At the heart of the mass rose eight massive spikes of dark metal, thrusting higher even than the spires around them, jutting as a single coronet into the skies. And within the heart of that iron crown, more massive than anything else, jet-black, frosted like glass, a hemisphere of such aching perfection that it made the urban sprawl lapping up to its perimeter look like a tide of thrown rubble. Lightning was drawn to the dome, licking and slithering around it in an unending cascade of attraction. Its smooth face swam with eldritch light, reflecting the lacerating discharge of the firmament.
It had been made, like so much else on Terra, so far in the past that its origins were now little more than myth. Some held that the Emperor Himself had laid the first stone. It was almost universally believed that He had designed it, drawing up the plans that would one day connect its central chamber to the mechanisms of the Golden Throne itself.
The majority knew nothing of the Black Ships that ran their long circuits through the lonely paths of the void. They knew nothing of the ancient harvest of the gifted, who had once been destined to form the vanguard of a new humanity, but were now fated to become something just a little more exalted than psychic firewood. They knew nothing of the months-long voyages in those creaking, heavily warded behemoths. They knew nothing of the null-soulled guardians plucking the strange and the changed from their childhood homes. They knew nothing of the long journeys back home, assailed on all sides by madness within and without, until they came back to the Sol System at last, unmarked and unmonitored, to dock with the stygian orbital facilities rotating silently over Terra’s skies. They knew nothing of the choices made by age-ravaged ancients, selecting those who might survive to prosper under the guidance of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica to become the soul-seers and seekers of dreams that the Imperium relied upon in order to communicate with itself. They did not know that a few select individuals among that harvest might be elevated to the highest echelons of all – the mysterious Librarians of the Space Marines, or the sanctioned psykers of the Astra Militarum – and that of those, many in turn would be selected for service within the Forbidden Fortress.
So it was that the black-liveried landers would descend on prescribed nights, slipping out of orbit and down into the Throneworld’s crowded skies. Once disembarked, the chosen would file through the great arched gates, their heads shaved, their bodies stripped naked and their names taken from them. They would be given new raiment – nightshade robes, controller collars, spinal implants and steel-ringed input nodes at the bases of their skulls. They would be instructed in the lore and the mysteries of their craft, and learn to control the beasts that coiled within their minds.
Many would die during that training. Others would succumb to insanity and be turned over to the tech-priests for servitor-meat. For those who survived, a mind-altering journey of discovery awaited them, one denied to almost all other members of their species. They would learn the true nature of the ether. They would learn of the beings that dwelt within it. They would learn of the few ways that a mortal could employ its powers safely, and the many ways that a mortal could wreak destruction through hubris, malevolence or error. They would write treatises on the philosophy of the empyrean, and compose music reflecting its shifting harmonics. They would be tested, over and over again, for signs of taint, sickness or open-mindedness. They would come to believe, in time, that annihilation in His service was the highest calling any mortal human could ever hope for. They would dream of it. They would long for it. And, when the call finally came, they already knew the words they would sing, endlessly, rapturously, as their eyelids burned away and their skin began to crisp.
The Astronomican itself was a gigantic sphere. Its lower half was hewn from the stone of the mountain; the upper half looked like glass. The scale of it was hard to process – the zenith and nadir stretched so far overhead and underfoot that both were lost in the haze of distance. All across the sphere’s inner surface were points of light, thousands of them, some blazing brightly, others dim. Murmuring, shouting, chanting filled the entire space, reflecting and echoing back and forth until it seemed that there must be millions of sources there, fissured, overlapping, interplaying.
At the very centre was a huge orb of light, dancing, spinning, whirling like a neutron star. It was not static, but it vibrated to an uncertain rhythm, contracting and expanding like a lung taking in air. Tendrils of ephemeral force ran into the orb, connecting it to the thousands of lights at the sphere’s edge. Pulses travelled down the tendrils, all moving in the same direction – towards the centre. It should have been beautiful. The light was blue-white, dazzling in its purity, making the glass dome ripple like sunlight on water. The singing was harmonious, the proportions of the sphere were perfect.
Instead, it was hateful. It was abominable. Every one of those brilliant points contained, at its heart, an iron throne. On every throne writhed a mortal man or woman, locked down by iron collars, their skin punctured by control jacks, their temples weighed down by psy-resonant tiaras, burning themselves to death. This was a furnace. A cold, hard furnace. Each point of light was slowly being drained to nothing, sucked into the orb in order to generate the signal that burned through the warp itself.
It was humanity’s greatest and most irreplaceable psychic accomplishment.
- The Hollow Mountain by Chris Wraight (art by Igor Sid)
