"Fondest salutations people of Commorragh, and my disappointment for those yet to arrive. I am Hassarian; teller of tales and iterator of truths. Now my dear Commorrites, honored archons and dracons. Look at yourselves, now back to me, now back to yourselves, now back to me. Sadly my dear friends, you aren't me.
Now that, that depressing detail has been introduced, I henceforth consign my brilliant talents to your entertainment. We begin with our setting; this great city with a skyline that can- and will be- viewed from all angles. Our characters, the fallen noble Naerion Ynneath, his dangerously cunning sister Anaeil, and her charming companion Zalikith, and then of course myself; but that is an introduction for a later part of the unfolding drama as are the other personae of import to this fantastically darkling tale that I had been consigned to witness first hand. We now reach back, to the past, Naerion is in hiding, little knowing that destiny is soon about to seize him." - Death Jester Hassarian, regarding his signature epic.
The Raider, bearing the black and dark purple coloration scheme of his kabal on it's hull, and the white hand-print insignia on it's grav-sail was hovering directly over the interior courtyard, ten Invisible Hand warriors were laden upon it, the green lenses of their helmet visors peered in every direction, calling upon the peerless visual perception inimical to the eldar race to find him.
Naerion was now certain someone must have seen him in this area, and reported it to the search parties, already they were starting to tighten the noose around him.
Fighting them would be suicide. Though he was more than a match for every one of them individually, engaging an entire squad was beyond his abilities, especially as under equipped as he currently was. Furthermore, announcing his presence would do little more than draw in the other search parties for the kill. Complicating his odds of survival.
The best approach here was to stay hidden until they moved on or find a way to sneak out of this area and through the search cordon, find another place to hide.
Then he heard it; a distinctive whine climbing rapidly to a high pitch. In that moment, he knew that hiding was no longer an option for him.
Naerion leaped through the door just as a dark lance beam cut into the room. The fearsome long-throated heavy energy cannon, intended for vaporizing the armored vehicles of younger races with ruinous fingers of dark energy gutted the room inside of an instant, and now he was wide open for the warriors mounted upon the vehicle's side. Five splinter rifles spoke in unison, Naerion was executing a rolling recovery from his leap when he sensed the toxin coated splinters splitting the air around him at hyper-velocity.
He slid swiftly behind the cover of a ruined plinth that once held a statue, overlooking the triangular courtyard long fallen to disrepair which was open to the sky that was now darkened by the Raider. Naerion was now pinned down on the third level, and it would not take long for that dark lance to fire again, and there would be nothing left of him to reanimate.
Fortune seemed to be smiling on him however, frightened by the noise, the mulish emaciated form of a male mon-keigh leaped through a nearby door, seemingly intent on making a run for it. Naerion pounced like a sabrecat, and seized the human by the arms. The slave shrieked a curse in it's awkward grunting language as Naerion dragged it across the open balcony at full run. The human twitched as splinter fire struck him, even as he ran Naerion savored the taste of the slave's agonized soul energy; fortified he redoubled his pace and gripped the convulsing meat shield tighter.
The Dark Lance spoke again, carving away the balcony right in front of him forcing him to close his eyes to avoid getting his retinas scarred. Naerion shifted the rapidly expiring slave under him as he stumbled down the void in the floor. The splinter riddled slave finally died when his spine snapped upon the fallen rubble, but he served his final purpose of cushioning Naerion from the impromptu decent to the second level.
Naerion quickly rolled off the corpse, got to his feet and sprinted, his robe flapping behind him as it caught the dust filled air, the Raider was now lowering itself to allow the mounted warriors a bead on his fleeing form. He rushed through a hall that connected to an overlook viewing the exterior of the tenement complex, he ducked as another dark lance cut through the walls like a hot knife through butter. The hall sagged under the unsupported weight and collapsed as he reached the overlook.
Another building had been erected beside this one, directly in front of him on the other side of the divide was a window covered with cheap and degraded resin-board. As the hall came down around him, Naerion leaped, both feet landing on the solid guardrail, he kicked off the rail and flew across the two meter gap, driving his shoulder into the boarded window.
Crashing into the room on the other side, Naerion quickly became aware that it was occupied. The smell of sweat, blood, and cheap drugs, followed by the surprised yelps of said inhabitants brought him to full awareness. Two eldar, male and female, locked together naked on a bed paused in their pain and narcotic enhanced fornication, eyes wide in a mixture of euphoria and shock, the female looked slightly like Anaeil. The splinter pistol was in hand within a heartbeat, he quickly fired a pair of envenomed shards into each of their necks, they collapsed upon each other, foaming at the mouth in a silent seizure, still joined together as they died.
