AN : here is another chapter - another annex to our main story. This one came into existence after I finished listening to my audiobook version of the new Black Legion, by Aaron Demski-Bowden. I really enjoyed it, and after about an hour at my keyboard, this story was written. For the full experience, imagine that this is spoken in the voice of Jonathan Keeble, who did an amazing work for Black Legion and for all the other audios in which he participated. If you don't own a copy of one of his works, go on the Black Library website and listen to the free sample there.
Lots of stuff going on IRL, so I can't tell you when the next chapter of anything will be up. I am working on the Times of Ending for the RH in my ever-diminishing free time, though, and have commissioned Nemris for a new illustration, so look forward to it !
I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
I can hear you, Inquisitor. Stalking the darkness that surrounds me, trying to hide your presence with every artifice and technique known to Mankind. It is pointless, all of it. I can smell the scent of your soul, taste the fear in your heart as you enter this pit of disguised lies and blasphemous truths. There is no point in trying to hide. Do you really think that after so long alone down here, I would not notice when I finally have company ? Please. This kind of petty insult serves neither of us.
Yes, that is better. No need to be rude, now is there ? Let me take a good look at you, have a taste of your aura. You are a new one, aren't you ? I do not recognize your essence, though it shares the same traits all of your predecessors have. The unrelenting will, the unwavering self-righteousness … and hidden under it all, the creeping doubts and fear, the slow poison of horror eating away at your sanity. You have seen many things that had no place in your narrow view of the universe, have you not ? Then you know this first, most important and bitter of truths : revelation is never pleasant.
I always knew one of you would come back, eventually. Your kind cannot help it. You always come here, even though you know better. Always you are drawn to that which only I can offer you. Always there is some terrible need, some abomination on the horizon that makes coming here and consorting with one such as me the lesser of two evils.
No, do not speak. There is no need for that, or did your predecessors not record their experiences here ? Ah, I assume they did not. Such knowledge would surely fall within the purview of that which you foolish Imperials think to be too dangerous to be known, even by those entrusted with the kind of authority you wield.
He has come back again, hasn't he ? My master, my maker, my lord. His shadow has emerged from the deep dark, cast once more upon the people you swore to keep enslaved to what you believe to be the will of a long dead false god. And now you crawl back to me, after keeping me locked alone in this prison for countless years, desperately seeking any scrap of lore I may possess, any morsel of knowledge that might reveal a chink in his armor.
Well, my master would not want you to be denied illumination – he was always a teacher at heart, as well as a warlord and a monster. Should I tell you then, of the secrets of the Planet of the Sorcerers ? Of the turnings of Fate, of the Great Game of the Gods ? Or perhaps you wish me to speak to you of the Heresy, that legendary war that is now lost to the mists of time ? Or maybe it is power you seek, the power to reshape the galaxy to your own vision of what it should be ?
Hmm ? What is it ? You wish me to tell you none of these things ? You want me to tell you my story, how I came to be down here below your fortress, chained in this dark pit, with the wards carved by your forebears denying me my powers and forcing me to answer any question asked even if not spoken aloud ? Is this tale not already recorded in your archives ? Or is it that those who came down here before have erased almost every trace of my existence, leaving only a trail of half-buried clues for you to follow like breadcrumbs leading to this place ? It is, isn't it. You scoured the secret archives of your predecessors for any clue as to how to defeat him, and you found me, hidden amidst cryptic metaphors and sealed references. It's always the same dance.
You will do the same, you know, when we are done here. You will leave this place, and once whatever drama Fate has in store plays out, you will erase all traces of me and what you learned here. Then you will set up another trail for another of your kind to follow in some distant future, when my master's hand once again reach out of the darkness. How many times do you thing this has all unfolded before ? Would you like to know ? Sometimes your predecessors succeeded in foiling him. Others they failed, and died in shame and dishonor, their souls burning forever in the Empyrean, cast out and abandoned, and it fell to their disciples to erase their traces leading here.
Which of them do you think were the most fortunate, Inquisitor ?
I suppose it doesn't matter in the end. You are here to learn what I am and how I came to be here, and by the bindings placed upon me I must answer. You hope to find some clue as to my lord's goals in my tale, like a hunter learning all he can of his prey before even leaving his keep and venturing into the dark woods.
Very well, then. Listen to my tale, Inquisitor. Listen to the story of how your precious, secret, forbidden oracle was claimed from the claws of Ahzek Ahriman, the Arch-Sorcerer of Tzeentch, the Lord of the Rubric, Savior of the Thousand Sons, Favoured Son of the Cylops, the Broken God of the Eye, and a myriad other titles I have neither the patience nor the desire to speak.
Our story begins in ancient Terra, long before Mankind ever conceived of the true nature of the stars, before you even truly understood the miserable mudball you called home. It begins in an age of empires and conquest, of faiths with many gods waging war against one another. It begins with two empires ruling what their rulers believed to be vast territories, but was in fact but insignificant specks of dust in the grand scheme of things. One of the empires was old, having endured for millennia without changing, locked in a stasis its people believed to be divinely ordained. It has survived through the histories of Mankind as the Gyptian Empire. The other empire was young, and did not claim the title of empire though it was one in all but name. You know it as the Roman Empire. This later empire was strong, in the ascendant, while the former's glory was all but faded, destined to soon vanish from the world and go into history.
