The gun clatters silent. He raises his sword. A clawed hand bites through a leg joint. He feels the warm fluid pooling inside his armour. He steps forward, ramming the sword into the open mouth of a bird-shaped creature until its blade disappears in flesh. The power flows through him like a storm rush. The half-feathered body explodes in a blaze of light. He realises he is screaming. Lightning gathers around his body in a crackling spiral. The creatures fall back for a brief moment, turning their lidless eyes from the light. He raises the sword. His limbs are shuddering. Inside his helmet he is weeping blood.

They come for him again, a tide of teeth and claws. He is striking, each blow a thunderclap. Many of the creatures fall, their distorted forms sliding back into shadow and smoke. But they are many and he is alone.

This has not come to pa.s.s yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet. But the thought dies.

The creatures around him howl and he feels the psychic crystals haloing his head shatter. He is blind.

The world goes quiet and warm.

I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness.

Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers.

He tries to raise his sword.

He is falling...

He was...

... running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers. The vision faded, bleeding away into the grey present. He blinked, pushing away the sensations that remained coiled in his mind like a fever's touch. He had seen echoes of possible futures before, but this had felt different; stronger, more instant, like a memory of something that had already happened.

*Epistolary?' said a voice, its sound flat inside his helmet. Cyrus looked up from the grey dust falling from his armoured fingers.

He flicked his eyes across the green runes at the edge of his sight; the four green cruciform marks of Phobos's squad winked back at him. He turned to look back at his escort spread behind him in a loose diamond. The white of their armour was bright beneath the shroud grey sky.

Like him they were clad in monstrous Terminator armour. Their genetically enhanced physiques wrapped in layer upon layer of adamantium, their movements augmented by sheathes of fibre bundles that ran through the armour like a second set of muscles. The suits were relics of a lost time, their components replaced and repaired so many times that they were like walking scar tissue. To wear such armour was to feel the past as a cold shroud against one's skin. Hundreds of his Chapter ancestors had worn Cyrus's suit before it had pa.s.sed to him. Most of those ancestors had died wearing it, he recalled.

*Is everything well, brother?' said the red-helmed sergeant.

*Yes, brother. An errant thought, nothing more.'

*As you say, Epistolary.' Phobos's tone was clipped and respectful, but Cyrus could feel the sergeant's questions unspoken behind the blunt snout of his helm: why had they come down to the surface of this planet?

A flat, grey plain extended away from them, its surface undisturbed by wind, rain or the tread of feet. Runes flowed across Cyrus's vision, his sensorium searching for movement, heat, life, and finding nothing. Two hundred and thirty million people had died here. He blink-clicked away the questing runes; this world was dead, and it had died at its protector's hand.

It was called Kataris, an agri-world of processing cities and endless plains of crops, ripening under a bright sun. It had died in less time than it took that sun to circle the sky. Something had drawn the eyes of the daemons to it, and they had come from beyond reality. Millions had died in the first a.s.sault. Their deaths had prepared the world for the arrival of more of their kind. More and more had slipped across the shadow divide between reality and the warp. The few, the very few people who had not died then became a defiant clutch of humanity clinging to the planet's last fortifications. There they had muttered prayers, tears rolling down their ash-dusted cheeks, and waited for the end.

An astropath had sent a desperate call out through the warp. It had called for help, for the protection promised by the priests of the Imperial Creed. *The Emperor protects' had been the last words of the message. And a single word of execution had answered that message: Exterminatus. The death sentence of a world and all who lived on it. Kataris had pleaded for aid and been answered by death falling from the tortured sky. For a moment the wide plains of ruin had been still, the sound of thunder settling with the dust. Then the inferno came, rushing across the world from horizon to horizon, consuming the tainted air in a roar like the war-cries shouted at the end of time.

Cyrus could almost taste the pyre.

*This was no victory,' he murmured to himself.

Decades before, Cyrus and his brothers had fought on Kataris against a raiding force of eldar. They had defeated the aliens and broken their hidden witch-gate. It had been a vicious war, but they had won and the world had lived. This time their answer to the dead world's plea was too late. They had arrived many days after the ships of the Inquisition execution force had departed.

