Abaddon looked at her for a long moment, then turned and began to walk back to his brothers and Layak. The smoke coiled from the torn remains covering the floor. The rest of Luna would fall within hours and there would be more killing until that was done, but they had accomplished what their father asked; they had the treasure of Luna in their grasp.

‘Build us warriors, matriarch,’ he said without looking at her. ‘Build us Legions.’

The Phalanx, Inner System Gulf

Blood. There was blood all around Massak. Snow boiled out of the night sky. He was running, but the world was pulling away even as he tried to hold on to it.

‘Come, my son…’ cackled the voices of crows and insects. ‘Come, you know what you must do. Come to us… Be free…’

‘No!’ he shouted, forcing his will against the image in his head. Somewhere, far off, he could feel his hand clenched around the haft of an axe. Heat was pouring off it, charring his palm as he gripped harder and harder.

‘No!’ he shouted again, and pulled himself down into the well of pain. He opened his eyes, biting back the agony that had been his tether to reality. He was kneeling on the floor of the chamber. His hands were locked around the haft of his force axe. Heat glowed yellow from his gauntlets. Ice covered his armour and the floor around him. Beside him knelt his brothers. Light and heat and cold fumed off them. All were fighting within themselves now. The warp was clawing at them, ripping at their will, trying to pull them into the storm tide. Something vast and terrible was happening, something that he could feel as though it were as real as the floor beneath him and the armour covering his skin. It would kill him soon. He could feel it shredding his psyche, and he could not fight it. He had the weapons to defend himself, to bite back at the things that clawed at him, to raise the voice of his spirit and escape the sea that drowned him…

But he could not. He had given his oath. There was only his will, his mortal will standing against the hungering ocean. He would die here, in this cell that had held him and his brother Librarians for the last seven years. And facing that death would be his last duty.

Beside him he heard Kordal gasp as the pain escaped his mouth. Blood-jewelled frost covered the former Lexicanium, branching into sharp spikes over Kordal’s skull.

‘Hold, brother!’ called Massak. ‘We are our oaths. They are our strength. Pain is the anvil of our honour.’

Kordal was juddering in place, blood flowing from his eyes, mouth and ears and freezing on his face.