Every breath burns.
The air is scorching and dry and soured by the taste of warpfire and wrongness. It makes my eyes sting as I fire my bolter one-handed at the devil that has manifested before me. This conjuration of wickedness and hate. This monstrosity of mirrors. The daemon is vast. Swollen to fill the space, its mirror-bulk grazing the vaulted ceiling of the Navigation quarter. Its body is a coil of bloody crystal and its wings are faceted, fractured glass. Four long arms erupt from it, ending in colourless glass talons. Where they touch the deck they set the marble alight.
But the daemon is alight, too. Blessed promethium clings to its limbs and its thick, serpentine tail. The daemon thrashes in the heat and the purity of it as Ashava angles her flamer upwards, directing the jet of fire up and across its body. The rest of my Sisters are firing on it, too. Dozens of bolt shells detonate against its crystal hide, sending a fine, glittering powder into the air. The thing does not break, though. It does not shatter, it just continues to grow and swell, and the whispers grow with it.
Deathiscomingdeathiscomingdeathiscoming!
It moves, then, more quickly than anything of such a size has a right to, propelling itself forwards on the coils of its body like a great glass serpent. Warpfire winds around its claws and its many mouths open wide as if in hunger.
‘Do not let it break through!’ I shout.
We stand together as the daemon rears, lashing out with its claws. Eugenia blasts holes through its faceted wings even as Qi-Oh tears one of the daemon’s claws away with a volley of bolter fire. Haskia roars as she fires her own bolter, the shells impacting against the creature’s bulk and scattering clouds of glittering glass mist. Beside me, Ashava turns her flamer on the daemon and burns it anew. Lightning flares and arcs to the deck where her blessed promethium meets the creature’s warpfire.
The creature screams from its jagged mouths and twists around to face her. It lunges for Ashava, its remaining colourless claws lit with warpfire. She will not be able to dodge it. She does not even try to. Ashava merely grits her teeth and holds her ground, the firelight reflecting in her dark eyes. Between heartbeats, the Contemplation resurfaces in my mind. The warpfire and the laughter. The sound of her bones breaking, and the sight of her still body on the marble.
‘No,’ I say, the word stolen by the fire as I throw myself between them. Heat washes over me, blackening my vestments and immolating my oath seals. It takes my breath away. Scorches the inside of my nose and my throat as I bellow my hate at the daemon.
But it does not stop me.
My sword blade connects with the daemon’s massive, hooked claw and shatters it before it can reach my Sister. Crystal and glass explode outwards, ringing from my armour and cutting my face. Still I do not stop. I push through the flurry of shrapnel and plunge my power sword into one of the daemon’s nine lidless eyes. The blade punches inwards and starlight spills out from inside. Starlight, and screams. I roar and twist the blade and then the daemon screams too, rearing backwards. It drives another of its claws into me, hitting me in the chest hard enough to crack my armour and lift me clear off my feet. I land hard on my back on the ruined marble, my grip still tight around my sword’s hilt. Something has cracked inside my chest, too, making it all but impossible to breathe.
Stand.
The word floats up inside my mind, and through bleary, blinking eyes, I could swear that I see Adelynn standing and watching me with her emerald-green eyes, just as she would when she trained me. When she would not offer her hand to help me up, but wait for me to do it on my own.
Stand, Evangeline.
I do not know if the words are hers or mine, but I grit my teeth and drag myself upright. When I do Adelynn is gone and it is Ashava that I see in her place. She is bloodied and breathing hard, her face creased with pain.
‘You blessed fool,’ she says. ‘You really are so much like her.’
‘I might as well be a mirror,’ I say, between breaths, looking past her to where the daemon is coiling and recovering. Regrowing its mutilated limbs. I raise my sword again as it twists at its core and fixes its lidless eyes on me, its jagged mouths opening in perfect synchronicity.
You, it says. You are the one who was burned. Believed to be blessed, you think yourself a prophet.
The daemon’s voice comes from everywhere. From inside my mind. It holds me in place as it looms forwards, eyes unblinking. My Sisters are frozen, too. Locked in place by its wicked power as dozens of images play across the daemon’s reflective, silvered surface. I see the lowdeck chapels, burning. The stoke halls made into slaughterhouses. I see whole swathes of the ship frozen with void-lock, and the gunnery decks awash with blood. I see the crew murdering one another and laughing.
But you do not see the truth of fate, or time. You cannot see the fullness of the path that lies before you, because you are nothing more than a pinprick of fire in the ever-darkening void, it says. A tiny, insignificant light.
The images change again to show me Beatris and Radah cut down by a flurry of shadows. Canoness Commander Elivia on her knees, bleeding, her sword shattered.
Look upon the cost of your prophecy, little light.
My heart thunders with rage. I am breathing through my teeth. Straining against the daemon’s hold on me.
They will all die, it says. One by one. Light by light, until only you remain.
