As it changes, and her flesh changes with it.

Dread halts the song in my throat as the infernal magicks turn Gytha’s hands to claws. As her spine breaks and resets itself and her jaws open wider and wider until there is nothing left of her save for her screaming. Gytha lets the standard fall and turns to look at me with multi-faceted, hungry eyes. She lunges towards me and my limbs and mind and heart freeze. I freeze. The maw that’s left of her face opens wide. Wider. Then it tears apart with a boom and a burst of ashes that scatter over me like an anointing rite. The creature that was once Gytha crashes to the ground, and I see Adelynn, her bolter held tightly in her fist, the barrel trailing smoke.

‘Sing, Evangeline,’ Adelynn says, a tear tracking through the blood and dirt on her face. ‘Do not stop.’

I take a breath that tastes of blood and of death. Of the ashes that are all that remains of my Sister. A tear traces down my face, too. A mirror of Adelynn’s.

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

Adelynn nods, and turns away from me, levelling her sword at the devil on the dais. The creature raises its hooked, barbed sword in answer. It looms over her, sloughing crystalline feathers and molten silver. Laughing through its jagged beak. I stagger towards Adelynn on fractured legs, but I am too slow. The greater daemon’s sword comes down with a scream, and there is a flare of blinding, blue light.

‘No,’ I say, through the blood in my mouth.

But when the light fades and my vision clears, Adelynn is still standing. Her power sword is broken in her hands.

She turned the blow aside.

‘Adelynn!’

I shout her name over the clamour of the Last of Days, and my Sister Superior looks at me. Her emerald eyes are clear even now.

‘Stand,’ I somehow hear her say. ‘Until you cannot.’

And then the greater daemon’s sword descends, and Adelynn falls. Her broken blade clatters to the ground.

‘No!’ I shout the word this time. ‘No!’

I stumble forwards, half blind with agony, and take up what remains of Adelynn’s sword, before turning to face down the greater daemon. Magicks course along its staff and warpfire blooms along my limbs, coursing over my skin. The remnants of the sword melt and flow away over my gauntlets, painting them silver and gold. That peculiar calm descends over me once more as I burn, awaiting the fall of the sword. I am ready to join my Sisters in death. I want it.

‘O God-Emperor, who is light,’ I murmur through blood and smoke and agony, as a golden light blooms on the Contemplation, filling my failing vision edge to edge. Thunderclaps resound, buffeting me, and I think that perhaps Isidora is right. That this is the God-Emperor returning from the heavens to claim my soul.