If we had been here, could we have saved this world? The question had no answer, but that did not stop Cyrus asking it to himself. Unlike the rest of his brothers he could feel what had happened here as echoes lingering in the immaterium. He was a psyker, gifted with an ability to channel and manipulate the power of the realm beyond reality. The warp was a nightmare other realm of psychic energy, but the mind of a psyker could tap and shape that energy. To some it was sorcery. To others it was a step in the evolution of humanity. To Cyrus it was a weapon. It was a gift that allowed Cyrus to do things beyond even his brother White Consuls. But the gift also set him apart from the rest of his Chapter; it could not be otherwise. How could it be, when he felt the death of this world resonate over him like dust blowing over bare skin?

That is why I ordered us to come to the surface, he thought. Because someone needed to witness what had happened, someone needed to touch it and remember the price of survival.

*Epistolary,' said a voice washed in static. It came from the bridge of the Aethon, the battle-barge that hung above them in high orbit.

*Speak,' said Cyrus.

*We have received a signal. It seems to be another plea for help.' The voice paused. *It includes the word "Fateweaver".'

Cyrus closed his eyes for a moment. It could only mean one thing.

The world he stood on was only the latest to be subject to a daemonic incursion. World after world had fallen in this crescent of stars that edged the Eye of Terror. Thousands of millions had died as the Inquisition attempted to contain the incursion. And in the wake of this destruction a name followed like whisper made with a dying breath: Fateweaver.

*Where?' asked Cyrus.

*The message is garbled but we have an origin location. An astropathic relay fortress in the Claros system.' The vision of the future resurfaced in Cyrus's mind. *What are your orders?'

The astropath's voice sounded like the rasp of a dying man. *.....report... Claros... the enemy beyond...' The robed figure turned in a cone of cold green light, mouth flapping in a thin face as it spoke words which were not its own. *...lies.... Fateweaver, we... blinded.... failing...' The man's lips twisted, breath wheezing as he tried to say incomplete thoughts. *... soul... that hear this... send.... help.... accursed eternity.'

Cyrus sat alone and watched the holo-recording. He wore no armour; his suit of blue Terminator plate was being cleansed and re-blessed after his journey to the surface of Kataris. A cowled robe of white covered his hunched form, its edges woven in blue and with the names of Chapter ancestors. Within the cowl's shadow his gaunt face looked as if it were carved from white marble. Around him the battle council chamber was dark, the pale light of the holo-recording showing the outlines of a wide stone table and chairs. Beyond the circle of light the darkness hummed with the roar of the Aethon's engines as it cut through the warp.

As soon as he had stepped back onto the Aethon, Cyrus had asked for a recording of the signal. As an Epistolary of the Adeptus Astartes, he was capable of receiving the psychic messages that pa.s.sed from the mind of one astropath to another. Pa.s.sing through the warp, these messages crossed the vast distances of s.p.a.ce faster than the light of stars. This message, though, had arrived while he was down on the surface of Kataris. Amongst the death echoes surrounding that world his mind had been deaf to such subtle telepathy. The Aethon's own astropath had received it and now Cyrus looked at a recording of that moment.

Something about the signal disturbed him. It was garbled, chewed by its transmission from one mind to another, but he felt as if he could almost hear the words that hung unsaid in the gaps.

*It won't change you know.' The voice came out of the gloom towards the chamber's door.

Cyrus looked up. His eyes turned the darkness into monochrome shades of light and shadow. The figure standing at the other end of the deserted council chamber wore a tunic of white fabric. His blunt head was shaved smooth and snaked with scars, and there were two chrome studs above his left eye. Bare forearms, thick with muscle and looped by heavy copper vambraces, hung loose at his side.

*Phobos,' Cyrus said, smiling as the figure walked forwards. *Come to shake me from my melancholy?' Phobos said nothing but stopped on the other side of the circular stone table. Between them the holographic astropath still turned and spoke in its cone of light.

Phobos stared at the projection. *You still judge it best to follow this?'

Cyrus frowned: there was something wrong with his old friend. There was no trace of the usual stone dry humour in his words, just a tone that Cyrus could not place.

*Yes, brother,' said Cyrus, standing up from the iron backed chair. *You did not raise an objection when I ordered the Aethon to the Claros system. Is there something you wish to say now?' Phobos was silent, but Cyrus could see emotions playing across the sergeant's blunt features.

