Chapter 56 : The Tower

"The Tower :
No matter the subject of the reading, this card is justifiably dreaded by all
practitioners of divination. Depicting the eponymous structure, sometimes
struck by lightning, sometimes with figures – winged or not – falling from its
summit, the Tower foretells misery, calamity, disgrace, deception and ruin,
along with a host of other ills. Unique among the Arcanas, even its reverse
side heralds misfortune, representing apathy, vanity and absence. […]
regardless of how it is drawn, the Tower always heralds a great shift in
fortune."
Extract from the Treatise of Divination, a text describing the meanings of each
of the seventy-eight cards of one of the most widely used versions of the
Emperor's Tarot, author unknown, M31.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

745.M32

Grand Master Khyron of the Grey Knights pulled his spear from the twitching
corpse of the thing of shadows and lies he had just killed, in the ruins of the
decoy Tower the Inquisition had raised on Kemyros.

Pieces of foreboding black stone were scattered around him, making for
treacherous footing. The terrain near the Warp portal Khyron and his brothers
had sealed was hideously altered, the stone having melted into the shape of
grasping hands and tortured faces. The air was thick with the stench of ozone
and blood, and Khyron more esoteric senses could feel the lingering
corruption. Despite the Grey Knights' victory, this was a foul place now, which
would need to be forbidden and forgotten forevermore, lest the evil of the
Warp seep through a barrier that was forever thinned.

It shouldn't be too difficult. The Tower had been built in the middle of the
wastes, far from civilization. But Humanity had a tendency to forget such
things over time, to disastrous effect.

Of the ten thousand Guardsmen who had accompanied the Grey Knights in
the assault, slightly more than half had survived, the torn bodies of the
remainder left where they had fallen to the claws of nightmares shaped like
grotesque parodies of Space Marines. Considering what they had faced, it
was an impressively low casualty rate. The survivors were already packing
inside transports, to be brought directly to troop carriers in orbit, where they
would be debriefed by agents of the Inquisition who would check for the most
obvious signs of the corruption mortals fighting daemons always risked. At
least, since everyone in Azarok knew of the existence of Traitor Marines from
the Forsaken Sons, they wouldn't be put to death simply for
knowing that secret.
There had been Inquisitors who had tried that, Khyron knew, before
Abaddon's own Black Crusade had made it impossible to keep that kind of
knowledge from the Imperial Guard. The revelation that Horus' traitors had
survived their exile into the Eye of Terror had been a harsh blow to the
Imperium's morale, and the War of the Beast had put an end to lingering
impressions of invincibility. Now the Forsaken Sons, who bore the colors of
the Black Legion if not its insignia, had launched an attack on the Imperium
from a completely new direction, which was the kind of things that gave
nightmares to strategic planners.

If the soldiers were lucky, they would die honourably in one of the battles to
free the Azarok Sector, during which their overseers would ensure they
weren't put in contact with other elements of the Imperium. If they weren't
lucky, the Inquisition would pick the best of them serve in its secret wars after
wiping their minds of all knowledge of the Grey Knights, and the rest would
quietly vanish in the shadows of the Imperium's bureaucracy. They would be
secretly executed or turned into servitors for the Inquisition's use, their records
falsified to show that they had died in previous engagements.

This fact brought Khyron neither joy nor sorrow : only acceptance. Not even
the Lord Sector himself would be allowed to know the truth of what had taken
place on his capital world. As far as the man was concerned, the source of the
troubles on Kemyros had just been defeated by Imperial Guardsmen and
Space Marines from the Red Hunters Chapter – he would even be met by a
genuine member of that Chapter, to ensure the lie took root. Helians von
Lextark had proven too valuable to the Sector's continued stability to risk
exposing him to the Grey Knights' existence and the mind-wiping protocols
that would imply.

Once, all of this would have disgusted Khyron. Indeed, once he had raised
arms against regimes that used such methods to control their people, bringing
down tyrants with fire and fury, bringing liberation to those they oppressed.
But all of that had changed, and he had had even longer than the rest of his
brothers to, if not accept it, then learn to live with it. For all that the Grey
Knights had existed since the Heresy, they had only begun to act across the
galaxy in the wake of the War of the Beast, and the protocols to conceal their
existence and secrets from the Archenemy were still being written.

Khyron had the feeling that, in the ages to come, the Grey Knights would only
become more stringent in the pursuit of secrecy. He wondered what deeds
would be considered necessary, and eventually become commonplace. They
had already crossed so many lines in the name of survival – not even victory,
just survival.
None of them were heroes anymore, except by contrast, and what worth was
there in a nobility that only existed because everyone else was so much worse
?

The Grand Master pulled himself out of his melancholy. The sight of the
Possessed Marine he had fought here, that wretched creature cloaked in the
sins of the traitor Warmaster, had dredged out memories best left untouched.
It had been powerful, capable of shaping the daemons that had emerged from
the breach at the center of the ruins into warped Chaos Marines – echoes of
the trauma the Horus Heresy had left on the soul of Mankind. These and other
monsters had spawned in the ruins of the fallen Tower, before spreading
across Kemyros and effectively putting the hive-cities under siege.

Before the arrival of the Grey Knights, the Inquisition in Kemyros had been
working desperately to protect the Lord Sector and maintain a semblance of
order in the system. Given the scope of the Black Crusade and the disaster
that had been the Battle of Silberstadt, Khyron thought that they had done
well.

They had kept the Lord Sector alive through seven attempted assassinations
(three of which they were certain had been orchestrated by the Forsaken
Sons, two of which had been the work of unrelated cultists, and one, against
all common sense, which had been made by a political rival seeking to take
the throne of Lord Sector in the middle of a Black Crusade). They had put
cultists to the pyre all across the planet and hunted the monsters that had left
the ruins of the Tower and crossed the wastes. They had kept the factories
churning out equipment for the war effort, and kept the system's infrastructure
from collapsing from half a hundred sabotage schemes.

More important to Khyron's mission in Kemyros, they had also successfully

breached their own former headquarters. Of the two six-men teams that had
made the attempt, only two Acolytes had returned alive, but they had brought
priceless information – along with a prisoner, which had provided even more.

The speed with which the Imperium resorted to torture these days was
another thing that made Khyron uneasy. It reminded him of a past he would
rather forget. Nevertheless, it had been effective : the witch had confirmed that
Asim, the Sorcerer of Blood and responsible for the slaughter of the Azarok
Conclave, had returned to the scene of his crime. Having conquered the
underground fortress, the Chaos Sorcerer was now pursuing a great working
that would put the entire system, and perhaps the entire Sector, at risk.

