Quintus may as well have been a snowball from so far away. Now, looking down upon it from a viewport aboard the Coldbreed, the world seemed so harmless and innocent. So far from the hell that had accosted us upon its surface. And was Rannek the only survivor of the Iron Warriors down there? He was the only one he knew about, but that did not mean anything. There could have been more, and I was all but certain other daemons lurked in the coldest reaches of the planet’s snowy storms.

Thankfully the planet had already been evacuated and stripped of salvageable resources, so the Exterminatus I had ordered of the ice-covered rock could be carried out quick. It would bring me as much peace to know Quintus was no more as it would provide the security that any daemons that had survived The Atticus’s crash would subsequently be eradicated in Divine Hellfire. “And there were no daemonic incursions on any of our vessels?” I asked then.

“No, Cal, there were not,” Silas answered from behind me while I continued to look on toward Quintus. It would be some hours yet before the planet was eradicated, but still, the world beckoned my gaze.

“But as you described of your own struggles,” Captain Caleb Vakian observed, “we, too, have lost the means for Astropathic communication. The Choir, they say, has gone silent.”

“What of the Navigators?” I asked the group behind me.

“Sir?” Caleb answered.

“The Navigators? Have they peered into the Warp, looked for the Light?” I clarified, turning about and facing my retinue.

“We have not tried to Warp, sir, not without you. They likely have not looked beyond,” Caleb explained. “I can have them do so, sir, if you so desire.”

“Please do. Bring some guards with you, however. And by some I mean many. Daemons do not just…manifest,” I suggested, shuddering at the word as I stepped up to everyone, a curved desk being the sole thing keeping us separate. A few reports were scattered along the desk, but not many; little information had come in to be processed since the Event. That is what we were calling the fall of The Atticus, and every oddity that coincided with it. The Event. “No, I suspect there is a risk, now, that when one looks into the Warp they now more than ever risk pulling something back with them. Why, how, I cannot say. Something, someone, has done this. It has either been done to us, to this fleet, or more widely. We must discern which it is, and fast. Go then, Captain. See what the Navigators can figure out.”

“Very well, Inquisitor,” Caleb agreed before departing from the room.

“There have been nightmares,” Castecael reported then, after Caleb had gone. I nodded. Her report still rested on my desk. “A substantial increase in night terrors amidst all staff, coinciding with the Event. If this is a psychic disturbance from the Warp, Cal, it is of a scale the likes of which I have not encountered before. Not even on Thantalus.”

“Whoever it may be that has assailed us so, I am quite certain that assessment is correct, yes,” I agreed, as did a few others among my retinue.

“May I?” Zha asked, raising her hand to speak.

“Please,” I smiled. Our crew was civil enough to be a bit beyond raising our hands, yet the savant among us—who was the youngest, but still more than a century old by now—was, for her trade, more academic in the way she carried herself.

“The Eye of Terror is expanding following the Event,” Zha asserted. “It is hard to make out how, and impossible to discern why. But its visible influence is growing. And that isn’t something that should happen.”

“No, the Emperor has thus far kept it at bay well enough, so something has indeed changed,” I agreed.

“I think you misunderstand me, Mr. Blackgar,” Zha suggested. “I-I don’t mean it shouldn’t happen in the theological sense, but in the temporal one. We’re closer than most of the galaxy to the Eye of Terror, but we’re still pretty far. Lightyears. We shouldn’t be able to see it growing so soon, that visual information should not reach us yet. That’s FTL, that’s…that’s the Warp at play.”

“Is it possible the Event is like a wave?” Silas suggested. “And that we’re seeing the Eye’s growth now because the wave has hit us, bringing with it the calamity aboard The Atticus and the nightmares alongside that?”

“Doubtful, Silas,” I shook my head, as did Zha and Varnus, both of whom likely best understood what I was about to explain. “Time in the Warp doesn’t coincide with time outside it. And yet something happened—the Event—at the same time in the Warp as beyond. This…I can’t pretend to understand it. But whatever happened, it happened in one singular instant, and affected us, all of us, at once. It’s like someone snapped their fingers and the lights went out across the system—or further.”

“So what’s our play?” Galen asked the group. No one had a response.