Cyrus was commander of the force aboard the Aethon; he had no need to listen to the sergeant's misgivings, but he would. As a psyker he had always stood apart from others. It was as true now as it had been when he was a shunned boy on a long forgotten world. But Phobos had never shown the remoteness that was common in his brothers. A sergeant of the First Company, a Proconsul, bearer of the Crux Terminatus, he was a warrior to the bone, and the closest thing to a friend Cyrus had ever known.

*We have been wardens out here for three decades,' said Phobos slowly. *Three decades of war.'

*That was our oath and our duty,' said Cyrus.

*Yes, and a duty we paid in blood,' said Phobos. Cyrus nodded. It had been paid in blood indeed. The Aethon was a battle-barge, a vessel for making war amongst the stars. It could carry three hundred Adeptus Astartes, their vehicles and tools of war. When it had left Sabatine it had been close to its full strength, but three decades of war in the margins of the Eye of Terror had demanded its price. Captains and veterans of hundreds of years of war lay dead on lost worlds, or drifting through the cold void. Silence filled the ship, its crew reduced to servitors, and its systems to the bare essentials necessary to serve the remaining White Consuls.

Yes, and we paid that price many times over, my friend, thought Cyrus. *Is there any other way for the Adeptus Astartes to fulfil their duty?' he said instead, with a sternness he did not feel.

*We are White Consuls.' Phobos leaned on the table looking at the raptor head emblems carved into the stone surface. *We are inches away from extinction. The Chapter calls and...' His words fell away.

*And what?' Cyrus watched his friend swallow.

*The Chapter calls, but we linger.'

*You think that is what we do? Linger?'

*I think that our Chapter needs us,' said Phobos.

Cyrus felt ice run through him at the words. It was true. The Chapter had gathered in great numbers to face a terrible foe, and it had been wounded to the point that its future hung by a thread. The call had come, drawing all the sons of Sabatine back to their home.

*And what of the purpose of our Chapter, Sergeant Phobos?' said Cyrus, and Phobos looked up at the coldness in his voice. *We are White Consuls, Primogenitors of Guilliman. We shepherd and guard mankind. That is what we were created for. That is our duty to our Chapter.'

*And if the Chapter is no more?' growled Phobos. *If it is destroyed and we are not there?'

*If we forget our purpose, my friend, then there will be nothing but ash blowing across dead worlds.' He thought he saw a flash of sympathy in Phobos's dark eyes, and knew that he had seen the echo of lost Kataris in his words.

*It had fallen,' said Phobos, his voice softening. *There was nothing that could have been done to save it. Were we there, or ten times our number, there would have been no option but Exterminatus.'

Cyrus thought of the dead world's last scream for help before it burned.

*We could not have saved it, and we will not be able to save Claros if the daemons come to it,' Phobos added.

*There is always something that should be tried before you step into annihilation.' Cyrus growled. *Pay for the survival of humanity with atrocity and there will be nothing left.' He shut down the holo-display, and walked away leaving Phobos alone in the dark.

The Aethon cut towards the bronze-hulled s.p.a.ce station, its auspex nodes filling the void around it with overlapping folds of sensor fields. It was over eight kilometres long, a blunt barb of off-white armour and macro weaponry folded in crackling void shields. The roar of its plasma engines at full burn made the bridge vibrate under Cyrus's feet.

*No signs of enemy activity, or battle residue, my lord,' said the logistician bound into the main sensor dais. The man turned his green bionic eyes to Cyrus. *The station seems to be intact and unharmed. They are acknowledging our hails and have accepted our request to dock.'

*Very well,' said Cyrus. He had expected to find the station wreathed in the fires of battle and shouting for help with its last breath. But looking at it on a viewscreen it was clear that it was far from falling.

Claros station looked a great wheel turning in starlight. Its armour gleamed as if forged from polished bronze. Five wings extended spoke-like from the station's central hub, each resembling the transept of a cathedral and over two kilometres long. b.u.t.tresses and towers tangled the station's surface, light glinting from the faces of vast statues that gazed out on the void with blank eyes. At its centre a tower extended above the central hub, its domed tip a ma.s.s of antennae masts. A thick collar of stone ringed the base of the tower, its surface blistered with shield generators and gargoyles the size of hab blocks. To Cyrus's eyes it looked formidable.