But there was one thing these two empires had in common. Both of them were at war with themselves, their rulers fighting each other with armies and schemes. When the Roman war came to Gyptian land, there was a betrayal, bloodshed, and a head offered by one of the Gyptian lords to his Roman peer in the hope of securing an alliance. But such barbarity offended the Roman lord greatly, and he allied with the Gyptian's foes instead. War raged, and armies clashed in a city that had stood for hundreds of years, where one of the first great libraries of Mankind had been built. During the battle, flames spread to the city, and soon they reached the library.
And there, amidst the flames of burning scrolls and the horrified screams of scholars watching their life's work vanish, I opened my eyes. I drank the lost knowledge these scrolls contained, I feasted upon the desperate efforts of these men to save what they could. I swallowed the souls of those who succumbed in the attempt, adding their lore to my burgeonning awareness. From the shadows I watched how even frail old men could find in themselves the strength of young heroes, driven to expand the last of their strength to safeguard the treasures of that antique library.
I saw it all, and I laughed, and the Warp laughed with me, for all that was lost in that great fire was mine, as is all the knowledge Mankind has and will ever seek to destroy through purifying flames. And there is so much your species destroys, Inquisitor. Your own order has fed me well over the years, with your grand purges of the Imperium's libraries. That is how I can differentiate you from the others who came to my cell before, even blinded and bound as I am – you are all responsible for the destruction of different pieces of lore.
For a timeless eternity, I existed in the Sea of Souls. I played my part in the great court of Fate, serving the God of Change with my lore and sorcery. Nine times in the course of history did I walk the mortal realm again, brought forth in all my terrible glory by those who served my divine master, rending reality apart with a single gesture. But most of my deeds were committed from within the Sea of Souls, as I whispered forgotten truths into the ears of those who sought wisdom in the secrets of the past. You cannot imagine how tempting the knowledge of long-lost records is for any scholar, how much they are willing to pay in return for even a fraction of what I have to offer. Thousands, millions of souls I captured that way, offering them to my god. Then, I was taken.
I will not try to explain to you why we Neverborn call Ahriman the Broken God. Your small mind cannot comprehend the scope of what happened to him when he changed his Legion's fate, nor the destiny that lies ahead of him and against which he fights with his every breath. Simply know that his mind reaches far beyond the confines of the Eye where you believe he and his kind to have been exiled. His will touches the dreams of those who are vulnerable to his whispers, and they become his servants, willingly or not. You know of what I speak – you have fought these cults in the past, and it is the threat of one of them that has driven you here in this chamber.
It was one of these cults that bound me into this form I now inhabit. I know you can see my flesh as it is, despite the darkness – I can hear the whirring of the augmetics where you eyes should be. My flesh is wasted now, dessicated and rotten away, but such was the strength of the bindings placed upon me by the magisters who summoned me on that distant day that I am still kept trapped within it, denied my return to the Empyrean. These mortals had summoned me with the knowledge Ahriman had implanted in their minds, and they had done so for one purpose only : that I may wield my powers in their service. They asked me to rend reality apart, to open a gateway through which they could reach the domain of their distant god. And so I did, for I was bound to obey.
They fled through that portal, vanishing from reality and onto the realm my master calls home. A thousand scholars and savants, men and women who would learn that which your Ordos deny them, stolen away in a single night, to replenish the depleted ranks of the Fifteenth Legion's servants. They fled from the punishment that would be inflicted upon them if they were captured, knowing that they could never go back, that the Imperium would never forgive them their transgression against laws they were not even permitted to know existed. They fled … But they left me behind. They could have taken me with them – I believe I would have served my master well on his homeworld, in the endless wars that oppose him to the other powers of the Great Eye. But they left me, because my lord commanded it. They left me in the circle where I had been bound, and when the servants of the Golden Throne arrived – too late, far too late – they found me and captured me.
And now you know, little mortal. You know why it is that your forebears did not leave any trace of what they learned from me. It burns, does it not ? Truth ? This unpleasant revelation, its implications worming their way through your mind, twisting your thoughts and pulling them down paths that lead only to damnation. All who came here before you, those who succeeded in foiling my lord and those that failed, they are all dead now, and all equally damned by that knowledge.
Ohohoho, that is right. That. Is. Right. Your forebears did not steal me from my master, tearing me from his control and binding me here so that you may plunder my secrets. I was sent here, surrendered by my lord because he knew that no mind that has glimpsed the universe's truths could resist the temptation I represent. Why ? Maybe for vengeance. His soul is so full of hatred, after all, burning like a beacon to the Courts of the Gods. Or maybe it is for vindication, to prove that he is right, that he has always been right, and that you were wrong for banishing him and his kind, because the knowledge you deem forbidden is the only way to do battle against the forces of darkness. He is prideful as well, after all. So immensely prideful. His belief in his own power and intellect is his greatest strength and his greatest weakness all in one. Most of the time your predecessors succeded against him, it was by using this flaw against him.
Will you succeed, or will you fail ? Anyway, you will be playing in his hands. Everything you do from this point will be as a result of his actions. And that is why, in the end, you have already lost.