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Azarok Sector – Cemetary-world Nerel
745.M32
The four materialized deep beneath the surface of Nerel. In some ways, the transition from the Judgement's Will to the underground was instantaneous; in others, it felt like an eternity had passed, and it took all four of them several moments to recover – to shake off the physical discomfort, and to remember who they were and what their purpose was. None of them, not even Elythrea Minias the Farseer or Tarek with the souls of six ancient Eldar psykers fused with his own, remembered what had or hadn't transpired during the transition – perhaps their minds had simply refused to process it.
"Let's go," said Inquisitor Lord Elydeos Akhaman, once he no longer felt as if his heart was trying to leap out of his throat.
With her staff glowing to light the way, the Farseer took the lead, guiding them through the labyrinth of bones. There were no maps of the catacombs – maybe the Nerelites had some, but if so, they had been lost to the Forsaken Sons' attack. The Farseer had her own knowledge of their destination's location, however, and her psychic gifts allowed her to see the way they must walk in order to reach it.
They passed walls of skulls, carefully arranged and tended to by generations of priests and caretakers. They saw traces of damage where the Forsaken Sons had passed : shrines to the God-Emperor torn down, broken bones, disrupted pillars and altars. There were no sign of desecration, however, and even this damage felt accidental, the product of transhuman warriors in full armor rushing through this place rather than deliberate insult.
They also found a few fresher bodies, the corpses of the Nerelite priests, left to rot where they had fallen, most reduced to pulp by the thread of armored boots.
"They were in a hurry," said Alphon.
"Yes," agreed Elydeos. "They must have known we were coming."
"But how ?" wondered the other Inquisitor.
Yes, that was the question, wasn't it ? How had Arken known the Imperium had any idea of his true plans ? The madman had set the entire Sector ablaze, scattered an army that rivalled those of the Despoiler's own Black Crusades, all as a smokescreen for his real objective – the unleashing of the Nightmare Fleet. And yet, despite all this, he had still acted as if they were on his heels, as if being caught before his plan reached fruition would spell failure. Even if he had known of the allied Imperial and Eldar fleets approaching Nerel, why hadn't he stayed and fought ? Judging by the disturbance in the aether the departing ships had caused, the void engagement would have been decisively in his favor, especially once Astartes boarding parties came into play.
What game was the Awakened One playing ?
Soon, they arrived at the threshold. It wasn't a smooth transition : the Forsaken Sons had forced their way in, blasting away the deepest Imperial crypts to open a path to the Eldar complex beneath. They had used heavy explosives, the kind used to breach fortresses, in order to tear open a hole into the wall, digging diagonally down until they reached the open space that had been hidden deeper. How they had known where to dig was unclear, presumably the same way they had known to come to Nerel in the first place. The idea that the Chaos Gods were giving information directly to Arken was disturbing, but it fit with the Chaos Lord's actions throughout the Black Crusade.
The breached tunnel led to a sudden drop into darkness. They climbed down a ladder of rope the heretics had left behind, and descended into the Archive of Loss.
It was … incredible. Despite the urgency of their mission, despite the threat that loomed over the horizon, Elydeos couldn't help but be awed at what the ancient Eldars had made here.
The architecture of the monument was completely different from the descriptions of Craftworlds Elydeos had read. Modern Eldar architecture was as strange as it was beautiful, but it was still of a scope and kind the human mind could comprehend, much as the Eldars themselves may scoff at the idea. This, however, had been built by the xenos at the height of their power, and the alien nature of their thoughts was on full display.
It brought to Elydeos' mind a theory he had once read, claiming that the Eldars who had survived the Fall had, in the process, become much closer to the other races of the galaxy, as opposed to the fey, eldritch creatures they had been when the galaxy had been their playground. There wasn't much evidence for or against that theory – even the Eldars themselves had forgotten much of their pre-Fall history, and those ancient monsters in Commoragh who actually remembered the days of the Empire could not be trusted for anything, least of all giving accurate accounts of the past.
