Fury and Silence
A ship died in the first moments – rent apart by the impossible collision of the material and the immaterial. There was an explosion along its starboard flank, at the enginarium decks. For a second, the Geller fields blinked, and the tide of the warp finally attained its long-denied access. The ship had been called the Wanton Embrace, a lesser pleasure barque of the Radrexxus. Its amethyst hull peeled away beneath the fiery mouths of a million questing daemons, laughing as they gnawed the metal into strange and newborn shapes.
The crew might have screamed, in those impossible moments as instant became eternity. There may have been a chance for them to fight the tide of madness that boiled through every airlock, that flowed through the walls, that took flesh at its leisure. The intruders had waited and been denied for aeons of mortal understanding, and now relished their release.
The fragile bubble of reality burst. The floodgates of the warp opened, swamping the ship in a boiling ocean of pitiless, yearning hate.
Others fared better, but only barely.
The death of the Embrace rippled through the non-void of the sea of souls. Its mortal crew’s mayfly existences bled out into the abyss, sending shockwaves through the empyrean near-space. Screams, death rattles, the inchoate agonies of an entire vessel. Thousands upon thousands of lives and deaths and ends slammed against the Geller fields of the accompanying ships, even as the first explosions tore from their hulls. Crippled their engines. The Lustful Paradox quivered in something like fear, like a living beast suddenly terrified. A grox facing down the armatures of the slaughterhouse. A tech-priest somewhere invoked a rite, and the ship slid from the warp in a rush of relief and adulation, even as others were forced from it by myriad equipment failures, power fluctuations and detonations.
The twinned hunting ships Spear of Ice and Shield of Wolves spun out of control, hurtling through clouds of conjured malice. Their fields burned against the tides of spite with a sound like the laughter of children, echoing through the corridors as they struggled to resist the daemonic. Both ships forced their break from the warp in the same moment, even as their escape sent the Wyrmslayer Queen into its own savage death spiral. The ship’s superstructure screamed, it howled at the pressures placed upon it. Cracks broke out along its spinal battlements, venting men and air into the infinite.
The sleek huntress, wounded, undertook its own return to the materium.
A cascade of failures echoed across the fleet. Radrexxus. Helvintr. Both suffered and bled, as the warp took its price. Even this far from the Rift, there were aspects and intelligences which hungered. Which remembered uncounted slights at the hands of the human race, of rogue traders who had defied them, and the prices they expected to be paid. Some of them babbled these things as they sought to hew ships apart, or as they slammed themselves to fiery debris against the ailing Geller fields. They remembered, and they hated, and they hungered.
And that hunger rattled on. Against the shields of the Vindication of Terra and the Throne’s Justice as their engines were rocked by explosions.
Till at last, with something approaching reverence, the calamity reached the pale blue hull and silvered bastions of the Indomitable Soul.