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The Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Labyrinth of Lost Souls

by Graham McNeill

‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How can you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?’

You chose this. All of it.

An explosion of pain and fire. Mercifully short.

Then blackness, infinite.

I sink, an exhausted swimmer drowning within sight of land. The blackness drags me down, and the ocean welcomes me into its embrace. Voices swirl in the darkness, whispers without source.

Lay down your burdens… You have already given more than enough… Time to die…

I try to shut out the voices, but they are all around me. I scream, but dark water rushes into my throat, pouring into my lungs and filling me with ice. The urge to simply let go is overwhelming, the pain of struggling too much to bear.

But the struggle is all I have.

I have memory and awareness, but I have no shape or form. As a disembodied spirit, I am dead and yet unborn.

Who am I?

Spots of light glow behind the darkness, extending and connecting and glowing like broken shards of a mirror. Each shows a different reality, glimmers of life I do not know. It is a story, vividly told, but fading. Are these my deeds?

The light of the shards begins to fade, time reversing each one from polished glass back to the sand from which it was wrought. If this is my life, then it will go unremembered, for even in the fleeting moments I saw them, I saw the death that surrounded me. I am a locus for violence. I was wrought to bring death, but too often it haunted my steps like a stalking shadow.

I am a death-bringer, this much I know.

The light is extinguished, and I am again in utter darkness. A darkness that is not simply the absence of light, but a state of being that denies that light could ever exist. A time when the first mortals were gifted with the awareness of death.

A curse laid upon them in ancient times, from one immortal being…

I know you…

And then, just as suddenly as the darkness enfolds me with numbness, I feel something. I feel… cold. I feel wetness against my skin.

I have a body!

I have flesh, bone and blood. I feel the fluids of life surging around my body, roaring like a thunderous river. My blood is hot and urgent, afire in a way that sears my veins with every circuit, as though freighted with an electric charge. It ignites my organs, shock-burning them with explosions of sensation and pain.

I will not die here!

With my new-found awareness of my body, I kick to the surface of this ocean as a searing fire burns in my chest. I feel the hammer blows of a double heartbeat, so close together it is like one bellowing scream. The darkness tries to pull me back, unwilling to relinquish its prize, but the furnace within me burns away its shadowed tendrils.

I swim up through the darkness towards the light of a distant star. It grows with every stroke until it is almost too bright to look upon. Yet I cannot look away. It is my beacon to life, and I dare not even blink or the darkness will claim me once more.

And then I break the surface, drawing a vast, sucking breath of air.

The light blinds me, a searing globe of fire. The ocean of death is behind me. A memory or a vision, I do not know. My eyes burn.

Air inflates my lungs, the tissue within slow to respond. I try to take shallow gasps, but my body’s demands overwhelm my conscious thoughts. Huge, shuddering, body-quaking breaths heave through me, my oxygen-starved systems fighting to restore life to my frame.

Where am I?

Awareness of my body slips over me like a corpse-shroud being pulled slowly back to reveal what lies beneath. And with each revealed limb, fresh pain stabs home. The agony of this rebirth is beyond imagining, and I cannot help but scream like a wounded animal caught in a tightening snare.

The fire in the back of my eyes fades enough that I can begin to dimly perceive my surroundings. Somewhere cramped, hard walls to either side of me, cold iron below and above. I try to move, but bolts of agonising pain detonate within my chest and skull, blinding me again and drawing another howl of raw anguish from my parched throat.

My fists clench, my teeth grind together. I force myself to take shallower breaths, controlling my reaction to the pain by sheer force of will. My body fights me. My metabolism is running too fast, consuming itself in an act of unthinking self-cannibalism.

I need to get out, to get up.

The box I lie within, is it a coffin? Does whoever put me in here believe I am dead? Perhaps I was, but I am alive! More than alive, I am vital!

I kick out. My heel strikes iron, but I feel it buckle. A door?

Again, again, again. I kick and kick, the iron bending and twisting with each impact. I sense weakness and concentrate my energies, until whatever lock secures it breaks. Cold air surges into my confinement, at once both sterile and awash with chemicals. I struggle like a wriggling newborn fighting to emerge from its cocoon.

And then I am out.

I fall to the ground, unable to bear my weight on unsteady legs. I lie curled in a foetal position, my body sopping with reeking chemicals that sting my eyes and nose. My lungs heave up a torrent of frothed chemicals and a slew of thin cables. I tear them from my throat, invasive fronds that flicker with light.