Despite the scale of the threat, only the Grey Knights would take part in the
assault on the underground complex. Khyron had brought half of his
Brotherhood with him – fifty warriors clad in blessed suits of the most
advanced in the Imperium, save perhaps that of the Custodes. They expected
to face daemons aplenty, along with the witches Asim had brought with him,
not to mention the Sorcerer himself, his pet xenos and the other Forsaken
Sons accompanying him.

The reports from the Inquisitorial agents had made it clear that bringing
Guardsmen along would only be throwing their lives away, and would slow
down the Knights' advance besides. In fact, the only reason they had even
gone to the ruins of the Tower in the first place had been that the attack was
going to occur no matter what – the Lord Sector had spent months gathering
the forces required for such an assault. Even if those same soldiers were now
doomed by what they had witnessed, Azarok couldn't afford to waste troops at
the moment. Reinforcements were inbound from the rest of the Imperium, but
the liberation of Berrenos had delayed them considerably. And with the true
goal of the Black Crusade still on the horizon, there was no telling when the
worlds of the Azarok Sector would be relieved.

Which made dealing with the remaining threat on Kemyros even more
important, for the Sector's reclamation effort would suffer greatly from the
system's loss. Khyron was confident they could win, no matter what the
heretics threw at them; he was less confident in what would happen if the
Forsaken Sons awakened that which slumbered beneath the complex.

The amphitheatre at the bottom of the Inquisitorial fortress on Kemyros had

changed a lot since the first time Asim had been there.

The tiered seats where Inquisitors had sat were now occupied by row upon
row of mirrors, all perfectly aligned to reflect the Sorcerer of Blood's image.
Asim stood on the same elevated dais on which the orator had stood when
addressing the Azarok Conclave, rebuild and remade so that it could bear his
weight.

On the topmost tier, facing Asim, stood eight of the most promising wyrds he
had gathered in the Wailing Storm, channelling power from the Empyrean and
into the chamber's ritual array. The wyrds were bound to him by oaths
enforced through blood, taken on altars imbued by the might of a thousand
sacrifices. They could, technically, still turn on him. Just like Asim could,
technically, walk on the surface of a sun for a period of time measurable by
the Mechanicus' most precise instruments without being turned into his
component particles.

Each mirror had been crafted with silver melted from the furnishings of the
Inquisitorial suites where the former lords of the fortress had slept. The thralls
of the Ordos had provided a suitable workforce for the task, once their will and
faith in the False Emperor had been broken. Daemonic runes had been
carved into the mirrors by scholars from the Grand Library of Tesseroth, that
repository of eldritch knowledge Asim had constructed in the Wailing Storm.

The Sorcerer Lord had brought eleven such scholars with him when his small
warband had pierced through the veil and emerged in that same
amphitheatre. Eight of them had died while making the mirrors : dealing with
the cruder renditions of daemon-speech was unforgiving work, and the
slightest mistake was fatal. And even the remaining three had been …
changed. No scholar of Tesseroth could be psykers, by decree of Asim, but
the power of Chaos could seep into any soul and flesh if the mind was
exposed to it long enough.

The results, however, had been well worth the price in Asim's opinion.
Through this chamber of mirrors, he could make contact with the Imprisoned,
that powerful entity that had been sealed under the surface of Kemyros for
millions of years, and whose bindings had been slightly set ajar by the
Sorcerer Lord's first visit. That small disturbance had been enough for the
Imprisoned to warp the entire lower section of the fortress, briefly turning it into
a hellscape that had killed the remaining Inquisitors and their Acolytes and left
the fortress ripe for conquest by Asim's warband when they had arrived. They
had put the remains of the Imprisoned's victims out of their misery : the
screams and sights had been too disturbing for the servants of the Forsaken
Sons.

From its prison below, the Imprisoned could reach out to the mirrors, its
infernal thoughts filtered through the reflected image of Asim. Part of the
runes' function was to prevent the Herald of Blood, that daemon that had
haunted the Sorcerer Lord for decades, from interfering through its usual trick
of replacing Asim's reflection with its own appearance. The Herald hadn't been
pleased with that, though Asim was certain he had heard something
approaching fear in its voice whenever they had discussed the Imprisoned.

You know not what you are playing with. Some secrets should remain
buried.

All his efforts to extract more details from the Herald had failed. The daemon
had refused to speak of the Imprisoned, which was both surprising, frustrating,
and worrying. It had been Arken himself who had first informed Asim of the
entity's existence, having glimpsed it in the waking visions that haunted his
dreamless hours. The tomes of the Grand Library of Tesseroth had contained
more clues, which had eventually revealed the location of the Imprisoned's jail
– but still very little about its exact nature. He had brought three of the
Library's acolytes with him, their minds full of the tomes that had contained
these fragments, but neither he nor the other Sorcerers had managed to
extract anything useful from them.
They knew it was a daemon, at least according to the definition of daemons as
entities originating from the Empyrean. They also knew that it was trapped
beneath the Inquisitorial tunnels, behind powerful wards that Asim's first visit
had disturbed just enough to let some of its influence seep through and bring
ruin to the entire Inquisitorial complex above. Anything beyond that, however,
was pure speculation.

It took great effort to translate the Imprisoned's daemonic thoughts into words,
even for the Sorcerer of Blood. Its mind was utterly alien, spawned by
emotions and desires that had no easy equivalents in the human psyche. But,
through the arcane devices of the chamber and his own ruthless training,
Asim could interpret them.

Right now, the Imprisoned was asking what Asim wanted. It had asked that a
great many times before, but that didn't make the translation any easier,
because each time it 'phrased' (for lack of a better term) its question
differently. And each time, Asim sent back his reply, trying to make himself
understood this time.

They had been at it for thirteen months, and this was the twenty-eighth
exchange. As far as Asim could tell, the Imprisoned wasn't trying to be difficult.
It yearned to be free, released from the shackles placed upon it long ago. But
the simple truth was that, just as Asim had difficulties understanding it, it too
struggled to comprehend the demands of the Sorcerer of Blood. The
variations in the way it asked its question were attempts at clarification, not
deliberate obstruction.

A bargain needed to be made before the Imprisoned was released, and not
just because such was Asim's mission : it would be the very height of folly to
unleash a being such as the Imprisoned without having first secured certain
guarantees. There were many, many legends about the perils of releasing
bound entities, and Asim didn't intend for his own life to become another one.
A full alliance between the Imprisoned and the Forsaken Sons was unlikely,
and subjugation of either by the other was completely off the table, but even a
conditional alliance, with the Imprisoned allowed to do whatever it pleased so
long as it didn't interfere with the warband's own objectives, would be a
priceless asset to the Black Crusade.

At least his continued efforts had yielded more information about the nature of
the wards keeping the Imprisoned caged. They were of Eldar make, though of
a scale and power the xenos had lost the ability to emulate since the Fall of
their empire.

