All he could feel was pain and all he could hear were heavy thumps of artillery impacting somewhere above him. He sat up, feeling a stinging in his eyes and reached up to the vacuum seals on his armour's gorget. They were cracked and useless, so he wrenched his helmet off, realising that he wasn't blind after all, but simply had clotted lumps of blood in his eyes.

Honsou scooped the clumps of sticky matter from his face and spat out a mouthful of dirt.

He wiped his face again, angry that he still couldn't see out of one eye. As he probed further he realised there a was good reason for this. Part of his head had been pulverised by the impact of the bolt round, and the left side of his face was a burned and bloody ruin, his eye a glutinous, fused mess.

Dizziness and nausea swamped him, but he put his silver arm out to steady himself, giving a short bark of laughter as he saw that it was smooth and unblemished despite the fury of the battles he had fought since it had been grafted to him.

'Damn you, Ventris, that's twice you've blinded me with my own blood.'

Honsou clambered to his knees, trying to piece the last few moments of the battle together. He remembered facing Ventris, and the Ultramarines' desperate charge that had ended in a hail of bolter fire.

Or, at least, it should have ended that way. The luck of the damned was with them and they had survived long enough to kill a pair of his warriors. As foolishly heroic as their charge had been, it had bought them moments at best.

But then the monsters had attacked.

Honsou still felt a shiver of revulsion as he thought back to their unimaginable hideousness. Their corpses were strewn all around him and as he pulled himself free of the rubble that buried his legs and swayed unsteadily to his feet, he was amazed that such incredibly abhorrent creatures could live.

He had heard of the Unfleshed, but had never dreamed they could have been so fearsome as to almost be his undoing.

The last thing he remembered was catching a snapshot of Ventris aiming a bolter for his head and twisting to get out of the way. Honsou remembered seeing the muzzle flash, a sensation of bright, burning pain in his face, then… then nothing until this moment.

'Iron within!' he shouted.

There was no answer and he knew that all the warriors who had accompanied him to the Halls of the Savage Morticians were dead. He put them from his mind and admiringly surveyed the destruction around him.

Nothing remained of the chamber, its entire structure laid waste by the daemonic battle and the continuous bombardment from Toramino's grand batteries.

A flash of movement caught his eye and he picked up his axe before making his way unsteadily towards its source. An Iron Warrior, trapped beneath the half-devoured corpse of another, moaned in pain.

Honsou lifted the body from the buried Iron Warrior and saw that it was his newest lieutenant, Cadaras Grendel. The armour of the warrior's legs had been torn away and great bites had ripped away a chunk of his quadriceps muscle.

'Still alive, Cadaras Grendel?' said Honsou.

'Aye,' replied the warrior. 'I don't die easily. Help me up.'

Honsou reached down and pulled Cadaras Grendel to his feet. The grim-faced killer retrieved his weapon from the ground and checked its action before saying. 'It's over then?'

Honsou shrugged. 'Maybe. I don't know. It looks like it, though.'

Cadaras Grendel nodded. 'What about Toramino?'

'What about him?'

'I still want to kill him.'

'Don't we all?' said Honsou, looking through a great rent torn in the side of the mountain. Blue fire still hammered his fortress from the sorcerous towers that surrounded it. Toramino's artillery captains were thorough, thought Honsou, to have broken open a mountain.

He turned towards a gleaming pile of twitching metal lying beside the entrance to the passageway that had led to the elevator cage. Recognising a discarded set of bronze claws that lay beside the pile, he strode over towards the jumble of metal.

As he drew closer he saw that it was no simple debris, but the still-living remains of his champion. Onyx lay twitching on the ground, his black armour cracked and shorn from his body, his daemonic flesh ripped from the metal of his skeleton by the monsters.

The daemonic symbiote's immaterial flesh had housed a scion of the warp and without a body, it had been cast from its shell. All that remained of Honsou's champion was a collection of loosely connected, silvered limbs, brass pistons and a bronze skull with a slowly dulling silver light weeping from the eye-sockets.

'Are you in there, Onyx?' asked Honsou.

'For now,' answered Onyx, his voice little more than a rasping whisper.

'What happened to you?'

'The monsters…' hissed the creature, only just holding off its dissolution. 'They unfleshed me, gave the daemon in me nowhere to hide. It fled and left me like this…'

Cadaras Grendel joined Honsou and said, 'This the daemon thing you wanted me to watch out for?'

'Aye,' nodded Honsou.

'Don't look like much now.'

'No, he doesn't, does he?' said Honsou, turning away and limping towards the centre of the chamber.

'What you want me to do with it?' shouted Cadaras Grendel after his retreating back.

'Get rid of it,' said Honsou with a dismissive wave.

He clambered painfully over the many piles of rabble and bodies that littered the cavern, hearing the hot flash of Cadaras Grendel's melta gun and knowing that Onyx was no more.

The centre of the cavern looked like the epicentre of some great orbital bombardment, the ground torn up and gouged with the fury of the battle that had taken place. Bodies and wreckage filled the place, so smashed and unrecognisable as to give no clue as to what they had been in life.

A shorn suit of power armour, gigantic in its proportions, lay at the edge of a deep crater and before it lay the Heart of Blood. The massive daemon's body was a dull, smouldering red, the colour of threatening embers that can leap to life in an instant. Its chest heaved with sated lust and as Honsou watched, the fiery streaks of its veins pulsed with renewed life.

The axe lying next to the daemon was twice as tall as Honsou and though he knew it was unfeasible, he felt an undeniable urge to try and lift it. His own axe growled in his hand and he knew that it was the daemonic presence within the Heart of Blood's weapon that was calling to him.

Honsou marched over to the Heart of Blood's recumbent body and delivered a thunderous boot to its horned skull.

'Come on!' he yelled. 'You are free now, and there are sorcerers to kill! Up!'

The daemon's lava-hot veins flared and its eyes flickered open, a soulless white fire, like dying suns, burning from its skull. Shaking off the satiety of its victorious engorgement, the Heart of Blood raised itself to its full height, its gargantuan axe and whip leaping to its great, taloned hands.

'That's better,' snarled Honsou as the daemon towered above him.

'Who dares rouse me from my blood-reverie?' bellowed the daemon.

'I am Honsou. Half-breed. Master of Khalan-Ghol.'

The colossal daemon loomed over Honsou, but he stood his ground, determined that he would show no fear before this creature.

'You are touched by the warp,' said the Heart of Blood. 'You have been flesh for one of my kind.'

Honsou nodded. 'Yes, I was once briefly blessed with the touch of a daemon of Chaos.'

'I still smell sorcery upon this place,' growled the daemon.

'You do,' said Honsou. 'My enemies wield powerful magicks against me and seek to destroy my fortress.'

'You are the master of this place?'

'For the moment, yes,' confirmed Honsou.

'Where are these enemies that stoop to the use of foul sorcery?' demanded the daemon.