There have been so many, many nightmares, but Terra was the worst. 

Of all the battlefields, on all the worlds that I had piloted my Questoris Magaera through, the screams had been loudest on Terra. Yes, Holy Terra, where the ground had turned to a desert of splintered bone, and the skies had rained screaming blood. An ossuary. A slaughterhouse. Terra. 

In those final days of the siege, when hell poured forth its angels and the gilded walls came cascading down in a gleaming avalanche, my lance strove forward alongside Legio Mortis. Then came the frenzied retreat from the shell of the tyrant’s stronghold. My war machine’s guns spat electric death like the fiercest lightning storm, smiting friend and foe alike. By the end, after the Warmaster fell, it hardly mattered anymore. God machines died, burned down by the rage of thousands of gene-wrought monsters. The earth gave way. The air was poison. Blood seeped from every dial and button of my dashboard. The skies were empt. No stars, only warships burning, falling, screaming in the heavens above.

I cannot feel my own breath in my lungs!

 ‘Vincent,’ the vox came through. The jolt of static and Olivia’s voice sent a hot rot of panic through my spine and tensed dozens of needles loaded with adrenaline, ready to burrow into my brain stem.

I squirmed; the stumps of my long-amputated legs ached. The places where the bolts had been driven through my bones, where they met my flesh, itched. 

‘Vincent,’ I raised my head. The nest of cables and wires around me gave off the same glow of phosphorescent sea life. The dials on my knight’s control panel had not stopped bleeding. The trickling of gore was beginning to coagulate into chunks and scabs. I reached out an arm honeycombed by wires and snapped the vox switch.

‘Olivia,’ I croaked back, my voice hoarse from screaming.

‘Do you see it?’ Her voice came back, ethereal and distant. The vox should have no interference. Her Cerastus Atropos was docked in the same hangar. ‘The lights!’

‘I don’t see anything,’ I said. 

‘Turn on your screens!’ Her voice was excited. I did as she asked. The monitors bloomed to life around me, stabbing my eyes with crimson light. There were the hanging bays, holding lance after lance of House Morbidia. There was no movement, no light. 

‘There’s nothing here.’ 

‘It’s here!’ Olivia’s voice came back with a scream of static. A vision of the siege jolted back; her Atropos drenched in blood. Hungry tongues that crept from between its armour plates lapped at the gore. I paused, took a deep breath, and stared at the monitors—empty, red-tinted darkness. 

‘What… what do you see?’ I asked, staring pointedly into the distance of the monitor. I could swear there was a face there, among the shuddering pixels.

‘Vin,’ her voice was softer now, filled with awe at something both beautiful and terrible. ‘It’s watching us, Vin. Calling to us.’ 

I stared intently at the view screen. The indistinct, wavering figure overlaying the hangar shifted. Its face grew larger, its eye wider. I leaned as close as the cables and bolts would let me, straining my ravaged sinews to peer deeper. From within the eye bloomed a light, the faintest speck, but not artificial and pixelated. Wavering reds and purples danced at me as though from below deep water. 

‘I see it,’ I breathed. It was like the light I remembered from my childhood. Before being inducted as a squire of House Morbidia. Before the priests of Mars came, hacked apart my legs, screwed my mangled body into this war machine and rammed compliance spikes into my brain that slaved me to the Legio Mortis and the Emperor. My mother had called the light an aurora.

The docking bay bucked and rattled with the familiar clamour of atmospheric entry. We were descending, plummeting in a controlled descent at incredible speeds. The light grew brighter.

‘Olivia…’ I stuttered, sweat dripping from what little of my exposed flesh remained and mingling with the blood seeping like sludge from the dials. ‘What is it?’ 

‘It is our reward.’ Her voice became yet more distant. ‘For our service. For our victories.’

‘But we were defeated at Terra. The Warmaster, Mortis, Morbidia, all fell.’ My throat was dry. The light filled my cabin, swirling like water in zero gravity. It settled on my bare flesh and clustered around the wounds of my mutilated limbs. 

‘But here, we are victorious.’ Her voice was nearly gone. ‘We shall live in glory forever.’ All at once, the hulking transport ship came to a shuddering halt. The familiar whirring sounds of the landing struts anchoring themselves outside. 

The doors of the hangar ground opened, and the rows and rows of knights and larger machines were alit with a scarlet aurora. I saw it. Swirling and dancing among the warriors of House Morbidia and the Legio Mortis. A mirage of blood seeping from a great eye from deep within the universe. I looked into the distance of this new world and saw an endless plain. Above it, hanging in the firmament, was the eye. In that moment, I felt the hot rush of wind on my skin and the spatter of the hot blood of mechancium oppressors across my face. 

I came undone. Rising, I floated freely over endless crags and mountains, crystal palaces and endless gardens. For that brief instant, I was unbound from my prison of steel and adamant. Morbidia was with me. I had to reach that place. 

The god-machines of the Legio Mortis led the vanguard. Then House Devine and House Malinax. At last it was our turn, and House Morbidia strode out of the hangar of the massive ark-ship and into the ether. Onto a world which did not spiral round and round, but stretched off into the infinite. Olivia’s Atropos led the way with my Magaera close behind. Unto that blood-soaked dawn we went, neither lost, nor damned, but free.