Saeva Abyssi Chapter 25
In the darkness of space the Rapture of Excruciation bled out into the void, it was last of the Dark Eldar fleet and it had been reduced to a shattered wreck. Its wraithbone hull bore terrific gouges and its wings were but ragged lines of tattered gossamer trailing out behind it. It was broken in ways that could not be repaired and anyone who saw it would have known that it would never fly again, a fact that would have brought relief to most inhabitants of the galaxy. The interior of the ship was if anything even worse, the unbreached compartments filled with smoke, flames and the ashen corpses of crew and slaves alike. The ship shuddered constantly and its strange, half-energy half-psychic, power network quivered like a steed with a broken leg.
Deep within those compartments a white-clad being was stumbling along the corridors, staggering from wall to wall as the errant gravity shifted randomly throughout the ship. The being had a tall, crested helm on its head and a stained white cloak, now ragged and torn. It bore a thin white staff in one hand while the other was waving away the thick smoke before its face. It was T'selia and she was frantically running, not to or from anywhere but just running.
T'selia was breathing hard as she picked her way over dead corpses and leaned away from licking flames. Her flesh was nicked and torn, letting thin blood flow under her armour but she was yet alive and was determined to stay that way. Her vision was poor in this dark, smoky world but her psychic awareness was more than enough to allow her to pick her way forwards, warning her of dangers and obstacles before she even encountered them. This feat took up only the smallest sliver of her consciousness and was as natural as breathing to her. But what was truly draining her strength was the fact that her mind was deeply immersed in the Skein, shifting the myriad potential futures as they appeared before her. Yet what she saw only filled her with horror.
T'selia was aghast by what she was seeing, the potential futures were multiplying exponentially, bringing new and unexpected configurations into being second by second. She had not foreseen these futures, they had not even existed as possibilities until a few moments ago but now they were spawning faster than she could process. T'selia was a Farseer, a master of clairvoyance and precognition, but this was unlike anything she had ever experienced before and it confounded her. The only possible answer was that something unforeseen had entered the field of play, something so monumental that its very existence had shattered the timelines, leaving only a fragmented, whirling mess of possibilities in its wake.
T'selia felt panic and rage creeping into her heart but she forced it down with a muttered mantra. She recited her disciplines and compelled herself to look impartially at the Skein; she must find the shatterpoint and then restart all her predictions from scratch. The Farseer looked into the timelines, future, present and past. She immediately made several conclusions; first Athra J'rect was still alive, along with his bodyguard and that vile Haemonculi. The second was that the Mon-Keigh target was still at large, and the number of futures where it was eliminated were shrinking rapidly. These were useful facts but not the shatterpoint, so she looked again and then she saw it.
In her mind's eye T'selia beheld a ship, a vast leviathan of the void that eclipsed even the waning power of the Eldar in its might. It was typically Mon-Keigh in design but built to a scale beyond their current, feeble comprehension. It was a fossilised relic of ancient times, brought back to life by a defeated Dusk Prince and then taken by his minions for nefarious purposes. T'selia was confused this, how could this be connected to the shatterpoint?
Then she realised that it wasn't connected to the shatterpoint: it was the shatterpoint. The vast ship had emerged from nowhere and wrecked carnage, leaving the possible futures flapping wildly in its wake. T'selia paused, lost in confusion and bewilderment. This thing was monumental in import and significance, lying across the various timelines like an iron bar, but how had it gone unnoticed? Her powers of foresight were considerable and surely would have detected this thing's presence, its every action bending futures around it like gravity around a star.
T'selia reached into the Skein and probed the ship's disposition, tracing the edges of its temporal silhouette. Yet she was most surprised to encounter an all too familiar spiritual scent lingering around it, obscuring it from all psychic detection until it revealed itself. The stench was pervasive and foul, a soured psychic potential tainted with the reek of Chaos. It was the spoor of the Mon-Keigh Sorcerer Beta and it was laced with his scorn, disdain and his brazen amusement at how he had tricked her.
T'selia felt her anger slip its bounds and she screamed in rage and pain. All her hard work and sacrifices had been made moot; all her careful designs for revenge had been laid in the dust. She snarled ferociously as her walls of emotional control crumbled and her soul filled with hatred, consuming her and uncorking a torrent of wild psychic might. Her hands flared with lightning as her power ran out of control, flooding through her in an unstoppable tidal wave of potency, one that would tear this ship apart. Her feet lifted off the floor as the Warp ran through her and in her mind she heard the chittering laughter of She Who Thirsts.
Yet T'selia's outburst was interrupted as the whole ship rocked around her, not from an explosion or weapons impact, no this was something else. T'selia blinked as her foresight showed her waves of crude cylinders and stubby gunships boring onto the wrecked hull, spilling waves of brutish Gene-Bulks into its bowels. T'selia's rage turned into wild joy as she saw the target step into the ship, waving a primitive sword around like a savage. She laughed aloud as she realised that the Gene-Bulks had come looking for a fight. Typical Mon-Keigh, give them a chance to hit something with a sharpened bit of metal and they just couldn't help themselves.
