Over a thousand years within the Eye of Terror, patiently plotting revenge, and now he finally was closing on the means to destroy his enemies.

‘Approaching the Hell-stalker,’ the sepulchral voice of Erkine returned over the vox.

Nihilan engaged the grav-harness. As it crept over his armoured shoulders, securing him for landing, he peered out of the Stormbird’s vision slit. There across a becalmed and cobalt sea, a vessel of molten-red lay anchored. It was an old ship with old wounds, and older ghosts. The prow was a serrated blade, ripping a hole in the void. Cannons arrayed its flanks, gunmetal grey and powder-blackened. Dozens of towers and antennae reached up like crooked fingers.

Hell-stalker had entered the Eye a mere battle-barge and had come out something else entirely. It was Nihilan’s ship and aboard it his warriors awaited him – renegades, mercenaries and defectors; pirates, raiders and reavers. There they gathered to heed of his victory and the slow realisation of their ambition – the total and utter destruction of Nocturne, and with it the death of the Salamanders.

Fireborn

FIREBORN

Though it was forbidden, Evangeline ran through the Chapel of Divine Sanctuary.

She ran as if the hounds of Chaos were behind her.

Votive candles lit the way through one of the transepts of remembrance, guttering faintly as she swept by. Statues of martyred saints glared at her disapprovingly from shaded alcoves. As she passed through the holy narthex, Evangeline was trying to piece together what she’d seen. Her sandalled feet rapping on the cold convent floor, louder than incendiary blasts in the silence, muddled her thoughts.

Blood.

She’d seen blood, like red rain coming from the sky.

All shall bleed, the voices had said. Skulls for the throne of–

The last part made her dizzy. She smelled oil, tasted iron and heard the harsh clank of machinery though the convent was quiet as the void.

In the Devotional Gallery, she found Father Lumeon.

‘My child, what in the Emperor’s name is wrong?’

The breathless specimen, a waif of a girl in pale unadorned robes, could only pant.

Father Lumeon, officious in his priestly vestments, drifted from behind his blackwood desk. He’d been labouring over parchments and data-slates, a mechanised lexicanum savant scribing his dictations with a neuro-quill. Sublimation of native belief cultures into the auspices of the Imperial Creed – it was heavy work, gratefully postponed, even for a devoted man like Father Lumeon. Dismissing a pair of cyborganic cherubs who had descended on angelic wings to investigate the sudden fuss, he came before Evangeline and gently lifted her chin.

‘Be at peace…’

Evangeline’s frenzy lessened to an insistent ache.

‘And tell me what the matter is.’

The Sister Hospitaller had tears in her eyes and a tremor in her body.

An answer wasn’t forthcoming.

‘Come with me.’ Father Lumeon led her slowly to an ornate balcony which looked out over all of Sepulchre IV.