The angel's chrysalis turned with the washing tides all about it, lashed to the glittering and ancient energetic Ribbon. Two other Ribbons cavorted and twirled, drawing her in their embrace as they hurtled, inexorably, toward the light of a trillion souls: tiny matchstick points glowing upon the surface of their tumbling rocks.
The rose petals fell about her as her mother led her by the hand, smiling down at her. Her long hair, normally intricately braided, was left free to flow in the breeze and sweep about her waist, picking up wayward petals and tossing them gently aside the next. Her father walked close behind her, and they followed the official Imperial envoy who was taking them to see the great voidcraft – a once in ten generations sight, her father had told her.
The petals swirled and coalesced, upon the bedrock of Halon's orbs: Belleros and her tiny moon, Orenda, Kaleida, and around the angel's chrysalis formed the giant Peristalis. A few remained apart, swirling in the pull of each elder Wheel until a scattered belt formed between Peristalis and the lesser coalescences, and the twins Ido and Echo launched themselves into the angel's orbit. The humans came after, first the half-machine Mechanicus who sought to exploit the rich resources of Belleros, Ido, and the belt of rose petals, then the trillions to toil in the mines and plunder Orenda's bountiful land to feed them.
They showed her the looming monolithic voidship hovering above the city square: a citadel of a cathedral, cold and black and pitiless. Golden edifices of ordained saints ordained it. They led her to the teleport pad, her parents stopping to tell her they would have to go two at a time due to Imperial rules, so she would need to go with the Imperial envoy – they would be shortly behind her, once the teleport pad recharged. She followed the envoy, unsure if she had looked back or not. There were no more rose petals here, save the few strays caught in her hair. They stepped onto the pad and –
– the Orks came next, scenting the busy Imperial activity so far from their heartland, and came calling for WAAAUGH! Their ramshackle ships lurched from the Warp and descended upon Ido and Echo, but Belleros came to answer the call. She summoned her vast Kataphron legions and even called to aid of her Titan houses, beating back the invaders through hard won battle after battle, until the Orks had been scoured and of the five Titan houses, only House Draedis still stood. Wounds were soothed, though Belleros remained ever wary, and for a time it was good.
The Ribbons, their adolescence dawning with the turning of the age, condensed themselves from the into the very fabric of the spacetime their ineffable presence warped. Their vapours descended and intermingled with the myriad elements of the worlds of Halon, seeping into the lungs of the humans to better touch their curious, linear minds. The humans dug hard and dug deep, carving tunnels into the very bedrock of Ido as they chased veins of precious ores, and transformed their old mining caverns into the connective tissues of the new hive cities. They lashed asteroids from the Belleros belt and dragged them to the Forge world for processing into plasma cores. As their population boomed, the servitor assembly lines were expanded to fulfill their growing need of a further and further mechanized workforce.
The adolescent Vapours marvelled at these strange mortals, living and dying in droves, and whispered to them in dreams. They told the humans ways to improve their yields, methods to improve the stability of their plasma cores – the energetic intermix ratios being a lesser, non-sentient cousin to their own adult forms. They cavorted and twirled in the lungs and the blood of generations who existed under the golden light of some far-away lantern god on his throne. And for a time, it was good.
Condensed further from the passing of generations, one day a lone Tech Priest returning to the manufactorum – one of the few of their kind who still clung to their own, grown lungs – fell into a fit of raging coughs in the midst of the radioactive dunes. Heedless to the warnings of their internal asuspex, the Tech Priest ripped his breathing apparatus free and spewed forth the Crystallized Child that had formed in their lungs. Globs of gunmetal hued ferromagnetic substance dribbled from their chin and pooled together, forming a disk that scintillated and altered shape at each refraction of photons that struck it's surface. Awed at what must surely be a gift from the Omnissiah, the Tech Priest re-secured their rebreather and reverently carried the Crystallized Child straight to the manufactorum to find that two other Children had emerged from alike Tech Priests across the planet.
But the Children lacked the communicative ability of their adolescent forms, and were no longer intrinsically bonded to their hosts. The whispered dreams ceased in the minds of the Tech Priests, and they could no more understand the temporal properties of these Crystallized Children than the Children could explain it to them. So they sat atop pedestals in tech shrines, enveloped in pulsing temporal fields; the shrines rusted and rotted away, only to un-rust and rebuild themselves, like a pict-capture played in forward and reverse endlessly. And for a time, it was also good.
But the day came when the light of the humans' Lantern God faded from sight, hidden by a blistering scar across the galaxy that had driven the Crystallized Children from the Empyrean in their adult forms in the first place, in true retrocausality. They were soft bodied eels in a sea of sharks, vulnerable to depredation from these new Chaos Gods when in aeons past
(or was it aeons future?)
they had been the predators, though few in number, eating Enslavers, Remoras, and Psychneueins who strayed into their territorial waters or attempted to feed upon the mortals in their breeding grounds. To those ancient beings, the adult Ribbons had been known as the Eshym; or Tachyomorays to the Old Ones. Now they were nameless, for none now lived who remembered them from those times.
