"Not a stranger?" said Stoll archly. "You think you are my friend, the Archmagos Toros? You are wrong. Her body lay flat and cold on my slab. I peeled back her robe and unpicked where her neural network interwove with her augmentics. I unbound her connection with the Machine myself, and then I hosed what little remained of her flesh out from the metal. My friend is dead. I performed the autopsy. You are no more her than I am Tiefenbronn, and that is a good thing too - it is he who is currently occupied with the painstaking task of stitching together what is left of her skull and brain matter into one of his servo-skulls. I fear that the broken and fallible flesh of my hands would not be steady enough to do what needed to be done."

"So much for my friend; and what are you? A voice on the vox, unknown and unasked for, activated by hands I do not know in conditions I cannot investigate. You may be a ghost, a phantasm, a memory of the machine, a daemon - and you might be any of those things while still being what you say you are. To call you a stranger is itself an act of weakness, and be warned that in this, I am the weakest of the Magi."

*

[Diagnosis] Do you remember the War? Sitting in this lab like this, looking over endless slides of blood for Tyranid bio-markers. It was not your calling but you did not have anyone else you could trust with it - not after Magos Biologis Rosella's disastrous attempt to communicate with the Hive Mind. You have never had reason to call upon the Angels of Death before, and you pray you never will again. 

[i]Their yellow and black was not the heraldry of glory. Theirs was not the inheritance of Rogal Dorn. Their vivid colours were the colour of camouflage in the chem-blasted wasteland they were accustomed to fighting in. The Ringbearers came and left without a single word, but that afternoon of violence left a ten year cleanup job. Magos Rosella's seat sat empty for years until it was sufficiently safe for Magos Pinel to move in.[/i]

It is a relief to see the Great Devourer's hand is not present here. That monster could not have died harder.