The walls of the Archive of Loss were curved and the floor impossible smooth, all of it made of the same, pure white material, with no visible junction – as if it had all been carved from one, enormous piece. Alien runes covered the walls, glowing like jewels – no, he realized, they were jewels, each cut in the shape of an Eldar rune. His knowledge of Eldar languages was spotty at best, and this was a dialect that had been old when the Emperor had risen on Terra, but he could tell the runes formed names. Thousands and thousands of names, a memorial to all those who had been lost to imprison the Nightmare Fleet.
Elydeos opened his mouth to comment on their surroundings, but no sound came out. Startled, he realized that at some point in their advance, all noise had stopped.
+This is a place dedicated to the dead,+ whispered a voice inside his skull. +My ancestors made sure that they wouldn't be disturbed, even as their descendants came to pay their respects.+
The Farseer, Elydeos realized with a start. She was speaking inside his mind using her psychic abilities. This was hardly his first time being addressed like this, but he still instinctively recoiled at the alienness of her mind touching him, keeping his face from twisting in disgust through an effort of will. He couldn't afford to anger her, not here, not now.
+Come,+ she continued, either not noticing his discomfort or choosing to ignore it. +We must hurry. There is something powerful down here, something that seeks to destroy what we came here to find.+
Ominous. Elydeos would have asked for more details if he could speak, but suspected the Farseer truly didn't know anything else. For all their pretensions of omniscience, the Eldars of Mian-Tor had been caught by the Black Crusade just as unaware as the Imperium.
Though the battle above had drawn the heretics to the surface, the catacombs weren't completely empty. As the party turned at an angle in the path, they encountered a band of cultists busy defacing a series of twenty-meters high statues Elydeos was almost certain were representations of the dead Eldar pantheon.
The cultists' equipment was a mix of primitive metalwork and modern weaponry. They were clad in armor of brass and silver, and wielded wickedly curved blades alongside a mix of laser and solid-projectile weapons. Mutation was rife among them, their flesh twisted by the cursed gifts of their dark patron : sensory organs were bloated, patches of skin were covered in scales or fur (or both), elongated tongues hung from open maws full of pointed teeth.
+We won't be able to cross the room without them noticing,+ said the silent voice, not of Elythrea, but of Tarek, surprising Elydeos – though the Inquisitor Lord realized he shouldn't be, given the man's condition. +We need to kill them.+
+Yes,+ replied Elythrea, her mental voice carrying a hint of the anger she must feel at the sight of such defilement. +We must.+
Neither Elydeos nor Alphon had any objection to the killing of heretics, of course – not that they would have been able to voice them if they did.
They caught the cultists completely by surprise. This far behind their lines, they hadn't thought to leave a sentry, and with all sounds suppressed, stealth was obscenely easy. The four of them charged in, opening fire with their ranged weapons as they did so. Elydeos' first shot took a cultist in the head, while his second hit another in the shoulder – from a bolter, both were instantly fatal. Then they were in melee, with the heretics finally noticing them.
The complete silence gave the fight a surreal effect, and Elydeos was forced to focus even more than he usually would during combat in order to compensate for the disruption to his instincts. He also couldn't use his esoteric abilities, which required vocalization to manifest. Instead, he relied on his martial training. He had learned to use a staff as a melee weapon years ago, taught by a minor sect of warrior-monks of the Ecclesiarchy who had chosen it as their weapon of choice. According to their doctrine, the first weapon Man had ever used was a length of wood, and so, by wielding a staff, a warrior honored the entire species from which they hailed. It was an unorthodox interpretation of some of the Imperial Creed's most obscure verses to be sure, but their prowess with the lengths of polished wood they used for training had been unquestionable.
