I held the late Lord Caliman’s Rosarius in gauntleted hands before me as we sailed through the empty void toward The Finality, aboard our boarding craft. It had never been, to me, an idol to pray to, yet here I was, hoping our Beneficent Emperor could hear my thoughts even in the deep blackness that had taken us in the wake of Cadia’s fall. I could not tell you what my prayers were at the time, and not because I would have wished to keep them secret. But my mind was racing, even before combat had started, and keeping track of my own thoughts was beyond me.

Our vessel jostled—not from atmospheric turbulence, as we were in the void, but it must have been from some hiccup in our engines. Whatever the cause, it stirred me from my trance upon the Rosarius bequeathed to me, and I looked up, out of the visor of my power armor and into the monotone red glare of Lucene’s Sabbat Pattern helm, as she sat across from me in our boarding torpedo. In silence, we stared at each other for a few moments, as still as statues, and then I put the Rosarius back under my armor and messaged her, +Do you want to talk?+

Emotionally, her thoughts screamed Yes! but physically she instead turned her head side to side, the single visual evidence of life within her armor. Her ambient thoughts of selfless worry revealed her reluctance; she did not want to distract me so soon before our ultimate battle.

+It will be alright. We have not spoken much, you and I, of this. Not since Mortoc.+

Of this? Of what, death? she thought. I nodded. I do not ascribe my fate to the designs of a heretic. If either of us are to die here, it will not be because of Ouranos’s whims.

+I envy that inexorability, as ever you have possessed it. Lucene Flint, thank you.+

I do not know what you are thanking me for, Cal, but you are most welcome.

Our vessel jostled again. +For two centuries of your candor, compassion, and patience. You were there for me near the beginning of this journey, and you are there whenever the end hints at its imminence. You have always been there when I have needed you most. I am glad, and grateful, to have been your partner these many long and trying years.+

May we see many more yet ahead, she thought in reply, and nodded to me. Cal…, she began, but her thoughts were drawn away by a mechanized, barely-intelligible warning over voxspeakers from our servitorized pilot that impact was imminent. When she pulled her gaze back to me, from having looked up at the vox unit above, she nodded to me and thought, You have inspired in ways you cannot fathom. Thank you, my friend, my partner, my love. It is time we do that which you are best at.

+Dare I ask?+

Nothing that is not flattering. Defending mankind from nightmares of its own making. It is a shame, Cal, that the greater Imperium not know of your legend, for it is just that, and would inspire trillions unto the pursuit of greatness, as you did for me, she explained, and to that, I had no response.

That was just as well.

[IMPACT IN FIVE…]

[FOUR…]

[THREE…]

[BRACE]

***

Like daggers, four boarding torpedoes plunged into side of The Finality in close proximity to one another, separated only by a dozen meters each. Such a distance was far closer than any Imperial recommendation would advise, and such recommendations as that were generous to begin with. But our proximity was a necessity, as the internals of The Finality did not need to play by physical rules—so Ouranos had hinted—and to drive one torpedo into its hull too far from the others could see it breach a mind-bending distance away on the inside of the Hulk. With greater proximity, Warp anomalies should be more localized, and our forces should be able to deploy alongside each other. Or, such was the working theory, anyway.

I cannot say how deep our daggers drove into The Finality’s hull, nor can I tell you what waited for them beyond their breaching bulkheads. What I can tell you was that there was a welcome party for us, but by the time we saw it, an array of Melta weapons mounted to the boarding torpedoes had turned our first foes to black ash and soot. Shortly thereafter, Santinus Astal and his squad of Red Hunters departed from one of the bulkheads, securing the immediate scene on their own, though there was nothing left for them to combat. When they had identified as such, our mortal troops—myself included—disembarked unto The Finality for the first time.

While Silas, then some distance to my left and having emerged from a craft other than my own, shouted rallying calls to speed our troops from their landing craft, I took in the sights before us. I could not tell you what sort of vessel it was we had boarded, only that it was not Imperial; Space Hulks were an amalgam of dead voidcraft, mangled by the Warp into an incoherent labyrinth of twisted architectures. We found ourselves aboard a Xenos vessel of sleek and minimalist design—Aeldari, Necron, or some other minor species, I could not say. I was not one for exploring Xenotech. But the pitch-black and textureless walls around us, illuminated only by the lighting of our own equipment, were certainly not of Imperial origin.

