Across from the dead warrior, Atharva saw Asubha and Subha. The twins lay side by side in death, next to the cloven body of a Legio Custodes warrior. Like Tagore, their chests had also been cut open, and they lay in vast lakes of impossibly bright blood. The temple was lost, and any hope they had of bringing Kai Zulane to the Warmaster was now ashes.

Atharva knew he had only one option left to him, and though it was a monstrously drastic solution, it was the only way he could fight the pariah and prevent what Kai Zulane knew from reaching those who were now his enemies. It was a solution almost as grievous as death, but without making this ultimate sacrifice, he could not fight on. Atharva was a Space Marine, a warrior, and though it was giving up that part of him that made him whole, there was no other choice.

He reached deep inside himself, to the secret place that could look into the Great Ocean and draw on its limitless power. It was a fragile thing, the incalculably precious result of a billion random mutations that had built upon one another over an unimaginably vast span of time. For a frozen instant that lasted an eternity, Atharva wondered whether death would be preferable to being blind for the rest of his life.

‘Only those sacrifices that have worth are meaningful,’ he said, crushing that secret part of his existence and forever severing his connection to the warp.

He screamed in anguish, as no warrior of the Legiones Astartes had ever screamed or ever would again until the last moments of this war, when men would discover the true depths of suffering the universe could inflict upon them.

Atharva was alone, all his carefully-wrought plans in ashes. With nothing left to lose, and with the last shred of power left to him, he reached up to the faceless angel that loomed above him with a vulture’s anticipation. He sensed the gathering anticipation of the neverborn creatures hidden behind its featureless mask, and tore aside the veil that kept them chained within it.

‘Kill them all,’ he commanded. ‘Leave none alive!’

KAI EXPERIENCED ATHARVA’S battle with the pariah through a haze of blurred and overlapping auras. His body was wracked with spasms of pain at its presence, and he fought to hold onto consciousness as its repellent presence turned his stomach inside out. He huddled in the lee of the faceless statue, helpless in the face of the bloodshed that had come to the temple, cradling Roxanne to his chest as a woman he didn’t know did the same with two young boys.

He heard Atharva shout at the statue above him and felt a bone-deep chill as a layer of frost crackled into existence on the smooth dark stone. Kai flinched at the sharp cold, and looked up as he felt the sudden presence of something far worse and infinitely more terrible than any pariah could ever be.

The outline of the Vacant Angel shimmered, as though two of them fought to occupy the same space. Like a pair of overlaid transparencies, they jostled and ran together. Kai saw a host of eyes, fanged mouths and claws press outwards from one of the images. As though the universe could no longer cope with two such competing realities, the wavering outlines snapped apart and the temple was split by a shrieking cry of birth more painful and more joyous than any endured by a mortal newborn.

A ghostly form rose from the Vacant Angel, and though Kai’s blindsight was not yet restored, he saw its form completely. It resembled a tattered giant in spectral robes with a hood that concealed a depthless void in which galaxies went to die and the empty wasteland that could only exist beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Skeletal arms unfolded, and its voluminous robes billowed in howling winds of aetheric energy. A pair of icy white wings furled into existence from its back, cutting streamers of frozen vapour through the air.

Crackling webs of frost formed on the stone walls of the temple, and glass shattered as the temperature plummeted to below zero in an instant. Kai’s breath misted before him and he shivered in terror at the magnificent and terrible creature Atharva had drawn out of the faceless statue.

Its horror touched Kai deeper than any fear he had known, even in his darkest moments aboard the Argo. All the grief, all the suffering, all the unendurable pain and woes given voice in this place had shaped its form, a creature of immaterial energy now coalesced into this monstrous, avenging angel.

Death had been wept into its faceless heart and it had been commanded to unleash that in the most direct way imaginable. The Vacant Angel swept down into the temple with its arms outstretched and a drawn-out shriek of grief exploding from beneath its hood. Kai pressed his hands to his ears as the sound cut into him like a cold knife to the heart.

The Black Sentinels shot at the angel, but nothing so paltry as gunfire could harm such a creature. Bullets passed through its ghostly form and lasblasts simply twitched its form with light as they passed harmlessly through. Men dropped to their knees as it flew at them, driven to madness by even a glimpse of the angel’s hooded face.

The angel’s gaze was death, and wherever it turned its head, soldiers fell to the ground as their hearts froze in their chests. Its scream was an unending lament for the dead, a solemn, piercing hymnal to the futility of life and the inevitability of death. To hear its scream was to feel the cold touch of the grave, and those Black Sentinels who had not already perished turned their weapons on themselves.

Atharva staggered into the lee of the statue, and though he had loosed this terrible angel, Kai saw his aura was grief-stricken, as though he had lost that which meant most to him in all the world. Even through the haze of the pariah’s presence, Kai could see that was exactly what had happened.

Atharva was no longer psychic.

‘What did you do?’ gasped Kai, his breath misting before him.

‘What I had to,’ said Atharva, as Kai felt Roxanne stir. Kai turned his horrified gaze from the warrior of the Thousand Sons to the girl cradled in his arms. She lifted her head, but before she could take in the full horror of the daemonic avatar at loose, Kai turned her head away.

‘Don’t look at it,’ he said, and she knew enough to listen.

‘What is it?’ she asked, keeping her eyes tightly shut.

‘It’s death,’ said Kai, knowing that was only half the truth.

He felt movement beside him, and turned as Palladis Novandio walked out into the chaos of the temple’s destruction. The sanctuary he had built from the ashes of his own grief was a charnel house, a tomb for the living and a dreadful mirror of what he had tried to achieve.

‘Palladis! What are you doing?’ yelled Kai.

‘What I must,’ he wept as he marched toward the angel laying waste to the living.

‘I told you to take me!’ screamed Palladis. ‘Take me and begone!’

The angel was hovering just below the shattered remains of the temple’s roof, its aetheric form bathed in the hellish light of the fires burning beneath it. The darkness beneath its hood flickered, as though the angel recognised something of its creation in the man approaching it.

The creature descended through the air with its arms spread wide, leaving a glittering trail of frozen moisture in its wake. Its keening lament grew sharper, and Kai could only watch in horror as its shimmering, icy wings began to wrap Palladis Novandio in a macabre embrace.

‘Palladis, please!’ screamed Roxanne as she saw what he was doing. ‘Come back!’

The master of the temple turned at the sound of her voice, but made no move to escape the angel’s clutches.

‘It’s alright, Roxanne,’ he said, as the wings closed upon him. ‘I’ll be with them now…’

Like the soldiers before him, Palladis Novandio slumped to the floor of the temple, dead in an instant and his soul now free to join his lost family.