The first blow slammed my face in the dirt. One moment I was staring down the scope of my rifle, watching the scene waver as my muscles trembled, waiting for the target to drift into the crosshairs; the next everything was pitch-black and my head was spinning from the force of the blow. My gun was underneath me, the points digging through my uniform into flesh. Men may complain about getting kneed between the legs – and while I'll concede that one to them – I do have to say that having something sharp and metal jammed into your boob is not exactly pleasant either. There was a hand in my hair, holding me face-down to the ground, and roughly a hundred-plus worth of weight was concentrated into a small area pressing on the small of my back. I had been on my belly to begin with, using the ground for both concealment and to steady my rifle – now I was splayed there and someone was ensuring I wasn't getting off the ground anytime soon.
'Go shoot the Eldar Farseer,' they'd said, 'One shot and we don't have to waste our men in some drawn-out affair with them damn aliens picking us off one by one. Also: you're totally expendable if you screw up. In fact, I think we paid more for your gun than what we pay you.'
Okay, so that wasn't quite what my Commissar said. He used pretty words like 'tactical' and 'in service to the Emperor.' However, I am a soldier. I know how to cut through the bullshit. I knew what he meant to say, what he was saying in his heart.
There wasn't much I could do. My rifle was resting against my sternum, my bolt pistol was at my waist and might as well be a mile away with the disadvantage my assailant had me at, and all I could do was lay there helplessly and try not to inhale dirt. He apparently had friends, for I felt hands briefly flutter across my body and the weight of my gun, knife, and anything else of tactical value quickly vanished. The grip on my hair vanished and was replaced by a hand on either of my arms and then the eldar removed his knee from my back and I was hauled to my feet and away from my sniper rifle. My weapons lay in a discarded heap off to the side. I snapped my gaze from side to side and took in my situation. There were three of them, their armor hidden under cloaks that seemed to shiver as they moved, the colors tasting their surroundings and shifting to mimic them. They carried the elegant rifles of their kind and every single of them was at least a foot taller than me. Their eyes looked at me dispassionately, examining their capture as clinically as an inquisitor, unfeeling, uncaring. I would have preferred hatred or disgust. Anything to make me think they weren't so remotely alien.
"You will come with us," the one that seemed to be their leader said – at least, I guessed he was in charge by the way he stood and how the others oriented towards him.
Fantastic. I couldn't be more fucked unless I stripped naked, bathed in marinade, and paraded in front of a Tyranid carnifex.
I expected stares of curiosity or disdain – just anything to acknowledge that their scouts were dragging in a captured Imperial guardswoman. But to the eldar war-force, I simply didn't matter. I was ignored by all but my immediate captors, and even then they didn't bother to bind my hands or anything. Taking away my weapons was enough. I wasn't enough of a threat to matter more. That stung. It really stung. A few more seconds I would have had a clear shot at their leader and those rifles are designed to pierce through anything – including eldar armor. The tech-priests regularly serviced and blessed my weapon, which was probably why it was worth more than me. I was a good shot, sure enough – good enough to be the unit's sniper – but humans came in multitudes. We didn't so much as expand across the galaxy as consume.
The eldar force was clustered around an ancient structure of theirs, something left over from when they had been in far greater numbers than they were now. I wasn't sure what it was for. The locals avoided the ruins out of superstition and my Commissar didn't see fit to explain much more than the bare facts. There was an eldar artifact on this world. The eldar had moved in one night in force. The Imperium didn't like this. We were here to kick them off our world. The initial foray had gone badly for us, with the eldar simply scattering once they bled us a bit. They didn't seem terribly concerned about holding the actual ruins, but rather just staying near it. And our commanders rightly feared that if we took charge of the ruins and held it, they'd be content to launch raid after raid and whittle us down until nothing but skeletons remained. For the moment, they held the ruins. I could see their shapes in the darkness, all tumbled metal and other materials common among their kind. The presence of the aliens did nothing to relieve the haunted feel of the abandoned structures – they did not return life or vitality to the buildings. They were like ghosts in the night, lithe, graceful, and silent.
I realized with dismay that the scouts were steering me towards the very Farseer I had been sent to kill. He stood in the shadow of one of their tanks, sitting idle with its belly flush against the ground. His helmet was off and his armor was swathed in black robes trimmed with white edges and intricate patterns. A sword was slung at his narrow waist. His brown hair was bound back and fell to the middle of his back and what little light there was caught at jewels in his earlobes. I could feel the power even when we stopped a respectful distance away. The eldar took no notice at first, finishing his conversation with someone important, if their armor was any judge. I had thought to take a shot at him next, assuming the one meant for the Farseer had gone off as intended. That's me. Selflessly serving the Emperor in all things. I would have been praying at that moment if I could just remember the correct literature. There had to be a prayer for being captured by aliens. They had prayers for just about everything: about to be eaten by a genestealer, prayers for tumbling towards a black hole, prayers for when suffering from constipation, etc. My Commissar would be most disappointed if he knew I couldn't come up with anything but a dull sort of shock. It was as if my brain had shut down from the moment an eldar scout landed on my back.
Then the Farseer took notice of me. I wanted to be back on the dirt, only this time curled up and hiding in some foxhole where no one could see me and I wasn't caught here in the open, vulnerable under the gaze of a being that I could not comprehend. I searched for any sign of humanity on his angular face, anything that would serve to dispel the terrible knowledge that even though he looked like us, he wasn't one of us. In turn, he searched for something and I felt awkward and ungainly under his examination. I may be expendable to the Imperium, but to this eldar was I less than that. My existence was nothing compared to the vast weight of power and eons that hung around his shoulders and I felt ashamed for simply standing there. I dropped my gaze, trembling, and stared at the ground.
I heard the swish of his robes as he moved closer and then he stretched out a hand and his fingers touched my brow. My muscles froze and I wasn't sure if it was my fear that did this or if they reacted to some unspoken command from the Farseer. My world narrowed to the touch of his hand and my vision blacked out. His power pressed in on me, like searing heat suffusing my body, and my mind was lay bare. There was no pain. Unlike our own psykers, he had enough experience to navigate the corridors of my mind without tearing down the walls – perhaps the human mind was simplistic to something like him. I felt his indifference as a physical thing, the quick glance he gave to my life and then how quickly and easily he discarded it as trivial. All my hopes and fears and memories were tossed aside like they were but a moment – here, gone, and then forgotten. What he did to my mind, I could not tell. He changed something. His will was absolute. Then his presence was gone, he withdrew his hand, and he was walking away. I fell to my knees, tears streaming down my cheeks, my breath coming in short gasps. I barely registered that the scouts were pulling me to my feet and pulling me away from the eldar encampment.
They left me where I would be found by my own side. One of them told me – and this was about the only thing I remembered from that haze after the Farseer discarded me – that I had a message for the Imperium's army here on this world. That we had to understand why they were here and that such knowledge could not be spoken with words – that it was bundled up inside my head instead, waiting for someone else to review and understand.
And that's what they did. Our psyker examined me and found it. The knowledge was enough for them to reconsider hostilities against the eldar. All this by tampering with the mind of an expendable guardswoman.
And that's how I received my honorable discharge from the Imperial Guard.
It has been a long, long time since I've played Warhammer 40k. At least a decade. But after reading a very enthusiastic fanfic for the Imperial Guard I was inspired to write one of my own. I've been on fanfiction hiatus working on my novel and this is a reprieve from painful editing, as well as an attempt to get back into the swing of it and finish up some fanfic projects that got set aside. This is not a one-shot. There will be more. This is merely the prologue.
And yes, I played eldar when I did play and I was terrible at it.