“Orders, Inquisitor Blackgar?” Varnus asked of me after I spent a few moments sightseeing.

“Get the convoy formed. We venture deeper into this abominable vessel, emptying it of its inhabitants until we find our target,” I answered without turning to face him, my eyes taking to sliding along the slick, dark halls of our surroundings.

My kind strikes from the shadow of doubt. A warning, unprovoked and uncalled for, from Cronos. While I did not even think to reply, its sudden voice in my head snapped my senses to greater focus, the aimless look of curiosity on my unseen face swiftly transfixing into a proper Inquisitive scowl within my power armor. Doubt was the heretic’s domain; righteous surety that of the loyal. That is not quite what I meant, but it works for your purposes. I wished to ask what it cared, but I could not spare the time to entertain the beast, nor did I wish to rely on its insight to begin with. Even so, thoughts were the language of my tormentor, and it answered my wishes: Contrary to what you may believe, I am on your side here, Blackgar. You are my host, after all; I can’t let you get yourself killed. Yet. That, I think, was at least a measure of honesty.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

A low growl permeated the commotion of our boarding. It was metallic, not monstrous, and upon turning to source its origin, I identified it as the departure of one of our Leman Russ Exterminators from the bay that had held it on its boarding torpedo. The torpedo’s landing gear seemed strained beneath the Exterminator’s weight, hence the metallic growl; but it was the growl that was soon enough drowned out by the oscillating rumble of the tank’s engines which, once situated on the hollow interior of the Space Hulk we were invading, sufficed to energize a rumbling within us infantry as well, from the soles of our feet to—bless us and forgive the pun—the souls that carried us onward.

Offloading all our troops and vehicles took ninety seconds, measured from the point of time at which Santinus Astal gave us the all-clear from the Red Hunters’ initial deployment. It took another twenty seconds to get our convoy formed up properly. All said and done, just under two minutes to board The Finality, form ranks, and begin the breach & clear of the Space Hulk. One may think it courteous that Ouranos had not attacked us during that time, but even for all the sway he likely had over his vessel, it was of such a size that maneuvering forces around—particularly those unwilling, such as any Xenos lurking aboard—was likely a grand task for him.

Our advance, likewise, was uninterrupted for a time, leaving us to stalk empty halls of uninspired blackness on our own, the wafting smell of Leman Russ emissions percolating through our toxicity filters. To be amidst such iron and smoke took me back; it was the regal smell of preeminent warfare, before everything inevitably fell away to piss, shit, and other viscera. War looked high and mighty until you found yourself in it, within which time there was nothing so sensually pleasing. In any event, our proud, dignified ranks got a few moments of the high life within the abyssal darkness before hearing the low whirr! of metal-on-metal grinding a few dozen meters ahead. It had been drowned out, at first, beneath the rumble of our convoy, but soon grew to be a high-pitched nuisance above the guttural growl of our motion.

The convoy stopped, aware that whatever it was that lurked beyond was of an enemy force, and that we would soon come to blows with it. Our looming foe’s identity dawned on me moments before we made visual contact by it cutting through a far-ahead wall; the nonsense and deranged utterances of lower-intellect Xenos filth I had once warred against in the Guard proved a nostalgic reminder of the fungal infection that plagued the stars. But the first thing to emerge from the stygian walls ahead was not green, as I anticipated, but red—a crude bipedal contraption, like a stunted Knight devoid of any chivalric character. One of its arms carried a rudimentary rotary saw apparatus, while the other bore a pair of what were likely missiles loosely strapped to a Melta-array. Thankfully, none of these weapons were ever utilized against us, as the Demolisher of our convoy immediately punched a hole through the mechanized scrap that had emerged into the hall ahead of us.

