The other cadet had shaken his head. He had pointed to the tombstone they were hiding behind. The wind had scoured it of name and rank and date of death.

‘When all the names are lost, then there is no need to honour their memory,’ the other said. ‘The graves are emptied, the bones taken to the ossuaries, and the graveyard waits for the next lot of martyrs.’

Minka had spent many hours in the ossuaries. They were cold, vaulted chambers, silent and reverential, heavy with the weight of death that pressed down upon them. Broken panes hissed with the wind. The walls were stacked with long bones and punctuated by row upon row of mouldering skulls. Aquilas of thigh bones hung on the wall, chandeliers of ribs, and here and there was a complete body of some ancient hero, the bones held together with threads of sinews and skin, all stained brown with age and lit by the light of a flickering candle.

Keeping their age-long watch, skeletal fingers held aloft banners that had long since mouldered down to a see-through gauze.

In their first year, each cadet in Kasr Myrak had to spend one night a month alone in an ossuary, praying for the departed. Minka had been fearful the first time among the decaying remains of the ancient heroes – thousands of skulls with their blank eye sockets and jawbones missing, the dust of the long dead in her lungs.

But with time, she had learnt there was nothing frightening about the massed graves. There was melancholy, yes, but the longer she maintained her vigil, the closer she felt to these lost generations. And the greater the weight of expectation she felt in the empty eye sockets.

The last night Minka had been in an ossuary was a month before the Black Crusade had struck. She remembered the night with a chill of fear. The Eye of Terror had been livid with unspeakable colours, vomiting up plumes of warp-energies as they swirled back into its heart and there were howls in the night outside, as if the world itself was being whipped up into a state of eldritch torment.

Shadows had crept up the walls, their long arms ending with clawed fingers, their heads little more than a circle of mist, the elongated jaws fanged with gloom. She knew these were just apparitions. The Eye of Terror had a baleful influence upon their world, but she was not so weak-willed as to be scared by shadows.

Surrounded by the dead of ages, she took strength from their remains.

We died to preserve Cadia, the silent bones stated. Our lives were brief and violent, but in that sacred duty we did not fail.

Of course, not all young Cadians could bear a night alone. Drill and training and punishment dominated every hour of life and any who failed the exacting physical and mental standards were mocked and beaten, and subject to public opprobrium.