A faint whirring echoed through the byzantine halls of The Catacomb. Every angled nook and crook and barrow carried the noise for miles through the labyrinth of the fourth moon of Sepulchra. The grey, polished walls glimmered with phosphorescent fungi and marble streaks were arrayed in stark contrast to the detailed architecture.
The sound whirred onward until it reached Lord Cardinal Mors’ ears. “One of them is awake.” he said on the Vox-channel within his Cataphractoi armored, skull-shaped helmet. Mors stood amongst the ashen open cavern his company called “checkpoint 7.” His companion stooped beneath him like a slave, though he was armored just as heavily. Severus, codicier of the VIth Legion, was a witch-slave. A thin silver cable reached from the back of Severus’ head, to a connector on Cardinal Mors’ wrist. The penalty for being a witch was heresy, but Severus had vowed not to use his powers at Nikaea, so he and the other sorcerors of The Entombed were allowed to live. Those who refused, or those who broke their owth and touched the warp, well, they were entombed with the Primarch, bless his name. And now one of them was whirring.
Mors and Severus marched into a low chamber. Mors’ helmet analyzed the structure automatically, and a small holo-map kept track of the tunnels and caverns around him, and he used it to reach the very core of the moon. A massive stone door loomed above him. The stone had been worked, as if mixed while molten and cooled, so that a skull formed in quartzite crystals across the door. It was a skull of warning, a skull of hatred, and a skull of reverence. On its brow, emblazoned in red rubies, was a roman VI.
Cardinal Mors tugged lightly on his slave’s cerebral cable, and Severus moved to touch the skull. Both men were intently silent. For the Entombed Legion, silence was a battlecry. The door, too, was silent, when it opened inward to reveal a massive spherical chamber beyond. Spiral walkways crooked around the sphere’s inner surface, emblazoned with rubies and gold. Dotting the chamber’s walls was a hexcomb pattern of ossuary nooks, shallow crevices, each with an iron cybernetic skull nestled in it as if it were at home. A thousand servo-skulls in all. “This place,” said Mors, “Is the home of the witches who did not bow to the Emperor’s will.” Severus nodded, “It is called the Basilica of Skulls.”
At the bottom of the sphere, below Cardinal Mors and the slave Severus, stood a Statue of bone-wrought construction and massive scope. Its height reached up to the center of the sphere, and facing them directly was a massive iron skull. Its single massive eye glowed a dim red. Next to the glowing eye, encased in the iron, was a biological eye. It was held wide open by bone-wrought needles and clamps. A masterfully designed cybernetic array kept the eye moist. Mors knew that behind that Iron, and that eye, was a brain. An Iron cable of massive proportion snaked down from the bottom of the skull and worked into the Statue that Severus now realized was armor. The arms of the statue were folded in front of it in the sign of the aquila. The right hand was a massive fist of iron-plated bone stained brown with the blood of heretics. Set into the pauldrons of this bone-wrought monstrosity were rows of iron skulls. They were fused into the very matrix of the armor, never to be removed again. On the right pauldron a single skull had its mouth open. Servo-gears whirred and spun, as if it were speaking.
Mors climbed down the walkways to reach the silently screaming skull. Severus hesitantly followed. “My lord… I can… Hear it…” whispered Severus, stooped low beneath his Lord. Mors reached out with his massive power fist, and placed it onto the whirring skull. “It says the Voidwatcher has broken the pact of Nikaea.”
A sudden, screeching roar filled the chamber. The massive Iron skull at the head of the statue crooked around frenetically, in silent anguish. The servo-skulls across the dreadnought’s pauldrons glittered to life, and all began whirring as well. The sussurus of whirrs made music with the clanking of the spinal cable. The massive skull turned to face Severus, and the masterfully iron-encrusted jaw began to move. It spoke in a deep reverberating voice infused with anger and hate, “WITCHCRAFT! SORCERY! HERESY!” The chamber rumbled as the massive Dreadnought began to move its limbs.