It might seem strange, that the Eldar Empire had another forgotten threat
locked away in Azarok besides the Nightmare Fleet. But sixty million years
was a long, long time. Mankind hadn't sailed the stars for a thousandth of that
duration, and between the Dark Age of Technology and the Heresy, the
species had already seeded the entire Milky Way with slumbering
apocalypses of its own. One needed only look at Isleas, where the Word
Bearers had made a weapon from the dead that the Forsaken Sons had
unleashed centuries after the war for which it had been crafted had ended.

How many other powers had the Eldar of old bound during their reign, Asim
wondered ? How many other tomb-prisons laid scattered across the galaxy,
their occupants waiting with deathless patience for the chance to reclaim their
freedom ?

And what prizes might be exacted from them in return ?

That was what he was here to find out, on the orders of the Awakened One.
The power of the Imprisoned had to be bent to the purposes of the Black
Crusade, one way or another, but Arken was no fool. The lord of the Forsaken
Sons had witnessed the consequences of ill-conceived bargains with Warp
entities during the Heresy, when the Sixteenth Legion had drunk deep of the
Dark Gods' proffered cup. The Imprisoned was greater than any of the entities
with which the Sons of Horus had consorted back then – though not, it was to
be hoped, greater than some of the ones the Warmaster had dealt with – but
the same principles applied.

This time, Asim had asked for the Imprisoned's assistance in wiping out all
Imperial resistance across Kemyros by triggering a series of daemonic
incursions that would drown the entire system in madness and blood. Such a
blow would cripple what remained of Imperial leadership in the Azarok Sector
and set back any attempt at reclaiming it for the Imperium by years, if not
decades. The Sorcerer Lord had thought his terms simple enough to
understand (he had asked the Imprisoned to 'drown the worlds of this star in
the children of Ruin') but it seemed his translation still needed work.

He would consult with his peers of the Coven who had accompanied him to
Kemyros. He would share with them the recollection of the Imprisoned's
transmission. They would go over the translation together, and see if they
couldn't -

The pretend-king is dead,+ whispered Carthago in his mind. +And the hole

we made is closed.+

Asim frowned. Illarion was a powerful Secondborn, bound to a daemon of rare

power and ability. Of course, Illarion had always been meant as a sacrifice : a
dark lord reigning over a court of monsters in the ruins of the Inquisition's
obvious stronghold, from which he sent his minions to attack the walls of the
hive-cities. While all eyes were on him, Asim and his companions could
proceed with their work mostly undisturbed on the other side of the planet.
It hadn't quite worked out as planned. The Azarok Conclave hadn't forgotten
the location of its own headquarters, and there had been an attempt at
infiltration three weeks ago. But, by and large, Illarion had done his work,
keeping the rest of the Imperial presence on Kemyros from launching a
massed attack on the underground complex while also preventing the Imperial
leadership from looking outward.

He hadn't thought the slaves of the Corpse-Emperor in the system had the
strength to defeat the Secondborn. Which meant …

+Who killed him ?+ he asked.

Asim had been the one to tear open the Warp Rift and lay the bindings that
had compelled all Neverborn crossing it to serve Illarion – with assistance
from the Herald of Blood. But it was Carthago who had infused it with enough
strength to bring the entire Tower down and keep it open since. She was still
connected to it, and would have felt its ending.

+Soldiers in silver,+ she hissed, her thoughts bubbling with hatred, +bearing

the sigil of the eagle.+

So, they were here. Arken had warned him that his dealings with the
Imprisoned were bound to draw the attention of the Imperium's elite witch-
hunters.

+Brothers,+ he reached out with his mind to the three Sorcerers of the Coven
who had accompanied him to Kemyros. Once the connection was established,
he shared with them what Carthago had told him. Unless I miss my guess, we
are about to be attacked. See to our defenses while I finish what we came
here to do. Carthago, come to me, please.+

It appeared the time for subtlety was over.

The ash-storms that kept most of Kemyros uninhabitable were no threat to the
Grey Knights' transports. A squadron of gunships descended upon one the
hidden entrance to the headquarters of the Azarok Conclave, having carried
the warriors from the other side of the world in just under three hours. The
Stomravens didn't land, merely hovering ten meters above the ground and
letting the Grey Knights jump down before rising up again, returning to low
orbit.

They moved with purpose, gathering in squads and advancing toward the gate
leading into the underground complex. Their contacts in the local Inquisition
had told them exactly where the passages were, and Khyron had selected this
one as the closest from the Tower's battlefield. They were careful
nonetheless, for their enemy had had a long time to prepare.

The first trap sprung as the vanguard reached the gate. The thick metal door,
hidden under a layer of artificial stone, rippled like a pond of water struck by a
pebble. A gnarled arm, covered in blue scales and ending in a nine-fingered
hand with black talons, erupted from the door and seized the closest Grey
Knight, its monstrous digits large enough to meet around his torso.

The caught warrior didn't panic as the hand tightened around him, sending
cracks along his armor even as it was burned by the wards inscribed upon it.
He plunged his sword into the wrist of the arm holding him, even as the rest of
his squad hacked into the daemonic limb with their own Nemesis blades.
Within a few heartbeats, they severed it, but it continued to squeeze, twitching
madly, until the Grey Knights burned it to ash with a combined stream from
three blessed flamers.

The black storms suddenly redoubled in ferocity, and shapes emerged from
the poisoned currents. From within the stronghold, heretic psykers were
projecting their astral bodies into the storm, fashioning solid bodies out of the
ash with which to attack the Grey Knights. These bodies were frail and easily
broken apart, but the psykers simply constructed new ones, striking at the
Grey Knights with lightning and Warp-fire as they did so.

Khyron felt the minds of the foe around him, seeing with senses not hindered
by the storms whatsoever. There were less than a score of them, each
puppeteering several ash-golems. Three of them burned brighter than the
other, the radiance of their souls darkened by corruption and ancient hate.

Traitor Marines, he thought, accompanied by mortal witches. They couldn't

defeat the Grey Knights with such paltry tricks, but they could slow them
down, and that was unacceptable.

Entrusting his defense to his command squad, the Grand Master gathered
power inside him. His mind aligned with the pattern of a word in a long-dead
language, and he slammed the butt of his spear into the ground as he
unleashed both word and power. The dust where he struck was turned into
glass by the heat radiating from his weapon, and immediately cracked under
the impact.

A psychic wave erupted from Khyron, spreading in a circle around the Grand
Master. The weaker souls of the Forsaken Sons' servants were ripped from
their bodies, the tie between soul and flesh sundered. Within moments, their
spirits had been caught and devoured by the daemonic spirits that crowded
the Aether, while their Sorcerer overlords were forced to withdraw into their
bodies.
"Onward, brothers," he commanded. "The first line of defense is breached, but
there will be more."

