Bodies are heaped around Fell's corpse: cultist warriors, their bodies cut open and emptied. They are staged in poses of devotion, arms chained to the spike-topped staff upon which Fell is impaled, mouths slack with praise, eyes stitched open in adoration.

'What's that he's stuck with?' asks Selaton. 'It's different from the others. That symbol...'

'I saw the same thing over and over again,' says Sydance. 'I'd always thought it was some kind of unit marking. A load of the rabble we broke through to get to you at Numinus carried staves just like it.'

'No,' says Eikos Lamiad. 'It is not a unit marking, not as we understand it. It is a totem, an icon of their new masters. As we still carry the aquila, our enemies now carry this. They call it the Octed.'

Ventanus feels a spasm of revulsion at the word. He looks at the staff, its thick, inscribed haft and eight radiating spoke blades mirroring the arrangement of the dead Word Bearers. He has seen enemy champions carrying this symbol before them, brandishing it like a holy relic.

'We should get out of here,' says Ventanus. 'Let Tawren's guns level this place.'

Foedral Fell's head snaps up and his lipless sneer pulls tight over his skull.

'Guns won't save you now,' says a bleak voice that tears from the corpse before a froth of tar-black fluid vomits from its mouth onto the corpses at its feet. 'The Neverborn are coming for you all...'

The Ultramarines step back from the pit, revolted and shocked. Foedral Fell's body spasms a series of bone-snapping convulsions that would surely have killed him had any life remained in him. The Word Bearer dances in his impalement as a tidal wave of black bilious fluid, noxious and viscous, continues to pour from his mouth.

It is an impossible amount, more than a body could possibly contain. It squirts from his eyes and ears. It flows from his nose and jets from his mouth like a pressurised hose. The pit fills with piceous fluid, a seething cesspool of the darkest corruption. Foedral Fell's skull is now fully submerged, but Ventanus can still hear his gleeful mantra.

The Neverborn are coming...

The Neverborn are coming...

Only the bladed finial of the Octed staff remains above the oily liquid. Inky smoke coils from its spiked tips. Ropes of it writhe like mating serpents, spreading overhead like a veil of shadows, reaching out to the impaled corpses spread throughout the fane.

'Back!' cries Ventanus, now understanding that they have been lured into a trap; the very doctrines that saved them from destruction now turned against them. 'Get to your vehicles and withdraw. Go! Now!'

The pit bubbles over, the protoplasmic black ooze spreading over the bloody ground like an unstopped oil well. Bubbles of unnatural matter form and burst, carrying the stink of the charnel house and the buzz of a million corpse-eating flies.

The Neverborn are coming...

The Ultramarines retreat in good order from the growing pool of darkness at the heart of the chamber. A miasma of black smoke fills the temple, the vile breath of corrupt and daemonic gods.

The Neverborn are coming for you all...

And the dead warriors of Foedral Fell open eyes of blackest night.

XXVIII.

Hol Beloth steps away from the Dark Apostle as he sees the curling horn was not some ornamentation wrought upon his helm, but a part of Maloq Kartho's skull. The ridged appendage of bone extrudes from a swollen mass of necrotised tissue, veined with blood and coated with sticky, foul-smelling fluid.

Nor is that the only change in Maloq Kartho's appearance.

His skin has taken on a rugose quality and his eyes are now opaque orbs of sickly orange.

'Do you know Sorot Tchure?' asks Kartho, his mouth a rip across a yellow skull. His lips are bloody where serrated, triangular teeth have torn them. 'He understands many of the hidden truths of the universe, not at least of which is the power of betrayal. He knows something of the potency of its impact in the immaterial realm. To betray a friend is one thing, a trusted friend even more so. He took that lesson to heart when he began this.'

Hol Beloth had heard the name, a whisper of one destined for great things.

'But Lord Aurelian taught me that to betray a brother... ah, now that holds the greatest power of all,' continues Kartho. 'Their screams were like the Phoenician's sweetest wine, their blood a baptism richer than any rained down by Angron himself. Fell was the greatest prize, a warrior whose dreams were on the very cusp of being realised when they were snatched away. Such towering desire unmade and dashed before his very eyes...'

Kartho gurgles with laughter at the memory.

Hol Beloth's hand slides around the grip of his sword.

'Fell is gone,' says Kartho, 'but you can still claim what he desired.'

'Why should I trust you?'

'Because you have no choice,' says Kartho, pointing towards the horizon with a hand that looks a lot less like a hand with every passing moment.

'Watch the melodrama of the universe at play,' says Kartho as a darkly radiant light erupts on the horizon. Hol Beloth lifts a gauntlet to shield himself from the new sun that boils up in a mushrooming cloud of atomic fire. He knows where that sun has touched down and scorched the world to glass.

