This place, once so familiar, so purile and unstimulating he now experienced afresh, his new eyes and perceptions interpreting each new sensation in a way that was so very foreign to his neglected pallettes that he walked in a daze of hedonistic experience, the street and its denizens offering a veritable cornucopia of delight.

His former incarnation would have been overwhelmed by such an overload of sensation, cast into the abyss of insanity by the weakness of its flesh. Not so now. The ragged stalls lining the streets were bedecked with acidic fruits and succulent meats, their mingled scents arriving like ambrosia in his nostrils.

A cruel wind blew here even within the tightly compacted streets of the Hive City, its atmosphere heavy and rank with pollutants. A gentle pattering of warm rain soaked the black material of his hood, dripping from its low-slung canopy in a steady torrent that splashed about his feet. The peoples about him were facinating in their own right; individual entities, swirling aimlessly about the tides of fate and time, never truly learning, never truly becoming enamoured of the joy of sentience. He could see their thoughts, their emotions conglomerating about their heads in a chaotic halo of constantly shifting colour and pigment, those in moods sullen or brooding being tainted with a muddied, dark hue whilst those jovial and happy endowed with a trail of fantastic luminescence; sapphires, turquoises and emeralds following in an awe-inspiring train.

There were others too amidst the crowds who's colours were unpleasent to the eye; impenetrable voids of black and grey, or worse still were those who's colours harboured remnants of their previous beauty, but had become muddied or tainted by insanity or unjust intent. He realised with intermingled horror and fascination that these were the pestilence of society; murderers and rapists, thieves and brigands conglomerating together in a shallow drunken stupour.

He pondered on what he would see shrouded about his own head should he turn his vision outwards. It was probably not beyond his capacity to do so; he had not yet tested the strengths and powers of his new body to their utmost yet, and was unsure of the full extent of his potential. Still, it would most certainly be interesting finding out. There was a destination in his mind; a place and time rendered in such pristine detail that it must exist, for its very conjuration sent brief snippets of fractured images coursing across his perceptions, the circumstances of life and times past.

Names and faces also bloomed before his warp-altered eyes like dew-laden blossoms; Seraphina.... the name was alien to his tongue, and rolled awkwardly from its forked edges, and yet tasted so exquisitely apt in such an abstract manner that it bordered upon profundity. The face that came with the name was more impressive still; beautiful, pristine skin, alabaster white wreathed with a crown of raven locks through which peered eyes the colour of the waning eve, flecked with stars and heavy with adoration, adoration for him, or who he once was.

He turned sharply at the next intersection, noting the fresh scent of rain and dampness settling upon the street and also the scurrying curses of its denizens as they damned both the cruel whims of their world's weather and secretly, their Immortal Emperor whom had condemned them to such purgatorial suffering. He smiled ruefully at their petty hatreds; as self-centered as a cyclone and just as destructive. If he allowed the strands of his thought to flow freely, he could catch the impetus of the thoughts of those in the immediate vicinity, riding them like a salmon would traverse the rapids to find the find the spawning grounds of its birth. Thoughts and feelings, lifes and peoples all foreign, all tantilizing as only the lives of others can be.

However he would not allow these petty distractions to detract him from his true purpose. He was here to find her; Seraphina and to learn of her, and quite possibly, of himself. the street terminated into a wide plaza, the suffocating jungle of ceramite and plasteel allowing the dying light of the Minos system's crimson sun to sieve through the vapour clogged atmosphere of the planet and arrive weakened and sullied for its meeting with the ground below. Ringing the plaza were ostentatiously decorated buildings and palaces, draped with rich velvets and banners bearing the symbol of the imperial eagle. The symbol of a dying race.

In the center of the plaza was a fantastic fountain, a statue and mural bearing the depiction of the armoured bulk of a space marine, his armour bedecked with the clenched fist of the Imperial fists, statuesque alien corpses writhing in fiery agony at his feet. He spat into the clear waters, and watched with dark glee as the crystal irredescence soon became black and clogged with filth, a skin of white mould and scum encasing its surface.