The tunnel beyond the gate was large, meant to accommodate the supply
carriers that replenished the stronghold's stores. The other four passages
scattered across the wastes were nowhere near as big. Of course, that meant
that this tunnel, which made the best entry point for an armed force, had also
been the one best defended before the underground stronghold had fallen
from within. The Grey Knights had the authorization codes for every defense,
but somehow Khyron doubted they would still work, more than a year after the
headquarters' fall. The Forsaken Sons, for all their damnation, had proven that
they were no fools many times since they had revealed themselves to the
Imperium.

Unfortunately, time constraints prevented them from making a careful

advance. Despite the vast distance, Khyron could feel the entity trapped
beneath the Inquisitorial headquarters stirring.

When the Grey Knights had been founded, Malcador had scoured the
forbidden libraries of Terra, and arranged for the transportation of hundreds of
tomes from various holdings to Titan. During the Great Crusade, this would
have required absolute secrecy to avoid inflicting great damage to the Imperial
Truth; in the midst of the Horus Heresy, the slightest leak would have resulted
in disaster. The war had reached Sol long before the first ships of the Arch-
Traitor, and the horrors his agents could have unleashed with just one such
cache of grimoires was almost beyond imagining.

Khyron wished that they truly were such, but what he had seen during the
Scouring, when he and his brothers had hunted the great evils left behind by
Horus' retreating Legions, had opened his mind more forcefully that all the re-
training he had endured during Titan's exile.

When word of the Black Crusade against Azarok had reached the Grey
Knights, carried by an astropathic scream bearing markers of authority not
used in a thousand years, the Chapter's archivists had gone looking through
this collection of books, scrolls and data-crystals. They had exhumed all of the
lore related to the Azarok Sector, from the recorded dreams of seers during
the Age of Strife to the reports of the armies that had conquered Azarok
during the Great Crusade and, later, freed it from the scattered Waaaagh ! of
the Great Beast.

Thanks to their work, Khyron had come to Kemyros armed with knowledge of
what he would find there. The Forsaken Sons couldn't be allowed to set the
prisoner bound beneath the Inquisitorial headquarters free. They didn't have
the firepower to destroy it if they did, not without leaving the capital world of
Azarok in ruins – and even then, there was the possibility it might escape.
The Forsaken Sons knew the Grey Knights were here, as their sorcerous
assault had made clear, and were doubtlessly increasing their efforts to break
its bonds. Given that they had worked on it for a year already, a few more
hours should have made little difference – but Khyron remembered the vision
his Chapter Master had shared with him before he had taken his warriors
away from the main host of the Grey Knights. It wasn't inability that had
stopped the traitors' hand before, but pragmatism, and the Grey Knights'
arrival may force them to take shortcuts they would rather have avoided.

Over one hundred and ten kilometers separated the Grey Knights from the
Conclave's base of operations. With no mortal troops accompanying them, the
warriors of Titan moved at full speed. In the past, Khyron had seen entire
armies of unaugmented humans break at the sight of a force of Space
Marines sprinting – the transhuman dread was amplified by the sheer
unnaturalness of their speed, all human instinct screaming that nothing living
could possibly move that fast on its own power.

As he had expected, the defenses of the tunnel had been reset to ignore their
idents. It seemed the Forsaken Sons had not been able to get to all of them :
the Grey Knights passed destroyed gun turrets and collapsed walls, and the
corpses of battle-servitors whose target algorithms hadn't been subverted by
the heretics.

Even so, the gauntlet of automated defenses took its toll. Designed as they
had been to deal with infiltrators, the defenses couldn't outright kill a Grey
Knight in full armor, but they did inflict light wounds, and disabled several
warriors, whose injuries made them too slow to follow the quick pace of the
advance.

It took the Grey Knights a little over an hour to reach the end of the tunnel –
which was completely blocked by rubble. The Forsaken Sons had triggered
the charges the Inquisition had put in place for precisely that purpose, and
judging by the state of the rubble, they had done so long before the Grey
Knights' arrival. Khyron briefly wondered if they had done the same in every
tunnel, or just this one, since it was the one most likely to be used by an
invading army.

"Join me, brothers," he commanded. "Together, we shall clear the way to our
foe's lair."

The combined telekinetic power of over two scores of Grey Knights was a
fearsome thing. They moved aside piles of rubble like the invisible hand of a
god, melting the stone to restore some semblance of structural integrity.
Within minutes, the way had been cleared.
It was at that moment that a horde of daemonhosts rushed through the still
glowing-hot passage.

Elerika, who had once been Anointed of the Black Tower, Lady of Tears and
leader of the greatest circle of wyrds on the Broken Cage – a nameless death
world on which the Astra Telepathica had imprisoned the psykers harvested
from the worlds of the Trebedius Sector – stood in the ritual circle from which
the three Sorcerers were directing the defense of the underground stronghold.

The Sorcerer of Blood had brought his most trusted comrades with him on this
endeavour, along with the most powerful and useful of his servants. Two of
them, Neferkare and Ubaid, shared a gene-line with Asim himself, while the
third, Zarieth, still bore the emblem of the burning daemonhead on his left
paldron – which made an interesting contrast with the image of the chained
daemonhead on the right one. All three of them wore armor of black and gold,
warped by the years spent inside the Wailing Storm. She had never seen any
of them with his helmet off, and wasn't sure any of them still could remove
them at all.

Few of the wyrds who had departed the Broken Cage on Forsaken Sons
vessels still lived. Elerika had taught many of their descendants to wield their
powers, her life prolonged by the artifice of the Fleshmasters as a reward for
her continued usefulness. Her own abilities had grown over time and use, her
innate gift for the mind arts balanced with sorcerous knowledge from the
Sorcerers' grimoires. Right now, she was acting as the nexus between the
psykers gathered in what had been the antechamber to the Inquisitorial
gathering hall, where the lord Asim was even now making the final attempt at
striking a deal with the Imprisoned, that terrifying creature Carthago at his
side.

Elerika wasn't ashamed to admit she was scared of the xenos psyker. Its
might was immense, far surpassing even that of Lord Asim, and its mind was
… weird. Broken, even. The Lady of Tears didn't know if what she sensed
from the alien was what passed for normal among its kind, but she suspected
it wasn't. She had never needed to use her talents in cooperation with it, and
she was glad of it.

