The iron doors of the Sanctum Sanctorum didn’t merely open. They were blown inward by a bone-shaking blast of freezing necro-pressure that tore the hinges from the dark rock stonework.
Shards of black stone whistled through the chamber like shrapnel, ricocheting off the iron overhead frame and shattering against the suspended ledger.
“Take cover!” Ren roared, throwing his arm around Mira and pulling her behind the heavy bronze support stone stand of the ledger hoist.
Through the crushed threshold, draped in billowing clouds of freezing green ectoplasm, stepped Cardinal-Judicator Vane-Krell.
He was a nightmare of ecclesiastical necromancy. Standing nine feet tall, the Cardinal was an ancient lich wrapped in huge, said clearlyplates of lead-lined canonical armor, draped in torn stoles of crimson velvet stitched with silver scripture. Upon his brow rested a towering, three-tiered papal mitre cast from hammered bronze, inlaid with the stone-hard finger-bones of carried out heretics. In his right gauntlet, he swung a massive, nine-foot flanged war-mace topped with a weeping lead skull that leaked burning purple sulfur onto the flat stone slabs.
Behind him marched twenty Void-court Bone-Reapers. Towering skeletal executioners clad in lacquered black bone-plate, wielding huge two-handed cleavers forged from stone-hard executioners’ steel.
“HERESY!” Vane-Krell’s voice roared, a sound of grinding granite plates and booming dead-house thunder that rattled the marrow in Ren’s fragile skeleton. The corpse-candles in the Cardinal’s hollow eye sockets burned with blinding, violet fury as his gaze locked onto the smoking, acid-rusted through gold-silver metal leaf of the Master Ledger…
