He advanced three steps, seeing nothing at first. There was only the cloying black. Then the monster lunged out of the night. It was massive, spined and horned. Its jaw was long and powerful enough to snap iron. It could never have been human, but the remains of Word Bearers armour clung to its tree-trunk limbs. The old markings were still there, to be read, as if the powers that had transformed the Word Bearer desired all who saw it to know what it had once been, and know despair. Warp-fire tendrils arced from its body to the sides of the splinter, turning into webs, then cracks. This thing was the source of the disintegration.

In the distortion of form, the complete desolation of anything human and the mockery of the preserved armour, Guilliman saw the distillation of the perversion and treachery of the XVII Legion.

He jerked back, firing the Arbitrator as the monster lashed out with a massively clawed hand. The blow threw off his aim, and the shell punched through its left shoulder, disintegrating flesh and spines. The monster snarled and lunged. It was fast, and its movements slid between the real and the immaterial, hard to track and counter. Guilliman blocked a strike with Incandor, but then the claws were suddenly coming from a different angle, and the creature seized him. It was huge, half again as tall as he was, and its flesh was still shifting, mutating, growing in the glory of its ascended state.

‘I am Toc Derenoth,’ it boomed with a double voice. ‘I am Unburdened. And I will unburden your ship.’ It bent Guilliman backwards, acid dripping from its jaws.

Guilliman heard the first cracks in his armour. He resisted, and the monster grew even larger, fed by the warp. Toc Derenoth’s eyes were a milky white, but patterns swirled in them, forming and dissolving runes.

Guilliman tore his arms free. He fired and stabbed into Toc Derenoth’s chest. The stream of shells blasted a hole a foot wide in the monster’s chest, breaking its hold and hurling it back. Guilliman drove the gladius deep into the wound, puncturing things that had once been organs. Toc Derenoth howled, the twinned voices wrapping around Guilliman’s mind in pain and fury.

Guilliman poured bolter shells into the thrashing beast. The web of disintegrating unreality began to withdraw. The crimson light dimmed, and the substance of the splinter became more stable. It began to resemble a fragment of a void ship’s bridge once again. Undulating mounds became the wreckage of cogitators and pict screens. The floor shifted from tissue to ferrocrete. The shape of a command throne began to appear in the centre of the darkness.