The entire circle, three Sorcerers and all thirteen wyrds, were bound together
by her telepathy. Their thoughts passed through her and into each other,
forming a sort of gestalt mind bent on keeping the Imperials at bay. She could
feel that overmind, even if she wasn't directly a part of it. Lord Asim had told
her that, during the Great Crusade, before such things had been banned by
the Edict of Nikaea, Librarians of the Legiones Astartes had practiced a form
of psychic communion enabling them to alloy their powers into something
greater than the sum of its parts.
What they were doing was a bastardization of that process, helped along by
blood and daemonic blessings. Instead of a proper merging of selves, the
three Sorcerers utterly dominated the minds of their thralls, and Elerika
doubted many of them would survive as the Forsaken Sons drained them dry
of power. However, she wasn't blind to how desperate the situation was. She
had seen the power of the invaders first-hand, watching through Zarieth's eyes
as over half of the warband was wiped out outside the gate. She had been too
valuable to risk in that long-range attack, but the sheer power the leader of the
enemy had displayed was terrifying.

Through the overmind, she watched as the hosts of Ruin were unleashed,
pouring out of the tunnels in a procession of horror and warped flesh. Some of
the daemonhosts still bore the tattered remnants of Inquisitorial uniforms, and
many the simpler clothes of the indentured servants whose ancestors had
worked in the hidden stronghold for generations. For their centuries of service,
this had been their reward, and what remained of their souls shrieked their
madness and torment from within the corrupted husks of their flesh.

Other warp-spawns walked without even the pretence of flesh, drawn from the
Aether in the fullness of their horror by the Sorcerers and their thralls.
Daemons of Tzeentch were in prominence, though all of the four infernal
choirs were represented, as the members of the Coven called upon every pact
they had made and every debt they were due to stop the Grey Knights'
advance.

The horde of Lost and Damned monsters crashed against the silver knights
like a tidal wave of mutated flesh and infernal power. Containment circles
were brought down, and yet more daemonhosts emerged from hidden
compartments at the flanks of the Imperials.

At the prodding of the overmind, the tunnels began to shift and twist. When
the Imprisoned had first stirred, its influence had spread the impossible
geometries of the Empyrean through the complex. The Forsaken Sons had
used rituals and sacrifices to restore order so that they could continue their
work, and were now tearing those protections apart, letting loose the madness
of the Sea of Souls. Corridors looped in on themselves, rooms had more
entrances than they had exits, stairways led downwards to storage rooms
near the top of the complex, and more than a few gates led to places
completely divorced from the Materium.

A mortal army would have wandered this labyrinth until it died of starvation or
went utterly made, if the daemons didn't get them first. Several of the previous
Imperial intruders had been disposed of like this. But the knights were made of
sterner stuff : they forced their will upon their surroundings, making the taint of
the Warp recoil from the bright fire of their souls while their ordered minds
imposed sanity upon the labyrinth.
The obstacles slowed them down, but they still made their way down far faster
than Elerika would have thought possible. The casualties they were taking
weren't slowing them down : the warriors who were too wounded to continue
were left behind, holding the line against the daemonhosts before being
eventually brought down by sheer numbers, though never without taking a
great number down with them.

Elerika had seen the Forsaken Sons fight in the Wailing Storm. She had seen
how the transhuman warriors could crush mortal armies, slaughtering them
with impunity thanks to their greater strength, speed, and resilience. But these
silver knights seemed to be to Space Marines what Space Marines were to
unaugmented humans. Except that was impossible, she told herself. She was
overreacting, and a closer look showed why : the warriors' weaponry and
training clearly were designed to take down Warp-born creatures. Against
another foe, they would still be terrifying, but she suspected it wouldn't be the
same sort of all-but one-sided carnage that was taking place.

Unfortunately, daemons were the only thing between her and the silver-clad
killers. That … did not bode well.

In the end, it took less than two hours for the silver knights to make their way
through defenses that had taken months to prepare. By that time, Elerika
could feel the unease radiating from the Sorcerers directing the overmind, and
the utter terror of the wyrds. The knights had wandered across the labyrinth,
but they had always sought to go down – towards the section of the complex
formerly reserved to the Inquisitors themselves, which now served as the
chambers of the Forsaken Sons and the very ritual room in which they all
stood.

Only one path led to the ritual chamber, right in front of the massive gates
leading to the amphitheatre at the bottom of the complex. The knights ran
down it, even as the overmind broke apart as the Sorcerers returned their
astral forms to their bodies and prepared to fight for their lives.

The knights' leader was at the forefront of their host. Elerika didn't know their
heraldry, but that this one was in charge would have been obvious even to
someone without her supernatural talents.

His skin was corpse-white, and his eyes were two orbs of perfect obsidian.
The blade of his spear shone with power, but it paled compared to the might
she felt emanating from the warrior himself. Elerika had witnessed many
things since joining the Forsaken Sons; she had beheld the horrors of the
Wailing Storm, the myriad forms of daemonkind and the twisted cultures
Mankind had developed under their influence. Yet nothing had ever scared
her like that warlord did. She felt certain, without knowing how, that this
warrior – all of the silver knights, but this warrior especially – was anathema to
her and her kind, his body, mind and soul shaped by a great and terrible
power to hunt and destroy them.

She struck at him with all her strength, focusing her power into a needle of
psychic energy aimed at his mind. She had broken kings and generals with
that attack before, and even the trained servants of the Inquisition hadn't been
able to keep her out when she had helped the interrogation of the captives
taken in the initial attack on the complex.

Her attack smashed against the knight's mental defenses without making the
slightest dent. She wasn't just facing his own defenses, Elerika realized : the
knights were mind-linked to one another, like the wyrds and Sorcerers had
been, though the overmind had broken down the moment battle had been
joined on the physical plane. She tried again, and again, pouring more and
more power into each desperate attack. If she could take down their leader,
perhaps the backlash of their joining's sundering would be enough to give
them the upper hand. It was a slight hope, but it was better than waiting to die.

On the fourth attempt in as many heartbeats, she sensed the slightest crack
form in the warrior's barrier. She focused her power and will, ready to attack at
the weak spot she had created, but he turned his gaze upon her, having
identified the source of the psychic attack. Before she could react, he moved
across the battlefield, dodging every other assault that came his way, and
struck.

The spear pierced through her kinetic shield and rammed through her chest.
In the instant she stood transfixed, before death claimed her, Elerika saw the
wards and runes that covered the knight's armor and weaponry with perfect
clarity. With the insight of one caught on the brink of death, she realized that
all of them had been empowered by sacrificing psykers, imbuing their lives
and spirits into the objects after extensive purification rituals – or, as she and
the Sorcerers of the Coven would both have called it, mind-breaking torture.

Was this what the Imperium had wrought from the psykers taken by the Black
Ships ? Would this have been her fate too, if the Awakened One hadn't
unleashed the Wailing Storm and cut off Forlorn Hope from the Imperium ?
Slain to arm her oppressors, or burned like kindling in the Astronomican's
great engine of agony ?

