Chapter 5: The Threshold

Kiri activated the auspex and pointed it down into the dark.

The readings made no sense. Life signs, but diffuse—smeared across the space below like ink through water, nothing resolving into anything distinct. Then for a half-second the display flickered purple, then settled back to its usual green.

She turned the device over, checking connections that weren't loose. Checked the readout again.

“What do you see?” Seraya asked. She rocked from side to side. Clearly impatient.

“I have no idea.” Kiri held it out. “Gen.”

Gen took it without comment, frowning at the readout. “Diffuse,” she said finally. “Like there's no clear boundary between one thing and another down there.”

Nobody said anything.

And then Seraya was moving, shouldering past Kiri and down the stairs. A sickly sweetness wafted up in her wake — as if disturbed by her passing — and then Glume followed with a cheerful look that Kiri found deeply unsettling.

“New smells,” he said, almost to himself.

“Throne,” Kiri muttered, and went after them.

The passage bent around a corner and opened up, and at the far end, light flickered in colors that had no right to exist.

Then without warning, she felt as if she pushed up to, and through, an invisible membrane. On the other side: sudden, total wrongness — like stepping onto ground that looked solid but wasn't. The air on the other side was still sweet, but now it was warm too. Humid. Like breath.

Kiri stopped walking without deciding to.

The walls didn't meet at right angles. The geometry of the space implied rooms that couldn't fit inside it, corridors folding into each other in ways that made her eyes ache if she followed them. The light didn't flicker—it moved, crawling slowly across the surfaces as if searching for something.

And she felt desire. Of what, she wasn’t sure. A heat in her, a raw wanting.

It felt wrong. And also, right.

Her hand found the inside of her coat without her telling it to — the small, dense shape of the book she'd been carrying since the ship. The Litany of Sacrifice. She didn't take it out. Just held it through the fabric, over her heart, until the wanting receded enough to think past it.

Seraya's hand found her staff. “We're not in the same place we were,” she said quietly, the way someone might say it's raining—plain, factual. “This is a warp bubble. A reflection of Slaanesh's realm bleeding into realspace.” She scanned the room. “We're not dead, which means it's not full warp. But it's close enough that things can manifest here that wouldn't be able to otherwise. Be very — very — careful.” She turned and glowered at Glume. “You especially.”

“What?” he said, palms outraised.

Seraya turned away, muttering under her breath. She stalked forward into the room.

Kiri felt it then—not a sound, not a sight, but an awareness, somewhere in the room, that they had arrived. Like being watched by something that didn't have eyes.

She looked at Glume. He was looking at the walls with open curiosity, head slightly tilted, the way he looked at anything new. She watched him register the shapes moving under the surface of the stone, the way the shadows gathered against the light’s logic, and instead of horror she saw—

Interest.

“Glume,” she said.

He looked at her. Whatever it was receded from his face. He nodded once.

Gen made a quiet sound. Kiri turned to see her reaching toward one of the pillars and then yanking her hand back a full second before contact, pressing it flat against her side. She said nothing. But her jaw was tight in a way it hadn't been upstairs, and her eyes had the slightly unfocused quality of someone doing mental arithmetic, calculating thresholds and margins.

She's being extra careful, Kiri thought. She must be feeling the room’s effects.

Throne knew she was too. A wrongness had settled into her bones, a faint static at the edge of consciousness that hadn't been there before. Just from crossing the threshold. Just from being here.

She filed it away and kept moving.

The room was large and mostly empty, pillars scattered through it, everything slightly off at the edges. Directly across from their entry point stood two massive doors. But along the near wall, Kiri caught something—a shadow that stayed put when the others moved. She watched it for a moment, then crossed toward it. An alcove, and inside it: a cogitator terminal. The Aquila on the terminal had been defaced but Kiri didn’t see any of the ruinous glyphs on it.

Kiri looked at Gen.

Gen took one step toward it and stopped. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to—Kiri knew. It was taking all she had just to be here and keep her sanity. Gen wasn’t going to risk looking at the cogitator.

