Aura Hieron hung open like a carcass. It had been austerely beautiful once, much like the rest of Cirrion, stark silver alloyed with cold marble. Now it was an abattoir-temple. Blood slicked its walls, seeping down into the cracks of the intricate mosaic floor. Broken columns punctuated a high outer wall that ran around the temple’s vast ambit. Statues set in shadowy alcoves had been beheaded or smeared in filth, their pale immortality defaced.

Crude sigils, exulting in the dark glory of the Cult of Truth, were daubed upon the stonework. A black altar, re-fashioned with jagged knives and stained with blood, dominated a cracked dais at the back of the chamber. Metal spars ripped from the structure of Cirrion’s underbelly had been dragged bodily into the temple, tearing ragged grooves in the tarnished marble. Blackened corpses, the remains of loyal Stratosans, were hung upon them as offerings to the Chaos gods. A shrine to the Emperor of Mankind no longer, Aura Hieron was a haven for the corrupt now, where only the damned came to worship.

Nihilan revelled in the temple’s debasement as he regarded the instrument of his malicious will from afar.

‘We should not be here, sorcerer. We have what we came for,’ rasped a voice from the shadows, redolent of smoke and ash.

‘Our purpose here is two-fold, Ramlek,’ Nihilan replied, his cadence grating. ‘We have only achieved the first half.’ The renegade Dragon Warrior overlooked the bloodied plaza of Aura Hieron from a blackened anteroom above its only altar. He was watching the Speaker keenly, beguiling and persuading the cultist masses basking in his unnatural aura with his dark-tongued rhetoric.

The brand Nihilan had seared into the hierophant’s flesh over three months ago, when the Dragon Warriors had first come to Stratos, had spread well. It infected almost his entire face. The seed the sorcerer had embedded there would be reaching maturation.

‘A life for a life, Ramlek; you know that. Is Ghor’gan prepared?’

‘He is,’ rasped the horned warrior.

Nihilan smiled thinly. The scar tissue on his face pulled tight with the rare muscular use. ‘Our enemies will be arriving soon,’ he hissed, psychic power crackling over his clenched fist, ‘then we will have vengeance.’

Eyes like mirrored glass stared out from beneath a mausoleum archway, no longer seeing, unblinking in mortality. Tiny ice crystals flecked the dead man’s lips and encumbered his eyelids so they drooped in mock lethargy. The poor wretch was arched awkwardly across a stone tomb, his head slack and lifeless as it hung backwards over the edge.

He was not alone. Throughout the temple district, citizens and insurgents alike lay dead, their breath and their life stolen away when the atmospheric processors had vented. Some held one another in a final desperate embrace, accepting of their fate; others fought, fingers clutched around their throats as they tried in vain to fill their lungs.