What do you fear, Blackgar?

I knew the voice too well, as it was mine. But I was not its speaker.

“Nothing,” I answered, and pushed myself to my feet. I was not in the black void that Ouranos had once summoned me to, but I was confident that wherever I may have perceived myself to be was neither real nor my actual, non-psychological location. Instead, I was in a field of pale maize resting atop green grass, and under a blue sky. A gentle breeze sent rippling waves through the maize. The tranquility of the scene betrayed its own ominousness, and was mired by the presence of the being behind me, which I turned to face after I spoke. “And if there is such a thing I come to fear, it would not be you, daemon.”

You say that with such surety, Cronos chuckled. It, in possession of a darker portrayal of my own visage, as though standing in shadow, made the movements of chuckling, but it never opened its mouth, neither to laugh nor to speak. Its voice—mine, still—emanated from its presence rather than being spoken. Life is not alive that knows not the clutches of fear.

“And a life lived in the grasp of fear is not worth living,” I countered, then took a quick moment to look myself over. I did not have my usual armament on my person—no Drepane, no weaponry, no power armor. Last I knew, I had been returning from my vacation with Mirena, in which I had brought Drepane albeit not much else.

And you believe yours is?

“It is if I am of use to the God-Emperor,” I replied.

Even if that makes you of use to me? A good question, and I was not happy that it had been asked, as it had haunted me as of late. You fear the answer, Cronos asserted with a grin, still not opening its mouth—its facsimile of mine—to speak. I want you alive, Callant Blackgar. Is that impetus to kill yourself? What if ending your life serves the works of another, such as Ouranos? Live, and serve your archenemy through me, allotted an eternity of service thanks to Absalom. Die, and serve your archenemy through Ouranos, eternally in the shreds of your afterlife. What is the poor Inquisitor to do?

“Kill you both, obviously,” I shrugged. Cronos grinned again. “You think I can’t,” I responded to its smile.

I think you’ll try. And I look forward to the trying. Alas, as I want you alive, I am inclined to aid you, whether you want my aid or not.

“I do not.”

You left Saar’s World too late. You are in for a rough time of it. Awaken, Blackgar, and act decisively and instinctually. You will not have time to second-guess yourself. Today may hurt, but I—and Ouranos, I imagine—will try to protect you, Cronos warned me, though I knew not of what that warning entailed. It then lifted its right arm—again a shadowed copy of mine—and poised to snap its fingers. Wake up, Blackgar, it started, and then snapped.

***

I awoke with a start and at once felt as though my head was splitting. I shot upright in bed, clutching at my skull and must have screamed, but could not hear it over the deafening sirens that echoed through The Atticus, the vessel on which Mirena and I were traveling. Mirena rose with me, equally alarmed, but not nearly in as much pain as I; indeed, she appeared to be unafflicted save for the noise. She shouted something at me, but it was impossible to discern through my newfound headache of catastrophic proportions or over the blaring alarms of the ship.

#—ALL HANDS EMERGENCY. GELLAR FIELD EXPERIENCING SIGNIFCANT INTEGRITY LOSS,# shouted the alarms through the whole of The Atticus while dim red lights flashed in every corner of every room. #DAEMONIC INCURSION LIKELY. PLEASE BEGIN PRAYING TO THE GOD-EMPEROR. NAVIGATIONAL CREW WILL ATTEMPT TO MAKE EXIGENT EVACUATION FROM THE EMPYREAN. ALL HANDS EMERGENCY. GELLAR FIELD EXPERIENCING SIGNIFICANT INTEGRITY LOSS…#

+We need to move!+ my mind shouted to Mirena. Curiously, using my psykana lessened the pain I was experiencing—the opposite of what would usually happen if I strained my mind too much. I chalk this discrepancy up to a temptation from the archenemy, perhaps Cronos itself, in wanting me to ease my burden by leaning into my mind’s strengths. In that moment, I resolved to only do so as necessary.

But there was much that was about to be necessary.

And go where? Mirena thought back while I willed our work clothes and jackets onto our bodies and Drepane to my grip. Upon flicking the Nemesis falchion on, the pain in my head lessened still—indeed, it was of a psychic and likely daemonic nature.