Incoherent shouting—some of it ours, most of it belonging to the newly-emergent tide of Greenskinned Xenos—followed from there. Such as it had been on Pyrras-3, where this whole accursed story of ours began, when Cronos first showed its hand and took the 8th from me. Here we were again, at the end, with the 9th at odds with another Greenskin horde, and with Cronos lurking somewhere in the shadows of my mind. How poetic. Amidst the shouting were orders barked between Scions and ecclesiastical condemnations levied by Sisters. The techpriests operated silently, likely communicating through some means beyond me; the Red Hunters, too, coordinated in silence, speaking with each other through the headsets within their helmets. And yet the scene was a roar of gunfire and anger all the same. A pair of servitors were our first casualties, followed by a Scion. I knew not of her name, but some crude Xenos weapon blew her upper body to shreds not unlike a Bolter would have managed. She fell to the ground as a ravaged mass of blood, flesh, and shattered bone, and was momentarily alive before at last I felt the light of her life’s existence fade to shadow. In the span of time I had had the thought to ease her passing, she had gone. Just the same, there was no time to administer Absalom’s curative—she was truly lost to us all, then, as much of a tragedy as could be imagined.

Schism, Cronos said as I fixated on the Scion’s loss.

What? I thought in reply.

A Lesser Presence. In your tongue, it would be called a Schism. You fixate on that human’s death, as others have. The anguish births a Schism. It will arrive momentarily.

As if on cue, no sooner had I received Cronos’s warning than the Scion’s body lurched, as though erupting with newfound life. The corpse pitched upward and writhed amidst the remnants of its flesh, before at last its shattered skeleton splintered out from within. I am not ashamed to say I was awestruck—for all I had studied of the daemonic under Thaddeus Scayn, I had never seen or heard of a horror such as this, nor had I encountered something like it during the terrible crisis aboard The Atticus I had shared with Mirena. But what came of the mangled, fleshy corpse of the once-Scion rose as a mostly-humanoid abomination with an exoskeleton, pale bone stretched above and beyond the confines of its once-mortal host. Where the Scion had once had a head and a face, this creature instead had only an empty crown, a dark hole that seemed as though to swallow light itself for a face.

I put a Bolt in its torso at once, and then another.

It did not seem to care, nor did it care of the other Bolts that screamed into its form.

However, before this ‘Schism’ could do anything to harm any of us, a techpriest swung down upon it with a power axe. Uh oh, Cronos muttered to me. Your warning is their undoing, it said as the axe lopped a boney arm from this beast before the techpriest came in for another swing upon the daemon’s gut, white viscera spraying out from the arm wound.

My warning?

That melee weapons are better for killing my kind. Dearest Callant, you have never met my kind, Cronos explained as the axe buried itself in the Schism’s gut. I did not know what it meant or what was to transpire, but I knew that without some form of intervention, the techpriest was undoubtedly in danger. So I shoved the techpriest away from the Schism with my psykana, but not quickly enough; nay, perhaps there was no such thing as ‘quick enough.’ The Schism was banished from the materium, but in its banishment, its maw, like a black hole, expanded rapidly, devouring the creature itself as well as the frontal half of the techpriest. What subsequently landed away from the yawn of reality in the Schism’s wake was an amalgam of cybernetics loosely connected to stray patches of flesh.

And then the question sets in. It came from her, that Scion, as you call her. It came from her body. What of the servitors? The thought, for you, came from me so you are not to blame. But their doubt, you see, that of those around you…I have warned you, my kind strikes from the shadow of doubt. Our Master is the God of Self-Destruction; you all will bring about your own apocalypse. You do not know how to avoid it; it is in your very natures. These are Beasts of Malice, Hideous be my Master’s name.

I spun on my heels to face the servitors that had fallen earlier just in time to see their torsos erupt. Two large, fleshy, spiderlike things emerged from their piles of carnage, ribcages molded into legs and bionic heads warped into avian horrors. They chittered and chattered curses unintelligible, and scurried out from their servitorized wombs amidst our ranks. As luck would have it, a Greenskin round blew one to smithereens before it could do anything, and a Red Hunter recognized the inherent danger of the daemonic and broke ranks from what had been Zha Trantos’s order of battle to snuff out the other Beast with a well-placed Bolt. Each, upon their deaths, shattered into a spray of viscera like bombs, splattering the nearby scene. No one was hurt, but only by the Grace of the Emperor, and all who bore witness to the event were traumatized, myself surely included.

A Schism and a Beast—what are you then, Cronos? I thought to the daemon.

In your tongue, I am an Exalted Arbiter of Enmity. A Greater Presence for my Master. And I am yours, to help you as you need, as you are mine to feast upon. And what a feast you are, Callant Blackgar.