With his strength enhanced by the power armor he wore and his staff crackling with the energy of the field-generator attached to its top, the lethality of the monks' precepts was multiplied. Bones shattered with his every blow, and he easily parried the cultists' return strikes, while his armor absorbed their fire easily. Next to him, Alphon fought with his power sword held in both hands, cutting down heretics with ruthless efficiency. It was the first time Elydeos saw his colleague fight outside of the training chambers, and he was a shining example of what an unaugmented human was capable of, given the right training and tools.
Meanwhile, the Farseer seemed to dance among the cultists, so gracious were her movements. Her bladed staff cut through their armor with ease, slicing metal and flesh in smooth motions. The heretics were focused on her, their debased souls sensing the favor their Dark God would bestow upon them for slaying one of her kind, but they couldn't touch her.
Of course, the outcome had never been in doubt. They were all trained fighters, with Tarek especially being impressive to watch. The empowered human was surrounded by a corona of psychic light, and moved with incredible speed, dodging every blow aimed at him and striking back with perfect precision. His every attack was lethal, crushing skulls and breaking necks, or piercing throats and hearts with his roaring chainsword, adamantium-tipped teeth tearing through the heretics' armor like paper. The soulstones embedded in the flesh of his arm shone through the flak armor he wore, a constant reminder of the alien origin of that prowess.
Within less than a minute, the four of them had slain the last of the thirty-odd cultists, and they were barely even winded. They left the corpses behind and resumed their advance. The Archive of Loss was vast, a network of criss-crossing avenues similar to the one they had come down into, all of them covered in the names of the dead. According to Elythrea's earlier briefing, the monument containing the information they sought should be at the Archive's center, where the greatest heroes of the Eldar were honored.
The deeper in they went, the more Elydeos began to feel the power Elythrea had mentioned waited for them at their destination.
+We are being hunted,+ said the Farseer silently.
Alphon raised his hand a pointed at himself, then at the way they had come from.
+You'll stay behind and deal with it ?+ asked the Eldar. +Are you sure ? It is a powerful slave of Chaos that approaches.+
Alphon nodded, his expression grim but confident.
+Very well,+ sent Tarek, surprising Elydeos with how quickly he agreed. +Be cautious. I recognize this presence : the Dark Gods once sent it after me, before I was what I am.+
That reveal nearly made Elydeos stop Alphon, but he reconsidered. If Alphon thought he could do this, then the Lord Inquisitor must trust him. They couldn't risk being ambushed while confronting the power they could sense deeper in the complex.
With one last nod to his friend, Elydeos turned back to follow Elythrea.
The sheer amount of death in the catacombs had thinned the Veil between Materium and Immaterium. For decades, the constant rituals and prayers of the Nerelites had kept the Neverborn from taking advantage, but now the Nerelite death-priests were dead. With the battle above having drawn the eyes of the Ruinous Powers to this world, all the conditions were fulfilled for an old friend of the Forsaken Sons to return.
Reality screamed and was torn asunder as the Dark Powers finally broke through the wards of the Anathema's servants. Near the entrance to the Archive of Loss – for even all the desecrations performed by their followers couldn't yet breach the pre-Fall sorcery protecting the Archive itself – a rift opened, but no daemonic horde was unleashed upon the catacombs. Instead, a single figure stepped through the opening into Hell, which closed behind it.
The figure was no daemon, though it would be difficult to tell when looking upon him. His body was made of living darkness hung around the bones of a Space Marine. His face was a skull within which laid two unblinking eyes that were unmistakably made of flesh despite being completely black. His right arm ended in a vicious blade, the only part of him apart from his exposed skull that was completely solid, and which crackled with sorcerous lightning. His left arm was grotesquely extended, ending in a claw of shadow that reached the height of his knees.
He was, or had been, Zarl Korak. Once, he had been a Space Marine of the Eighth Legion, a son of the Night Haunter and a monster that paid lip service to the principles of the Great Crusade. Then he had been a Forsaken Son, throwing in his lot with Arken, not for glory or revenge, but the opportunity to continue to inflict pain upon the weak.