+Anywhere but here. Landing bay?+ I suggested, gingerly and painstakingly rising to my feet amidst the continuing sirens blaring through the ship. Mirena shot to her feet quicker than I managed, and moved to assist my rise and, subsequently, my motion. +There may come a time when I will have to ask you to carry me, if I need use my mind more profoundly.+

I’m not Bliss, she warned.

+And I do not have my power armor, so we’ll call it even,+ I replied, managing a grin as we took our first steps out of our room aboard The Atticus. The halls beyond were pure chaos, in the literal sense as much as the theological. With every flash of red light, the walls seemed to contort upon themselves, and the floor appeared to be ever-moving, as though the ship itself were trying to change into something other than a ship. I hoisted Drepane up, illuminating our view, and within the span of its radiance the shifting of our surroundings ceased. We set out into the darkness together, the dim light of my blade guiding our way. Mirena supported me with one of my arms thrust over her shoulders while I gripped her tightly, squeezing at her as I contended with the psychic pain ever washing over me.

Panic and horror ran around us, both in the form of terrified civilians and uncertain Guardsmen alike, as well as in the form of an implacable and unknowable essence that permeated the confines of The Atticus. As we went, I reached out to the Navigators’ compartment, wanting to see if I could help them to steer us out from the Empyrean, or at the very least come to an understanding of what had happened to result in this tragedy. In the Navigators, I felt greater fear than anything Mirena and I had encountered yet, for they saw in the Warp a deeper darkness than ever they had before. I could not see as they did, and felt only their emotions and their reactions. But to them, the Fire was gone; they could no longer see the Astronomican. I did what I could to ease their panic, but I knew not how to maneuver a vessel into—or, more poignantly, out of—the Empyrean as they could. I retreated, then, back to my own body, where Mirena had been hurrying us along further still. And just in time, too.

When I returned to my body, the first thing that greeted my senses was the heat of lasfire and the smell of autogun munitions. I could hear neither over the sirens. Neither the lasfire nor the autogun bullets were meant for us, thankfully; instead, a squad of Guardsmen was at a crossroads—a poor tactical positioning—before us, firing down a hallway obscured from our view. I thought to wave them to me, to join my command and escort us to the landing bay, but what they were shooting at reached them before my mind could. A blur of brass and flame shot through one of the Guards, splattering some part of his body into red gore while carrying the rest off into the darkness deeper down the other hall. As this happened, three other events occurred as well:

* The crossroads at which the Guardsmen were positioned became a T-intersection in the blink of an eye, the walls of the hallway that Mirena and I would have proceeded down morphing closed before our view. A face, far from human, laughed itself into existence near to the Guardsmen, though I wagered the laughing was meant for us as our path terminated.

* A red humanoid leapt off the brass terror that had punched through one of the Guardsmen, landing next to those remaining in the group. It brandished a blade of terrible flame, was possessed of long, curved, stygian horns, and could not help but to hold its forked tongue in plain view as it landed, eager to eviscerate its next unfortunate victims. I had encountered a creature of its nature twice before, once while serving in the tutelage of Inquisitor Thaddeus Scayn, of the Ordo Malleus, and a second time while cleansing Thantalus of its corruption. Malleus called this daemon a Bloodletter, and its brass steed a Juggernaut. Neither were within my expertise to handle, but both demanded their existence be rectified.

* In unusual perpendicularity to the closure of our available path ahead, the wall to the left of us opened up, revealing a corridor that had not existed moments ago. It was tough to pry our eyes off the red horror before us, but I managed with the strength of will alone to do so and peer into this newly-available route. With my arm still wrapped around Mirena, I also shielded her view of the Bloodletter and forced her to turn round, that she faced this new corridor. It was then that a pyskana entered my head, possessing a voice I had not heard from since Jaegetri, but was all-too familiar with regardless. +Go, Blackgar,+ Ouranos ordered of me.

