All around me was chaos. The air tasted soapy with sublimed calcium that flayed at the back of the throat. The zealots behind us were charging the door, their screams drowned out by the howl of Elecktra's evicerator as she wove it in great figure eights, sending limbs, heads, and bisected bodies flying in all directions in a welter of blood. Hadrian and Lazarus were killing the psykers as fast as they could. The barrel of Lazarus' weapon was glowing white from firing, the air around it shimmering and twisting. I couldn't see Clara or Ortega but judging from the chatter of las fire and the continual boom boom boom of Ortega's shot gun suggested they were fully engaged. I looked up at the priest, above us. The psykic shield was weaking but slowly, too slowly. I knew what the scroll said, and where in the liturgy the command word came. However much we had dampened the psykic signal, many thousands of Imperials were about to be ensnared. 

I would like to say that inspiration struck, but in my experience, desperation beats inspiration everytime. I grabbed the cables connecting a now dead psyker to the altar and yanked them free. Flesh ripped with a horrifying sucking sound followed by two metallic pops. I caught the bloody ends of the cable and wrapped them around my force staff. With a a jolt of mental effort my mind tore up the conduit and into the altar, twisting along kaledoscipic wheels of light and meaning. I could taste the salty stink of the warp all around me, feel the gibbering minds of the captive psykers being drawn into the altar, feel them dying as Hadrian and Lazarus continued their bloody work. The command was building in the mind of the priest, there were only moments before the ritual was finished. The shade of the dead assassin I had raised gibbered in the corner of my consciousness. I had to concentrate.

It is a hard truth of the Warp that if you can touch something, it can touch you. Every psyker learns this, or is destroyed by what lies beyond. I just had to find the connection. My mind scrabbled on the inside of the ritual, like blind fingers feeling along impossibly smooth glass. I found it and wormed my way through, clawing my way up into the priests mind. I heard him start screaming on the inside as he felt me coming, his mind frantically trying to form the words of the liturgy. I had a fleeting moment of connection, I felt his desperation. He wasn't a heretic, not in his own mind, he merely wanted to bring the entire hive, the entire universe into perfect and unerring devotion to the divine Emperor. His will locked with mine. He was strong, as strong as any I have ever known. His mind was hard edged, bitter and fanatic. He began to drive me back, his mouth forming around the edge of the word. I clawed at him, slashed at him, but he was reciting a litany in his own mind. Abhor the Psyker, Suffer not the Witch to Live. Abhor the Psyker, Suffer not the Taint of the thrice cursed to lay upon thy flock. Abhor the Psyker. I was giving him everything I had but this was his play ground, his mind, a ritual space he had constructed and repaired, as strong willed and desperate as I was he was going to drive me out and say the unword. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

Except there was.

I blasted him with Lucius' memories of the Emperor of Mankind. Not a divine and omnipotent god, but a mortal man, tired from ceaseless wars, fallible and human. I shoved the borrowed memories deep into his brain. The third party nature of them was far more devastating than anything I could have come up with. From me it might have seemed a lie, a stratagem to be dismissed, but they very authenticity of them made them cut like a power blade. The Priest screamed and I opened my eyes to stare down over the dead psykers and the pit of profaned bones. I was larger, clumsier, my balance was all wrong without the weight in my breasts and hips. I was stronger and older. I saw myself gripping the end of a cable forty feet below, electric shocks jolting through me ever second which flashed dizzying images of the bones in my hand. I could see Hadrian and Lazarus hewing down the remaining psyhic batteries. I felt the priests sadness at their loss, along with a sense of joy that they had died for the Emperor. I saw Elektra who I had raised from the gutters hewing down my devoted servants. I saw the light of the pict receivers as they recorded my stalled sermon. I looked down at the scroll infront of me and my liver spotted hands. 

I jumped from the dias.

There was a brief sensation of vertiginous drop and then the connector cords that plugged my augments into the altar snubbed, caught my decent for a second and then ripped free in a welter of blinding pain. I screamed, the sound ripping from two throats in a confusing doppler as I plunged towards the bones. I caught a flash of red and the whir of chainsword blades as pain ripped through my left side as my leg and part of my hip were carved away, the feeling of ceramite blades grinding and sawing through my bones seeming to take far too long for the few instants it should require. I crashed into he bones, screams abruptly cutting off as a shattered femur drove through the cartilage of my throat. Wheezing I lifted my hands to try to stem the blood pouring from the terrible wound, though I knew that the arterial blood spurting from the stump of my leg must finish me first. I tried desperately to push myself up, lifting my head just in time to see Elektra's chain blade sweeping towards my eyes in a flat horizontal cut.

The mental link broke as the zealot's chainsword took off the top of the Priest's skull at eye level. If I had been able to apprehend fact I might have decided that she had been aiming for decapitation but had misjudged the strike as the priest slipped in the bones, but that was far to subtle a distinction for me as I screamed and vomited simultaneously. I gripped at my leg and my eyes all at once, trying to curl myself up into a ball with enough force to strain muscles. I just had time to cough up a spray of blood and bone dust before I plunged into merciful oblivion.