But he had made a mistake. On Parecxis, he had made promises to the Ruinous Powers and failed to deliver upon them, which had resulted in him being dragged into the Warp. He had been released and given another chance to pay back what he owed, only to be thwarted again as his quarry slipped away from him and he was recalled to the infernal realms.
He had suffered there, more so than any of his many, many victims ever had at his hands. Not because the Warp had any care for justice or karma, but because it had amused his daemonic creditors to do so. His mind had been broken, stripped of its thin veneer of civilization to reveal the beast that laid underneath.
Now he had been let loose once more, dragged away from the games of the Neverborn to play his part in the schemes of his former lord. For the shadow of Arken in the Warp was growing stronger with every step the Awakened One took on the Path to Glory, and the Dark Gods smiled upon his goal.
He sniffed, tasting the air through senses that only vaguely resembled the ones he had once possessed. The Realms of Chaos had wrought a potent alchemy upon Zarl Korak, remaking him body, mind and soul into a paramount hunter. The only release he had known from the torments inflicted upon him had been when they had set him to hunt down some wretched daemon or damned soul in the Formless Wastes, those sections of the Empyrean unaligned with any of the Four.
This was the first time since Parecxis that he had been let loose upon the Materium, a third and last chance to prove his worth to his masters. He would never be free of the debt he owed – too much interest had been accrued, too many gifts had been bestowed upon him against his will. But if he could do this, if he could deliver the sevenfold soul of his prey to the Ruinous Powers, his leash would be lengthened. He would be allowed to remain in the Materium, to rejoin with the warband and serve Arken as a shadowy killer, the souls of his victims sent to the Realms of Chaos in his stead, not too dissimilar to how the Drukhari sustained their own existences despite the hooks Slaanesh had in their souls.
He knew who he hunted. He had hunted him once before, only to be cheated of his kill at the last moment. Now he could feel his presence, smell the lingering traces of his aura in the catacombs. Tarek of Parecxis was here.
This time, he wouldn't escape.
Zarl Korak ran through the bones-filled tunnels, guided by preternatural senses. When he reached the hole his former brethren had dug, he leapt all the way down, landing on all four and continuing to run that way. He barely noticed the silent shroud that covered the area, and gave no attention to the ancient Eldar wonders all around him. These things didn't matter compared to the hunt, to the one chance of escaping his torments.
The former Night Lord, who was more beast than Astartes at this point, finally came to a stop. A figure stood before him. A man, just a man, clad in power armor and holding a power sword and a bolt pistol. It was not his prey, but his soul was a powerful one, full of secrets almost to bursting.
Zarl Korak would've smiled if he could. Acidic drool dripped between his teeth, sizzling on the floor but failing to mark it.
This would make for a lovely appetizer.
The further into the Archive they went, the more elaborate the décor became. The honored dead were commemorated with statues and hyper-detailed frescoes showing the bridges of Eldar starships, so realistic it felt to Elydeos as if they could walk through the walls and into the distant past. Even as he ran as fast as he could, aided by his power armor's servomotors, Elydeos took note of everything he saw, knowing that this was the kind of opportunity his peers in the Ordo Xenos would kill for – and that, likely as not, the Archive would be gone or sealed by the time the Black Crusade was over. He doubted the Mian-Tor Eldars would tolerate leaving it accessible to the Imperium.
More than ten minutes after Alphon had stayed behind, the three remaining allies finally arrived at their destination. The corridor they had been running down had brought them to a vast domed chamber, the ceiling showing a scene of the naked void, with stylized constellations drawn between stars. Perhaps it depicted the heavens as seen on the Eldar's mythical homeworld, though there was no way to know – that world was no doubt burning in the Eye of Terror, making calculating its position from this snapshot impossible.