Turning away from his works he espied a structure that stole his breath; the palace of his memories, recreated in a detail so meticulous that it were as if some metaphysical architect had plucked the image from his unwary mind. He hurried to the building's threshold, pausing beneath the vast canopy that shielded the heavily barred gates in a tent of stone, noting the exquisite masonry of the gargoyles and rocky seraphim lining the walls.

Despite the chains and locks that marked the building's condemnation and suggested that it lay in a state abandoned by its occupents, he could not stem his curiosity any longer. it took little effort for him to prize the weak adamantium chains away from the pulpy decay of the wood, and less still to tear through the decimated stuff of the doors themselves. He stepped into the midst of a grand hall, three large flights of stairs leading to seperate wings whilst doors and rooms lined every wall. The place had once been the home of some Imperial noblemen no doubt; the remnants of the rich decore and tapestries hanging in tattered shreds from the walls suggested perhaps some retired war hero, perhaps a member of the planet's Imperial guard regiments.

Whomever had once occupied this utopian domecile, it was evident that they no longer did so; the place was gutted, the walls and floors charred and blackened by passing fires, carpeted in a fine layer of ash and sand that danced in swirling eddies about his feet and floated upon the air. Pottery and statues lay smashed upon the ground, staring in blind horror at an unseen attacker. Along the walls, painted in a deep crimson that carried the strength of conviction in its hue were the words "heretic" and "damned". It took little to determine the fate of those whom once lived here.

This looked very much like the works of the late, great hypocrite, the Arch-Zealot Korvastus. His pleasure at the irony soon faded as the creeping chill of epiphany etched itself across his spine. Oh no, Oh no, no, no, no. Surely, it couldn't be. But it was; he knew it was. Memories, all painful, all sickening flooded the infinite recesses of his daemonically altered consciousness, feelings, thoughts and emotions so nauseatingly limited in their scope and yet so very, very apt to his given situation began to cloud his intellect, eschewing his judgement with the blind rage of the wronged.

Yes, this was his home. He'd lived here, ruled here for what had seemed like an eternity, harboured by the limitations of the flesh and repressed by the conformities of an unforgiving society. Then they'd came: the Arch-Zealot and his men, little more than thugs and brigands, a rag-tag militia armed with torches and uncouth weapons. They'd destroyed everything, as he sat and watched in a black fug of despair, they'd put both his home and possessions to the torch, sacrificing both his servants and family to their unjust zeal. Witches, they cried. Heretics, Daemons. He remembered the bitter sting of the tears as his wife was pryed screaming from the grasp of their child, at last coerced into hateful silence by a cowardly blow to the back of her neck.

The same tears came now as he once again heard the sickening, whiplash crack of her breaking spine; the subtle divinity of her body falling broken and marred to the ground. He could hear the impotent pleas and screams of his servants and vassals as they were murdered in the most brutal fashions; some bludgeoned as they sought to defend their territories and loved ones, others merely rendered unconscious for later sacrifice. There was a sharp, jarring pressure at the back of his head, his consciousness swimming with red-tinted agony, then only darkness...and voices both distant and malicious, plotting his demise.

Then the burning. He smells the stench of his own skin beginning to char and crack, like the smell of roasting meat that would otherwise have set his stomach a flutter with the barely suppressed lust of his appetite. He feels the roughly hewn wood of the stake to which his barely composed body has been lashed, the suppurating agony of a score of small incisions made across his torso.

Then he was back, kneeling about the ashes of his own personal apocalypse, the essence of his servants, his home, his family swirling about the wasted remnants of his old life. His tears smouldered with the heat of his rage as they fell amidst the ash, the very ground itself beginning to crack with the very power of his convictions.

An oath then, an oath made in despair and blood. They would suffer. All those who participated in his damnation and their descendants; they would know a suffering the like of which even the Daemonic creatures of the eye spoke of in only hushed whispers. Their children would weep rivers of blood, their wives would lament the rapt agony of their husband's passing, and there shall be a great cry amongst the peoples of The Imperium, the like of which has never been nor ever shall be again, thus swore he, Bartelby the Redemptionist.