Pushing myself onto my haunches, I sit with my back to the wall, blinking in the too-bright light. I lift my arm to shade my eyes, and see its entire length is ravaged by red tracks of sutures. From wrist to elbow, from elbow to shoulder. Across my chest in layered strips. All down my legs and groin. I reach up to find my skull is shaven and likewise seamed with scars.

My naked body has been split from heel to crown. My skin is a zippered bag enclosing a collection of meat and bone and blood. I feel I could pull any part of my body and the canvas of my flesh would unravel and my every organ would spill out in a tidal wash of red.

The roaring in my ears begins to subside, and I hear a confusing, overwhelming rush of sounds. I cannot separate them, just a cacophony of noise: perhaps shouting voices and alarms intermixed.

My earlier suspicion that this place is a prison or a place of torture gains credence as I see the blurred outlines of hulking figures moving towards me. I cannot tell what they are, but the gleam of steel in their hands and the death-mask faces tell me they are hostile.

Rough hands take hold of my shoulders. Light gleams on a blade as it stabs for my neck.

I roar as the furnace in my chest explodes with power. My legs unhinge like coiled springs and I surge to my feet. My fists are wrecking balls as I smash the figures back. One goes down, its white robes now red with blood. I seize another by its arms and tear them from the sockets of its shoulders.

The figure collapses without a sound, and I crash into a previously unseen slab table bearing instruments of excruciation: flensing blades, bone-saws and tools of incision that look like hooked, disembowelling swords. Scraps of wet meat lie in offering bowls, each still fresh with the blood of the bodies from which they were excised.

I snatch a blade with a moulded metal grip, too small for my stitched hands, but good enough.

A prescient sense of danger whips me around.

Just in time, as a buzzing whine slashes past my ear. A winged thing swoops down from the ceiling. It regards me with baleful yellow eyes, screeching as its fanged jaw works up and down in fury. A coiled tail whips beneath its body, droplets of venom oozing from the tip of a stinger needle. I hurl one of the bowls containing the denuded organs at it. Despite the pain in my eyes and the dazzling brightness, my aim is true, and it falls from the air with an ululating screech.

I vault the slab, hammering my heel down on the thing before it can recover. It explodes in a greasy mess of black bone and brain matter, its whipping tail still trying to stab me. I hear another screech, and duck as another of the vile flying things darts towards me. Its speed is astonishing, but my hand snaps out and seizes it by its tail. I swing it like a mace and smash it to splinters on the slab.

My vision is still blurred and filled with blistering light, but I begin to see more of my surroundings. A dark, cavernous space, lit by crimson flames in basket-sconces, dark arches bordered by carvings of intertwined serpents. And looming over all, a leering skull icon, a god of death presiding over its temple to agony.

Venting gas gathers around my ankles, billowing up through the wire-grilled floor. I smell the caustic stink of it, taste the acrid reek of its composite elements in the back of my throat. Images flash in my mind: strange alchemical names I do not recognise, diagrams of molecular bonds I do not know.

What I do know, on a base, instinctual level, is that this gas is designed to incapacitate me. I feel something in my throat constrict, a biological transformation, flesh reshaping itself to protect me. My body rallies to my defence with a speed my captors have clearly not expected.

I sprint for the nearest arch, barrelling past a pale figure with a bladed fist. I spring from the mist before he can raise it and crack his hard skull. He falls, one of his red eyes cracked and flickering with a daemonic light. I hear more voices behind me, garbled and meaningless, a clipped tongue my brain cannot process. Too many explosions of light are firing in my skull, connections reforging themselves in an electrical firestorm of rebirth.

Beyond the torture chamber, the tunnels are a strange mix of steel and stone, vaulted rooms filled with flashing red lights and screeching wails of the damned. I push through them, neither knowing nor caring where I go.

Out, just out.

I see skeletal remains set in the walls, crude shrines to death and the cruel god of the temple to agony. They leer at me with the promise of pain and suffering. I put my fist through every one I see, relishing the sound of cracking bone and buckling iron.

My flesh is limned with light, but I cannot tell if it is the fire in my blood or the fire in my eyes. I have caged lightning in my body, and it burns me from within. The pain is almost unbearable, but I must endure it if I am to escape this abode of the damned.

My bones are like ingots of molten metal in the raw meat of my limbs.

Volcanic light smoulders behind my eyes, and the fire of a sun burns in my chest.

I do not know how much more of this I can stand.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-675-9

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