Breathless and disgusted, Uriel and Pasanius clambered from the atrium and crawled away from the false seductions of the warp, the feelings of sickness diminishing the further they went.
Uriel looked up, coughing stringy, vomit-flecked spittle and said, 'Thank you, my friend.'
Pasanius nodded and said, 'There. The entrance to the gymnasia should be through that cloister!'
'Aye, it should be,' agreed Uriel pushing himself weakly to his feet. 'Let's just hope it is still there.'
Uriel stumbled through the cloister and turned towards the entrance to the gymnasia.
'Oh no…' he whispered as he saw what lay before him.
Where he had expected to find the carven marble archway of the gymnasia, there was now a gargantuan gateway of brazen metal: bronze and laced with razorwire that led into a rectangular, earthen arena which was fully a kilomette wide and twice that in length. More incredible still, there was no roof to this arena, simply a lacerated crimson sky, flecked with cancerous, melanoma clouds. What new madness was this?
Screaming, mad and insane like the wails of the damned in torment, echoed from within and pierced Uriel's skull with lancing, glass shards of pain.
His stomach knotted in horrified disgust as the overpowering reek of fresh blood filled his senses.
The soldiers of the 808th Macragge they had come to find were still here, but where there had once been a proud regiment of men and women ready to fight for the glory of the Emperor, there was now nothing more than the screaming, bloody shreds of those yet to die.
Hundreds of soldiers writhed on the ground, splashing great gouts of blood around them as though fighting some subterranean attacker. Fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth, clawing and grasping at their bodies and dragging them below the surface. Uriel ran through the gate, sword in hand, and felt his boots sink into the soft and loamy ground, crimson liquid oozing from the waterlogged earth.
Bones and grinning skulls gleamed whitely through the red earth and Uriel saw that the ground was not waterlogged at all, but flooded with fresh-spilled blood.
His mind reeled at the prospect. How many must have been drained of their life's blood to irrigate such a vast space so thoroughly? How many arteries had been emptied to slake the vile thirst of this dark, dark earth?
Uriel was shaken from his disgust by the nearby screams of a man half submerged in the earth and weeping tears of agony.
'Help me! For the love of the Emperor help me!' he shrieked.
Uriel sheathed his sword and ran over to help the man, who reached up with pleading arms. The man's gore-slick hands slid from his gauntlets, but Uriel gripped his tunic and hauled him clear of the ground, staggering back in horror as he saw that the man had been stripped of flesh below the waist, his entire lower body flensed of muscle, meat and blood. Even as he watched, the hungry earth swallowed what remained of the dying man, unwilling to be cheated of its fleshy morsel.
A sense of utter helplessness filled Uriel as he watched men and women devoured by the bloody ground, the monstrous sound of marrow being suckled from the bone echoing from the monolithic sides of this gory arena.
'Blessed Emperor, no!' wailed Pasanius, fighting to save a howling woman from a similar fate. Laughing shadows ran like black mercury along the walls of the arena, a capering dance of souls that flared into the blood-red sky as the slaughter of thousands concluded.
A sudden silence descended upon the arena as the last of the bloody ground's helpless victims were dragged beneath its thirsting depths. No sooner had the last body vanished from sight, when a throaty gurgling erupted from the centre of the arena and Uriel saw a long strip of rockcrete slowly rise from the soaking ground. Dull, bloody rail tracks arose with it, running across the middle of the arena and ending at opposite walls.
The hateful silence was broken by a sibilant moaning, as of a thousand voices trapped in a nightmare they know they will never wake from.
'Holy Emperor, protect us from evil, grant us the strength of spirit and body to fight your enemies and smite them with your blessing,' prayed Pasanius.
'Too late,' whispered Uriel, drawing his sword and standing ready to fight whatever new monstrosity the warp might unleash. 'We failed.'
No… you have not yet begun…
Both Uriel and Pasanius spun, searching for the source of the voice.
'Did you hear that?' said Uriel.
'Aye,' nodded Pasanius, 'I think so, but it felt… felt as though it was inside my head. Something terrible is coming, Uriel.'
'I know. But whatever comes, we will fight it with courage and honour.'
'Courage and honour,' agreed Pasanius, firing the igniters on the nozzle of his flamer.
'Let's go,' said Uriel grimly, nodding towards the dripping platform in the centre of the arena. 'Whatever is coming, we'll meet it head on!'
Pasanius followed his former captain as they made their way across the hideously squelching ground towards the platform.
As they mounted its steps, the source of the sibilant moaning was finally revealed.
Each sleeper laid between the rail tracks was a jigsaw of bodies and limbs, writhing in agony and knotted together by some dark sorcery. They screamed in lunatic delirium, their voices piteous and heartbreaking. Though he knew none of the faces, the cast of their features told Uriel that they were of the stock of Ultramar and that the souls of those consumed by this abominable place were suffering still.
Eyes and mouths churning in the fluid matter of each sleeper gave anguished voice to their suffering before being forced from form to formlessness that another soul might vent its endless purgatory.
Uriel's hatred swelled within him at such horror and he closed his eyes…
Splintering crystals of alternate existences clash and jangle, detaching from the walls of one plane and shifting their position to resonate at a different frequency. Echoes in time allow the planes to shift and change: altering the angles of reality to allow the dimensions to unlock, dancing in a ballet of all possibilities.
…then opened them as he felt a sickening vibration deep in his bones and a restlessness ripple through the air. The jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground retreated into its sanguineous depths and the moaning sleepers wept with renewed anguish.
Where the rail tracks vanished into the walls of this vast courtyard, streamers of multi-coloured matter were oozing from the stonework.
Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the mortar, twisting the image behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming skulls sent out to die.
Warped realms, a universe and lifetimes distant, flow together, joining all points in time on the bronze blood-tracks. On a journey that leads everywhere and begins nowhere, the Omphalos Daemonium pushes itself from nothingness to form. Snaking from its daemonic womb and leaving nothing but barren rape and death in its wake.
And the Omphalos Daemonium came.
Though the cenobite had raved of the might and power of the Omphalos Daemonium's evil, they had been but the merest hints of the thing's diabolical majesty. Roaring from the newly formed tunnel mouth like a brazen juggernaut of the end times, the Omphalos Daemonium shrieked along the bloodtracks towards the horrified Space Marines.
Vast bone-pistons drove it forward, iron and steel flanks heaving with immaterial energies. Bloody steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of tortured souls ground the tracks beneath it to feast on the oozing blood of the dead earth.