I myself shook my head. “I do not know, Galen. Await any intel Captain Vakian may return with. Decide from there. But there is more to tell you all even so. I have kept most of you in the dark for too long. Now the darkness seems to be all around us, and we’ll need to fight it back together. Secrecy is only operationally viable for so long,” I explained, then cleared my throat. “When those of us fought the fight we did against the four heretics in Abseradon, I believed there was a fifth pulling the strings. Some of you know I have been under orders to find and kill that fifth. When we dissected the operations of the Phaenonite and pursued them to their source in Absalom, resulting in this timeless curse we find ourselves stricken with, that fifth was confirmed to me. When we waged our war against the Iron Warriors, we did so as pawns to that fifth, as puppets, us and the Iron Warriors both. No longer. The strings are cut, the curtains are pulled back. That fifth is named Ouranos. And he has been behind almost every heresy we have spent our lives stamping out. I do not believe Ouranos is responsible for the Event, but I do believe he is the greatest threat any of us may ever face. And I believe we are about to face him soon.

“From the best intel we can find, Ouranos is a savant-heretic,” I continued, and some eyes glanced to Zha. Zha herself widened her eyes. “Brilliant, in the most profane sense. Smarter than…,” I started, and then locked eyes with my own savant. “Well, smarter than most everyone in this room. Evil, and dangerous in the extreme. The sort of man—if ever he was such a thing—that can pull the strings of an Inquisitorial cell, a traitor Astartes Warband, and of us. I have spent some years during the reconstruction of the Dawnshadow in seeing us better armed. Ouranos is why. I firmly believe that Ouranos will give us the most glorious and terrible fight of our lives, and soon. We must be ready for him and whatever he is planning.

“To that end, I will not keep this a secret either. Ouranos has set his sights on me and on Lucene. It seems he is in the business of engineering ends, that endings are the ritual through which he crafts his worship to whichever blasphemous powers it is he kneels to. He believes he has engineered an end for me, through Lucene, though I know not what that means. We must prove him wrong, not for my sake, not for the sake of anyone aboard this ship, but for the good of the Imperium. Whatever it is he is planning, he cannot succeed,” I explained.

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“Damn right he can’t,” Mirena said, sneering, and was met with assent from much of my retinue. Varnus and Lucene, ever the quiet types to begin with, remained so.

“I appreciate your enthusiasm. I am blessed, truly, to have found such wonderful, capable souls as yours. Which is why this speech pains me so. I do not expect…I don’t think we’ll all be here to celebrate a victory, if we find it at all,” I told them. “Coming off the back of our war with the Iron Warriors, in which we have lost…too many, I deeply insist that you all make your peace with each other and with yourselves. This…what’s to come…it may be the end of the story for us all. Billions,” I insisted. “Tens, hundreds of billions, Ouranos is responsible for killing already, and those are just the ones we know about. Absalom indicated that Ouranos is an enemy of ancient proportions, that the Phaenonite devised his pseudo-immortality to find the time to better strike at Ouranos himself. We number perhaps a hundred, all troops accounted for. We are the greatest hundred I could ever hope to wield, but we cannot allow our arrogance to distract us from killing him, as we must kill him. Even if doing so culls us to the man. All of you, myself, Lucene, if one of us needs to die so as to thwart and destroy Ouranos, that must be a sacrifice we are all willing to make. Do you understand?”

The cheers had fallen away, replaced by somber stoicism. But slowly, following my question, the nodding of heads began, and when one—Silas at first—had nodded, the others followed. “Good. Very good. Thank you all. I will be asking the impossible of some—if not all—of you very soon. Sooner than any of us would like. I pray you will find it within yourselves to answer, as ever you’ve managed previously. Dismissed. Zha, Silas, Bliss, stay,” I ordered, and then turned around, back for another look at Quintus. The snowball in the void was still there.

I must have stared at it for a long while, then, as eventually Zha broke my concentration. “Mr. Blackgar, sir, is there something you wanted of us?”

“Yes, sorry,” I sighed, shaking my head. Still, I did not turn to face them. I was finding it quite difficult to. “First of all, I want you to meet Bliss.”

“Callant?” Bliss asked.

“We are unfortunately well-acquainted,” Silas reminded me. “Following the stint on Canicus and Skardak, at least. And then arresting her after Aerialon.

“Tell them who you are, Bliss,” I ordered. “Tell them what you are.”

She paused a moment and bit her lip. Eventually, she nodded, then declared, “I am Seraina Al-Amar—yes, sister to Emile Al-Amar, Emperor protect her still. I’d rather you continue to call me Bliss. I am an Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus, the same as Zha and Callant.”

“Feeling a bit left out here,” Silas muttered.

“I had oft recommended you join our ranks, brother,” I chuckled, having more overtly taken to referring to Silas as a brother to me; he had made it clear I filled the role for him. “Continue, Bliss, please.”

“Before I joined the Inquisition, I was a member of the Officio Assassinorum, more specifically of the Callidus Temple. I am…I was a very capable Agent of theirs,” she explained. “Callant?” she asked, still wondering why I was having her explain herself to them.