'What have you done?' he gasps.

The Dark Apostle does not answer, dropping to one knee and gasping in dark rapture.

'What have you done?' demands Hol Beloth again.

'The old beliefs pass away, and a great light shows us the way,' says Kartho, looking up at him with a predatory grin as he quotes from the Book of Lorgar. 'Now brace yourself.'

Horrified, Hol Beloth can only shake his head.

'For what?' he asks.

'A fall.'

XXIX.

The conference chamber of the Ultimus is a hair's breadth from panic. There was no warning, no hint of yet another disaster, but when it came it was as sudden and shocking as the moment the Word Bearers first opened fire.

Another underground shelter is gone, transformed into a seething atomic cauldron of death. Even without the geo-sats, Arcology X's surface augurs are more than able to read the unimaginable spike of radioactive energy from the west. Picters and rad-counters combine their data on the plotting table, and Tawren watches as the towering pyrocumulus of fire-lit smoke takes shape on the western horizon.

'The Emperor protects,' weeps Captain Ullyet, clutching at something hung around his neck. 'He is the Light and the Way.'

'We just lost another one, didn't we?' says Hamadri, gripping the edge of the plotter tightly as the first shockwaves transmitted through the lithosphere shake the walls of the Ultimus.

Tawren nods, too busy sifting the myriad inloads from her linked surveyors and augurs. Orbital scans combine with surface readings to build a more complete picture of what they have just lost.

A bone-deep rumble fills the room as the surface of Calth is wrenched and torn by the force of what Tawren now understands is a subterranean detonation powerful enough to have ripped its way to the surface. These are just the first shockwaves racing from the blast; there will be worse to come.

'Which one?' asks Ullyet, the steel in his voice unwavering as dust and shards of ceiling tiles fall to the floor in a clatter of stone fragments. 'Magnesi? Gabrinius? Which one, damn it?'

His lapse into catechism has passed and he is barking orders like a soldier again.

'Triangulating now,' says Tawren.

The image of the atomic storm cloud fades from the plotter and a base-level topographical map of Calth's surface takes its place. Data coheres, readings correlate. An icon to the west begins to blink furiously.

Hamadri and Ullyet look up in puzzlement, but Tawren is just as surprised.

'Uranik Radial,' she says, as though not yet ready to believe her own incontrovertible data conclusion. 'It's gone. Destroyed.'

'But...' begins Ullyet.

'That's Hol Beloth,' finishes Hamadri as the main blast wave hits Arcology X.

XXX.

They haul themselves from the spikes impaling them to the ground. Armour splits, dead flesh tears. Ventanus doesn't see any blood pour from the huge holes in their bodies. Any fluid left in them has long since curdled in their veins. They move stiffly, as though they have forgotten how to walk.

Or they're just learning.

The Neverborn. Ventanus does not know the term, but he immediately understands its substance. These are the fleshless horrors the Word Bearers brought forth from the warp. Nightmarish xenos things from a dimension shut away from the eyes of humanity for good reason. They look out from dead men's skulls and he feels their insatiable hunger.

He doesn't need to issue an order. The horror of the situation demands individual response.

Bolter fire rips through the reanimated Word Bearers, each one bleeding black smoke from the exploded meat of their bodies. Wounds sufficient to put down two legionaries barely slow them. They come on with limbs hanging off, bones shattered.

The warriors in red crash against the warriors in blue, all adaption complete. These are no sluggish revenants, but warriors as strong and fast in death as they were in life. The numbers are nothing like even, but the daemon things squatting in the Word Bearers' skulls do not take up their hosts' weapons to fight. Claws and teeth are their killing tools, not guns. An eternity of war in a timeless dimension has seen to that.

It is the only advantage the Ultramarines have.

Ventanus shoots with pinpoint accuracy. None of his shots are wasted.

Kill shots to the head every time.

Inside every skull a squalling mass of shrieking darkness, solid and gelatinous. A daemonic parasite taken up residence in the body of a dead man that vanishes in a screaming implosion of displaced matter. He shoots until the hammer strikes an empty chamber, ejects the magazine and reloads with a fluid economy of motion. He shoots until his last magazine is expended and then draws his power sword.

The Neverborn throw themselves at him, driven by desperate hunger and loathing. Ventanus sees the hatred in their dead eyes and does not know what he has done to earn it. His sword cuts through armour made heavy without power. Kinetic shock travels up his arm with every blow, but he is energised and ready for this fight.

He came here to kill Word Bearers and, damn it, that is what he will do.