Naerion hurried out of the room through the door and into a hallway. This place was far better maintained than the tenement, the walls were mostly clean and painted in vibrant red, glow-globes filled the darkness with pink light, his synth-skin boots rested on plush red carpet.
The sweet smell of sex and psychoactive incense was heavy here, and the sounds of pain filled groans and rapturous moans clued him in to his current location; he was in a pleasure den. A place where the denizens of Low Commorragh worked off their ever present Thirst and libidos in a haze of sub-quality drugs and cheap sex. Males and females willfully sold their bodies in exchange for the currency tokens used in this particular region of the lower city. Naerion personally veered away from the pleasures of the flesh and senses, focusing most of his attention on perfecting his skills as a warrior and advancing his position in the kabal, when he needed stimulation he would attend the bloody spectacles of the Wych Cult arenas or torture the soul energy out of a slave, either on an operating table with the aid of an excruciatior wand or in a fighting pit at the tip of his blade.
In his mind, a courtesan could always be an assassin sent by his rivals to gut him the moment she got close enough, drugs befuddled the mind and warped the senses he needed to keep his guard up. Some had called his behavior prudish and paranoid, but he would always argue that self-control was more rewarding than mindless plunges into sensual abyss, and further elevated him above the low-born kin.
He advanced through the corridor in silent contempt of his gawdy surroundings, and those who enjoyed such carnal indiscretions. Their ties to the mortal coil be shorter for it.
Suffice to say, Naerion was angry. Very, very angry. And as member of a race who experienced emotions far more acutely than any other, it was a very dangerous state of mind to be in. It is said that Khaine bestowed the gift of hatred upon the Eldar, the ability to feel rage so fierce it clawed at the soul. When a craftworld eldar felt the touch of the strife giving god, it would invariably commit a tantrum in the face of it's bruised and pathetic feelings and ego and set themselves upon the path of the warrior until their ire and thirst for death calmed down. When a member of the True People was infused with anger, nothing short of the total destruction of the bringer of such wrongdoing will ever satisfy.
Naerion wanted nothing more than to storm the fortress of the Invisible Hand and strangle his treacherous sister with his bare hands. It poisoned his mind and corroded his judgment, and his inability to satisfy the rage in his heart made him want to murder everything in this entire building, and then carry out the bloodshed into the streets.
Leaning around a corner, he came upon a balcony that overlooked an open, four leveled gallery with a ground floor thronging with patrons, and entertainers of various states of dress ranging from bare to just below minimum dignity. Among the sea of oversexed hedonists he could see the tall helmed, glossy black and purple armored forms of Invisible Hand warriors, who attracted wary glances and appeared to be newly arrived, though they were not the same group who attacked him from aloft in the tenement.
He did not have much time, more and more search parties would arrive as time went by. Ducking behind the corner again, he lowered the muzzle velocity on his splinter pistol to a sub-sonic setting. He leaned out from the corner and aimed carefully down the precision optical sight, hand held steady, and fired four times. None of the kabalite warriors were hit, but the center stage dancer gyrating sensually as she stripped articles of clothing off who suddenly collapsed on the spot, two mercenary guards minding the kabalites swayed and fell, and what appeared to be the owner of the establishment who gurgled once before keeling over, these ones were not so lucky; and because the shots were traveling slower than normal, nobody could have detected were they came from, so naturally they all panicked.
Splinter pistols, rifles, knives, and swords were drawn, and shouting rose to a chorus. Then shots were fired. The patrons whose composure was weakened by their intake of drugs, and emotional energy immediately turned on the outsiders who were seen as the prime suspects of the confused incident and attacked.
As predicted the kabalite warriors immediately reacted in appropriately brutal fashion, they fired their splinter rifles into the enraged patrons, the discordant stacatto buzzing of continuous fire filled the pleasure-den, along with screams of agony as shots met their marks. A few of the warriors fell to return fire, but the rest continued to slay without mercy, either shooting them with lethal splinters, or eviscerating them in close combat with the monomolecular blades affixed under the barrels of their rifles. The warrior class of High Commorragh was not a force to be trifled with.