“Talk me through it,” Kiri said, already moving toward the terminal.

“Thank you,” Gen said, staying where she was. “If it was wrong, I’m not sure…”

“Talk me through it.”

“Key cluster, lower left. If it asks for authentication, the Administratum standard override is—”

“Let’s see if I need it first.”

The terminal woke under her hands. The housing was unpleasant to touch—not painful, just wrong in a way that made her want to pull back. She didn't.

The files were sparse. Someone had been disciplined about what they stored here, or most of it had been moved. What remained: a document describing this space as a test site for some larger event, details redacted or simply absent. References to the Architect's Protocol and the Lady's Design, whatever those were.

Neither read like the frothing devotion of the cultists upstairs. These were precise. Methodical. Someone lucid and intelligent had written them. That was, in its own way, worse.

Kiri stepped back from the terminal.

“We’ve got company,” Seraya said, from behind her.

Across the chamber, the great doors had not moved. But out of places that hadn't had openings a moment ago, figures were pouring into the room—a dozen of them, screaming, frothing, limbs moving in ways that suggested too many joints in places they didn’t belong. Some had extra eyes. All of them moved like they'd been built for speed and nothing else. And all of them were, in the same terrible way as everything else down here, beautiful. Not despite what they were. Because of it.

Don't look too long, some instinct supplied.

She grabbed her bolter, and started to fire into the mass of bodies.

---

These cultists were worse than the ones upstairs—more gone, more changed—and there were too many of them, and the fight was long and ugly. But it ended. Eventually.

When the last one dropped, Glume stood over it for a moment, breathing hard. He looked at the body with the specific expression he got around things that were new. Then he looked away, jaw working, and made the sign of the Aquila.

The great doors across the chamber had not moved through any of it. They stood there waiting, indifferent to the bodies on the floor between them and the door. Now, as the four of them regrouped, they began to open—slowly, at their own unhurried pace, with a low groan that resonated somewhere behind the sternum.

Gen was muttering under her breath. She made the sign of the Aquila.

That’s a good idea, Kiri thought, her hands forming the Aquila as well.

Beyond them: a chamber that made everything before it feel like a vestibule.

Crystals studded every surface—ceiling, walls, thrusting up from the floor in jagged clusters, all of them pulsing with slow purple light like something breathing in its sleep. They were larger than anything from the warehouse above, the same sharp geometry but amplified until the air itself tasted of them. Near the far wall they had piled to the ceiling, and at a low altar in front of the pile stood a man.

He turned as they entered. He was unremarkable—middle-aged, neat, the face of someone whose life was spent in logistics.

“Welcome,” he said. His voice carried easily across the chamber. A grin slowly spread across his face — the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time and found the wait completely worthwhile.

“I'm Overseer Kael. I see you've gone through my appetizers.”

He spread his arms wide. “And now it's time for the main course.”

The air behind him tore.

Figures unfolded out of the rupture — figures that moved like they'd been poured rather than born. Lithe and elongated, each one a disturbed kind of beautiful — long limbs, faces that the eye wanted to linger on and something deeper in the brain screamed to look away from, one arm ending in a razor claw that caught the crystal-light as they unfolded from the tear in the air. Nearly a dozen of them.

Beside Kiri, barely audible, Seraya said a single word.

“Daemonettes.”

Kiri's first thought, throne help her, was that they were beautiful. Her second thought arrived half a second later like a correction: no. No, they are not. But the first thought didn't leave. Both existed at once, pulling in opposite directions. Kiri staggered a step. She felt her thoughts slow down, pulled at by the perverted beauty of the creatures in front of her.

I’m going to die. The thought came to her. I’m going to lose my soul. She froze. Willed herself to move. To bring up her weapon. Nothing moved.

And then a thought came to her unbidden. Something she’d read from the Litany of Sacrifice that the Seneschal had given her: What is given in service to the Emperor is never truly lost.

She could breathe again.

But by then the daemons were sprinting faster than any living thing ought to, and all she had space for was instinct. She pulled up her inferno pistol and barely squeezed off a shot.