The floor of the room raised at its center into an altar of sorts, atop which laid a pile of broken stone. Elydeos gasped at the sight – and realized that he had heard himself gasp. Sound wasn't cancelled in this room, likely due to whatever had destroyed the stele at the center.
Two figures stood before the broken pieces. Veiled creatures crawled around them, their feminine bodies clad in drags that had once been the sort of priceless clothes only the nobility of Imperial worlds could afford.
In a single glance, Elydeos took in the appearance of these new foes. One of them appeared to be human, and would have been handsome, if not for the expression of his face, a mix of cruelty and viciousness. His body was muscular without the inhuman bulk that resulted from gene-forging, his pale skin covered only by black leather pants and a sleeveless vest. His purple eyes burned with inner light, and on his brow rested a golden crown set with jewels that didn't quite fit his head. A sword hung from his waist, inscribed with fell Chaos runes. His long, flowing white hair was matted with sweat, and he was breathing heavily, but this did nothing to diminish the aura of threat he exuded.
But it was his right hand that most drew the eye. It was an augmetic device of black metal, clashing against the rest of his unblemished flesh. A red jewel was embedded inside the palm, glowing with a fell illumination that set Elydeos' teeth on edge. Black tendrils rose from where flesh met metal, covering most of his forearm and stretching above the elbow. Drops of blood fell from the highest tendrils, giving the impression they were newly grown, though the wearer didn't appear troubled by the pain he must surely be feeling from it.
To his left was a creature Elydeos struggled to describe. It looked like a cross between a spider and an Eldar, with a dash of daemon thrown into the mix. It had six eyes, glowing with the same Warp-fire as the man next to it. Its withered body was implanted with many pieces of xenos tech, the purpose of which Elydeos could only speculate about. It carried no obvious weapons, but Elydeos' trained senses immediately identified it as some manner of psyker.
His hatred of heretics was the fruit of years of indoctrination and witnessing the atrocities they were capable of in the field, but the spider-thing inspired a deeper, atavistic hatred : the instinctive disgust all humans felt when faced with something that was so clearly, undeniably Other.
Sha'eilat, he realized. One of the corrupt Eldars Tarek had warned them the Forsaken Sons had resurrected in the Wailing Storm.
The two enemies of Humanity were looking at the trio, smiling smiles that revealed pointed teeth.
"I am Mikail Korzhanenko," declared the white-haired man with the Dark Tech hand. "Chosen of Arken, and champion of Slaanesh." He spoke the name of the Dark God like a lover's, and Elydeos shivered inside his power armor.
"And this," he gestured to the spidery horror, "is Garguestiel." He looked at the three of them : "I have to say, I was expecting Space Marines to be the first to make it here. How did you pass through Orpheus' delightful trick ? Ah, no matter. In any case, you are too late."
The heretic pointed to the pile of broken stone behind him with his cybernetic hand.
"The information you sought is gone. You'll never find the Awakened One and stop him from unleashing the Riaway Noara upon the galaxy once more."
For a terrible instant, Elydeos feared that this was true – that everything they had done had been for nothing, that the Forsaken Sons had won. Then the Farseer's voice whispered in his mind, quieter than before :
+This creature is mistaken, Inquisitor. It is in my power to restore the stone; enough so that we can read what was writ upon it. Do not despair, but do not let it realized this.+
Years of service as an Inquisitor had honed Elydeos' ability to roll with the unexpected, so he let none of the dread and sudden relief show in his face. Instead, he merely sneered.
"Really ? That's it ? You thought that would discourage us ?" He let out a short, mocking laugh. "If your masters really think the Archive only contained a single record of the Nightmare Fleet's location, then they are even bigger fools than their allegiance to Chaos suggests. There are many other such monuments across this complex, and we'll find them as soon as we've dealt with you."
"Believe what you will. It doesn't matter : you'll all die here anyway."
