The Reliquary of Luce Prime turned out to be a library. Its stacks rose dozens of meters overhead, stretching back, one after another, in row upon row. Dark-robed scriveners and knowledge adepts shuffled between the bookcases, reverently clutching at codices and parchment scrolls. A faint odor of decay permeated the air, along with the stronger scent of melting tallow. Wall-mounted braziers and brass candelabras lit the room, conspiring to lend the space an eerie, solemn feeling. Melancthon found it odd that the Luceans used candlelight in this space. It seemed an obvious hazard. He mentioned this to Derrida.

  “Yes, quite,” the captain agreed. “Duke Marius regularly revisits the subject. Overhead illumination offers obvious benefits and is, of course, much safer. Still, his grace feels that the older ways carry certain advantages, particularly here. Your kind built this place, millennia ago, and it remains much the same today as it did then.”

  “Astartes built this library?”

  Derrida nodded. “In ancient times, as I said. It existed at a lower elevation then. His grace spared no expense in relocating it to the surface. The project lasted two decades and was only completed in the year I was born.”

  Melancthon blinked in surprise. “The year you were born?” He asked, incredulously. He had not placed Duke Marius beyond his late-twenties.

  The soldier offered a wry smile. “His grace responds particularly well to rejuvenate treatments. He rather puts us all to shame, in that regard.” He wiggled his white mustache. “I lost the last of my dark hairs this past year, hunting the subdevil.”

  Melancthon halted mid-stride. He turned his full attention on Derrida. “The what?” The older soldier shrugged. “A beast-thing dwelling in the underhive. It attacks any patrol we send down there. As you might imagine, this makes policing the undercity difficult.” He sighed, shaking his head. “In truth, we suspect it is intelligent. Last year, a series of bombings almost destroyed the Reliquary. They took out several of the lower floors.”

  The Space Marine looked doubtfully at the carpet. He did not like to think that the ground he stood upon might be unstable. Derrida noticed and, laughing, assured him that the building was perfectly stable.

  “I see,” said Melancthon, though he felt little better. “Well, your master wished me to see some kind of weapon?”

  “A weapon of sorts, yes,” Derrida agreed. He led the angel into the maze of documents. They wove in and out of several rows of books. Melancthon felt as though he were tracing some arcane pattern on the floor, entering both literally and symbolically into the center of something unknown. Before he could process the thought, he found himself standing in an open space, empty save for stone pedestal, flanked on six sides by bookcases. A small leatherbound tome perched atop the pedestal, its cover latched with a golden clasp bearing the Imperial Aquila.

  Melancthon glanced at Derrida, but the man had stepped back and bowed his head reverently. After a moment, the Space Marine realized that the Captain intended for him to read the book alone. He opened his mouth to object, to protest that he did not have time to peer at dusty curiosities, but the words died on his lips. He couldn’t explain why, but it felt as though the book wanted him to read it. Stranger still, he actually wanted to read it.

  Stepping forward, the Space Marine unclasped the golden aquila. He would not read it all, there was not time for such trivialities. Perhaps just a page. Just this once, he decided, he would indulge himself.

  Later, he found it difficult to explain what he saw. Immediately, however, the book’s contents struck him as beautiful, even flawless. The script ran in clear, straight lines, although it contained many elaborate flourishes. The pages blossomed with rare and sumptuous natural inks, harvested from the world’s native shimmer eels. The design was so beautiful, so decadent, that he felt vaguely scandalized, as though he were a child peering through a keyhole at an indecent scene.

  The text relayed a story, apparently fictional, in lurid and baroque language. It wove a tale concerning a majestic realm floating in the sky. A wise and thoughtful ruler governed it, a woman, or perhaps a man, who knew all his subjects’ dirty secrets. She kept these secrets close to her bosom, using them to shape the world according to her inevitable will. None could possibly oppose him, nor would they, for his realm offered numberless pleasures, countless delights. She did not terrify her servants with festering disease. He did not frighten them with blood and gore. No, such things had no place in her realm. Here, there were only gifts, given without restraint, to those who worship and serve.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Melancthon watched, rather than read, the unfolding tale. It manifested before his eyes in all its fulness. Only later did he realize that the written language disappeared, as did the coherent images. Only impressions, deep and suggestive, remained in the later pages. A palace. A mansion. A tower of infinite delight. Men, women, and xenos, writhing in rapturous agonies of ecstasy. The goodness of their master burned them out from the inside, twisting their bodies into shocking and grotesque shapes.

