‘We call to the Ultramarines and to the Blood Angels,’ Licinia said to her choir. ‘We call them to us. We call to them across the infinite.’ Her words were command and invocation. As she instructed the astropaths, bringing them to the single-minded concentration on their duty, she conjured the collective power of the choir. Unity was its strength. Unity was the means by which the individual might survive. ‘We call to them through the bonds of loyalty. We call to them through our bonds to the Emperor.’ The ankle manacle each astropath wore was a symbol of the soul-binding to the Emperor. In the midst of transmission, when the individual became part of the whole, but also courted the risk of annihilation on the dream-storms of the warp, the anklet was a physical grounding, a lodestone for the self and its purpose.

As the transmission began, Licinia fell silent. Her guidance became entirely psychic. She reached out with the combined force of all the astropaths, and they reached out with the focus of her will.

They reached out to their counterparts in the IX and XIII Legions. They did not know where or how far away the Blood Angels and Ultramarines were. Location and distance were meaningless. The call went to the infinite.

But madness ruled the infinite. The call encountered the Ruinstorm, and the Ruinstorm answered with fury. Its winds sought to shred the coherence of the message. Its waves crashed upon the minds of the choir. The roar took Licinia. It plunged her perception into the maelstrom. She pushed back, urging the chorus to greater heights, summoning strength from determination. And as the storm raged harder, it reached into the minds of all to shatter the core of the collective.

A great distance away, blood ran warm from Licinia’s eyes and ears.

She cried out, again and again, hurling herself and her charges against the storm, until at last, there was a sudden crack across the non-space. It was a fissure, and the call went through it, travelling now on its wave of dreams, independent of any sender. It was also lightning, and it struck the choir. It was as if something in the warp welcomed the message at the same time that it punished its senders.

Licinia screamed, psychic vision blinded by shrieking silver, as she was slammed back into her physical self. She choked on the smell of ozone and burned flesh. She clenched her psychic vision shut against the pain and the feedback of energy. She was in the amphitheatre once more, surrounded again by the false sight of grey and phantoms. There was light in the grey now. Even with her inner eye closed, the psychic energies lashing out in the chamber were too strong to shut out completely. Some of the nodes were burning. People were screaming. An echo that might have been thunder or might have been laughter rolled away, fading with the dissipation of the energy.