+Your deaths shall be neither quick nor pleasant. I shall enjoy seeing how much the weakling descendants of my kin can suffer before breaking.+
The Sha'eilat's mental voice was completely different from the Farseer's. It felt like rusted nails plunging into his brain, and he felt physically ill at the contact. Next to Elydeos, Elythrea shivered, and raised her staff, which began to glow with a pale, gentle light. The sense of violation eased, the telepathic intrusion of Garguestiel repelled by her own psychic power.
"Inquisitor, Farseer," said Tarek aloud in a calm voice, appearing completely unaffected by the Sha'eilat's psychic intrusion. "It has been an honor meeting you. Fight well, and stop Arken from winning. He does not deserve it."
Before Elydeos could reply, Tarek moved, and he barely saw it happen. One moment the man was at his side, the next he was slamming into the Chosen of Arken, suddenly moving at incredible speed without seeming to accelerate at all. The Inquisitor Lord was versed enough in the laws of physics to know that this should have killed him, but it was obvious Tarek was using psychic powers here, and those cared little for the laws of the Materium.
The impact didn't slow Tarek down, and he and Mikail flew over the rubble of the stele and crashed through the wall behind. Surprisingly, the wall wasn't very thick – perhaps one meter, Elydeos judged, beyond which laid darkness.
He blinked, once, as every figure in the room remained immobile, stunned by what had just happened. Then the cohorts of the Chosen screamed, and it all kicked off. Elythrea thrust her staff in Garguestiel's direction, and the two of them froze in place, the air around them rippling as their minds fought against each other in the Immaterium, leaving Elydeos to deal with the mutants.
Their veils dropped, revealing too-wide mouths full of shark-like teeth. The creatures moved with unnatural speed, leaping from place to place with sudden bursts of speed before stopping utterly still, their black eyes remaining on the party at all times.
Elydeos slammed his staff onto the floor and spoke an incantation, focusing his will through his weapon. The closest mutant erupted in white flames, her bestial screams echoing for a few seconds before her charred corpse hit the ground.
As the pain of the backlash ran through his flesh, the Inquisitor Lord grinned defiantly at the other mutants.
"So ? Which one of you is next ?"
Intimidation didn't seem to work, as rather than hesitate they all screamed and charged him at once. Elydeos spoke a different incantation, this one drastically increasing the speed of his personal time-flow. With the mutants appearing to act in slow motion, he drew his pistol and shot three of them in the head, before rising his staff in front of him – right in time to block the claws of another as his spell ended and the normal passage of time reasserted itself.
The bolt shells rushed out, slamming into the mutants and killing them instantly. Sheer incomprehension succeeded where fear had not, making the remaining seven creatures hesitate for an instant. Elydeos seized the opening and slammed his staff into the head of another, caving in her skull while firing blindly in the direction of the others, keeping in mind Elythrea's position to avoid shooting his ally. He heard the sound of bolt shells hitting flesh – after the first time you heard it, you couldn't mistake it for anything else.
He turned just in time to ram the barrel of his bolt pistol into the teeth of an approaching handmaiden, pulling the trigger and turning its skull to bloody dust. He hurled its headless corpse into the path of another, turned to avoid the claws of a third and shot it in the waist, the detonation tearing its body in two.
Which was when the last one jumped on his back and started biting at his armor's gorget. Alarm runes flared in Elydeos' vision as the seals started to give under its mutated strength. Before it could pierce through, the Inquisitor Lord spoke one more incantation, feeling several of his ribs crack and one of his teeth burst into pieces that lacerated the inside of his mouth. The last handmaiden had no time to scream before its neck abruptly twisted and broke, and it fell bonelessly to the ground.
Elydeos spat out a mix of blood, bile and broken teeth. Breathing heavily, he turned to where the Farseer still stood before the Sha'eilat. The two Eldars – though even the Inquisitor Lord had to admit there was little in common between the two – were immobile, but the air around them crackled with power. The Sha'eilat was too monstrous to read its body language, but it was clear that Elythrea was struggling.