  He saw a temple at the center of four great towers. Its wide aisles throbbed and surged with waves of faithful worshippers, bowing down to a chthonic altar grown from solid amethyst, upon which rested the body of a Space Marine, his gray armor swallowed up in lichenous growths, his mouth stuffed with a smooth metal sphere.

  He saw a face, terrible to look upon, leering at him, its mouth split into a rictus grin. In its teeth languished the bodies of warlords and kings and emperors. She devoured them as she would devour Melancthon, as she would devour all things. She whispered to him now, filling his ears with promises to tempt the stoniest soul.

  The angel stumbled backwards, coughing, choking on his own acidic saliva. Disgust and wrath surged into him in equal measure. Spinning, he ripped his helm from his belt, slamming it onto his head. His other hand snatched up his chainsword, its promethium engine roaring to life, chattering its hatful dogma. He moved to strike down Derrida, to end this farce, when he discovered that the two men were no longer alone.

  Dozens of robed figures filled the space. They surround him on every side. Two figures made to strike him from behind, crackling force-pikes stabbing forward, when he caught sight of them in his helm’s mirrored peripherals. A deafening roar tore the air and screams followed hot on its tail. The pikes clattered to the floor, their wielders landing atop them. Blood oozed out onto the carpet.

  “It would be better if you did not struggle, Lord Melancthon,” Derrida said. The man wore a disappointed expression as he stared at the angel, as though the Space Marine had spoiled something. “We have long awaited the return of the Astartes. We have always known you would return. Our founder, Fulgrim the Great, left us this prophetic tome so that we would expect you. Do not spoil the occasion with needless violence, lord. You shall be our champion and our leader. So it is written.”

  “Yes! Yes!” hissed the robed figures. They shed their garments now, revealing twisted bodies of hoof and claw. They began to dance around the Space Marine, performing madcap mazurkas in honor of the abomination of desolations, Slaanesh the Accursed. “Master! Master! Melancthon the Mighty! Melancthon, the Prince of Light!” Their protuberant bodies writhed and wobbled. They sashayed and pirouetted, grinned and leered. Foul music piped like bile from their tooth-lined throats and they wheezed and sang in a scale known to no living man. “Such sounds shall we show you! Such delights shall we lavish upon you!”

  The Space Marine understood it all now. He had walked into a trap. The arcane positioning of the Reliquary’s candles, the strange patterns that led him to this destination, all of it had been a spell designed to disorient and confuse him. There was nowhere to turn. He stood alone, surrounded, lost in a maze prepared over generations for this moment.

  “You should abandon hope, my lord. There is no room for it here. You know this already, in your heart. The Despoiler has triumphed where Horus failed. Cadia is broken. The Astronomican is gone. Your chapter is lost. Abandon hope, Elezar Melancthon, and seize pleasure.” Derrida spread his hands in a gesture of welcome. “Find peace here with us. Peace, yes, and endless delight.”

  A cultist danced closer to Melancthon. His body, embiggened and swollen in the loins, juddered and curled, wrinkling and stretching itself with its manic ecstasies. It shuddered and moaned in metronomic time to the Captain’s speech.

  “Abandon hope,” Derrida urged again. “You do not need it in this realm of delight.” The man’s words exerted a compulsion on the Space Marine. He felt the last reserves of his hope, already depleted after Cadia, vanish entirely. He would die here, alone, forgotten, and without hope.

  But Space Marines need no hope, and they know no fear.

  A blessed shriek silenced the swollen cultist’s voice forever as a bolter round punctured his head. The round slammed into the bookcase behind the cultist, scattering flaming parchment into the air and tipping the shelf backwards. It hit the ground with a deafening crash, kicking up several more screams as more cultists, clearly lurking behind the shelf, were crushed beneath its bulk.

  Behind his helm, the Space Marine smiled grimly. “Delight in this.”