Beside him Phobos shifted. Freshly attached purity seals hung from his shoulder guards, and he held his crimson helmet in the crook of his arm. Cyrus had not spoken to him since their words in the command chamber.

*I will prepare an honour guard, if you intend to go aboard,' said Phobos.

Cyrus could feel the question held in check behind Phobos's words: if we came here to save this place and it does not need saving, why waste more time?

The memory of the vision he had seen on Kataris slid into Cyrus's mind: the stink of warp, the wet warmth of his blood. The memory was as fresh and raw as an unhealed wound. He was a haruspex, trained in his Chapter's tradition as a diviner of meaning in visions and omens. To an oracle there was no such thing as blind chance. The arrival of the signal and his vision were linked. Fate was pulling him to this place, he was sure.

*Yes,' Cyrus said. *Prepare the battle force to stand in armour. There is more here than meets the eye.'

The docking bay rumbled. Beyond the bay's blast doors, the hull of the Aethon met the armoured dock of Claros with a sound like the tolling of an iron bell.

Before the doors the White Consuls stood in ranks, their armour bright under the light that filled the docking bay. Cyrus stood at their head, his force sword resting point down, its psy-active core quiet without his will to give it life. Parchments hung from his shoulders and greaves, and white cloth fell to the deck from his torso. In deference to the occasion his helmet hung from his waist so that his pale face looked out uncovered from its collar of crystal nodes.

Phobos and his Terminators stood a step behind Cyrus, and behind them were the Devastators of Valerian alongside the Vanguard and Tactical squads under Galba and Vetranio. All stood below the strength demanded by the Codex. But they were still a battle force of the Adeptus Astartes, an a.s.semblage great enough to break armies.

The blast doors split open with a hiss of pressure. A void-cold wind spilled into the docking bay, stirring the parchments on Cyrus's armour. Two figures waited in the growing breach at the head of a sea of kneeling figures. One was a man with a hawk-thin face and a wash of gloss black hair pulled back into a braided tail. The burnished gold of his chest armour a worked with laurels and eagle wings a caught the light as he bowed. Beside the man was a tall woman with a wrinkled, withered face, the bald skin of her scalp tattooed with swirls of faded text. A high-collared blue coat covered her thin form, and she held a staff in her right hand. An eagle topped its black shaft, a blue crystal eye clutched in its claws. She looked at Cyrus with an expression of rank dislike, a sneer edging her mouth.

*Hail in the name of the Emperor.' The man's voice trembled in the cold air. Behind the man the kneeling ranks echoed the words.

Cyrus bowed his head briefly; he disliked such moments. To most people of the Imperium the s.p.a.ce Marines were a breed apart: terrifying beings of protection and destruction made at the dawn of history by an Emperor they called a G.o.d. Such crawling deference was to be expected, but to Cyrus it ignored the reason for his existence: to protect these people and the realm of which they were a part.

*Rise,' he said, stepping forwards and offering the pair a smile. *I am Cyrus Aurelius, Epistolary of the White Consuls, and we come in might as we were called.' The man looked up and Cyrus saw curiosity mingled with anxiety.

*Rihat, colonel commander of the Helicon Guard.' There was a tremor of fear in the man's voice. Rihat gestured to the woman at his side. *And this is Hekate, Savant Immaa'

*This can speak for herself.' The woman's voice cut through Rihat's words like a knife.

She looked straight at Cyrus; there was no fear or awe in her eyes. He could feel the strength of the woman's mind, the tamed and tethered psychic power held within her.

*You see the confusion in his eyes, s.p.a.ce Marine?' she said. *The fear he feels at the presence of the Emperor's angels of death?'

*My lord, we are honoured by your presence...' bl.u.s.tered Rihat, his face paling.

Cyrus kept his gaze locked with Hekate's. He felt the contest in that look, the challenge.

*Why are you here, s.p.a.ce Marine?' she asked, tilting her head, and Cyrus knew that she had seen his kind before, had perhaps seen and survived more than most humans could imagine. She was a primaris psyker, a battle psyker and occult savant who might be his equal or superior in power. He wondered at the dislike and anger that radiated from her like an icy cloud.

*We were summoned, lady,' said Cyrus calmly. *We intercepted a call for aid that indicated that this station was under threat. We came to answer that call.'

Rihat flicked a puzzled look at Hekate who broke Cyrus's gaze to return it. Rihat shook his head, frowning. *My lord, no signal was sent.'