T'selia forced her power into abeyance, reining it in by sheer willpower and sinking to the deck. She stroked her soul-stone and was reassured by its constant presence, all that was best about her being woven into its structure. She knew she still had a slim chance to bring the Skein back under control; she just had to get to Athra J'rect before the target did. T'selia set off at a run, skipping over dead bodies and dancing past flames. She could hear the Gene-Bulks all around her, filling the ship with their simple thoughts and felt Eldar lives being snuffed out everywhere under their crude attacks. True, they were all tainted Drukhai but they remained Eldar and she would gladly have traded a million Mon-Keigh lives for just one of theirs.
T'selia ran fleetingly through the ship, headed upwards and avoiding conflicts where possible but she knew that she would not evade them all. Sure enough she soon emerged into a mess hall where a dozen Drukhai were trying to fight off five Gene-Bulks and failing. The room was filled with fire and debris, sparking power conduits making the space seem like a vision of some primitive Mon-Keigh hell, but that didn't seem to faze the Gene-Bulks.
One of the Gene-Bulks was wading into the surviving Eldar, slaughtering them with wide sweeps of a roaring sword that boasted spinning serrated teeth. T'selia reached out into the Aether and felt the departing souls of the Drukhai, sinking into the embrace of She Who Thirsts. The Farseer channelled her power and rewove the connections to their bodies, buying the dead a few seconds more of life. The revived warriors glowed with power and then leapt upon the Gene-Bulk, sinking long knives into its joints. The primate fell to the relentless attacks, confused by how its victims were still moving as it joined them in death.
Another of the brutish primates saw T'selia coming and moved to intercept her, aiming a ridiculously oversized projectile weapon her way. To the Farseer it seemed to be moving in slow motion, its vaunted gene-enhancements no match for natural Eldar grace. She reached out into the Skein, searching for a future that suited her needs and quickly found one that was just right. She grasped it firmly and brought it into being, making the improbable not only probable but real. Under the Gene-Bulk's feet a power conduit suddenly ruptured, spilling etheric energies out in an incandescent fountain that engulfed the primitive creature. The primate went up like a bonfire, semi-psychic energies consuming it and making its armour run like wax left in an oven. It collapsed in a molten heap of steaming offal but its death drew the attention of its kin.
T'selia now had the Gene-Bulk's full attention and one of them leapt at her, swinging a roaring sword at her head. The Farseer saw it coming and arced backwards, bending her spine in a way that would shatter a rigid Mon-Keigh skeleton. The blade passed harmlessly over her head, leaving the Gene-Bulk off-balance. T'selia rose and as she did so she struck out with her staff, connecting her mind to its physical form.
The second the staff touched the primate's armour she channelled her power, reaching into the essence of the Mon-Keigh's being. It was a simple matter for her to unweave the connections between the primate's body and the simple collection of impulses it called a soul, severing its lifeline with a mere twitch of her mind. She felt the Mon-Keigh's soul being cast into the warp, foundering and helpless in its depths. She smiled to herself as she saw that there was no Golden-God on a throne waiting for it, no choirs of angels. It merely fell into the Warp and dissipated into its components, the slivers of everything it had been cast adrift for minor Warp predators to gobble up.
With an angry roar the last two Gene-Bulks threw themselves towards her, trying to get their apish hands on her flesh but T'selia wasn't about to let them. She drew upon the Warp and unleashed her powers in their most brutal and destructive aspect. A storm of eldritch lightning sprang from her fingers, blazing arcs of searing, bright lights filling the room with annihilating potential. A terrible wind blew in her wake, scattering loose debris everywhere and making it seem like a true gale had sprung up from nowhere. T'selia focussed her wrath, channelling her rage and hate into pure power. She felt her heart soar as one of the Gene-Bulks went down, its nervous system burnt out by her arcane might. The other one however, must have been some form of leader-beast and it fought on, holding up an energised fist before its face in an attempt to deflect the lightning. It took one ponderous step forward and snarled in its crude language, "Alien Fiend!"
T'selia felt her hate surge into an inferno of revulsion at the savage's stubborn refusal to die and she shrieked, "Die filthy creature!" As she did so she redoubled her attack, cascading wave after wave of lightning from her hands in a torrent of eldritch power. Brilliant white bolts caught the primitive full-on, digging into every joint of its armour and stabbing into the flesh below. The Mon-Keigh seized up as it was torn apart, the energies dismantling its flesh cell by cell and eradicating its life-force. T'selia laughed to see the primate's spark fading but she did not relent, instead pouring on power second after second. She kept the primitive conscious and suffering for long seconds after it should have died, animating its body to prolong the torment. She laughed in revelry at the might that was hers to command and the just, fitting punishment she was bestowing, then she finally snapped off her power in satisfaction.
The last Gene-bulk fell to the ground in a clatter of burnt plate, its flesh reduced to charred ashes. T'selia wasted no time in celebration, instead she ran on as fast as her legs could carry her. She had to reach Athra J'rect while there was still time, the target was closing and she had to be there to ensure its death.