Despite the pain, she felt a flash of horror-tinged gratitude to have at least
been able to live her life somewhat on her own terms, before her body gave in
to the inevitable.
The reinforced doors to the amphitheatre blew open. Projecting a facade of
calm, both in his body language and in his surface thoughts, Asim turned to
face the intruders.

His attempt to contact the Imprisoned again with Carthago's assistance had
worked, but the entity remained infuriously unable to understand them. He had
risked damaging the conduit with the intensity of their repeated exchanges,
half of his assistants had perished in the attempts, and his left leg felt as if it
had turned to stone. And it had all been for nothing.

The Imperial Space Marines erupted in the chamber, spreading on the

uppermost tier and plunging their strange weapons into the wyrds. Asim had
read Mahlone's report on the witch-hunters' capabilities, but seeing them in
action was something else entirely. They were especially effective against
daemonkind, he knew, and were also masterfully crafted power weapons that
cut through the mortals' mutated flesh with ease.

As the knights slaughtered his circle of assistants, they sent the mirrors close
to them flying, and the chamber was filled with the sound of breaking silver
and the stench of ozone as the energies that had flowed in complex patterns
were violently disturbed. With an effort of will, Asim redirected the backlash
into the second tier, absently watching as the entire row of mirrors on that tier
also detonated, silvery fragments kept spinning in the air as they were caught
in streams of Warp energy.

The support beam of Asim's dais was broken, and the Sorcerer Lord waved
his hand, quickly weaving a spell to keep the small platform from collapsing.

Ironically, he couldn't use the way by which he had been banished from this
place during his first visit to escape. His own work here had altered the
fundamental esoteric properties of the location, making sorcerous travel
extremely hazardous. He could only hope that, after the damage the knights
had already suffered, his power (and, more realistically, Carthago's) would be
enough to deal with them. The alien child – he could still only think of her as a
child : she hadn't grown up at all in the years she had spent at his side, her
body preserved by her sheer alpha-psyker power – was standing at his side,
head cocked as she looked at the silver knights without any trace of fear.

As the last of the wyrds fell and the knights turned their weapons toward him,
Asim and Carthago weaved their power together, erecting a kinetic barrier
around the two of them. As they did, he saw the one who could only be the
knights' leader enter. His power burned Asim's second sight with its intensity,
so bright that the Sorcerer could barely seen the ornate armor that covered
the warrior's physical form.
A name was written in golden letters on the warrior's chest-plate : Khyron. His
face was bare, and to his shock, Asim recognized it, though it had changed,
altered by gene-forging beyond that of a typical Space Marine. The eyes were
still the same : twin pits of blackness, typical of the Eighth Legion's gene-line,
though seeing them on a Grey Knight felt jarring to say the least.

Despite his situation – surrounded by Imperial elite killers atop the prison of an
ancient daemon lord, with only Carthago for back-up and no way of escape –
curiosity overcame Asim. It had long been the flaw of his lineage, and despite
everything he had done and become since breaking his ties to the Fifteenth
Legion, the Sorcerer Lord still was Magnus the Red's son.

He extended a cautious mental probe toward the knightly lord : not to attack,
but to establish communication. To his surprise, he felt the other psyker
respond, and a tentative link establish itself. The Sorcerer of Blood's
perception of time slowed down to the point he could see individual bolt shells
move slowly through the air, and he began to speak, mind to mind, to the one
who had come to kill him. Telepathy was a much more efficient method of
communication than spoken words, after all.

+I know you, he sent, his thoughts expressing the theory that had blossomed
inside his mind at the sight of the warrior's face. +Chief Librarian Fel
Zharost of the Night Lords. It has been many years.+

The psychic imprint of the answer was so different that for a moment Asim
thought he had been mistaken, but its contents quickly confirmed he hadn't.

+So it is you, Asim. I thought it might be when I heard your name from those
who last broke into your stolen domain. Indeed, it has been many years – not
since the compliance of Varakish. But I ceased being the Chief Librarian of
the Eighth long before it even turned its own blades upon that cesspit it called
home, and I am Fel Zharost no longer. The Emperor burned away that
name when He remade me, so that it couldn't be used against me.+

Asim stared at him in absolute shock. That Fel Zharost hadn't been part of the
Night Lords Legion when it had destroyed Nostramo wasn't surprising. Like
the rest of the Legions, the Sorcerer of Blood had thought the Chief Librarian
to have been executed, either by the Night Haunter or one of his lackeys, after
the Edict of Nikaea had forbidden the use of psychic powers among the
Legiones Astartes. The other Legions had reintegrated their Librarians into the
ranks of battle-brothers (except the Imperial Fists, for some stupid reason only
someone like Dorn could have conceived), but no one had been surprised
when the Night Lords had instead purged them in blood. Even back then, they
had been a disreputable Legion.
That Fel Zharost had changed his name wasn't surprising either – indeed,
Asim would have been surprised if the other psyker had still used the same.
The Imperium had tried very hard to pretend the Heresy had never happened,
and a survivor from one of the Traitor Legions would have been awkward to
explain. But that wasn't what the Grey Knight was talking about.

Names were not so important to psykers as they were to daemons, of course,

but they were still core pillars of their identity, from which they derived much of
their power. Knowing the name of an enemy practitioner was a key advantage
in any sorcerous contest, and any seer worth the name could use it to glean
precious information from the Aether. To have it removed … he didn't doubt
the False Emperor could have done it before His entombment in the Golden
Throne, but the consequences of such a thing would be …

He mutilated you, hissed the Sorcerer of Blood, and yet still you serve Him ?

+I volunteered. We all did. We understood what was at stake, and that the
treachery of you and your kind left Him no choice. A weapon was needed to
deal with the consequences of your folly. And you would know much of folly,
wouldn't you, Asim of the Fifteenth Legion ? Those of us who were chosen by
Malcador owe you a debt of blood for your deeds at Terra. You killed a hero of
Humanity there.+

+Yes, I did. I faced one of the Sigillite's twelve, and for all his learning and
power, I killed him. But you weren't there, Khyron,+ replied the
Sorcerer. +None of you gilded knights were, even as the fate of the galaxy
was decided in that crucible of war. That mortal might have survived, if you
had been.+

+True. We were not. Our duty demanded something else from us. But we
remember, Asim. Of all the Imperium, we alone remember the full horror of
the Siege and the war which murdered the dream of the Great Crusade. They
have forgotten, or been made to forget. Even the ones who ruled here before
you killed them aren't allowed to know the full truth. But we do.+

+The Great Crusade's dream was always a lie,+ scoffed Asim. +You, of all

people, should know that. How many worlds did your Legion bring to the fold
of the Imperium through torture and terror, with the Emperor's own blessing ?
We were always monsters. Horus simply made us face and accept that
reality.+

+No. You and your kind chose to be monsters.

