The Dark City (Vaults of Terra: Warhammer 40,000 #3)

by Chris Wraight

But he had not come here to escape. He had come to retrace the steps taken by the creature itself, to burrow down into the hidden place it had emerged from, the abyss where it had practised its long and storied depravities. It would be hard, even in his non-corporeal state, to visit that place. Even before all this had started, he’d known stories of the Dark City, the fabled haunt of infinite tortures closeted away in the depths of the empyrean’s undercroft. Rumours of its legendary cruelty, its fabulous riches and its unfathomable treasures were whispered across the breadth of the human Imperium, spoken of either as myth or as a warning. To be a living soul in that place was to be in torment. No purer expression of evil had ever been constructed, for there was no pity in that realm, no redemption, only the endless rehearsal of excruciation for its own sake. A civilisation that had once bestrode the stars themselves had been driven down into its lightless pits, reduced to scratching around in the sordid depths of sensation, sucking at the teat of anguish merely to stave off the extinction their own hubris had delivered.