This is what I saw, Kva. You tell me what it means. I stood on a desolate plain recently cleansed by fire The reek of hyper-accelerant suggested promethium as the means of destruction. The heat radiating from the baked earth told me the barrage was finished only a few hours before The ground steamed. Heavy clouds of smoke bruised the sky in grey and purple. The world's sun was rising, and its light slanted beneath the smother of war. A molten glow poured over the aftermath, lighting the clouds from beneath, and dazzling me As I held up my left hand to shelter my eyes, I noted a brighter light shining above my head, and I turned and saw I held the Spear of the Emperor in my right hand. The world was black. My armour was dirtied by fumes and smuts. Everything was filthy, but not the spear. It was as clean as if it had been polished by the blademakers. It reflected the rays of the sun and returned them twofold, outshining it.

The spear was the only beautiful thing in that place. There was nothing alive. Uniform soot furred every surface soaking up the golden light. A quality of this contrast was a hyper-reality. 'I felt that I really was there that the dream was real and that the waking world was not.'

'It was real,' said Kva. 'A different level of being, but no less real than this hall we sit in now.'

'I have told myself that cannot be that the Imperial Truth denies it.'

'The Imperial Truth is a blunt tool,' said Kva. 'And sometimes it is not true.'

Kva's heresy meant nothing to Russ. He had always forged his own path.

'A landscape of blackened bones stretched in every direction from my feet,' said Russ. They were carbonised by whatever terrible weapon had atomised their cloak of flesh. The smell of burned meat choked me, wrapped itself about me, so thick I thought I might never be rid of it. It was worse than the smouldering pyre of Tizca after the Censure Host had done with it Trees made charcoal sketches of themselves clawed at the sky. This had been a living world, but all had burned to slag.

And then I saw that fragments of armour lay amid the ash. The paint had burned away and the ceramite was discoloured purple by the heat of its unmaking. A pauldron lay close by my feet that retained some of its colour. I knew I was asleep and I knew what I would see if I were to pick it up, but the logic of dreams compelled me to bend over, and fish the guard from the filth. I was a spectator to actions undertaken by some other agency.