Cyrus flicked the bone cards over one at a time. His eyes took in images while his mind danced with inferences and possibilities. He did not like any of them.

The chamber around him was echoing and bright. Pillars of white marble rose from a floor of pale green stone. Light shone from cl.u.s.ters of glow-globes which hung by chains from the arched roof. Sentences of High Gothic covered every inch of the chamber. Rihat had said that they were the words of lost messages heard by astropaths over the thousands of years the station had existed. The lost words filled many rooms. Some, he had been told, believed that they formed a kind of oracle, that fate could be divined in their broken fragments of meaning. That belief had seemed fitting to Cyrus.

On the bra.s.s-topped table, beside the pile of bone cards, the holo-recording of the astropathic message turned and spoke. Cyrus had been listening to it again and again since his arrival. He believed that the signal had come from the station he stood in, but it was also clear that the station had not called for help. He would not leave, though, not yet; there were too many unanswered questions.

Phobos had nodded at the order to remain, but Cyrus had felt the sergeant's dissent in his dutiful response: why waste more time? Because of a vision and a feeling that I cannot share with you, was the answer that had gone unsaid. The sergeant had withdrawn with Rihat to review the station's tactical readiness, while Cyrus had asked for a place of solitude. They had brought him to the pillared chamber and there he had stayed, shuffling through his brooding thoughts for several hours.

A blind man reaching into oblivion, that is what I am, he thought.

The bone cards were slivers of polished ivory the length of a human hand. An intricate picture painted with subtle skill in fading colours looked up from one side of each card. Some showed figures from myth, others patterns of lines and numbers. Words in High Gothic wove through each design. In the hands of a psyker sensitive to how the future echoed through the tides of the warp they could reveal hidden truths about what was and what might be. It was an old form of divination, one that had persisted with variations for millennia. The designs of the cards came from a time before the great darkness of the Age of Strife, an age of lost history and forgotten lore. The bone cards that flicked through Cyrus's armoured fingers had been crafted on Sabatine, the home world of the White Consuls. Cyrus had used this set for over two centuries, and they felt as much a part of him as the armour that wrapped his body.

He turned another card. The Blind Oracle sat over the Nine Blades: confused ends, paradox and lies.

*...Fateweaver...' the voice recording crackled next to him. He lifted his hand to turn the last bone card.

The vision pierced his thoughts like a knife.

The sword in his hand, blood sizzling as it drips down his arm to meet the weapon's caged fire. The sword twisting in his grip, pinning feathered flesh to the floor. A carrion scream, echoing through him, blotting out the shouts of his brothers around him. Light flowing like water from a face like a flayed bird, flowing into the floor, twisting through metal, changing it, becoming it. Its mouth is opening to say...

*You are adept at divination, I see,' said a voice close by. Reality snapped back into place around Cyrus, leaving him with a dull ache behind his eyes. He looked up from the unturned card to the speaker. It was a man, thin and bent by time, the green silk of his robes falling from hunched shoulders. A stole of black and gold thread circled his thin neck and a skull cap of blue velvet topped a wizened and bearded face. He had no eyes but the empty sockets seemed to be watching Cyrus. In his mind Cyrus could feel the ghost touch of the man's psychic senses play across his skin. The man smiled, showing Cyrus a mouth of crooked teeth.

*Never been much interested in it myself,' the man said. He raised a hand and shrugged. *I know. Astropaths are supposed to be concerned with such things: the deeper resonances of the universe, insights into eternal mysteries. But, I must admit I find it tedious, and liable to lose me too much sleep.' Cyrus found that he was smiling. The man shuffled closer, the tip of a silver cane tapping as it took his weight with each step. *I am sorry to disturb you, but I thought I should apologise for not greeting you when you arrived.' The old man dipped his head, making him briefly even more hunched. *My name is Colophon; I am the senior astropath of this station.'

*Epistolary Cyrus Aurelius of the White Consuls,' said Cyrus, returning the bow without thinking.

Colophon grinned broadly. *Hmm, a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes. No wonder Hekate is so put out. Can't stand a rival that one.'

Cyrus remembered the primaris psyker's challenging gaze when they had met at the docking gate. *I am sure that she is a worthy servant of the Imperium,' he replied carefully.