One moment Luciene was among allies, the next not. With a flash of vibrant blue light, the Angel found herself elsewhere, standing before a familiar face, but one far from that of an ally. “You’ve changed,” Luciene said flatly, tightening her grip on her Eviscerator’s handle but keeping the blade pointed toward the ground.

  For the time being.

  “Stating the obvious right from the start, huh?” Veralith shrugged. “Arms, wings, feathers—yes. A bit more overt than a haircut, I suppose. Consequence of bonding with my immaterial self for our reunion.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your outward appearance, Veralith,” Luciene shot back, hotly, and stepped toward. “You have changed. All this death and destruction—where is the woman that taught me about hope? Life? Who gave me purpose?”

  “Perhaps you never really knew her,” Veralith shrugged again. “Would you like to?”

  Luciene’s eyes managed to narrow even more than they already had, and she began to encircle Veralith. Veralith turned to keep the Angel in front of her as Luciene moved, standing atop a dais in the center of the Noctilith room. Veralith still possessed the general shape of her humanoid self; it was as though she had become more than she once was, which was ultimately the case. She had grown to a size approximating Luciene’s, had sprouted four wings and generated another pair of arms. Her hands ended not with fingers, but talons. Skin pigmentation had darkened to a subtly blue hue, and where she had had hair, either atop her head or over her body, she had instead begun to grow feathers. An Imperial Inquisitor might deign to call such changes mutations, but Luciene knew they were all far more than merely some unintentional reaction to Chaos.

  Veralith was as she saw herself, a woman of her own design, outwardly and inward.

  “Yes,” Luciene decided at last, and raised her Eviscerator between herself and her once-patron. “I think I would like to know a bit about you before I strike you down, Veralith.”

  Veralith smirked, and spread each pair of her arms wide, inviting. “Good. Let’s start at the beginning, then: Vaktez. What I and my siblings have done to worlds like Shanolok is a mercy compared to what befell Vaktez, out of our control. The pain, Luciene, the suffering—you cannot imagine it. The despair of Old Night cut deeper into the people of Vaktez than I could ever hope to describe. It was horrible beyond measure, and I grieve for my people still—they did not deserve such a fate. Yet it was a fate thrust upon them all the same, by an uncaring, cruel universe.

  “The Warp preys upon those of weaker wills. Drukhari raiders steal people for living toys for their twisted delights. Greenskins maul and ravage the constellations. What can a man hope for among such stars? To be devoured by the Tyranid, or rendered soulless by the Necron? Perhaps to succumb to the empire of decay that is the Imperium, or give in to the delusions of the T’au Spheres? There is no hope among the stars, Angel, there is nothing but pain, suffering, and grief. This is a dying galaxy, and death is never pretty. You want to know who I am? I am the Coup de Grace, the Doom of All Things, I am the one to put Life itself out of its misery. I shall be the Dark Queen of a darkling cosmos. That is who I am. That is my goal, my one and only hope, for it is the only thing one could ever hope for in as twisted a story as this. Are you going to stand against hope? Who could do such a thing?”

  “If your hope is to kill everything in existence, yes, I am going to stand against that,” Luciene said cooly, Eviscerator revving. “My hope is for something more than death. More than you. I do not doubt you endured the suffering you claim, but I have seen others rise from pain and make of themselves something better than you have. They have needed help at times, yes, but I can be that for them.”

  “You are but a cog in a machine, Luciene. A means to an end.”

  “Whose end? Yours?”

  Veralith smiled again, sharply. “If you think you can.”

  “Needs must,” Luciene replied, and with a beat of her wings, shot across the room for Veralith’s head. Veralith, in response, whisked a hand aside, and suddenly she and Luciene found themselves in a room no more, the Blackstone Fortress a quadrillion miles away.

  ***

  Duck under the claw of a Schism, smash my blade through its gut—my weapon’s thirsting edge never dulls. Catch a leaping Hunger before it makes its mark—toss it, and a fist behind it, into the ground, killing the daemon in an instant.

  Behind me, my Shadow meets his end again, as ever he has. The Brass Doors open, but it is not an army of daemons that greets me from them. Instead, it is a surge of vitality into my Shadow, as he is overtaken by the Other. We regard each other for a moment, it wearing the visage of my Shadow, before it smiles. ‘You’re dying a lot lately, Angel,’ it observes. ‘I almost think you want to see me.’

  ‘Him, not you,’ I reply, and strike out at it with my blade. It parries the blow nonchalantly, and tosses a hand up to and around the left half of my face.

  ‘Well, I’m here and he’s not. Regardless, would you rather have me or her?’ it asks.

  In truth, I do not know. The grading of evils was not something I ever bothered with. I had lost count of the number of times she had sent me here, into the shadows. Into the jaws of death. To choose between two monsters, one that vied for my survival and one that endlessly thrust me into the realm of the dead, felt as unto an impossible task.

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  But there had to be a third choice. I had yet to give up hope for that. ‘Neither,’ I reply, and smack the daemon’s hand from me. As it releases me, I bring about my blade for another blow, and this one strikes true, bisecting my Shadow’s remains. They fade away into the dark of night, while the daemon laughs and laughs.

  ‘I shall see you again soon, I think, Angel. We’ll never be rid of each other.’

  Luciene awoke in a smoldering crater under unknown skies. Blue flames raged around her. She twitched one of her hands, and found it pinned beneath the handle of her Eviscerator. Luciene gripped it tightly, and then wheeled herself over onto the flat of her blade, fighting to stand in full.