The Chaos Gods, however, did not forget and their hunger was never satiated. They dispatched their servants to the final breeding ground of the Tachyomorays, eager to feast on their soft energetic forms and their crystalline eggs. Morias Enfrite came first, fleeing from backwater system to backwater system from the Scouring, gathering what wayward Emperor's Children he could to bolster the ranks of his dwindling hunting party until none remained but those who had been initiated centuries after the Heresy. The descended upon the Halon system in secret, planting the seeds of what would eventually bloom into drawn-out civil war:
Phaltrix made overtures to the Organicist faction of the Biologis sects, offering up his own gene-enhanced body for intense surgical experimentation in exchange for allegiance – his twisted body, already made serpentine from the blessings of his Patron, Slaanesh, and the genius of Fabius Bile, augmented and rearranged to obscene degrees.
Decellis approached the local Logi sects with his obsession of tactical precision, promising new technological marvels and defensive stratagems to defend against future Xenos incursions, particularly against the hated Orkoid menace.
Targanon urged on the growing Pleasure Cult among the nobility, convincing them to transform Belleros' barren moon into a mathematically perfect paradise, and to further oppress the serf class into serving their increasingly depraved desires.
Leandro whispered unrest in the ears of those very serfs, championing worker unions and freedom from the lies of the Corpse-Emperor until the fires or rebellion threatened to reach a fever pitch.
Slaanesh revelled in her new prize, but the Prince of Pleasure would not be alone in her thirst. Tzeentch sent his servant next: the Sorcerer-Lord Ptar'nek and his Rubricae came next, offering partnership with Morias Enfrite and revealing to him the true crown jewel of the Halon system. Not it's people, not it's resources, but the three Crystalline Children he claimed he could bend to the will of the Dark Gods.
"He is a duplicitous rat," Leandro had warned Morias. "I would sooner trust a Corpse Worshipper than a slave of Tzeentch."
"We don't have to trust him," said Morias. "We only have to use him."
And so, their plan shifted. Ptar'nek taught the Lord of Huntsman how to use the Crystalline Children to rewind and fast-forward time; the Sorcerer-Lord carried one for himself, and the Lord of Huntsman carried the second. Targanon, whom Ptar'nek declared with his prescient visions would be the only one among them to receive the blessing of Nurgle, was given the third. With the blessing of two Dark Gods and the attention of the Grandfather drawn, the war was initiated and the distress call sent to Baal.
It did not take long for the Emperor's Angels to descend upon the Halon system, and with their arrival the trap was set. A ritual sealed the temporal loop, and with each iteration the satisfaction of the Grandfather grew. For there could be nothing more stagnant than endless repetition, a plague of despair rising in the ignorant citizenry.
Yet still, Khorne cared not for the sacrifice.
The first iteration had given him sustenance, but the repetition quickly bored him. The same blood flowed over and over again, in and out. Skulls were removed, put back, and removed again, and the Blood God found this infuriating. He had no interest in Tzeentch's grand scheme and hated the sorcererous wretch for his inane, stupid mind games. He loathed Slaanesh's libidinous hunger and all her needless, self-absorbed obsessions. He respected the Grandfather's steadfastness and resilience in the face of such useless repetition, but spat on his need to be part of such a ridiculous endeavour.
His eye remained on the Halon system, however, in such case that one of the other Gods found some advantage there and he would need to intervene. Ptar'nek prayed to Khorne day and night, promising him the servants he had always desired above all: the Blood Angels. They were to be a gift to the Blood God, an entire company of Blood Angels who would be his, one by one as they fell to the flaw boiling in their gene-enhanced blood. Still, this was not enough to satisfy the Blood God's demands – not nearly enough. It was an appetizer, a mere amuse bouche. What he truly wanted he could no longer have.
And so Ptar'nek promised him a new champion.
With the power of Tzeentch flowing through every fibre of his being, he passed on his prescient dreams to the Librarian of the 7th Company, disguised as the Emperor himself. He whispered of the coming of a new entity to the closed system, and told Alecto of gene-modification secrets pioneered by Fabius Bile and perfected by the traitor Organicists on Belleros: how to separate the very few specific lines of code in Sanguinius' gene-seed that were compatible with adult human women, and which organs would not be rejected; how the Librarian could use himself as a conduit to the Empyrean to fill the subject with pure Warp energy, ensuring that the gene-splicing would take and her mutation would be controlled.
It was a gamble greater than any before he had made. There was no telling if he had successfully fooled the Librarian – a mind as old and nearly as potent as his own. Even still, Alecto might be unable to convince his Captain and Sanguinary High Priest that this borderline heretical action would be the correct – in fact the only – course. Greater still was the possibility that the desired subject would die in the crash rather than be properly injured.
None of this he made privy to Morias or the others. The wily Leandro, he knew, suspected something amiss, but he continued to let the Noise Marine whisper his misgivings to the Lord of Hunters. Eventually, Ptar'nek knew he would have to deal with the nosy worm, but better to let him continue on for now than to upset the already tenuous balance of their warband.
And so did Ptar'nek create a gap in the time-loop field, just long enough for the Inquisitor's ship and his Sororitas escort into realspace, engineering their crash-landing and introducing a new variable into what had for millennia been a closed system.
Ash fell about the ruined hulk of the downed voidship like the rose petals of Sabina's childhood, and the Blood God turned his gaze to the Halon system with renewed interest at the prospect of an Angel of Death built just for him. He had only to wait for the rage within her to boil to the surface and overcome her faith, and soon – very soon – the blood would flow freely.
Will you resist the call of bloodlust?
Can you?