The 8th.

Nothing.

Scayn.

Nothing.

Mirena.

Silas.

Penitent.

Czevia.

Hans.

Castecael.

Xavier.

Luther.

Zha.

Nothing.

***

I stumbled out of the flesh-room and into the light. There, I found a factory of sin. Towering vats of liquid man, assembly lines of organs, surgical anatomy on an industrial scale. I have not the heart to describe the sight of it all, nor the stomach. I had already begun to piece things together from having seen the puppet-Astartes, but now I knew the whole of it. The Four heretics were conning the Imperium of biomass to use for themselves in the crafting of organs and augmetic flesh. They were abducting the lowly and downtrodden for experimentation, with progress being made and quantified. I do not know how the real Astartes are made, nor do I wish to. But the Four seemed to have their own idea, and I bore witness to it.

I want not for heresy in His universe, but what the Four were doing on Abseradon was a greater sum of evil than what my worst fears could have produced. It was sickening, maddening.

And it was producing real results, which was the worst of it.

“Welcome, Pyrras, to the grand stage!” Vostroya shouted, voice booming now, his laughter echoing off his heretical metal contraptions. “Some would say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that may be, but you must admit, the parts themselves are quite the sight, no?” he asked, laughing.

“Death is too great a mercy for you, Vostroya,” I called back to him, leaning on a safety railing to keep my footing. The sheer irony that a place such as this would have ‘safety’ almost makes me balk today, were it not for the ever-present, contextual horror of it all.

Vostroya laughed again, voice pounding into my eardrums, deafeningly loud. “Be that as it may, we have supporting actors, stage left!” he shouted, and I looked to my left. I saw nothing more than the horror I already knew to be there. Then a lasrifle shot raced past my head from my right, searing off some blood-soaked hair. I turned in time to see a small squad of the privatized soldiers that had abducted me in Merek’s office, and pain exploded in the back of my head. Fortunately, that pain was of my own making, and where I simply felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my head, their skulls burst into red mist. “Ah, sorry, my left, your right. Apologies, Pyrras,” Vostroya laughed. “Oh, I’ve almost forgotten! You stay right there, let me fetch the thing,” he said, voice still pounding through me, but he seemed to step away.

I willed an autogun—Agripinaa Pattern, Type III—to me and inverted it in my grasp while flicking the safety, such as the barrel was pointing at me. I would have failed basic firearms training for that, but as I only had one functioning arm, I needed to improvise. So, with the butt of the weapon on the ground and its barrel pointing skyward, I kicked the charging handle down to ensure the weapon was readied, then hoisted it back up into my grasp more properly. “I was right-handed, damnit,” I grumbled, now needing to manage the weapon with my left, but otherwise soldiered on, stalking through the walkways and catwalks of this hellscape. I flicked the firing mechanism to burst-fire, as I did not assume I could waste time with single-fire, nor that I had the strength to sustain full-auto.

“Ah, I see you’ve found a toy, Pyrras!” Vostroya boomed eventually, his voice making me stumble a bit. “So have I. Behind you, by the way,” he said, and I turned and shot a squad of three more soldiers to shreds. “Huh, I had assumed you wouldn’t listen a second time.”

I ignored him. Or, I tried to. I did not acknowledge him, but it was impossible to ignore the—dare I say it—godlike voice in the sky.

“In any event, my toy. Here we go,” Vostroya chuckled. “Are you a classical man, Pyrras? A devout one? Ah, what am I saying, you served the proud and brave Guard of the Imperium! Surely you have heard some of the works of the Militarum Symphonica,” Vostroya suggested.

“More than you can know,” I growled. I do not know if he heard my reply.

Whether he did or did not hear me, it did not matter, as my world rocked under a truly-deafening volume of music. Vostroya began playing rallying songs and chanting marches of the Guard through the vox, and garbled as it was, it was still entirely recognizable. Louder than the last warzone the 8th had served in, Vostroya’s music slammed into me, shoving me to the ground in symphonic agony. I could not think. I could not focus. My ears began to bleed.

Stolen story; please report.

There I laid, floored to crippling motionlessness, from the overpowering symphony of my past. Even if I had the thought to cover my ears, I only had one hand to use for the task, and the thought was too involved for me to focus on anyway. Thankfully, there was one saving grace, one last trick Vostroya had up his sleeve that proved to be a double-edged sword. My world rocked again, but this time not due to the booming music coming from the vox. Instead, the factory around me shuddered in frequent, iterative explosions, and dust and stones began to fall from the ceiling all throughout the complex. From the rapidity and pacing of the explosions, I knew what they were—demolition charges. Vostroya was planning to bring this whole factory down, not merely because they could not risk my survival, but probably because they had found better, more successful production methods elsewhere.

