Its face was the worst. Looking into its eyes was horrific, and yet he had gazed into them before. Just as they had been in the underhive on Terra, those eyes were empty, bottomless pits into nothingness. Only cruelty reflected from them, and not merely any kind of cruelty – not human cruelty, which was an aberration and a fault in the species – but constitutive cruelty. This thing was made of it; it was built by it and sustained by it. It breathed in pain, it exhaled desperation. Even the air of the chamber seemed to shimmer and hiss around it, repelled by proximity to such raw and pungent
...more
