. Her armour is coated in that otherworldly, glittering ash. Adelynn is a light in the darkness, carving her way into the tide, banishing the horrors left and right. Every movement is exacting, and deliberate. Every blow direct and deadly. Her rasping voice echoes across the Contemplation.

‘We stand, and He stands with us,’ she shouts. ‘Do not falter, my Sisters.’

My heart lifts. It always does when Adelynn speaks. And together we keep fighting and bellowing and pushing against the horrors, no matter how they sing and chatter and burn us. We do so until the air is thick with ashes and smoke. Until the tide starts to recede.

In the quiet that follows, Isidora speaks.

‘Perhaps the Last of Days will wait, after all,’ she says between gasping breaths.

But then something large and shadowed moves in the smoke. It laughs, like the lightning does, and I feel a peculiar sort of calm fall over me like a shroud.

‘Perhaps not,’ I tell her softly.

The shadow moves closer. Silence falls.

‘Hold,’ Adelynn says, as the smoke parts.

The beast that steps onto the dais is monstrous. A creature cast not from flesh and blood, but from wickedness. From the warp itself. All of mankind’s madnesses and murders, manifested together and channelled in terrible unity. Vast wings unfold from its back with a crack, scattering smoking feathers. Its toes are clawed and feverishly tapping. In one gnarled hand it holds a hooked, mirrored sword. The other is locked around a staff topped with an ever-shifting, wicked sigil. The creature tilts its avian head, opens its beak and laughs again. Its voice is the chorus of a whole world’s suffering. Its scent is that of a charnel house. The mere presence of the creature prickles at my heart and my soul. It makes my ears ache and my nose bleed thickly down my face. But I do not look away. Instead, I stare up at this hateful, wicked creature that has taken my home from me and settle my bolter’s sights between the greater daemon’s depthless eyes.