Then the fortress began to appear over the horizon. The black, infinite wall ate the sky. The Ruinstorm disappeared behind it. Darkness and red flame climbed higher and higher, swallowing the sky, becoming the sky. Hierax felt its inconceivable mass pressing down. He was suddenly aware of the horror of scale. The world on which so vast a display of Legion might was advancing was less than a speck beneath the daemonic construction.

Hierax lowered his gaze, bringing all of his attention to bear on the land before him, pushing the monster in the sky to the edge of his consciousness. He stared straight ahead, a motionless sentinel. The hours passed. The Ultramarines and Dark Angels covered hundreds of miles towards their goal. The land was uneven but ­battered down, the rock so rounded by erosion it was a faded corpse of topography. At last, far ahead, belching smoke, the first of the forges came into view. They were pointed, twisted silhouettes. They looked like torn fragments of the night, spewing flame.

In the endless red-lit gloom, there was movement on the ground.

‘Captain,’ Teosos voxed, ‘we have contacts ahead.’

‘I see them.’

The land appeared to be boiling. He was too far away to make out the details. The motion of the daemonic mass made him think of insect swarms. There was a suggestion of inhuman limbs and shapes in the jerking, flapping, skittering approach of the abominations. This was a tide too, and it was everything the Ultramarines and Dark Angels were not. It was undisciplined. Closer now, the wave of the enemy was filled with competing currents. It was chaos, rushing to repel the invading order.

Hierax closed his grip on the storm bolter. He gauged the shrinking distance between the two forces, calculating the moment he would begin to fire. He predicted the precise second the longer-range guns of the Land Raiders began to thunder. He nodded as solid lines of artillery blasts engulfed the leading edge of the daemonic charge. He could see the exact spot on the barren ground where the mailed fist of the Legions would slam into the jaws of the daemons. Without asking Teosos, he knew how far they were from the primary target.

Still far. Too far to punch through without committing to a long campaign, one that the daemons, with their infinite resources, would win. The charge had been fast. It had summoned the enemy to the battlefield. The daemons were rushing to stop the threat of two Legions.

Now was the time for the true speed of the attack. Now was the time for the third Legion.

And because it was time, Hierax allowed himself to look up once more.