Planet Pagnis.
Weinstein Hive City.
Towering industrial spires pierced the gray-green sky. Thick black smoke rose from thousands of fires, merging into a low-hanging leaden cloud that shrouded the entire hive city in perpetual twilight.
The streets were piled with shattered armor wreckage and abandoned weapons. Burned-out transports blocked every major thoroughfare, casting twisted black shadows in the firelight.
Warp storms had cut this sector off from the rest of the Imperium.
The beacons that had once guided ships through the void had dimmed, leaving nothing on the communications channels but crackling static and distant, ominous whispers.
Pagnis was not the only world to suffer this fate.
Amid the storm sweeping across the galaxy, countless Imperial planets were stranded on islands of their own. Their distress signals were like sparks falling into the deep sea, soon extinguished without raising even a ripple.
Pagnis was merely one of them, a name forgotten in the darkness, swiftly marked on star charts as a red dot indicating a possible loss of contact, then never mentioned again.
But Pagnis itself did not know it had been forgotten.
It merely struggled in agony, for a band of Chaos cultists had infiltrated this world long ago.
Clad in ragged hoods, the cultists moved through the darkness and whispered in the slums of the lower levels, slowly and patiently injecting corruption into the planet's veins.
They found ancient tunnels in the deepest reaches of the city. In those forgotten cellars, they used blood to inscribe layer upon layer of concentric magic arrays, then offered hundreds upon thousands of living sacrifices before their altars.
They used screams as fuel and pain as a precision tuning instrument, tearing open the veil between reality and the warp little by little.
When the rift finally widened enough to admit something from