Monsters ? What do you know of monsters, servant of the

empire ? hissed Carthago through the link, her voice full of the terrible wrath
she carried inside of her. I see you, butcher. I see the ashen ruins you left
in your wake. I see the devastation you made and called empire. I see the
lies you tell yourself to justify it all, and I know it to be dust. Judgment
comes for you now, and you will die, die, die !

The communication ended, sundered by the raw power and hate of the alien
psyker. From the moment Asim had initiated contact to its end, it had barely
lasted a single heartbeat in the world of flesh.

Carthago unfurled from Asim's back, her eyes blazing with witch-fire. Fel
Zharost – no, Asim corrected himself, Khyron ; thinking of him as he had once
been would be a dangerous mistake – slammed his spear into the ground
before him.

Carthago struck while still maintaining the barrier, splitting her attention
between two tasks that would individually have drained a weaker psyker in
seconds. But the Grand Master had brought up his own protection in time, and
the kinetic blows that would have ruptured ceramite armor like kindling instead
smashed against an invisible shield. Words of power emblazoned on the
armor of every knight flared, as together they held the wrath of Carthago at
bay.

Every single knight was a psyker. Asim had known this would be the case, but
to see it in action was still jarring. His former Legion had been humiliated for
relying on psychic abilities to win war, and here was the utmost elite of the
Imperium going even further – since not even Prospero had been able to fill
the ranks of the Fifteenth with only psykers.

Together, Asim and Carthago battled the assembled knights, laying waste to
the amphitheatre in the process. They shattered the tiered seats and broke
the silver mirrors into thousands of pieces that flew around in arcane patterns,
crackling with the psychic equivalent of static energy. They superheated the
air and dragged pieces of rock from the walls to hurl at their foes, all while
maintaining the kinetic barrier around them while hundreds of blessed bolt
shells slammed into it.

It wasn't enough, Asim realized with grim acceptance. Carthago was powerful
beyond reckoning, even if she hadn't learned to use her full power (or perhaps
she couldn't : the Sorcerer of Blood had long suspected that the Dark Gods
would not allow her, or indeed any psyker of her level, to fully master their
potential). But the Grey Knights were witch-hunters, designed by the Imperium
to kill her kind as much as daemons. The wards of their armor were turning
aside her attacks, and their ammunition was slowly but surely burning their
way through her shield.

In one of the floating silver shards, Asim caught sight of the Herald of Blood.
The daemon that had haunted him for decades stared back at him with a
strangely solemn expression. It did not speak into his mind this time, did not
offer any way out that would come at great cost, either to Asim or to someone
else. Perhaps it couldn't see a way out of this situation, or perhaps it judged
that the Sorcerer Lord's usefulness to whatever game it was playing had run
out. Even after all this time with it as a constant companion, Asim couldn't
claim to understand the infernal mind of the Khornate Neverborn.

If he was going to fail and die, then by the Dark Gods and all their nameless
legions, he wouldn't die alone. The Sorcerer of Blood opened his mind to the
currents of Chaos, preparing to draw upon all the power he could handle and
more, determined that he would slay Khyron and cost the Imperium one of its
last champions from the Great Crusade. Drawn by his spite and his hatred,
the Ruinous Powers answered, and he felt himself swell with power such as
he had only felt once before, when he had transported a world's worth of
sinners and criminals through the Empyrean.

As he held that power and was about to strike, knowing that to do so would
destroy him utterly, time seemed to stop. His perceptions were dilated by the
power he clutched to his soul, and for the first time, he sensed the true nature
and might of the Imprisoned. It was immense, greater than any singular Warp
entity the Sorcerer Lord had ever encountered in his long life. It was greater
than Serixithar, greater even than his former lord Magnus, after the Crimson
King had abandoned the last trappings of mortality during the Siege of Terra.
And it was bound, held in place not quite beneath Kemyros' surface but in
some sort of adjacent realm, a prison that kept it barely in touch with reality
without letting it escape to the Immaterium either.

In that timeless moment, it looked back at him, and spoke in a voice that
shook what remained of Asim's soul :

THIS IS MY BARGAIN.

THERE WILL BE NO OTHER.

YOUR LIFE FOR MY FREEDOM.

He had been tricked, Asim realized. All this time, the Imprisoned had been
pretending to be unable to communicate clearly. It had waited for this, for a
shift in the situation that would give strength to its bargaining position.

Out of sheer spite, Asim was tempted to simply die fighting. To reject the
Imprisoned's offer, condemning it to an eternity trapped in its ancient prison.
His task on Kemyros, given to him by Arken, had been to arrange the
Imprisoned's liberation to inflict as much damage as possible to the Imperium.
With no bargain to direct its actions, there was no telling what the fallen
daemon king would do.

But … Whatever it did was unlikely to benefit the Imperium.

+I accept your bargain,+ he sent back, and rammed his full power into the
weak spot of the seals through which he and the Imprisoned had been talking
for months.

All of the power he had drawn into himself vanished, gone as if it had never
been there, consumed to break the seal. It didn't kill Asim as he had half
expected it to, bargain or no bargain; he knew enough about deals with
Neverborn to expect treachery, especially in such a blind and desperate pact.
But the power's consumption was too total, too absolute, for there to be
anything left that could fuel his own demise. He felt his blood run cold, his
hearts go slow and his muscles turn to lead as most of his life-force was
syphoned away, but he didn't perish. In the distance, he thought he heard
something like the Dark Gods' snarl at being denied the spectacle they had
anticipated his final stand to be.

"NO !" Asim heard Khyron shout as the Grey Knight who had been a Night
Lord felt what was happening. The power of the Grand Master fell upon the
seal, his shining energies seeping into the damaged spell to try and repair it.

He might have succeeded, for Asim's strength was utterly spent : it was all he
could do to stand, and not fall to the ground. But Carthago seized upon the
distraction. Badly wounded though she was, her hatred gave her strength.
She plunged her thin arms, wreathed in sorcerous lightning, into the Grey
Knight's chest, burying them all the way to her shoulders, until her snarling
face was pressed against Khyron's armor.

Delenda Imperium, she shouted into the minds of all who could hear her.

Then she burned, as that ancient city had burned, as her birthworld had
burned. And for all his power, all his armor and all his Emperor-given
blessings, Khyron burned with her.

Asim didn't have time to enjoy this victory or mourn that sacrifice. The other
Grey Knights were still there, their aura flaring with the drive to avenge their
Grand Master. The barrels of twenty wrist-mounted bolters turned towards him
-

- and the seal broke.