“Lord Caliman, the bastard,” I began, and then couldn’t help but smirk and reach for the Rosarius hanging from my neck. “He had assigned Bliss to infiltrate our unit and keep an eye on me. Caliman, you see, was not much trusting of psykers like myself, and put his faith in Bliss to put me down if the need ever arose. Following Amnes Minoris, she revealed herself to me, and joined our retinue more formally, leaving his command. Aside from a regrettable lapse in judgment on Jaegetri, she has since been one of my most trustworthy Agents. But before we continue, I need to ask a question of both of you, Zha and Silas. Who would you kill to keep the Imperium safe?”

“Anyone you asked me to, brother,” Silas declared at once.

“Anyone that needed to die,” Zha agreed, herself an Inquisitor who could pass the judgment and sentencing on her own.

“It’s a common ask that we make of each other to die for the Imperium. But dying is easy. Killing others is more difficult, especially when they’re close,” I muttered.

“Cal?” Silas asked, again seeking clarity.

Then, finally, I spun to face the trio, where I found Bliss’s expression had soured. She had had this conversation already, and was none too pleased about it. “Would you kill me to save the Imperium?” I asked them at last.

Silas scoffed, and Zha joined him in an uncomfortable laugh, as though having not understood my question as a joke—because it wasn’t—but wanting to join Silas in laughing at the absurdity of it. But as the realization settled in, the laughing fell to pained confusion. “What are you on about, Mr. Blackgar?” Zha managed to ask first.

“Lord Caliman had tasked Bliss to this at first. Now I see fit to provide her with support. Yours, if you’re up to the challenge. But I won’t go into the details until I’m certain you’re up to it,” I explained. “Would you kill me to save the Imperium?” I repeated.

They both hesitated. I admit I anticipated that. Hesitation was defeat, which is why I wanted to burn it out of them now. “I’m…I’m gonna need more to go on, Cal, before I can answer that,” Silas said.

“Well you can’t have it, not until I have my answer, Silas,” I shot back, leaning forward onto two outstretched arms which I had placed upon the desk between us.

“Throne’s sake, Callant, there are better ways of going about this,” Bliss protested, shaking her head in dismay. “I would not need their aid. You gave me the task and so help me I’ll fulfill it, if there are no other options. Do you doubt me?” she asked, moving to my right and placing a hand on my shoulder.

“I do not doubt you, Bliss, but I will not underestimate our enemy. Not again, not ever,” I answered. “So, you two, what say you?”

“If-if-if there are no other options? If-I mean…I,” Zha stammered. I sensed she was leaning toward yes.

“Cal, what the hell?” Silas answered. “What the frig are you asking us?”

“As I said, I am asking the impossible of you, sooner than you’d have liked,” I replied. “And I should make the question more specific, and therefore even harder. I am not just asking you to kill me. I am asking you to fight to kill me, to put down those that would come to my aid and defense. Would you make of me your enemy, your target, and would you pull the trigger?”

“You don’t just want them as my allies, you want them out of my way,” Bliss understood in a moment of clarity, backing off from me.

“Out of your way of what?” Silas shouted.

“I said yes!” Bliss yelled back. “If there were no other options, if I fought tooth and nail to save him and failed, yes. I would kill him.”

“Save you from what?” Silas turned back to me, simmering and seething.

“You were always too damn cunning not to be an Inquisitor,” I growled.

“Yes,” Zha decided, making Bliss and Silas turn around to her. “I’m…I’m…I’m sorry. Should I be sorry? Yes, Mr. Blackgar, I will kill you if the situation demands it.”

“Thank you,” I nodded to her. All eyes fell on Silas, who then crossed his arms and shook his head. That was not him declining me, though; I read well enough from him that he was still protesting the question in its essence and form.

“Inquisitor Callant Blackgar,” Silas started. He had not addressed me as such since Thantalus. It was like being hit by a cold shower in the depths of Firestation Ariadne. “Are you asking me to kill you?”

“I am.”

His eyes narrowed, piercing deep into mine. He was angry, partially at me, but mostly at whatever compelled this line of questioning. I was angry too, albeit not remotely at him. “Fine.”

“I need to hear you say it.”

“Oh you son of a—fine. Fine! Yes, Cal! I’ll kill you as the situation demands it. Now tell me the frigging situation before I flip that desk of yours over,” he relented.

My head fell forward as I let loose a deep, heartfelt sigh. “Good. Thank you both. You can know, then,” I agreed, and lifted my head up before standing upright. “I didn’t kill the 8th, not as I remember doing anyway. That is a half-lie conjured up by my peers in the Inquisition and implemented by the Black Ships. The truth…is the daemon in my head. Its name is Cronos.”

And they are not enough for me, Blackgar.