The Chapel of Saints
Session: 2026-06-17
The Nightmare Hulk's first footfall cracked the floor.
Sister Dauphine did not wait for it to reach her. She stepped forward instead, her chainsword rising in a diagonal slash — high to low, left to right. "Die blasphemer." The blade bit home. Not deep enough to stop the creature, but deep enough to strip away whatever protection its mass and fury had provided. Its defences were gone. Whatever happened next, it would not survive this room.
Marius was already moving. He drove his own chainsword into the Hulk's side — a deep wound — and the contact tore something loose in the warp. The candle flames lurched sideways as though the chapel had exhaled, and for a moment every target in the room seemed to swim and double. Ranged weapons could not be trusted; what the eye saw and what the warp permitted were no longer the same thing.
Dauphine pivoted and fired at the nearer psykers — the rogue emaciated figures still fused to the shrines, their hoods concealing obscene human-machine grafts. "Heretics," she said. Not an accusation. A verdict.
The Hulk turned its attention to Marius and Treave and roared.
The sound moved through the air differently than sound should. Marius felt it in his chest like a command. Treave felt it too. Both of them stopped — frozen, for a moment, by something that was neither purely physical nor entirely warp, but something threaded between the two.
The psykers used the interval. The warp pulsed again, and this time the walls softened. Stone became something less certain. The floor began to run at its seams, marble oozing like fat in a pan. Somnus, Marius, and Treave felt the world grow unreliable under them — every step now became a reckoning with ground that was not entirely ground.
In the midst of it, one of the psykers reached for the Hulk. The warp, not finished dispensing its complications, misdirected the attempt entirely. It smote the Hulk instead. The creature staggered.
Treave chose his target. He moved through the slow, treacle-thick resistance the warp had imposed on his body and swung his arc maul in a single downward blow. "Witness my superiority." The maul drove the psyker's head into its neck. The figure collapsed.
Somnus stepped forward, staff raised, and swung — and missed. The melting world made distances unreliable. He pivoted to what he could do instead. He extended one hand toward Marius. Dull Pain. Some of the damage eased back, fractionally, Somnus absorbing the worst of the hurt from the man beside him.
The Veil thinned where Somnus stood. The air around him lost something — some essential quality that living lungs required. Those nearby felt it in their chests: a subtle wrongness, like breathing in a room where the oxygen had already been used.
The psykers pressed back, leeching life form Sister Dauphine, draining vitality away in an invisible current. A Flash Bang detonated in Marius's sensorium — a crude attempt to blind the Space Marine. He endured it. He shook his head once and kept his eyes on the Hulk.
Using divine guidance, Dauphine stepped sideways — placing herself between the flanking psykers and Marius's exposed side. She was the wall. She held the wall.
The psyker smote her, a crack of warp‑charged power — she took the blow and did not move.
Marius looked at the Hulk. The Hulk was still standing. The fear had frozen Marius. The warp had slowed him. The psykers had diminished him. But Marius too was still standing.
He let go of the restraint.
All out. No caution, no calculation — the full weight of what the Absolvers had made him, aimed at a single point. The Hulk's guts hit the floor. The creature crumpled, dying but not yet dead — though it would not matter anymore.
In response to the Hulk's fall, another psyker enfeebled him. He took it.
He looked at a nearby surviving psyker. He raised his weapon.
"Back to the warp with you, you piece of garbage."
Point-blank. The psyker's head ceased to exist.
Sister Dauphine turned to the final psyker — the one who had been harrying the group from the flanks. She levelled her gun, declared something about the God-Emperor that landed with the weight of a citation and the fury of a sentence, and fired.
The psyker became paste.
The chapel was quiet.
Dauphine moved through the stillness to the altar. Reconsecrating desecrated ground was within her training, her vows, her purpose. She went through the rites with the calm of someone who had arrived at the place they were made for, and as she worked, the taint began to ease. The wrongness in the air receded. Something that had been held under tension relaxed.
Jerhan Astoff stood in the doorway, the soldiers he had shepherded since the Arena arranged in a loose perimeter at his back — four of them, exhausted, still standing. They had followed him through the corridors without complaint. They watched Dauphine work and did not speak.
The shock of the last hour drained from the group. They breathed more easily. They fortified what they could — barricades at the entrances, a defensible rest point carved from ground that was now, once again, consecrated to the Emperor. Jerhan's soldiers took the watch without being asked.
Then Dauphine looked up at the five shrines.
She had known they were saints before — that was obvious from the architecture, the iconography. But now, with the taint removed and the candles burning as they should, she saw clearly what figure occupied the most prominent shrine. The face. The crest. The posture of absolute, unbreakable certainty.
Saint Alicia Dominca.
Patron saint. Founder of the Adepta Sororitas. The first Sister.
Somnus watched from across the chapel and saw it happen: something in Dauphine's posture shifted — not dramatically, but completely. Treave observed it too. Whatever moved through her in that moment, whatever conviction or clarity or grace the sight of her founder's image had conferred, it was not a thing that required comment from either of them.
The agents would face whatever came next with resolute certainty.
The vox crackled to life.
"You're alive! Saints be praised — perhaps Varonius was right about you. The Geller Field Sanctum still lies ahead — you can pass through either the Hydroponics Garden or the Perpetual Opera to reach it. One of our senior Tech-priests, Broder Able, is in the gardens — he's alive, but is only transmitting machine code over the vox. Alouette De Mornay is in the Opera, a talent worth preserving. Thankfully no abomination would dare set foot inside that sacred space."
Treave's expression did not change.
"The only option is to see to the priest," he said.
Somnus did not disagree.
Jerhan did not ask to come with them. He had learned, somewhere between the Arena and here, to read the shape of a decision before it was spoken. The chapel was defensible. The ground was clean. The Geller Field Sanctum lay ahead, through spaces no Guardsman and four tired soldiers could be expected to survive.
They would wait here until it was done.
As [they] approach[ed] the Hydroponics Garden [they could] smell the noxious stench of decaying plant life. Fruit [had rotten] on the trees with a sickeningly sweet smell, dripping pestilent pulp onto the bloody lawns. Bile clog[ged] the streams and ponds. The gilded paths glisten[ed] in the warm glow of the artificial sun suspended over the treetops, as though the marble itself was oozing.
The air tasted of corruption before they even crossed the threshold. Whatever the warp had done to the rest of The Herald, it had reached the garden as well — consuming it in a slow, greasy, sweet-smelling rot.
Broder Able was in there. He was alive. He was speaking only in machine code.
The agents pressed forward.