The ceramite was crumbly in my hand, so I turned it over gingerly. On the other side, burned almost to invisibility, was a snarling wolf's head, as I expected.

'I dropped the plate. It shattered into fragments upon the ground. Flakes of ceramite blew away on the wind. Again, as is the way with dreams, I noted only then that the bones were not those of ordinary men, but of the Legiones Astartes.

'My warriors were dead around me by the hundreds, if not the thousands. The realisation of it pricked out more detail for me, and I saw many suits of broken armour, and wolf skulls atop men's bodies.' Russ was troubled. He no longer looked upon Kva, but stared off at sights lodged in his memory.

'What battlefield it was, I do not know. The identity of the enemy was also hidden from me. As it turned out, the scene was only a stage for what was to come.

'The sun rose past the level of the clouds, and the land was cast into darkness. I was seized by a terrible foreboding. A black wind blew, blasting up the ashes of the dead and whirling them into my face so that I tasted the burned meat of them. Within the wind a dire howling sounded.'

'The sound of the wolf can be a good or bad omen in a dream like this,' said Kva.

'It was a bad omen,' insisted Russ. 'Louder and more harrowing than the call of the greatest of the lone wolf kings. A second howl joined the first, twinned with it, singing in chorus. It was a challenge, and a portent of death.

'From out of the black snow of ash stalked the greatest wolf I have ever seen. It was as large as an Imperial Knight, two-headed, with burning red eyes and a burning red mouth. It came towards me, and I knew it was there to kill me. Who else could it have been, but Morkai? The great wolf itself, the world ender. I set the spear and prepared to do battle. He did not disappoint me.

'We fought, Morkai and I, for an age. His breath was the thunder, his teeth the lightning. I was the fury of the tempest. The ground shook at our battle, the sky boiled and fire stabbed down wherever I struck. His eyes blazed, his jaws snapped, but I was never where his blows landed. I moved with such speed, I danced, Kva. I danced with the spear and with death!'

'Did you wound him, my lord?'

Russ picked up the ewer, and made a face of annoyance when he found it empty. He put it down.