Pushing that image away, Togandis spent the next few hours reading passages aloud for his mnemo-quill to transcribe, steadily filling the pages of his prayer book with inspirational verses and catechisms of watchfulness against the daemon and the impure.
The glow of the electro-candles grew stronger as the light through the high windows dimmed. Togandis heard a noise through the door behind him and blinked in surprise as he looked up and saw the darkness beyond the stained glass.
It was later than he had imagined and he still had duties to attend to. His priests and vergers would be gathering for vespers and it would be unseemly for him not to join them. His library was just off the main body of the temple, and already he could hear insistent voices from the other side of the door.
They seemed to be calling his name, the sound muted by the heavy timbers so that it sounded little louder than a whisper.
As he stood and wiped a hand across his mouth, he realised that the sounds he could hear were altogether too insistent. Shavo Togandis, a master of self-deception in many other regards, was honest enough to know that his sermons, while filled with relevance and poignancy, were hardly ones that people gathered to hear with excitement or called out to him to deliver.
Curious, Togandis slipped the mnemo-quill armature from his forearm and gathered up his prayer book. He made his way towards the door, but as he reached for the handle some unheard timbre in the voices on the other side of the door resonated with that portion of his mind that knew fear.
You were there.
With sudden, awful clarity, Shavo Togandis knew what lay on the other side of the door.
Mesira Bardhyl felt the power growing throughout the city, a malevolent vibration in the bones that grated along her nerves like nails down a blackboard. Her room was dark, yet silver threads of light, invisible to those not cursed with psychic abilities, wormed their way inside, pushing between the brickwork, oozing through the mortar and slithering beneath the doorjambs.
Ghostly frost limned the door and her breath feathered the air before her.
She closed her eyes. 'Please, go away. What did I do? I didn't do anything.'
Even as she said the words, she knew that was crime enough.
To stand by while such slaughter was enacted and do nothing about it was almost worse than pulling the trigger or slicing with the falcata. The dead were massing and whatever dreadful, terrifying thing had brought the two Space Marines to this world had forever altered the balance of power on Salinas.
Immaterial energies were part of the fabric of the world now, enmeshed in the very warp and weft of it, and things that had once been incapable of doing more than unleashing nightmares now had a very real, very dangerous wellspring of power to draw upon.
She could feel a dreadful force within the room, a solidity to the air that could only be caused by another presence.
'Please,' she wept. 'No.'
Open your eyes.
Mesira shook her head. 'No, I won't.'
Open your eyes!
Mesira cried out as her eyes were forced open and she saw him: the Mourner, his black outline a stark silhouette against the soft glow from beyond her window.
Shimmering with spectral light, his blazing eyes fixed her in place and held her pinned like a moth in a display case. The stink of smoke and seared skin filled her senses and silver flames roared into life around her, cold and unforgiving.
In the icy light surrounding the Mourner, she saw the burned flesh of his body, the meat and fat of him running in yellow runnels from his bones.
You were there.
Mesira Bardhyl screamed and screamed until her mind detached itself from her senses and spun off into the darkness.
Shavo Togandis felt the chill of the door handle before his skin made contact with it. His breath was mist before him and he could feel the sudden cold that engulfed the room through the thickness of his robes.
He could feel them on the other side of the door, willing him to come out, willing him to face them, to face his accountability.
Terror filled him, his legs feeling like they might give out at any moment.
Togandis whispered a prayer to the God-Emperor, closing his eyes and reciting verses that he had learned as a child when he had been afraid of the dark and his mother had told him that the Emperor would protect him.
In that moment, Shavo Togandis was four years old again, wrapped in blankets in the darkness as he rocked back and forth with the simple catechisms of a child spilling from his lips to hold back the monsters.
The words came easily, his terror reaching back over the decades to his youth and plucking the memories from the forgotten corners of his mind. With every word spoken, he felt the terror diminish and his hand gripped the frozen metal of the door's handle.
Togandis turned the handle and pushed, forcing his unsteady legs to carry him through the door. A wave of cold air, like a winter's breath, blew past him, questing around his body like eager hands that pulled him onwards.
He could feel the cold wind's exploration of him, but with each recitation of his childhood prayer, their ministrations grew lighter and less urgent. With his prayer book held outstretched, Shavo Togandis emerged from his library and into the temple proper.
His words faltered as he saw that the temple was full, but that none of those gathered before the magnificent golden statue of the Emperor at the end of the nave were parishioners or worshipers, or were even alive.
Little more than smudges of silver light, like candle flames viewed through misted glass, they had the semblance of human forms, but little more.
'Emperor protect me,' he whispered, unwilling steps carrying him along the transept towards the altar before the towering statue of the Emperor. The fragile courage that had bloomed briefly in the library deserted him, and cold, clammy terror seized his heart once more. His bladder loosened and he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to void his bowels.
With an effort of will, he kept control of his bodily functions, looking past the flickering lights of the intruders towards the altar, seeing his priests, vergers, confessora minoris and attendants huddled before it.
Their faces were alight with awe at the sight before them.
Could they not see that these figures of light were terribly, horribly wrong?
Did they not know that they were in the most terrible danger?
Something of the man Shavo Togandis had been before the horror of the Killing Ground stirred within his breast and he walked towards the great statue and the living people who gathered beneath it.
These were his people and he had a duty to them.
As he walked, he felt the heads of the ghostly intruders turn towards him, their stares accusing and their eyes filled with a newly awakened sense of malice.
One of his priests looked up as he approached. 'Can you see them?' cried the priest. 'Angels, your eminence! Angels of the Emperor!'
Togandis looked towards the spectral figures, horrified that such dreadful things could be mistaken for something as holy and reverent as angels. Though the meat and bone of their faces was obscured by the silver light that billowed outwards from their core, Togandis could see enough to know that these were no angels, but daemons in human form, fiends sent from the blackest pit of the abyss.
'Stay away from them!' shouted Togandis, hurrying his steps towards his priests. The sweat on his brow chilled him to the bone and his breath came in short, hot spikes in his chest. The priests looked at Togandis uncomprehendingly, not seeing what he was seeing, and he interposed himself between them and the figures of light.
Togandis was breathless with fear. He could feel their hunger and anger, knowing now that these were no daemons from the pit, but the vengeful dead, hungry and voracious souls come to take what was theirs by right of blood.