The Neverborn are not silent. They scream as they claw at the Ultramarines and they shriek as they die. Their cries are tormented, but Ventanus has no pity left in him. Not for himself and certainly not for the Word Bearers.

Strobing flashes of gunfire light the dark umbra spreading overhead.

Ventanus and Sydance fight back to back. Both have exhausted their stock of ammunition.

'A few more than twelve this time,' grunts Sydance as he hacks his chainsword down through a Word Bearer's collarbone and sternum with a two-handed grip.

'You mean thirteen,' says Ventanus.

'No, only ever twelve,' replies Sydance with a grin.

Ventanus understands that grin.

They are brothers and they are equals, and there is a purity to this fight. There are no lofty ideals at stake, no grand strategy in play. It is simple life or death, and there is something to be said for such simplicity.

Ventanus cuts heads from shoulders, opens chests and hacks legs from hips. His blade is always in motion. He employs every move he knows to stay alive; those learned from the blademasters of Macragge and those picked up in a lifetime of desperate brawls in almost two hundred years of war.

Telemechrus slaughters the Word Bearers by the dozen. His assault cannon shreds bodies into their constituent atoms and renders even a corpse warrior unable to fight. They claw at his body, beating broken fists to pulp against his casket. The Contemptor relishes this melee, fighting alongside Eikos of the Arm and his Shield Bearers.

The Tetrarch of Konor is no less lethal with only the one fighting limb. He has fired his pistol empty and kills with the precise strokes of a master fencer. He too has learned the lesson that the only way to put the enemy down for good is to make the decapitating strike.

Selaton and his squads are carrying the banner towards the arched portal through which they entered. He is not withdrawing, he is clearing a corridor for the rest of them to use.

Ventanus shouts the order to fall back.

Something huge and crimson slams into him, knocking him to the ground. He rolls as an armoured boot slams down. He swings his sword for the warrior's centre-mass, but the blade clashes against the bladed Octed finial of a rune-inscribed staff.

'Death has come to you,' says Foedral Fell, still skewered.

'Death will come when I'm good and ready,' answers Ventanus.

XXXI.

The world spins. Up becomes down and the ground falls away from Hol Beloth.

The starscraper, already on the brink of collapse, needed only a nudge to come crashing down. The blast wave from the cyclonic warhead's detonation at Uranik Radial shatters what uneasy arrangement of vectors still holds it erect. Its foundations break apart and the structural members at its base buckle like wire in the face of the pounding shockwave.

Ten floors collapse in an instant, blown away like dust in a hurricane.

The building slumps, its own weight crushing it and dragging it down.

Hol Beloth grabs onto an exposed rebar, but it won't be enough to save him. His stomach lurches and he feels momentarily weightless. He hears Kartho's crazed laughter over the crescendo of shattering steel and exploding permacrete. Floor slabs snap like tinder and plasteel stanchions capable of holding up a building kilometres high unravel like twine.

Debris cascades around him, battering him and threatening to tear him from his handhold. The building itself wants to murder him, but he won't let it. Hol Beloth has to stay alive long enough to kill Maloq Kartho.

The sky falls away. Through a break in the flooring slab that was once over a thousand metres above ground, he sees the surface of the world opening up.

Wide chasms rip jagged traceries through Lanshear's outskirts. Hair-fine fault lines tear open and abyssal canyons gape like gateways to the underworld. Vast clouds of dust and smoke jet into the sky in a cloud to match that above the fiery crater that once housed his army.

Hol Beloth can see nothing of the world around him.

Everything is noise and fire, dust and impacts.

Then he hits the ground. The starscraper doesn't stop.

Metres-thick columns smash through the surface of Calth like piledrivers slammed down by an angry god. The starscraper's colossal mass and momentum plunge it through the rock like a sword thrust. Hundreds of metres down, previously unknown cave voids are broken into. Unconnected galleries and sinkholes appearing on no map are suddenly open to the sky.

Hol Beloth sees nothing of this. Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes cascade down into the revealed cave systems. He is a speck of mortal flesh in a hurricane of aeons-old rock. The plates of his armour shatter like glass. Bones break and he feels the shock of furnace heat as his biological repair mechanisms fight to keep him alive.

He loses his grip on the rebar and drops through a storm of bludgeoning rock.

He falls, spinning downwards from impact to impact. Blood fills his helmet, threatening to drown him. He slams into a rock wall and it is torn away. He cannot see anything but darkness and a blitzing torrent of debris. Steel and glass fall with him in a shimmering rain.

Over the unending fury of deafening noise, Hol Beloth still hears the maddening laughter of the Dark Apostle.