Nothing, not the warnings of the gangers, not the flood-marked, water-stained walls, nor even the sounds of metal under stress as I approached prepared me for the sheer mindfucking scale of it. The violence. Not human bloodshed but raw, furious nature, bottled up, squeezed, until it screamed with the pressure.

Looking into it, I understood. It became, in my mind, personified; I named it, then, a secret name, seeking in my own way to deal with it. More than that, to control it. That was what brought me here: this storm, raging for more than five decades now, and the power it embodied. Control it, and use it, against Slayer's fucking faithful.

Once, a foldship had stood here: The original, from which all descended. They had their own ways -- other dark ways -- of growing them now, but this is where it all began. The Silverpoint Facility. Dark Lament hollowed out this vast chamber and then filled it back in again, first with their black, glyph-strewn equipment, then with scurrying, harried technicians, and finally with the ship itself, palpitating under the floodlights as it took form. And at the ends of the chamber, more conventional equipment, unfeasibly large by modern standards. It might as well be pre-Conflict technology for all the difference it made to me. Generators. Manipulators. Atmospheric regulators.

But the ship had folded out generations past and taken its place amongst the stars; as I stood, battered, at the edge of the chaos, the congratulations, the promotions and the infighting the success had left behind it, were all just footnotes in the vaults of the Company's files. Departmental rivalries had killed off every plan to make anything of the facility. Gradually the AtReg units drifted from their settings or broke down entirely.

And one night, the storm came. No one knows what caused it, but back then, every pundit had a theory, and would cheerfully pimp it on TV. Heat convection from surrounding industrial zones. Pressure differentials caused by the malfunctioning AtReg units. Cold water trickling down from the upper levels. Liquids spilling from fractured pipes. Leaked A/C coolants. Moisture condensing against the geodesic support structure. And when the viewers tired of these, then flux discharges from Dark Lament equipment, Ebb residue left over from the ship's growth, quantum disturbance caused when it folded out of the chamber. Then departmental coverups. DarkNight. Aliens -- whatever that meant. I pictured packs of wraithen with big, big fans, and suppressed a smirk.

None of it really mattered: Not one of those ignorant puppets watching knew what any of it meant anyway. But they liked the glowing diagrams, and feeling that sensation, like Progress was being made.

And the storm remained. Rising, falling, twisting, folding in on itself, an endless cycle, an endless cyclone. Nowhere to go.

I made my way down into it, sheltering at the base of a silent AtReg unit, impassive metal spikes like tower blocks bristling above me, scorched obsidian by a hundred thousand lightning-strikes.

I knew the time was fast approaching when I would have to give up this pretence at shelter. I cowered, head bowed, in a maintenance alcove, thick sheets of rain ripping past. This was no way to take command.

I closed my eyes. Breathed slowly, deeply, cleared my mind. Stepped out into the fierce winds, head held high, and opened them again. And, letting it wash over me, strode into it.

Don't get me wrong: it wasn't physically easier. No magic shield kept the rain from my skin nor the wind from my bones, no hidden reservoirs of strength fuelled my muscles. It was just... acceptance. The rain wasn't going away. Nor was I. We'd just have to get used to each other.

Left foot. Right foot. The body knew what to do. I remained a tiny, slowly travelling bead of calm, even as gusts buffeted, knocked me from side to side, I kept my footing and kept my pace. Making my way in a line, a jagged, dislocated line to be sure, and with time it became a spiral, as the cyclone at the heart of the storm swept me round, but still my feet moved themselves. Left foot. Right foot.

And then peace around me. So within, so without: the eye, eerie in its comparative quiet. Somewhere above, I knew, was the apex of the cavern, but I could see only cloud devouring cloud, lit with blue-white flickerings of lightening.

I pulled from my pack the tools I had brought with me: the knife, the stone, the cage, the pouch of rock salt.

Here in the centre of it all, I was standing on the platform that once supported the nucleus, from which the foldship had been grown; the Dark Lament material long since taken away and "repurposed". Mundane items still remained, tangled in the recesses of maintenance hatches and tether rings. Cables snaked across the floor, the insulation rotten and peeling, many stripped down to the bare copper core. Round sensor pads lay scattered amongst them, other items I did not recognise, and all covered in rust and grime, alternately layed down, then blasted clear over the decades with the storm's unsettled spasms.

Clearing aside this detritus of the distant past's plans for the future, I opened the pouch and lay down a white circle a few metres across. Forgive me my foibles; they have brought me this far, at least. In the centre, I knelt, and aligned the polyhedron of iron, and set inside it the stone: dark green quartz, shot through with jasper.

The storm shifts again, troubled; I could feel it, my ears popping. Thunder rolled uneasily across me, as I started to inscribe the floor inside the circle, the tip of the knife cutting through the layers of grime, etching liturgy of my own design. Lightening again, not forks now but balls of white-hot fire crackling around me, tense, held at bay. I reached down inside myself and sought out the symbols, not the glyphs of the Preceptor's blank-eyed freaks but rather that which meant something to me: a history in lines and curves, a corrido, a story-song of hopes and betrayals, of deaths and bitterness and the dark knot of anger that drove me now. And from these personal sources of power I drew authority to command this storm. I demanded of it.

And with a blaze of heat and light, lightening tore into the iron cage, not a strike but a continuous writhing plasma from all around; and strange things happened, then: the temperature dropped, and ice started to form around the edges of the circle, and the bloodstone sang with the electricity.

Through the stone the storm spoke to me. Its name and salutation alike: HAIL

And it sung me a corrido of its own: of a soul once a man, trapped and twisted inside a misbegotten, profane body. Of organs and reflexes unsuited to this place of air and gravity. Of harrowing nightmares, of senses that whispered unsought secrets like a cold, loathsome trickle. And finally of being forced from even that form, of no form at all, an icy cold, isolated soul. Hail.

And I saw the songs did not stand alone, but were the first two movements of a sonata. As yet unwritten, the third spoke of retribution.

With a gutteral, resonant grating sound, drainage cover 2317 is slid aside. A figure slips out, and into the shadows that pool at the foot of the industrial works squatting across this sector. The rain, blackened with soot, drizzles against the massive bulk of an incinerator stack, but in the shadows, crystals of ice form, one by one; a chill gust of wind brings renewed rain in dirty blatters and overhead the clouds darken and churn. A storm is coming.