It was a sight to unnerve the bravest man.

Before them was a grey strand of shattered stone and machine parts, stretching some half a mile wide in a great circle around the circumference of the chamber for as far as the eye could see. Dotted across this beach of debris were tall crosses of welded girders and stanchions, embedded in the trash and dirt of the chamber floor.

And crucified to these structures were Space Marines.

Drake counted fifty nearby, but there were many more – scores, perhaps hundreds, out in the distance. They were still clad in fragments of power armour, which might have originally been green, but now were so stained and pitted that they had descended into a bilious pink-grey. The Adeptus Astartes had all been unhelmed, and were bolted to their scaffolds through every limb. Their agonies were written across their faces; these paragons of courage were shrieking with silent mouths.

Some had been disembowelled, others dismembered and then nailed back together. Many had had their eyes and tongues torn out. Most had the eight-pointed star of Chaos carved on their foreheads, the flesh sliced so deep as to reveal the glint of bone.
Others had undergone mutation. They had tentacles for arms, horns arching out of their skulls, nests of snakes squirming in their exposed bellies. Still more were being gnawed on by the shining pink slugs of Chaos spawn, which infested the ground around them like maggots in a gangrenous wound.

And the worst thing of all; most of them were still alive.

Their eyes moved, wide and white – those who had them. They quivered in their impalement, their flesh trembling, exposed organs pulsing dark and gleaming. They dripped blood, but the blood was black, and it seethed with bubbling life even as it left their veins. Their bodies had become incubators of teeming foulness, and they knew it; it could be seen in the glittering madness of their gaze.
Some of them struggled on their crosses, as they must have struggled through years uncounted, but they were stuck fast. They endured the torture unendingly, and around the feet of every one the maggot-life of Chaos writhed and squirmed, feeding on their dripping blood, their chopped viscera, and above all, on the pain itself, nourished by it, growing on it.

‘Throne of Terra,’ Regan said in a cracked whisper on the vox, and his voice was near breaking.