Naerion was tempted to stay, the boiling sensations of departing souls in agony was rich in the aroma of desperation and terror was delectable, but this was the best chance he had to escape.
He looked to the other end of the balcony, and what he saw took him aback.
Standing within the frame of doorway on the other side was a figure wearing a stunning panoply of black armor, razor sharp spines and blades adorned his armor and crowned his helmet, in each hand he carried a vicious blade with a hooked tip that glowed with pale coruscating energy, even from this distance Naerion could feel a profound aura of menace and bloodlust coming off the warrior in waves. The spectral figure made a beckoning motion with it's blades and disappeared into the shadows beyond the doorway.
Naerion hesitated for a moment, normally when you come upon a figure even remotely matching that description, it was the height of stupidity to follow after it. But Naerion, for some insane reason felt that this being was actually here to help.
The decision was made for him when the sound of the bordello's doors crashing open to admit several squads of Invisible Hand kabalite warriors, who had begun spraying the crowd with volleys of accurate splinter fire. They were going to slay everyone in this building to find him.
He stole across the balcony under the cover of the stone guiderail, reaching the other side undetected. The kabalites were cutting through the remaining patrons with deadly efficiency, the sheer terror and agonies they were emitting were scintillating to the extreme, and as he reached the doorway Naerion felt himself feeling more refreshed than he had been in many cycles.
Of the darkened warrior there was no sign, but Naerion could feel a trail of that same bloody malevolence on the air, and in his current state of mind he was helpless but to follow.
The trail led him through a hallway similar to the one on the other side of the building. It led him into another pleasure room, this one vacant. The window in the room was unboarded, and the trail led right through it. As if controlled by an outside source, Naerion opened the window and promptly stepped out of it and dropped into an alley. The trail urged him forwards, to a drainage culvert in a wall where filthy water pooled through and around.
The bars were brittle and easy to break with appropriate force, and Naerion continued forth sliding down an incline into a sluice channel, stinking with the accumulated rot of filth and the decomposing remains of disposed corpses. Naerion barely had enough time to wonder where his hygienic sensibilities had taken leave to before the dark warrior's trail urged him further along the path.
Naerion was not easily spurred to fear, but he wondered if he had somehow become the witless mind-thrall of some manner of warp creature, or worse a diabolical agent of She Who Thirsts. But the evident lack of his soul essence being siphoned away by an outside force beyond the everyday slow decay experienced by everyone told him this was not the case.
The trail of hate led him through sharp turns and corners through the sluice tunnels. His eyes, surgically augmented by the haemonculi to see in total darkness, easily pierced the gloom. And with his finely trained sense of hearing, he knew that something was following him. When he stopped the tagalong also stopped. As he continued he could hear more sounds of hands and feet moving on all fours along the tunnel.
He knew what was hunting him, having dealt with their verminous ilk before. But not until now had he actually had to kill one.
As he walked, Naerion waited for the right moment. Closer, come closer...
Now! Naerion turned, and slashed his monomolecular blade in a wide horizontal arc, a splash of black blood decorated the walls of the sluice tunnel, two invisible shapes fell to the floor in a shallow splash. Materializing into view, the headless body of a shadow skinned Mandrake appeared before his feet, a long crude blade clutched in it's dead grasp.
It wasn't a true Mandrake, it was a lesser form of the breed that could not fully phase out of the material realm hence the fact that he heard it and it's fellows coming. Outcasts then, too stunted to cavort with the fully gifted members of it's kind.
The other demi-Mandrakes phased out of their lackluster connection to the shadow realm and pounced upon him, mouths wide and hungry.
Naerion did not bother with his splinter pistol, the toxic ammunition probably would not affect their abnormal physiology anyway.
His dagger swung downward, cleanly bisecting a female creeper's head down the middle before he kicked the body back into her compatriots. "Die mutant filth!" Naerion spat as he layed into them with his incredibly sharp blade.
A darting flick disembowled a shadow creature, a lightning jab ran another through it's twisted heart, Naerion counting on his experience and training artfully dispatched the lesser Mandrakes in suitably gory fashion, barely a challenge at all. But his rage was hardly sated.
He left the bloody corpses behind, and continued forwards, chasing the trail of the dark warrior.
A/N: And so Naerion has instigated a bloodbath and gives zero shits in his defense. Isn't it amazing what a character can accomplish when he is morally bankrupt? But who is this mysterious dark warrior? And where is he leading our decidedly unheroic protagonist?