The First Heretic

and she watched the utterly silent, utterly still city to the east. In the last hours, burning blurs had floated upwards: each one a landing craft belonging to the XIII Legion, each one returning to the heavens now that their warriors’ work was done.

With creeping inevitability, the sun reached the horizon. Pale gold – cold for all its gentle brightness – spilled over the minarets and domes of Monarchia. A city of unrivalled beauty, the spear-tips of its ten thousand towers turned golden by the dawn.

‘Holy Blood,’ the young woman whispered, unable to find her voice and feeling the wet warmth of tear trails on her cheeks. To think that mankind could create such marvels. ‘Holy Blood of the God-Emperor.’

The sky grew brighter still – too bright, too fast. Barely past dawn, it was already becoming as bright as noon.

Cyrene raised her head, watching with weeping eyes as the clouds of heaven lit up with a second sunrise.

She saw the fire fall from the sky, lances of unbelievable light spearing into the perfect city from above the clouds. But she did not watch for long. The sun-spears’ incomparable brightness stole her sight after only the first few moments, leaving her in darkness as she listened to the sounds of a city dying. The world shook beneath Cyrene’s feet, casting her to the ground. Worst of all, her eyes itched as they failed, and the last clear sight she ever saw was Monarchia in ruin, its towers falling into the flames.

Blind and betrayed by fate, Cyrene Valantion cried out to the heavens and prayed for a reckoning, while the city of her birth burned.

II

The Last Prayer

‘Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

False angels walk in our midst, cast in your image but bringing none of your mercy. They call themselves the XIII Legion, the Warrior-Kings of Ultramar, and have spoken only threats of bloodshed and sorrow since they darkened the skies a week before. Their warriors have walked the streets of Monarchia, forcing the people to abandon the city. Those who resisted were butchered. Fate willing, they will be remembered as martyrs.

Monarchia is not alone. Sixteen cities across the planet stand empty, likewise swept clean of life.

For many days, we were silenced, unable to call out to you. The XIII Legion has allowed us this moment, in the hours before the last dawn. They have vowed to end the perfect city in a storm of fire as the sun rises this very day. Return to us, we beg you. Return to us and make them answer for this injustice. Avenge the fallen, and restore what will be lost when the horizon lightens.

Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

Return to us, sons of the God-Emperor, blessings upon His Name. Retur– ’

– First and only distress call sent from

Monarchia, capital of Khur.

TWO

Serrated Sun

Devastation

Aurelian

Cyrene’s reckoning took two months to arrive. Almost nine weeks of lancing headlong through the tides of unspace, breaking through the immaterium with little thought of safety or control. They lost vessels. They lost lives. But they lost no time. Reality trembled in their wake.

The first ship to burst from the immaterium ripped back into reality on tormented engines. As it accelerated from the wound of re-entry, it seemed cast from the warp like a grey spear, trailing plasma mist the colour of madness. Its engines roared heavy and hot into the silence of space.

Along its ridged spine, statues of marble and gold stared out into the starry void. Armoured buildings of worship rose like overlaid carbuncles from the vessel’s skin. Battlements lined the walls of those cathedrals, and dozens of lesser temples were decorated with banks of weapon turrets in their tallest towers. The vessel, terrible in size and grim in aspect, was more a bastion city of prayer and warfare than a spaceborne vessel.

Its dangerous momentum sent shudders through its metal bones, and still it didn’t slow down. Blue-white engine wash streamed in disintegrating smoke trails from immense boosters that had taken decades to construct, by thousands of labourers working millions of hours. The ship’s prow was fashioned into a colossal ram – an eagle figurehead, wrought in dense metals polished to a silver sheen. In its talons, the eagle held the steel-forged icon of an open book. The beast’s head was frozen open in a silent shriek. Its cold eyes reflected the stars.

Other ships arrived, rending reality, breaking from the warp as lesser blurs of grey – a volley of arrows that eclipsed the stars around them. A few at first, then a dozen, soon a fleet, at last an armada... A hundred and sixteen ships, one of the greatest coalitions of force the human race had ever assembled. And still more arrived, savaging the layer between realms, dropping from the immaterium, attempting to race alongside their glorious flagship.

The grey armada moved in loose formation, the slower vessels falling behind as over a hundred ships closed in on a single blue-green world.

A world already surrounded by another battlefleet.

One of the armada’s vessels – a ship mighty enough in its own right, but utterly dwarfed by the flagship at the fleet’s vanguard – was the battle-barge De Profundis. In Low Gothic, its name translated with ragged eloquence into ‘Out of the Depths’. In the Colchisian dialect of the warship’s home world, it translated from those proto-Gothic roots as ‘From Despair’.

The terminal shuddering through the ship’s bones lessened with realspace reasserting its hold, and temporal engines took over from the overheated warp thrusters. The captain of De Profundis rose from his ornate command throne as his ship threw off the empyrean’s lingering shackles. The throne itself was carved ivory and black steel, draped with devotional parchment scrolls and taking up the centre of a raised dais.