It was silence, his hunger was gone. He awoke in a dark place, the air whistling as he felt nothing. He stretched out his senses, feeling for something or anything. He felt life, but no connection to it. It was a rather cold emptiness that filled him, or rather, his mask. He was left alone, after his defeat at the hands of that wound in the Force. Though, he could not sense her either around here. Where was here anyway?
"Oh," A male voice said, causing his senses to turn on the figure, "Something to wear, might fit with what goes down here in this Emperor forsaken xenospit place."
The voice belonged to a human, one that looked very mutated beyond the regular norms. He internally sneered as the life force of this being sang, sweetly calling to be devoured by him. He reached out, black tendrils snaking their way into this mutant's mind and coating every thought in darkness. Like oil, it was nothing but blackness in this vessel's mind. Upon putting on his mask, he started devouring the body of the creature into a more practical vessel.
Tendrils, dark as night, surged deeper. The body melted into a black mess as the tendrils went from physical to metaphysical. The light within this body was so intoxicating, so alluring. He stabbed at it with deadly force, tearing into the light and sucking it into himself. He felt everything this being had been, enter into his mind. Past and present, becoming knowledge and giving him more power then he had ever had under Traya's tutelage. The mess bubbled then stood up, taking the form of a man. Robes billowing out from its black void and solidifying as he contorted reality to his will. The mask came out of where the upper face would be, the pure white facial armor clean as the figure reached out with its new physical body.
Darth Nihilus stretched his fingers, feeling them become real as he internally smirked. He had a new body, a new planet to devour. Not only that, he wasn't accosted by that lingering hunger that drove him to not seeing the little details of the grand picture. He reached out further and found his blade, the lightsaber had followed him into this new realm. He couldn't help but smile as he called it to his hand and activated it. The crimson blade fills the darkness with blood red light, painting everything but him with its sinister color.
Nihilus took stock of his surroundings, both physical and on a more metaphysical one. What surprised him was the amount of people packed into his place, so much life and those lights within them. Life was teeming in this place, a gigantic work of metal, stone and sweat that went both above and below the surface of this planet. He was located within the underworld section of this hive of a city. Life was in the shadows, watching him with horror filled minds. He would have grinned but even his new physical body had limitations, lacking a mouth was one of them.
Deactivating his weapon, he made his way through the darkness of the passage. Hands splayed out slightly as he reached out with his power to those in the darkness, beginning to consume them. They screamed, moaned or gasped as they expired. Feeding the Sith as he moved through the passageways towards the surface, each expiring husk gave him more power through that unknown light within themselves. Memories filled him before he dissected them for information, at least in what these foul fools knew.
It seemed that he may have been consuming their soul, or something. A few were quite incompetent and didn't really give Nihilus much but a better understanding of the layout of this Hive City. Though, if he was honest, a few of these morsels were able to tell him of what he would expect in resistance. There was a church here with women in powerful suits of armor, carrying weapons called 'bolters' and 'flamers'. Flamers, Nihilus could easily guess what what was, but a bolter?
He hadn't the foggiest idea of what that was.
Stepping into a wider passage, Nihilus noticed the lighter atmosphere that surrounded him and the tighter amount of life that was packed around him. Looking around, he saw buildings that looked like they had been built on top of. Like the next owners thought these buildings wouldn't be enough at all and build another level. Much like Coruscant, in a sense, Nihilus thought to himself.
He needed to get to the surface and see what he could consume before leaving. Hopefully, this place had hyperspace worthy vessels.
Night came swiftly on the Hive City, as Sister Ester marched through the streets of Hive City Erstothros. Named after the first man to step on the world, Erstothros had over five thousand years of history within its walls and people. They were a rather hardy people, full of Faith in the Emperor and steadfast in the work of his Imperium. Though, some recent reports were rather disturbing. They had come from Sister Superior Adias, which was always a bad sign.
People were coming up dead or vanished, their bodies (those discovered at any rate) were nothing more then husks. More often, ash was discovered in the homes of those that had vanished. Nothing else had come up but the increasing amount of death in a city of nearly eighty billion souls of his Emperor's most holy Imperium.
Checking her bolter pistol once more, she also checked her heavy flamer's ammunition before motioning her fellow Sisters, Druis and Etros, forward. Moving as silently as they could in their power armor, Ester led them until the air turned cold. She could literally feel something around her as the air started to freeze, her armor becoming harder to move in. She pushed her mind into the prayers for protection as she pushed forward, Faith driving a blade into the cold.
"Sister," Etros muttered, motioning with her bolter into the darkness, "something is over there, I saw a figure in black. It could be one of those Tyanid Genestealers Legatine Ruth spoke of?"
Ester pondered on it before shaking her head, "We would have noticed a rather substantial number of people showing up as hybrids as the Sisters came here with the first settlers around five thousand years ago. The entire city has many protocols against them, so whatever that is, it might be our killer."
Reading their weapons, Ester led them into the darkness and focused herself on the present. The cold got worse, like the world had become lifeless and empty. She grimaced as she spotted the figure, tall and imposing. Wearing the darkest of the void robes she had ever seen, Ester aimed her heavy flamer at the figure, then something filled her ears. It sounded wrong, like trillions of voices were trying to speak in a long dead tongue that should have never been spoken. Her heart froze in her chest as the figure turned to face them.
Where its face should have been was a mask, white with two red lines, one over each eye socket. The white mask tilted with the head, as the figure looked at them as the voices continued to fill the air. The wrongness set her one edge and she fired her flamer at the monster. Brilliant flames surged forth, lighting up the street in golden light. The flames connected and seemed to consume the black figure but the voices didn't stop, instead they all began to laugh in that same alien tongue.
The flamer's flames parted, the figure standing there with its arm lifted. Its palm facing forward as it parted the flames. She then felt something close around her throat and lifted her into the air, along with her fellow sisters. She felt, more then hear, her weapons fall away and clatter to the ground. Her gaze could only see the figure as it walked towards them, before it was torn away at the gurgling horrific gasp on her right. Looking as best she could, she saw Druis as she began to age. It was slow at first before it started getting faster and faster, a blue light was being pulled out of her eyes, mouth, and nose as she became a withered husk of herself.
The voices laughed, Ester swore she heard Druis's voice amongst the choir of alien voices. Laughing, calling, pleading. Then, she felt something slide into her head. It was not pleasant or gentle. A black oily tendril stabbing into her thoughts as it pushed meaning into her very soul.
"You are nothing but a morsel for my hunger, power to add to my own. A fleck of dust in a galaxy of trillions."
She then screamed, feeling all of herself being forced out of her own body. It was like her own skin was being stripped off her muscles with a rusted combat knife. But she couldn't scream, not really. Her voice had been silenced as did any semblance of being as she was consumed into the mass of voices and former souls that now empowered a wound from another galaxy, another reality.
One bent on consuming life itself to empower itself forever. A threat far greater then any Tyranid fleet could ever possess, a threat that was shaped like a man.
The most dangerous kind of threat.