Slowly, forcing himself through the pain wracking his body from the backlash of using so many of his bag of tricks in quick succession, Elydeos walked toward them, pulling out a new clip for his gun as he did so.
Elythrea remembered the first time she'd faced a more powerful soul than her own in a battle to the death. It had been many cycles ago, when she'd just begun walking the Path of the Seer. None of her teachers had been able to predict the rise of the Beast, let alone the Orks' attack on the Craftworld. They had been caught by surprise, the green-skinned brutes boarding the Craftworld in a tide hundreds of thousands strong. Their not-so-primitive boarding crafts had crashed into the residential sections, forcing a massive evacuation that had left them dangerously vulnerable.
Amidst the confusion, she had ended up facing one of the Ork shamans, bloated on the power of so many of its kind. In both the realms of the flesh and spirit, a single blow would have destroyed her, and the battle had forced her to draw upon reserves of strength and cunning she hadn't known she possessed. Now, facing the abomination that called itself Garguestiel, she would need to use every lesson she had learned in that duel and since, lest she meet a fate infinitely worse than what the Ork would have done.
Unlike the Ork shaman, the Sha'eilat's power came entirely from within, drawing on the full psychic potential of the Eldar race in an unrestrained manner no child of Isha had been able to do since the Fall. Elythrea could feel the gaze of She-Who-Thirsts being drawn by such a reckless use of power, like a knife lovingly stroking against her soul, waiting for the chance to plunge deep inside her.
If the Sha'eilat felt it too, it gave no sign of it. But then, she supposed it wouldn't.
Their minds clashed in the Aether, forming and countering attacks as fast as their thoughts could conjure them. Kinetic strikes formed and dissolved, bursts of lightning were stillborn, and any attempt by the Sha'eilat to call forth the children of She-Who-Thirsts was smothered by Elythrea. Their bodies remained distant, but this was far more intimate than any physical combat, and despite Elythrea's repulsion, she glimpsed fragments of Garguestiel's nature through their exchange of psychic blows, just as it no doubt did from her.
She saw that it was a Gene-Lord, and had performed hideous experiments upon humans in its first life. She saw the horrors it had wrought from such fleshy clay, and how it had grown bored with them. She saw that it had given itself psychic powers in order to explore new avenues of research and entertainment. She saw that this creature, this monster, had made the other one – the one Tarek was fighting even now. It had saved the Chosen's life from his rightfully earned demise, and grafted onto him that awful hand of Chaos-tainted technology. And it had done so out of curiosity. Just to see what would happen.
A lifetime spent on the Paths left the Farseer utterly unable to understand that attitude. Such evil had been unleashed, such destruction wrought, and not for the greater good of its people, but merely because it amused it to do so. She hated it, though her hate was focused through the lens of discipline by the training of the Path.
+You have shackled yourself,+ said the Gene-Lord's voice in her head as it, too, received pieces of her own past. It sounded disappointed. +You could be so much more if you but had the courage to go past the limitations placed upon you. What a waste.+
+There is virtue in restraint, old monster, beyond seeking salvation from the horror your kind unleashed.+
Virtue ? It scoffed. +Virtue is for the weak. The strong pursue their own ambitions, regardless of the mewling of others.
+And yet, from it I have learned the importance of subtlety.+
She felt its puzzlement. Like the Ork Weirdboy before it, Garguestiel hadn't seen her true ploy, too focused on the confrontation between them.
+What are you …+
BLAM !
The sound of a mon-keigh brutish gun unloading pulled Elythrea away from her focus just in time to see Garguestiel's headless corpse fall to the ground. Elydeos stood next to it, his smoking bolt gun held mere centimeters away from where the Sha'eilat had stood. His torso was covered in gore, and he grimaced as he wiped off the worst of it from his face, his mouth tightly closed lest some of the vile ichor find its way inside his body.
"You couldn't have done that from further away ?" asked Elythrea once she could speak.
