The bridge of The Deathshroud resembled a mausoleum more than a command centre. Titanic walls of black god-steel rose to invisible heights. The skulls of Nilldoranian Hydras stared down from where they were affixed, cyclopean, their polished bone gleaming like shards of Erethian moonlight.

  The central captain’s seat and mind-link console seemed a black throne found in the ancient ruins of some long dead emperor, rather than anything technological. Horrors adorned its arms, back, and base in the form of elaborate sculptures and engravings. Throbbing wires the size of colossal pythons extended from its rear and ran down into the floor, where they spread like parasitic infection, communicating brain-waves to every part of the ship.

  The machines we have built are not unlike Daimons, the dark figure upon the throne mused. They communicate via thought. They are dependent on us and yet we, too, depend upon them.

  The figure was alone in the bridge save for one servant, a god themselves, robed in beauteous vermillion, the fabric threaded with histories of conquest that made the time of human beings upon Erethia seem but the blink of an eye. The servant-god knelt, awaiting command. The figure on the throne sat with eyes closed, mind absorbed in the machinery of the ship with which he could communicate, as though it were an extension of his senses, a way of seeing beyond the darkness that occluded even divine eyes. And indeed, that is exactly what he was doing: feeling his way with elaborate sensors of infinitesimal sensitivity and mechanisms for harvesting the invisible forces of physicks into the Great Dark. Searching the absolute void. He knew not, exactly, what for. Answers, perhaps. But he knew it was unlikely he would find answers, only more questions, questions that perhaps should not be asked.

  Beyond even the Great Dark lay a place that was no place, a Nowhere. It was the boundary of all Creation. Only The Deathshroud could withstand the crushing pressures and colds here, its hull tempered in the fires of the deepest volcano of Nilldoran, hammered and cooled seven-thousand times by the Smithlords of Nyshala. Only The Deathshroud’s navigation systems could tolerate the absence of all stars, all maps, all sense. Beltanus’s greatest creation, the figure upon the throne thought, and the softest smile lifted his heavy, thick lips.

  But the thought of Beltanus summoned another feeling, quite different from the pleasure of brotherly remembrance. A frown creased the granitic forehead. He bared his teeth as a sudden pain lanced through his heart. This pain was not his own, it belonged to another. He felt it even across unimaginable distance, felt it close as a dagger blow.

  What… what is this? Images hovered and flashed. The pain in his heart waxed until it was hardly endurable, even for one who had endured all. Rage, fear, then… nothing. It was sharper than a dream, as vivid as remembrance of forgotten trauma.

  He started from his reverie and his eyes flashed open: violet jewels, engraved with holographic scripture, pierced the dark. The very words of the sacred tablets were etched into the oculi of his soul.

  He stood, rising from the throne. The Cython-Class warplate he wore, fashioned from twenty-two alternating layers of Hydraskin and god-steel, buzzed and whirred as mechanisms long unused roused themselves from torpor. The armour plating was utterly black yet somehow shone.

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  He stepped down from the throne, and his footfalls made the ship’s deck tremble as though shaken by cosmic winds, or the gravity of some devouring black hole. The vastness of the room was filled up by the aura that mantled him.

  Before him was a vast viewing window, large enough that the other ships of the Nilldoranian fleet could have docked there, were not the glass nigh-on impenetrable. Infinite darkness beckoned with an invisible whisper, a darkness at once singular and yet, he had discovered, mysteriously multifaceted, like a gemstone that appears one-sided, but when turned, reveals its shining faces. There were paths and patterns in the dark; rivers of time and space flowed in the place where no light shone. He would map this expanse, he would know the extremities of Creation, he would find Source…

  But not yet. The burning in his heart told him something was direfully, darkly amiss. Rynu’nakan blood had been spilled. Beltanus… He had heard his soul crying out across the vast depths of the void. No other god possessed this strange affinity, almost Daimonlike, but he was like no other god. A god of gods. Highest among the high.

  Wrong, all wrong. I have been too long absent, I must return.

  He paused one final time at the viewing window. The servant had risen from his kneeling posture, sensing his master’s change, that orders were imminent. He approached the figure reverently, head bowed. The servant was some eight foot tall. His flesh glowed with the energy of one born to Nilldoran.

  And yet, beside the other, he was nothing. A dwarf. An atom.

  The lord stood nearly thirteen feet—a giant even by the standards of his own towering race. At his side hung the nine-food Daimonsword, Githyc—which meant The Hunger—one of only three weapons imbued with the essence of a Daimon, their limitless power concentrated by the blackest of sciences and imbued into the edge of invincible steel that could not fail to find flesh and drink life wherever it was swung. Its surface shone coruscating emerald, screaming faces of phantom creatures fazing in and out as the flamelight of its brilliance flickered.

  His face more resembled the surface of a planet than a man’s visage. The eyes, with their startling violet and strange writing, were striking enough. But the whole warp of his albino-white features was of disgusting handsomeness. He possessed every feature attractive: a proud nose, distinguished brow, a high forehead, immaculate black hair that hung in luscious locks, full lips, impossibly white teeth, a strong chin and jaw—yet all combined rendered the face monstrous in its beauty. Hard to look upon, even for those of Nilldoranian blood.

  “What is your command, Lord Koronzon?”

  The God of Death stared into the utter blackness.

  “We must return to Erethia,” he said. “Something is amiss. And I intend to discover it.”

  The servant bowed and left to relay the orders to the pilots and navigators.

  Koronzon remained by the window.

  “Beltanus…” he whispered. “Have you truly fallen?”

  The blackness offered no reply.

  THE STORY WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK 3: THROUGH DARKNESS OF MEMORY