‘I was having a hard enough time with that anyway,’ Chetta replied, making a conscious effort not to snap. ‘Right now, standing upright is… Oh, my…’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Nero commented.

Chetta stared, trying to focus with her warp eye, shifting her feet around to face in the right direction just in case that would help. Something had erupted into being: a silent glow that bled the colours of the warp through into real space. Tendrils of the immaterium were reaching out, and for all that they were tenuous and nebulous now, Chetta could sense the power inherent in them, the power that they would soon possess. This flower of malignant energy would continue to grow, and gain strength, and when it achieved its full form…

‘I think I’ve found him,’ she told the others. ‘And I think we have a new problem.’

Enlightenment

Enlightenment

Radimir stepped back through the darkness, his fingers dripping red with blood and the final warp eye clutched, still warm, in the palm of his hand. The pit of his stomach was twisting in excitement and antici­pation, as it always did when he was on the verge of another great act of worship. Soon, very soon, he would set in motion the events that would consign this planet to the warp and offer up another grand sacrifice to his masters. And then…

The Imperium would barely notice the loss of Gallimo Prime. In an empire of a million worlds, the Administratum would shuffle some papers and before long the hole in space would be nothing but a dusty footnote in what passed for their record-keeping. Billions of souls swallowed into an eternity of torture, and the ailing behemoth of which they had been a part wouldn’t so much as blink.

Vorlese, though… Vorlese was different. A far more prominent world, made all the more so by its narrow rescue from the fleet of the Despoiler, especially since it had taken the intervention of the accursed Guilliman to do so. The psychological blow of its loss would be exponentially larger than that of Gallimo Prime, and – if Radimir’s suspicions were borne out – Vorlese’s absorption into the warp would greatly disrupt one of the major warp routes to Terra on which it sat, and from which it acquired its prominence.

After Vorlese… well, there were many possibilities, should the gods grant that he survive. Radimir was a weapon of Chaos, and he would not stop striking blows for it until his life was exhausted and he took his final reward from the Ruinous Powers. Perhaps he could further isolate the Throneworld, or disrupt another crucial point elsewhere in the galaxy. The Great Rift and its siblings meant that some narrow corridors of real space clung only tenuously to existence, bordered on all sides by the howling warp; a cut in reality, in just the right place…