No matter how good the Christmas lights on your tree, house, or street, they’ve got nothing on the eerie purple glow emanating from the Eye of Terror. This puncture in realspace dominates the sky of nearby planets, a marked reminder of the omnipresent threat of Chaos.
Today’s Grotmas Calendar entry pertains to a cult who actually worship the Eye, and a message that it has for them. Sounds ominous…
Isaiah shot furtive glances both ways before hurrying across the street. At this hour, the steep pedestrian tunnelways between Lowhabs and the Smelteries were quiet as the grave, everyone either toiling at their allotted shift or sleeping like the dead. But Isaiah hadn’t stayed alive and free this long through carelessness. If he got caught and charged with loitering, he would be docked food rations and maybe end up in the stocks. But if anyone in authority caught even a whiff of his real business, the outcome didn’t bear contemplating.
Despite his precautions, the few quick steps across the street made Isaiah’s heart pound. He felt marginally better once he’d plunged into the shadows of the cross-tunnel, but it still took an effort of will not to simply run helter-skelter all the way to his destination. That would be disastrous. Echoes carried along the tunnel-streets of Galagan. The sound of running feet always attracted trouble.
It was thus a jittery but determined Isaiah who finally reached Grandmother Eye’s temple at a brisk walk. From outside, the ‘temple’ was a typical hole-in-the-wall hab unit, one of a row of more than a hundred domiciles crammed cheek-by-jowl along the tunnel. He gave the approved knock, offered the password and slipped hurriedly inside.
The outer slopes of the mountain might be thick with snow and ice, the weather of Oleadros Delphos a relentless barrage of frigid storms and howling gales, yet here inside the tunnels it was as stuffy and overheated as ever. The air in the cramped hab was close. It smelled of body odour and insufficient ventilation. Yet its three occupants were all smiles as they ushered Isaiah through to the concealed hatch behind their stuttering enviro-shrine. He wasn’t surprised. It was a blessed life, he supposed, to stand watch over Grandmother.
Through the hatch, down the ladder with his work boots clanging on each rung, along a rough-hewn tunnel of living stone and through the gauzy curtain; Isaiah would have known his way to the temple even with his eyes closed. He breathed incense smoke and felt the familiar frisson of transgressive excitement.
And fear.
Always that, for there was another scent that slunk beneath the sweetness of the incense, never quite masked. It was a hint of corruption that caught at the back of the throat. Isaiah suspected it was the smell of the Warp.
The temple was perhaps undeserving of so grand a title. What purpose the cavern had been excavated for was long forgotten and – though it was a wide space – it was low-ceilinged and crudely cut. Plasteel supports did their part to prevent its collapse; offerings heaped around their feet could not disguise their base industrial nature. Water had spent years dribbling through a crack near the ceiling and draining away through another in the floor, and had stained a wide swathe of one wall with slick green lichen.
None of it diminished the sense of unnatural menace radiating from the small, elderly figure who sat on a metal stool at the temple’s centre. Grandmother Eye wore crimson and black. The nails at the ends of her crabbed fingers were silver claws. Her face was hidden by a beaded veil on which an eye, huge and staring, had been wrought in silver stitch.
The rest of Grandmother’s congregation were already present. They sat about her feet, men and women in the garb of labourers and sanitation adepts seated alongside others in the clothes of up-tier merchants, clerks – even a minor scion of House Toil. No ranks amongst the faithful, thought Isaiah. The Gods didn’t make such distinctions.
‘Sit,’ said Grandmother, her voice a parchment rustle. ‘The Warp whispers. I must speak its words.’
Isaiah hastened to take his place on the uneven stone floor, knowing that with his arrival, the gathering of acolytes had reached the sacred number that meant communion could begin. The instant he sat, Grandmother’s head rolled back so her stitched eye stared at the ceiling and her veil hugged the contours of her face like a death shroud. Her nails dragged black cloth into bunches on her knees. She uttered a rattling breath that went on for far too long. With every moment the exhalation lasted, the lumen in the walls glowed dimmer and the temperature dropped. Isaiah had experienced several communions now, but they never became any less unpleasant. From their rapid, shallow breaths and furtive movements, he knew this was true for his fellow acolytes also.
The room grew colder yet, and a pale blue nimbus swelled around Grandmother. The lumens shifted hue to match it. There came a crackling sound as the drizzling flow of water froze into ice across its wall. Isaiah felt something moving over him, through him, something that redoubled the taint of corruption on his tongue even as it filled him with mingled dread and elation. The touch of the Warp, he knew. The messengers were here.
Grandmother sucked in a shrieking breath, then spoke in a babble of overlapping voices:
‘The shattered gate vomits the get of the storm… they fight beneath the staring eye… worlds blessed and worlds cursed… the defeated are yet defiant…’
Isaiah frowned, hoping to understand something of what Grandmother said. He rarely did. Autoquills scratched as the scribe Jebet recorded the holy utterances of communion. Their meaning could be interpreted later.
‘The black sun burns cursed iron… and lights the furnace of vengeance… steel and flesh and blood and ichor tear and flow… and from ruin shall rise infinite geometries of spite…’
Grandmother’s head rolled forward again and fixed them all with its silver-stitch stare. Isaiah froze. This had never happened before. He felt something coil in his gut. His breath came in short gasps.
‘Childer of Oleadros Delphos… faithful of Galagan… the time of whispers is ending… soon will come the time of knives… make ready, true believers… deliverance comes ironwrought and vengeful…’
Grandmother slumped on her stool. Ice cracked, gunshot-loud, as water unfroze in an instant, causing several of the acolytes to gasp. A wave of feverish heat prickled Isaiah’s skin. Nausea rose, then faded. It was replaced by a ripple of excitement that ran through the assembled acolytes. Even as several went to aid Grandmother, the rest of them exchanged wild-eyed looks. The rest of her prophecy might have been impenetrable, but those last lines could not be mistaken. All their preparations were finally about to come to fruition. The overthrow of Imperial rule must surely be at hand. The true gods would reign over Oleadros Delphos at last, and the faithful would have their reward.
One by one they filed out of the temple, Isaiah amongst the last to leave. None spoke. There was no need. They all knew what they needed to do now, the word they must spread through the mountain city’s hidden network of cults:
The uprising was about to begin!
Whatever could they be talking about? I’m sure we’ll find out one day. Until then, why not take this opportunity to remember Cadia, which used to be a fortress world on the edge of the Eye of Terror, until someone blew it up.* Why not check out this Loremasters episode all about the planet.
Next on the Grotmas Calendar, we’ve got more fiction fresh from the Garden of Nurgle.
* No use trying to hide, Abaddon, we can see your topknot poking out from the crowd.
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