  Overhead, as Luciene had already seen, Veralith watched her, floating in the empty skies unopposed. “You cling to life, Angel. Why?”

  “To come back stronger,” Luciene answered, and in a flash, vanished from the basin of the crater to dive for Veralith once more. She does not cross half the distance thereof before Veralith whisks another hand aside, and an invisible force thrusts Luciene back into the ground with the might to daze the Angel and make her lose her weapon’s grip at last.

  “Strength isn’t enough for me, Luciene,” Veralith shook her head. “If it was, Mordefir would have killed me long ago in his zealous bloodlust for carnage. You need power, purpose—two things you severely lack. Shall I give you a purpose?”

  “Wha—what do you mean?” Luciene struggled, once more fighting to her feet.

  Veralith spun about in the skies above, and pointed far overhead to a cluster of the world’s moons. “There are twelve billion souls on this world,” she said, turning back toward Luciene. “Kill me in the next two minutes, Angel, or I will moonstrike this planet and end them all. There, that is your purpose.”

  Once more, Luciene rose to challenge her foe, taking to the skies. She expected Veralith to strike her down again and again, but this time, Veralith did not need to; Luciene was shot out of the skies from behind, and plummeted to the earth in a ball of flame. She did not have time to ascertain what or how had struck her from her ascent, for soon after landing, she caught a kicking leg at its knee and ripped it clean off from there. Then, as she rose, she buried a fist in the Greenskin’s face, decapitating the beast in an instant.

  Raucous roars of approval surrounded her, though those Greenskins nevertheless moved in to kill the Angel too. She—they—did not have time for whatever that was, and Luciene once more tried to take to the skies. A hand grabbed onto her ankle, however, and pulled her back to the ground yet again. No, the Greenskins wanted their fight.

  “Of course,” Veralith shrugged from up above. “This world’s inhabitants don’t necessarily know you’re trying to save them. And in this particular case, they may not care. Are they worth saving? What about the one you’ve already killed? How many must you kill to save the rest?”

  “Enough,” Luciene hissed to herself as her wings bore the brunt of the Greenskin assault, and then roared for all to hear. “Enough!”

  Her shout was, temporarily, met with further approval from the Orks, until they were all incinerated in a blast of golden light.

  Luciene flew to the skies once more, but paused in her ascent toward Veralith to dodge a Gargant’s blast. She then pivoted to bring the giant hulk down, aware that it was as much an obstacle to defeating Veralith as her former patron herself was. After dodging more fire from the Gargant’s Soopagun, Luciene contacted its Kustom Force Field—and blew straight through it, piercing the Titan-sized biped front to back in a streak of gold.

  Luciene began to circle back toward Veralith as the Gargant exploded into a giant fireball, but further found herself needing to weave between a pair of missiles launched from one of three Barracuda that blazed past her in the skies. “Oh, yes,” Veralith taunted from above. “This world may be inhabited by Greenskin hordes, but it’s owned by those aspiring T’au. They likely have no idea who or what you are, but you’re in a warzone, so even for them diplomacy is unlikely.”

  “Forgive me Kor’Kassan,” Luciene muttered to herself, bobbing and weaving through the air to evade the Barracuda’s attempts at striking her down.

  “Consider Apotheosis,” Veralith started while Luciene did battle before her. “A world embroiled in a conflict of such a scale that it nearly drove your little Inquisitor friend mad. Yes, a conflict of my making, but this one here isn’t. These T’au and Orks are going at it of their own designs. Do you know what wars do, Angel, when they’re won? The armies move on, the generals clap themselves on the back, but no one picks up the pieces left behind. The suffering of this world will last far longer than the battles fought on the surface, and there is little hope of recovery from it. Why let this world bleed, then, when all the pain can just as easily be ended outright? What does anyone stand to gain from your defiance?”

  Veralith’s last question came as time seemed to slow to a crawl for Luciene, she having cleaved through the last of the Barracuda and meeting its pilot’s eyes before the shrapnel of his vessel’s debris shredded him. “They would have their lives to live!” Luciene roared to the skies above. “Who are you to take that from them? What gives you that right?”

  Luciene did not intend to give Veralith time to answer, and drove toward her quarry as a raging tempest of gold flame. Yet Veralith caught her by her neck with one hand, using a second to keep the Angel’s Eviscerator at bay. The speed and energy contained in Luciene’s final dash emptied out past the pair, blowing away what clouds and smoke had blurred the heavens above, better revealing the trio of moons that lurked in the void overhead. “I do,” Veralith answered as Luciene wrestled in futility to free herself from her foe’s grasp. “I claim that right as Heir to Powers Ruinous. Your Corpse-Emperor shed the responsibility of becoming The Dark King, and so the mantle falls to me to be The Queen. Ruin is my birthright, it is in my blood, it sparks from my breath. And from your failure temporal, Angel of the Corpse-Emperor, I grant this world the divine mercy of Ruin. You had purpose, this time. Now you need power, the power to avenge the lives of the twelve billion you have failed.”

  “No!” Luciene gasped out, fighting for air as much as fighting to stop Veralith. But neither were possible, and Veralith’s other two arms rose to the void above before thrusting down to the surface below. Three moons cracked, blue flames erupting from under their crusts. As the debris began to descend upon the nameless world, Veralith’s sky-blue eyes flared, and she teleported the pair elsewhere, leaving the planet to its cataclysmic fate.