In any case, the demolition charges rocked the vox communicator a bit, and while it did not silence it completely, the volume fell to more tolerable levels. While the chanting symphony carried on, I was able to pry myself off the floor and rise to my feet, painstakingly sullying onward to the cacophony of a falling, burning building and the militaristic music that rang through its halls. Eventually, after a few minutes of stalking around for an exit and a few more squads of soldiers either shot up or violently burst to giblets, blood-curdling screams began to call through the vox, timed with the chanting of the music. Throne, how I wished they were Vostroya’s, but they were not.

“Who am I hearing?” I yelled at the ceiling, debris falling all around me while I took cover in an archway between two support columns.

“Can you repeat that, Pyrras, I couldn’t quite hear you!” Vostroya boomed back, his voice still making me wince.

“Who is this?” I shouted back at the top of my lungs.

Vostroya laughed. “Not one of yours, unfortunately. Just our latest specimen. The Heretek has wanted to experiment on living specimens for some time—we’re finally at that stage of things! He has quite the voice, doesn’t he?” Vostroya asked. “Left and right this time, no lies here!” he shouted, and I dove out from under the archway, lighting up four more soldiers approaching from my left. One of them got away, but my autogun had used the last of its ammo. I tossed it aside and willed a lasgun from the three I had slain, turning it on a group approaching from the right of where I had been, and opening fire. All the while, the screams above carried incessantly as the chanting of the music reached its peak. “You’re a tough bastard to kill, Pyrras! But even if you get out of here alive—which you won’t—there’s no hope for you. My men have the whole facility surrounded! These squads you’re shooting at, they’re just to take you out early, make less of a mess in the city. Don’t wanna gun down an Inquisitor in the streets—again—, but I will,” Vostroya explained.

I did not care to answer, though I had a library of things to say to the bastard. Instead, I gingerly stood to my feet just in time to be knocked back as a lasrifle shot clipped me, slamming into my ribs and cooking them in an instant. My newly-acquired weapon flew from my grasp. The soldier that had gotten away, from the first group. I reduced him to a shower of red as pain seared through my being. I rolled over on my good arm, and pressed my forehead to the ground. “The 8th. Mirena. Silas. Penitent. The 8th. Mirena. Silas. Penitent. The 8th,” I chanted to myself, then yelled into the, blood, sweat, and saliva I had released upon the ground, maddened by everything in the universe around me, and forced myself to my feet again. “Throne save you if I get out of here, Vostroya!” I roared to the crumbling—and now ignited—sky, blood dripping from my mouth and the side of my body.

“I’m not too worried about that,” Vostroya chuckled in reply. “Time for the climax, by the way,” he said, the screams from the vox intensifying ever more as the music reached a crescendo. I stumbled on, swaying and moving like as much of a corpse as that puppet-Astartes was, and did not think of willing another weapon to me. I did not even have my eyes open. I was feeling with my mind, searching for Vostroya. I figured he probably was not in the building that he was demolishing, but to me, every living, moving thing could have been him. And when my mind found them, I ruptured their existence, tearing them apart from the inside out. A dozen. Two dozen, three. Eventually, after another minute or two of staggering along and killing everything I could sense, the screams stopped, though the chanting of the music continued. “Ah, pity. A day of failures, it seems. I’m sure the Heretek will move on to another soon, though.”

It was after that that a great chunk of the ceiling fell. I was on the ground floor then, with a great vat of pulped flesh near to me. The debris from the ceiling landed on the side of the vat, crashing it open and spewing the molten flesh everywhere. I dove forward away from it, but the explosion of debris was too great, and a splash of the vile, broiling liquid coated my left arm, searing much of my own flesh off. I felt such intense pain, then, that I blacked out.

I came to in a stairwell. I do not know how I got there. My left arm was reddened and bulbous, where it had any flesh at all. It could barely have been called an arm, frankly. I tried standing to my feet, having been sitting in a corner between floors, but blacked out again. Next, I was on a catwalk. An inferno raged above and below me. Bodies laid strewn around me on the catwalk, though they were not fresh. I recognized them. I had bursted them open in my mental-searching for Vostroya.

I was on fire. Not literally, but it felt as so.

I blacked out again.

I was outside. The music had stopped. My heart was racing, blood pumping through my skull and reddening my gaze. I could feel debris embedded in my back. I could feel my legs shaking. I could not feel my arms. I blinked the red out of my eyes, and saw them. A platoon of soldiers, weapons raised and pointed at me. I saw them. The 8th.

With what little strength I had left, I lifted my molten, flayed left arm up and saluted them, ready to die. On my feet. With them.

And then the Xenos monster cut through them. A rouge blur, crimson as the fastest Greenskins. It carved through them as had befallen the 8th. I began to black out, my last sight being the excruciating deaths of my men. Again. And then the red approached me.

“Cal,” it said. “It’s alright. Rest now,” she insisted. And I collapsed forward, into Penitent’s arms.