I admit, I was not much inclined to obey Ouranos’s command. But from weighing the options between following his request so as to kill him later, or to risk my life—and Mirena’s—to maybe kill a single lesser daemon and its mount, I chose the former, and pushed myself and my pilot into the newly-made hallway. There was no saving the Guardsmen the Bloodletter had targeted; it would kill them before I could reach them even were I at my best, which I, at the time, was very much not. Indeed, Mirena and I hurried down this new hallway for perhaps five seconds before a snarl sounded from our rear. I glanced back to see the Bloodletter slathered in a fresh coat of red, tongue still hanging and blade still burning.

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At once, and with a speed that could only be described as suitably daemonic, it surged forth toward us. I could not fight such a spawn while running in flight, and so turned to stand my ground, raising Drepane over my head as the Bloodletter effortlessly leapt from the floor of this hallway to its roof, where it scurried toward us from above. Meanwhile, its Juggernaut rounded the corner of our hall and began to charge toward us as well, at a far brisker pace than its master. They would likely set upon us at the same time. I had but one arm to defend against the two daemons, as still I held onto Mirena, both to shield her from them and to keep me on my feet amidst my perpetual psychic suffering.

“Throne burn you both,” I hissed moments before they reached us, prematurely bringing Drepane, fueled by my wrath, down in an arc I predicted the Bloodletter to strike upon us in. But before my arm could so-strike our assailant from the realms, another simultaneity of events occurred. The first was the sudden closure of this hallway of ours, except it collapsed upon itself at the Juggernaut’s location. The Juggernaut’s head and right forearm were launched past us as the rest of its body was crushed out of existence by the sealing of the hall. The second thing, which occurred at the same time as the Juggernaut’s splattering, was a rush of shadows that pierced through the torso of the Bloodletter before pulling the daemon away from us. It was so sudden and so fierce that even the spawn of bloodlust and hatred was taken by surprise, dropping its flaming sword to the ground as it was whisked away.

The Bloodletter found itself smashed into the ceiling by tendril-like shadows that gradually enveloped its form, and then pancaked into the ground, denting both areas of the hall. It was then pulled onto its knees while the shadows carved its form up, head to three-toed-hoof. Blackgar is not for you, seethed a voice as-yet unrevealed to me, but I knew its owner; we were in the Warp, after all, and it was here that daemons stalked. Moreover, Cronos had already made it clear it intended to protect me, for the time being. My daemonic archenemy, via powers remote from a visible form, ripped the Bloodletter in half down the length of its spine, after which its blade of flame snuffed itself out from existence.

Following that little horror show, Mirena and I ran on, as far as we could from the shadows that had—for the time being—spared us. There were other horrors on our journey through this Warp-hell, some of which were overt daemons that Malleus could classify, others of which were simply the result of The Atticus folding in on itself. But neither sort directly interfered with our path through the winding and alien halls of the vessel we once knew, not as the Bloodletter had. Was Cronos somewhere aboard the ship, or was it just its influence keeping other horrors at bay? What about Ouranos? Both had a vested interest in this event, cataclysmic as it was, not being my end.

In any event, we made it to Flight Deck C, where Mirena’s Fury was kept for her—our—prior joyriding, though such a time seemed impossibly distant and unlikely in the moments of our arrival. And for having arrived on a deck with an exposed view of the outside unreality—which was safe, insofar as the failing-Gellar field still existed, and as long as the integrity of our newly-donned spacesuits was maintained—we viewed wonders that we perhaps should not have. Far beyond the gaping launch bay of The Atticus, a beaten and pulverized hellscape sat in view. Titanic brass structures, adorned and shaped with unthinkable heresies, towered over a bloodsoaked land; or perhaps it would have been better to call it an ocean from which spilled forth these megastructures.

I knew to shield my own view of the profane nonexistence beyond, but for my partner’s safety, plunged myself into Mirena’s mind and tried to blot out everything from her sight save for the Fury itself. I do not know how successful I was; the mere vision of the beyond fought against my every effort to save her. And yet I was not the only thing the blasphemous unreality was fighting against; I could feel a struggle buried in its very essence, as though the world we bore witness to was in the process of being unmade by some other. And indeed, by the time we had boarded the Fury and begun initiating its launch protocols, the bloodied oceans beyond had begun to keel over and congeal into vats of sickly ooze. The brass megastructures painstakingly morphed into the visage of great trees and fauna as the hellscape fought to decide which unreality it wanted to settle on. Haunting crimsons and brasses regurgitated into pallid verdancy, yet still, both forms of the scene beyond wrestled against me in shielding Mirena’s mind from their insanities.