The images change again, and this time I see my own Sisters. The ones I swore to lead and protect. Calyth. Joti. Veridia. Sarita and Munari. They are fighting their way through a corridor choked with a horde of warp-maddened vassals and members of the Vow’s crew. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Enough to be a danger, even to my Sisters in their blessed armour. I watch my Sisters kill their way through, offering the mercy of death. But it is not enough. The crowd are too many. Too mad. One by one, my Sisters are overwhelmed and dragged to their knees, where they are cut to bloody ribbons. Slaughtered, like animals.
Such a price to pay, it says, and the daemon’s mouths all smile. All for the want of your martyr’s death.
‘I deny you, creature of darkness.’
The words press their way between my gritted teeth. Heat rushes through my body all over again, like a fever. Like being burned alive on the Contemplation. It courses from my core outwards, along my limbs. It sets my scars alight, and despite the daemon’s hold on me, I manage to raise my bolter and pull the trigger. The gun bellows, the round detonating against the creature’s crystal skin. It is not enough to break the daemon, but it is enough to break the spell.
‘Destroy it!’ I roar, firing again as my Sisters do the same around me. ‘By bolt and blade. By the God-Emperor’s grace!’
‘By His grace!’ my Sisters answer.
The daemon recoils from our words. From our righteous fury. I hold down my bolter’s trigger until the magazine clicks dry, the last of my blessed shells finding a home in another of the daemon’s lidless eyes. It reels and screams as we hold the line together. Ashava. Haskia. Eugenia.
But not Qi-Oh.
‘Qi-Oh!’ I shout at her. ‘Stay with us!’
I know she hears me, because she meets my eyes with hers. One crimson and steel. One hazel. Both full of rage. I could never hope to hear her over the screaming and roaring and the thunder of guns, but I see her mouth set in a thin line. I see her shake her head. And then Qi-Oh breaks the line, charging the daemon with her chainsword in hand. Just as when we fought in the training halls she is solely focused on her target, at the cost of all else. Her charge weakens our line. Haskia cannot shoot lest she hits her. It leaves the daemon an opening to knock Haskia from her feet with its long, segmented tail. A cloud of blood blows into the air as Haskia goes down, and Eugenia has to stop firing in order to drag her clear of the daemon’s claws.
With that, our line is broken. But Qi-Oh is close now. Her speed has taken her within the daemon’s reach. She whirls her chainsword left and right in brutal, cleaving strikes, severing first one of its arms, then another. I see her eyes light with fierce battle-joy, and her mouth open in a war cry that I cannot hear. But as she leaps into the air, propelled by the strength of her powered armour, the creature splinters and twists and moves. It laughs.
‘Qi-Oh!’ I shout, but it is too late.
The daemon catches her from the air, impaling her on the bladed point of its segmented tail, before slamming her onto the deck. Qi-Oh loses her grip on her chainsword, but even pinned and disarmed, she still fights it, her breathing ragged and erratic over the vox-link. Haskia is still down, with Eugenia at her side. The youngest of my Sisters has one hand stemming Haskia’s wounds while she fires her bolter up at the daemon with the other. Our line is more than broken, now. The daemon’s words echo in my mind.
They will all die. One by one. Light by light, until only you remain.
I cannot allow those words to be true. I will not. I turn and look at Ashava through the blizzard of glass and ashes.
‘When I give the word, burn it.’
Her dark eyes go wide, but she nods. ‘Aye, Sister Superior.’
‘Eugenia!’
She looks over at me. Her unscarred face is covered in blood.
‘The eyes!’ I tell her, as I push a fresh magazine into my bolter.
She nods and sets her jaw, getting to her feet as I start forwards, not towards Qi-Oh, but towards the daemon. I fire on it in the same moment that Eugenia does.
‘God-Emperor, be my blade,’ I shout as we advance together, our bolt shells painting points of bright light on the daemon’s crystal hide and bursting three of its unblinking, milky eyes. They spill black liquid and shadows, and the daemon writhes and lashes out, propelling itself towards me on the jagged, swollen coils of its body.
‘God-Emperor, be my armour,’ I cry as the daemon strikes at me with its claws and with its wings. With everything left to it save for that long tail that is still pinning Qi-Oh to the deck. Some blows I turn aside with the blade of my sword. Some I do not. Cuts open on my face and scalp, hot blood running into my eyes and into the collar of my armour. My broken ribs flex in my chest. My heart thunders and my ears ring as the mirrored monstrosity knocks my sword blade aside and rears, ready to tear my head from my shoulders.
‘God-Emperor, be my strength!’
Eugenia screams the words as she pushes me aside. The daemon’s claws strike her instead of me with an explosion of light that makes the daemon reel backwards, showering fragments of crystal. Eugenia is thrown bodily from her feet, her power armour splintered and her blood blowing into the air like smoke. She lands heavily, and goes still.
‘Eugenia!’ I shout.
She does not answer, but the daemon does. It laughs. Righteous anger lights inside me, burning me from the inside out.
‘You will die, creature!’ I roar at the daemon as I charge towards it through the storm of glass and death. It gives me the strength to shatter one of the daemon’s fractal wings, and to turn another of its clawed limbs to dust.
