They were at the broken door. Archamus was at Massak’s side, firing and reloading without cease. Massak knew what waited for them, seeing with his mind before he saw it with his eyes. A wave of heat broke over him. Images drowned in his thoughts: a wolf; a range of mountains, their canyons piled with skulls; the hiss of water falling into a shrine-pool, down, down – skulls looking up, grinning with promise…

‘Brother!’ shouted a voice close by.

He snapped back to full awareness. In front of and above him, a figure of burnt flesh and blood-smoke clashed with a golden giant. Red lightning spat from where claw and blade met.

‘Father…’ breathed Massak. In his mortal sight, Dorn and the daemon were a blur, a giant of shadow and ghostly flesh and a demigod of war, gleaming against the darkness. Cold control poured from Dorn, cracking the flow of the warp, splintering the folding dark as it spiralled around him.

‘Brothers,’ he said, and the word echoed in the warp. +Brothers.+ Cold light was kindling on the edge of his force axe. He heard and felt the other Librarians answer, and fold their thoughts and minds to his.

Pain enfolded him. He saw the pasts of his brothers as though they were his own; saw the scraps of human lives left behind when they became warriors in a crusade among the stars; felt the pain of remaking over and over again, the trials of mind, terrors faced and overcome, purpose found and then taken away, long years in the dark, dreaming, waiting…

He was moving forwards, his brothers falling into step around him, force blades rising to mirror his own axe. Behind them, Archamus and the Huscarls were firing back into the throat of the door they had come from.

Massak felt the creature fighting Dorn become aware of them, felt its gaze turn as the Librarians advanced. Massak formed a thought and gripped it with all his will. The thought lit in the minds of his brothers. They began to glow, light and flame radiating off them in reality and the warp.

It had been a long time since they had united in this way, and even before the Edict of Nikaea they had been few amongst their Legion. But it had bound them, and now they were as they always had been, as they were always meant to be: a single weapon of many parts, unyielding alone, unbreakable as one.