And yet, in this endeavor, I found an unfortunate ally. Just as pale vines began to press against and entangle the Gellar field of the launch bay, a great behemoth of black and brown materialized within view. I knew what it was in an instant—a Space Hulk. It tainted the already-sickened garden-like false-paradise beyond with its mere presence, and with amalgamated weapons Imperium and Xenos, opened fire on The Atticus. No, that was not right. It opened fire upon the pallid garden that tried to swallow The Atticus whole. The garden—why do I remember it as a garden? It was more horridly putrid than that—fought back against the Hulk, and as consequence began to give way to the return of brass and crimson, which in turn also resisted the presence of the Hulk. Ever, this amorphous unreality could not decide what it was, but it had made an enemy of the Space Hulk as much as it detested the presence of The Atticus.

+You’ll have moments, Blackgar and Law, mere moments. Punch yourselves out of there when blood and vine are replaced with flame,+ Ouranos commanded of us. I did not like that he had reached into Mirena’s mind, as I had, for I felt his presence there as much as within my own head. If we survived the day, Mirena was going to need a thorough psychic cleansing and resanctification, if—perish the thought—if she could be saved at all. As for me, who could say? What with my connection to Cronos, I would have thought myself too far gone several decades ago. But that was not in the cards, it seemed.

Ouranos’s Space Hulk—I knew it was his; the psykana with which he used to communicate with me had intensified between his first communication during our Bloodletter debacle and the appearance of the Hulk—continued its onslaught against unreality before my view for a time. Then, just as the Fury’s engines had warmed up sufficiently, the blood and the vines consuming The Atticus roared into raging flames, and the unreality before us evaporated into realspace. We were atmospheric, plunging toward an unknown world. Mirena at once rammed our Fury forward, and as The Atticus, enflamed and breaking apart at the seams, plummeted toward the newfound ground below, we discovered that we were still not alone. How? How could it be that daemons were able to persist even into the Materium? That should not have been possible, not without a colossal profane ritual or display of sin.

It did not matter how it was possible, for as Fury and Atticus fell toward the world, a cluster of daemons, crimson red and pallid green, joined us. I lashed out with my mind as best I could against them, and in so doing felt the shadowy malignance of Cronos even still. Mirena turned the Fury’s forward guns on whatever was unfortunate enough to cross her descent, but we were making a descent. Mirena may have been an exceptionally gifted pilot, but emerging from a collapsing, plummeting voidship unscathed was an impossible task. Eventually, we hit the ground, hard, plunging through one snowbank after another and crushing a small forest’s worth of pine trees. I began to black out, my vision fading.

I came to outside the Fury, dragged onto my back. The first thing I saw was the flames of Mirena’s favorite joy-toy. The second thing was the shrapnel sticking out from my gut. “I’m going to need some action from you,” Mirena panted from behind my view, then. I glanced around and subsequently found myself pulled into a sitting position, then I began to be lifted into the air. Mirena moved around me to put herself under my right armpit, keeping me upright as she lifted me to my feet. “Do you have it in you to walk?”

“No guarantees,” I muttered, wincing as the shrapnel twisted in my gut. “Thank you, Mirena, for everything so far. There are few that could do what you have today.”

“Let’s hope it’ll be enough,” she agreed. In times past, I think she would have smiled at such a compliment. But smiles were not for anyone’s face today. She began to carry me away from the wreckage of the Fury, and I found I could help in that regard, if only just. Perhaps forty feet from the wreck, Mirena and I looked upward as The Atticus, encased in fire, made its final descent upon the world, a violent streak of red flame in snowy skies. “Where are we? What in Blessed Terra’s name just happened?”

“I cannot begin to understand what has transpired today,” I frowned, shaking my head. “But I know those stars, and I know this snow and ice. We’re on Quintus. We’re home, in a manner of speaking. Let’s hope we can find a Firestation that wasn’t destroyed during the Sieges,” I answered. Only then did I take assessment of my possessions. I still had Drepane. I had little else. That would have to be enough.