Volume 2 - Chapter 96 - Rules of Engagement
| Beyond the Gate, the Warren waits— a hollow room beyond the dark, that knew your name before you came, that held your shape before your spark. You step inside. The walls are warm. They breathe the way your mother sighed the night she watched beside your bed and told you nothing was awry. You know this place. You've always known. You knew it as a child of three, when dreams would leave you thrown, with iron taste and bended knee. Here time forgets to keep its watch. Here distance pools like standing rain. You have been here, alone, always. You have been here, not once, again. You shape the air. You shape the floor. You carve a window in the wall, what looks inside will lay you bare. The Warren is your only room. The Warren is your only home. The Warren is your only crown— and it has worn you, like a plume. You will return. You always do. You will refine your halls, your gates, your altars and your stained-glass eyes, your countless quiet thrones and slates. Yet one day late, you'll lift your head and notice that the door is gone. And you will smile, because by then, you will not wish to carry on… [Excerpt from, "Voidsongs: Verses of the Damned, Volume 1," a collection of anonymous poems gathered from the personal effects of UHF Battlefield Psykers across multiple centuries, PFC 875, Editor's Note: Of the forty-seven poems in this volume, "Beyond the Gate" is the most frequently recurring—appearing, in fragmentary or full form, in the journals of nineteen separate Psykers across at least four generations. None of them are recorded as ever having read it before writing their own version of it.]
|