The adept's skin greyed and his entire body dissolved into a fine golden dust, leaving only his aged robes to fall to the rocky floor. Dalia looked over at the hulking servitor that had accompanied the adept and was not surprised when it also disintegrated into dust.

Such a sight would normally have shocked Dalia, but she felt nothing beyond a detached sense of completeness at the adept's dissolution.

'Dalia,' said Severine, and she turned to see her friend looking directly at her, a look of manic desperation knotting her features as tears of grief and horror spilled down her cheeks.

Severine smiled weakly, looking up at the distant cavern roof, and said, 'You brought me the Dragon, Dalia, but I wish you hadn't.'

'Wait,' said Dalia as Severine stepped towards the drop only a foot behind her.

'It's a mercy, I think, that we can't normally see the terrible things that hide in the darkness or know how frail our reality really is,' wept Severine. 'I'm sorry… but if you could see as I now see, you would do the same as I.'

Severine stepped off the ledge.

3.04

First Captain Sigismund of the Imperial Fists watched as yet more metal-skinned containers were borne skyward on Fabricator Locum Kane's gigantic Tsiolkovsky towers towards the container ships in orbit The enormous structures were working at full capacity, and it still wasn't fast enough, for his ship masters had just informed him of an enemy force closing in from the north-east: infantry, armour, skitarii and at least two Legios' worth of engines.

It seemed Mondus Occulum's privileged status was at an end.

Nothing of this mission to Mars had panned out the way it was supposed to, and Sigismund felt his anger gnawing at his bounds of control. Camba-Diaz and the Jovian regiments were embroiled in a fight for their lives at Mondus Gamma, and the Saturnine companies tasked with breaking the siege at Ipluvien Maximal's forge had been repeatedly turned back by the horrifyingly altered weapon-creatures of the Dark Mechanicum.

Sigismund marched through the precisely organised ballet of servitors, loaders and speeding lifters carrying racks of armour and bolters, seeing the elegant form of the Fabricator Locum directing the work of his menials with calmly efficient waves of freshly-implanted manip arms.

Dust storms billowing in from the wastelands beyond the collapsed caldera of Uranius Patera rendered the gold of Sigismund's battle plate ochre and stained the black and white of his personal heraldry, yet he was no less impressive a figure for such blemishes.

A host of similarly armoured warriors moved with the methodical precision for which the Imperial Fists were famed, working alongside mobs of Kane's bulky lifter servitors to secure as much of the armour and weapon supplies as they could.

Sigismund's companies had descended upon Mondus Occulum not knowing whether they would have to fight to secure the forge, and it was a relief to find that the Fabricator Locum still held true to the Throne of Terra.

Even Sigismund had been grudgingly impressed by the efforts made by Kane to ensure the smooth transfer of supplies from his forge to the ships anchored at the tops of the Tsiolkovsky towers. As impressive as Kane's efforts were, Sigismund knew they would be forced to leave the bulk of the materiel produced here behind.

Kane turned at the sound of Sigismund's footfalls, a weary smile on his smooth face.

'First captain?' said Kane. 'Have you heard from Camba-Diaz? How goes the fighting at Mondus Gamma?'

'Desperate,' admitted Sigismund. 'Camba-Diaz has secured the armour forges and the ammunition silos, but his company is outnumbered a hundred to one. The traitor Chrom's forces are pushing him back to the landing fields and his losses are grievous. We will not be able to hold the forge, but a great deal of essential supplies have been secured for transit to Terra.'

'Chrom's skitarii always were brutal things,' said Kane, shaking his head in wonder that things had come to this. 'And the number of his robot maniples is considerable.'

Sigismund felt his gauntlet curl around the grip of his bolter. 'Aye, and it offends me that such mindless machines spill the blood of Astartes. But enough of Camba-Diaz, how close are you to completing the evacuation of armour and weapons from here?'

'The work proceeds,' said Kane. 'Already we have shipped over twelve thousand suits of Mark IV armour and twice as many weapons.'

'I will be blunt, Kane,' said Sigismund. 'It must go faster. We have little time left to us.'

'I assure you we are going as fast as we can, first captain.'

'Yet still it must be faster,' stated Sigismund. 'Orbital tracks show a sizeable force of enemy troops moving in from the north-east. They may be upon us any minute.'

Kane's eyes flickered as he inloaded the feeds from the surveyor systems of the ships in orbit, and his manip arms clenched as he saw the size of the force converging on his forge.

'Two Legios!' exclaimed Kane. 'Over sixty engines!'

'And the rest,' said Sigismund.

'Those banners,' said Kane, haptically sorting the wealth of feeds from those satellites still in orbit around Mars. 'They belong to Urtzi Malevolus. Damn, but there's a lot of them. Can you hold against that many, first captain? We must save Mondus Occulum!'

Sigismund hesitated before answering, his desire to wreak a bloody vengeance on the heads of those who rebelled against the Emperor warring with the mission his primarch had given him of securing the armour and weapons of Kane's forge.

He sighed. 'No, we cannot. The forces arrayed against us are too many and my orders do not allow for futile gestures of defiance.'

'Futile defiance?' exclaimed Kane. 'This is my forge we're talking about. What could be less futile than defending the very place that fabricates the armour that shields you and the weapons you bear?'

Sigismund shook his head. 'I don't have time to debate this with you, Kane. Speed up the loading by whatever means you can, but within the hour we must be away or we will not be leaving at all. Do you understand that simple fact?'

'I understand,' snapped Kane. 'But you must understand that if Mondus Occulum and Mondus Gamma fall, you will have no way of replenishing the combat losses you will sustain in any meaningful way.'

Sigismund was about to reply when one of the Tsiolkovsky towers exploded.

The mighty structure spewed fire, and debris fell lazily from the ruptured portion of the tower as metres-thick guys snapped and twanged. Black smoke curled upward from the site of the explosion and a terrible scream of ruptured metal and torn carbon nanotubes rent the air as the tower leaned and bent as though no more substantial than a length of rope.

More explosions boomed skyward on the crater's edge and the echoes of their detonations rolled over the landing fields.

'No more time, Kane,' snarled Sigismund. 'They have range on us already.'

The distant tower came down in a rippling series of crashing detonations, trailing a city's worth of rubble and twisted metal in its wake. Huge manufactories, acres of industrial landscape and forests of towering coolant towers were smashed to pulverised dust as entire worker districts vanished, flattened in an instant by the monstrous weight of debris.

A massive cloud of dust and ash billowed outward from the collapsed tower like the blast wave of an atomic explosion. The ground shook with the force of the impacts, and Sigismund heard secondary detonations as enemy fire began to pound the outlying segments of the forge to destruction.

A thunderous, booming horn-blast echoed across the landing fields, and Sigismund looked up in time to see a host of towering silhouettes emerge from the red-lit smoke of the tower's destruction. Six Warlord Titans, their hulls blackened and scarified, roared in triumph, their weapon arms blazing with apocalyptic fire that reduced towering structures to rubble and entire swathes of infrastructure to little more than vaporised metal.