The psyker's forearms had been replaced by simple augments - unadorned pipes leading to basic manipulators with fingers like cleaning rods that mimicked the shape of human hands. They sat limp in the man's lap. Apart from the occasional slow blink, he'd made no move to shift position for some time, his head rested against the back wall of the cell. He was a rangy thing, tall and lean, his long, unshaven face marked by pocks as if from terrible acne scars or perchance some manner of shrapnel, cheeks lined by reddened tear tracks. His hair was grayed. At a glance one might have pinned him as a man in his fifties, a tragic fate for one nine and twenty.
The man that pulled out the chair opposite and sat in it was much the opposite, blocky and square-faced, his eyes hidden by shaded lenses. The psyker showed little reaction as the Inquisitor pulled himself up to the table and set a dataslate atop a stand where both men could view the screen.
He pushed a button and a scene began to play, the sound filtered through the speakers barely loud enough to be heard. Gunfire flashed through the vista of a battlefield, the camra centered upon the figure of a man fallen to his knees. His arms were outstretched, though not in welcome but rather in horror, his hands clawed as if struggling to grapple with some monumental force.
Then it leaned into view. An abomination. A thing that should not have been. A long, inhuman face of horn and bone and cartilage and long, scythelike teeth, eyes glowing with a malevolence felt even through the small datascreen. A face large enough it could have been mounted to one of the Imperium's knight-titans, jaws parting as the bio-form closed in on the comparatively miniscule human. As its mouth opened, it began to howl, an unearthly sound of bone-chilling vibration that filled the world and made the dataslate's speakers crackle and between the two figures the air could be seen to waver and sizzle as invisible forces pushed-
The Inquisitor jabbed another button and the scene froze. All throughout the playback, his unseen eyes had been locked to the figure across the table. He had studied the footage more than was sufficient to commit the scene to memory. The psyker had reacted to the display, at least to the extent that his own dull, sunken eyes had risen to watch the footage play out.
"Tell me what you felt," Kryptman said.
Long moments passed in silence as the psyker's eyes drooped, bobbed upwards again, drooped once more. Kryptman didn't hurry him, watching his every twitch in the silence of the too-warm room as the seconds slid languidly by. Finally, a parting of the lips, a subtle swallow. "Mm...mfelt like," the man murmured in a dry voice, speaking as if for first time in his life, "I wwas..." blink "...an algae. Beinng... swallowed by a whale." A blink. A breath. "A whale that...hh-hhated me," he said, voice shuddering, "ffor being...too small t'be worth the effort. T-too small for the hunger it had, like...it could eat and eat and never stop eating, and it was desperate to have me even though it hated how worthless I was because it had to have me and anything else that could feed it because it was so hungry and it hated that I was the next thing to eat."
Like a tumbling rock down a mountainside, the psyker's speech had gathered speed and clarity until it abruptly seemed to reach the end and shut off. All throughout his tone was gray, exhausted.
Kryptman waited for several seconds more before resuming the playback. He knew what came next - the norn emissary miraculously subsumed in a tidal wave of fire and smoke as the rocket artillery dropped, even at the moment the camra picked up the distinctive wobble in the air around the psyker's outstretched hands. By some miracle of chance, the camra had stayed in place to continue recording as the smoke and dust cleared, a hazy outline of the psyker still knelt in place, hands held out before him, a crescent of clean ground around his body. It had continued to record until the reinforcements had found him, still rooted to the spot, arms necrotized up to the elbow by psychic permafrost.
Inquisitor Kryptman didn't wait for it all to play out. Instead he pressed buttons on the slate that stopped the footage and restarted it, but this time the gunfire was muted, all but inaudible. Instead a man's labored breathing could be heard as if he heaved directly into the pickup. This time, as the terrifying face of the norn emissary leaned close, a whisper could be heard at the edge of sound, entreating "Emperor protect me...Emperor...protect...me, Emperor..." The voice of the man that sat opposite him now.
He jabbed the button to pause the footage once more. "You called out to the God-Emperor," he said. "Do you credit His intercession for your survival?"
Once more the psyker's eyes wavered, and this time as the moments passed the corners of his mouth began to tremble. "No," the man croaked. "I couldn't feel Him. There was just Her. There was only Her." He began to sob, lifting his pipe-shaped augments from his lap and pressing the cleaning-rod fists to his eyes.
Inquisitor Kryptman deactivated his slate, gathered up the damning evidence, and left the room.
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