The being that had been called (in a flawed and incomplete Low Gothic
translation of the original name, which had been spoken in a now-extinct
language) Devourer-of-Heart's-Dream, in the age before the Children of Isha
had wiped out its followers and bound its power beneath the crust of their
world, did not roar in celebration at its freedom, for it felt no joy in it.
It felt no joy in anything. That was its nature. Its people had been grim
creatures, who had believed that one must never speak one's hopes ans
dreams aloud, lest one draw the Devourer's attention. It was a spirit of
misfortune and dread, of the terror that comes with the thought of failure and
the destruction of everything you knew and loved. Its priests had worshipped
it, making sacrifices upon its altars to turn its wrath away from them and unto
their enemies. It had grown strong, feeding upon the dreams of kingdoms,
plunging them into misery and hopelessness.

Strong enough that, when the witches of the Eldar Empire had come, drawn
by visions of a nascent Power to join the Great Game, they hadn't been able
to eliminate it. Instead, they had bound it, using knowledge accumulated over
the aeons of their long war against the Primordial Annihilator. In that moment,
it had stopped being Devourer-of-Heart's-Dream, and become the Imprisoned.

From within its prison, it had watched as the galaxy turned. It had seen the
Fall of the Eldar, and found no joy in it, not even satisfaction, unable as it was
to feed upon the destruction of a trillion dreams at once. It had seen the young
race of Humanity come to the dead world of its people and remake it into
something that could sustain them. It had heard the echoes of the great war
that had torn their empire asunder, quickly followed – as the Imprisoned
reckoned time, at least – by the roar of the Beast.

So much destruction. So much despair. It had been like a feast being laid out
just beyond the reach of a man fighting against starvation. Scraps of it had
fallen through its cage, however, for the passing of aeons had eroded its walls
ever so slightly. It had devoured them, briefly regaining its original name, and
sought to use that trickle of power to influence those inhabiting its world-prison
into freeing it. It hadn't worked, though it lacked the perceptions to understand
how, and the site of its followers' attempts to reach into its cage, where the
Eldar witches had gathered to bind it long ago, had become the home of those
who had slaughtered them.

It hadn't despaired, for it couldn't. Its people had conceived it as a relentless

force, one that never paused its efforts to bring about the destruction of their
dreams, and its nature remained shaped by their perceptions, though they had
been dead for millions of years. It could feel the ascendancy of Ruin beyond
its cage, and knew that soon, its hour would come. And it had.

The spark had made bargain with it. It could have been freed sooner, but the
notion of being bound to another's goals was abhorrent to it. It had waited,
biding its time – for what were a few months to one such as it ? And in the
meantime, it had learned much of the little spark, while pretending not to.
Deceit was in its nature; how many times had its people thought they had
eluded its attention, or managed to trick it, before it brought their entire lives
down ?
But the bargain held true. The spark, for all its insignificance, had knowledge
kin to the Eldar witches that had bound it. It was bound by the bargain, and
only when that bargain was fulfilled would it stop being the Imprisoned. It
reached out and caught the spark, sensing the ties that bound it to other
sparks in the Materium. One of these burned brightest – an ally, an object of
fear, a master. It hurled the spark that way, and the final shackle of the
Imprisoned fell away as it completed its bargain.

At last, Devourer-of-Heart's-Dream was free. It considered the world of its

people, and the other objects that orbited its star. There was much strife here,
many souls working to keep Ruin at bay. It could feed upon them, in a way it
had not feasted since the slaughter of its people.

But then, Devourer-of-Heart's-Dream shivered. It was seen. Predators greater

than it, if perhaps not older, were taking notice of its existence now that it was
no longer hidden behind the walls of its prison.

It fled. It plunged into the Sea of Souls, past the surface where the hosts of
Ruin gathered and watched the Materium with ever-hungry eyes and into the
depths where other ancient leviathans of the Warp endured beyond the gaze
of the Gods. All across Kemyros, sleepers dreamt of broken chains and great,
burning maws, before waking up in sweat and with their hearts racing.

In the Inquisitorial stronghold, the Grey Knights barely managed to bring the
charred corpse of Grand Master Khyron out before the entire underground
complex collapsed. They looked up at the sky and, finding it not burning,
reasoned that this was not defeat; but it certainly wasn't victory either.

AN : And we are back ! This is the last of the "Tarot" chapters. Finally, no
more need to write these Tarot cards interpretations for the blurb at the start.

The Imprisoned was inspired by several things : one was the Railway
Storyline from Fallen London, another was the series The Age of Tyranny, by
Cameron Johnston (excellent series, I recommend you check it out). I had the
whole "imprisoned evil the Forsaken Sons want to release" in my notes for
years, but these two stories helped flesh out that rather bare-bones concept.

And so, at last, we are nearing the end of this story, friends. It has now been
over seven years since I started writing this story. Looking back, there are a
lot of things I would have done differently. For one thing, I wouldn't have so
many named characters and plot threads. I also would have documented said
threads more thoroughly so that I know what I was thinking about at the time.

Still, writing this story has been a good learning experience, and by all the
Gods and their numberless hosts, I am going to finish it. It won't be perfect -
there are several decisions I made years ago that I now don't think were the
correct ones (or just don't remember the reason why anymore) but that I can't
change anymore - but I am hoping it will be entertaining. As someone who
reads a lot of fanfiction, I know all too well the feeling of reaching the last
chapter of an unfinished, abandoned story, and I won't do that to those who
have stuck with this one through the last seven years ... or those who have
just found out about this story. I think we all know how much that feeling of
realizing the story is a Dead Fic sucks, don't we ?

I am rambling now. The next chapter of this story (much shorter than this one)
is almost done, with only a few touch-ups and checks. I expect it to go up next
week, if not sooner. Right now, my writing schedule is to finish that one, then
finish the next part of the Roboutian Heresy. After that, I am thinking of staying
focused on Warband of the Forsaken Sons until it is done, hopefully before
summer's end. (Yes, I know summer hasn't even started.)

To those of you who came to my work through A Blade Recast, sorry about
the delay. That story is unique among my fics, and requires me to "shift
gears", so to speak. I am going to have more time to focus on it once WFS is
done, though (since my only main stories will be it and the Roboutian Heresy).
Thank you for your patience.

I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter (for all that I bitch about it, I certainly
enjoyed writing it). If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask them. If you
have criticisms, they are also welcome : I started writing WFS as a training
exercise as much as because I wanted to read a story like it at the time, after
all.

Oh, and one last thing : if you used to read this story on Spacebattles, the
reason I am not uploading it anymore there is because too much time spent
between updates, and the thread is now considered dead. Sorry !

Zahariel out.