I do not fight like Qi-Oh, with ferocious speed. Or like Ashava once did, with artistry. I fight like Adelynn bade me to when she took me into the convent all those years ago. With a sheer, bloody-minded resolve. So when the daemon batters me to the deck with a snap of its remaining wing, I do not stay there. I get back up, my power armour whining as it lends me its strength. As Adelynn lends me strength, too, her voice echoing in my ears.
Stand, Evangeline.
I stand. I run. I bring my sword down so hard on the creature’s remaining wing that it sends a vertical crack along my vambrace from my wrist to my elbow. My bones splinter in concert with it. But the daemon’s wing breaks too, right back to the joint.
Fight, Evangeline.
Glass shards burst over me. I push through them and raise my bolter, my fractured arm creaking and my chest burning and my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I fire twice, blinding two more of the creature’s eyes. The bolter’s recoil turns my arm from fractured to shattered. My fingers go numb, and I lose my grip on my gun. It falls to the deck, but I do not stop. I cannot stop. The daemon is so close that I can smell it. Ozone and spoil and the cold ice of the void.
Never give up, Evangeline.
‘Now, Ashava!’ I cry.
She does not speak, but nor does she hesitate. Purifying fire blooms all around me, travelling over my armour and coursing down my blade as I roar wordlessly and plunge my sword through the storm of glass and into the daemon’s membranous central eye. Screams spill out again. A huge wave of invisible force hits me hard in the chest and threatens to take my legs from under me. I cannot breathe. Cannot blink. All is fire and smoke and the acrid stink of the daemon. But I do not stop. I do not give up. I put both hands on the hilt of my sword and lean all of my power-armoured weight on it. The blade squeals as it inches inwards, slowly.
‘You have… no… power here,’ I tell the mirrored monstrosity as we burn.
The daemon’s remaining eyes shatter, one by one. But still, it laughs.
You think this a victory, little light, the daemon says. But this is simply a step on the path that fate has set for you.
‘Fate does not set my path,’ I say, between breaths. ‘The God-Emperor does.’
And then I drive my sword the rest of the way into its hateful, slitted eye. Right to the hilt. This time, there is more than a thunderclap. There is an instant of absolute violence. Sound and sight.
And then silence. Blessed silence.
I pull my sword free and the daemon shatters from its central eye outwards. Not violently, this time, but calmly, the cracks travelling all across its surface like a fine lace shroud. It breaks into fragments that fall away until all that is left of it is a great black stain and Ashava’s fire, burning itself out on the deck and on my ceramite plate.
I look around to see that Haskia is back on her feet and helping Ashava sit Eugenia up. At the sight of her, all words escape me. The left side of Eugenia’s face is open to the bone, masked with blood. I cannot even make out the shape of her eye amongst the mess.
‘Is she alive?’ I ask. ‘Is Eugenia alive?’
My youngest Sister stirs, somehow. She rasps her reply through the blood in her mouth.
‘I am alive.’
I freeze, just staring at her. At all of that blood that was meant for me.
‘We have her,’ Ashava says, cutting through my thoughts. ‘Go to Qi-Oh.’
I tear my eyes from Eugenia and all of that blood and manage to nod, before limping across the stain on the deck to where Qi-Oh lies. A circle of her own blood surrounds her. Her armour is a smoking ruin, ruptured at the waist where the daemonglass pierced it. She is so pale and still that I am certain she must be dead, but then her hazel eye flickers open and she takes a great, ragged breath.
‘Stand,’ I say.
Qi-Oh coughs and rolls onto her side, one hand clamped over that wound in her abdomen. Then she struggles to her knees. To her feet. She looks past me. Around me.
‘You killed it,’ she says, her voice a blood-wet rasp.
‘Not just me,’ I reply. ‘Ashava and Eugenia. Haskia. We killed it together.’
She swallows. It looks as though it hurts her.
‘But not me,’ she says.
‘You broke the line.’
‘They were dying,’ she says raggedly. ‘Calyth. Veridia. Joti. Sarita and Munari. They were being torn apart in the lowdecks by those they swore to protect. I saw it in the crystals, and I know that you did too. Yet you asked me to ignore it. To ignore them.’
‘I did not ask you anything,’ I tell her. ‘I gave you an order.’
‘To leave my Sisters to die,’ she says.
Her words cut as deeply as the daemonglass did.
‘They are my Sisters too,’ I tell her. ‘My responsibility.’
Qi-Oh stares at me. ‘And yet you would not go to them,’ she says.
She makes to walk away from me, then, but I take hold of her by the arm.
‘Daemons lie, Qi-Oh, you know this. It showed you those things with the intent to turn your heart against you, and you let it.’
Qi-Oh’s cheeks colour with the blood that is left to her. Her hazel eye is alight with fury.
‘And if it is not a lie?’ she asks. ‘What then?’
I think about it for the sparest of seconds. About the hollowness at the heart of me growing larger.
‘Then that will be my responsibility too,’ I tell her.