"Didn't trust myself not to miss if it wasn't point-blank," grunted the Inquisitor, his voice pained. As he lowered his gun, the Farseer saw that his hand was trembling. They were surrounded by the corpses of the mutants, but it was clear Elydeos hadn't escaped the confrontation unscathed.
She turned her gaze back to the corpse of Garguestiel, already falling apart as its unnatural biology broke down, and had to stop herself from spitting on it in front of the human.
Tarek and Mikail landed amidst a mountain of bones.
It seemed the Eldars had overestimated the building skills of their ancestors. Somehow, one of the great mortuary pits the Imperium had dug for the nameless victims of the Great Beast had pierced through the walls of the Archive of Loss, flowing this section with human remains. The walls were lined with statues of severe-looking Eldar lords, each over a hundred meters high and buried in bones up to their waists. They were covered with incredibly detailed suits of armor that shone with a pale light, casting shifting shadows across the chamber.
The two fighters stood up cautiously, finding precarious balance on the pile of bones and eyeing each other warily. Whatever Mikail had done to breach the sound-defeaning field extended to this section of the Archive : their fall had made a ruckus fit to wake up the dead. Not literally, of course, which was unfortunate.
The seven-in-one who were Tarek were afraid. They could feel the power of the Chosen of Arken before them, and that of the hideous thing grafted to his arm. The Eldar souls of their gestalt had spent centuries eluding Slaanesh after the death of their flesh during the Great Crusade, and now they faced one of the Goddess' champions.
Ironically, it was the human soul among them, who had faced the horrors of Parecxis without flinching, that let them stand their ground.
Mikail stretched his limbs and cracked his neck, purple eyes never leaving Tarek. He drew his sword with his left hand, while the jewel embedded in his right hand flared, casting scarlet light over the bones and making their surrounding look like some ancient vision of Hell.
"Well, well, well," said the Chosen slowly. "That was … unexpected. I thought the delightful scent above came from the Eldar witch, but I see now there is more to you than meets the eye."
Tarek looked at his pistol, then discarded it. It wouldn't serve him against this foe; instead, he took up his chainsword in a two-handed grip.
"What do you think will happen to your soul when your body dies ?" asked the Chosen in a conversational tone. "Will it fall in the Warp, where the daemons of the Dark Prince await ? Or will it be torn apart between these stones in your flesh ?"
Tarek didn't know. He had tried very hard not to think about it. Even the seer-souls did not know, because their collective existence was, as far as they knew, unprecedented.
Now Mikail was growing frustrated by Tarek's lack of response. The Chosen didn't know, couldn't know, that talking had become harder and harder since his escape from the Warp and his arrival on Mian-Tor. He was seven minds alloyed into one, and that union had not been without cost. The prime personality had remained Tarek of Parecxis : the one who, ironically, could best communicate both with the Imperium and with the Eldars, for his mind had been undamaged by centuries of bodiless existence and torment by the Traitor Legions. But every time he fought, every time he used skills and power that had belonged to the six Eldar witches whose souls had been fused to his own, that personality faded away and the gestalt grew.
"Nothing to say ? Very well. I will make you scream, then !"
They clashed amidst the bones, Tarek's chainsword meeting Mikail's blade. The two of them moved in defiance of gravity, Tarek drawing upon the soulstones' power and Mikail on his black hand's. They flew over the bones like spirits fighting beneath the gaze of old gods.
Beams of eldritch light leapt from the Chosen's black hand, scorching the walls where they hit. It took all of Tarek's power to avoid being skewered by Mikail's sword or incinerated by the beams – if he was lucky; he suspected contact with this fell energy would do much worse than kill.
Mikail was a skilled swordsman, his abilities further enhanced by gene-forging and the gifts of his Dark God. With eyes not of flesh, Tarek could see the influence of the Dark Prince, that had slowly reshaped the Chosen's body over the years, one alteration at a time, keeping only the outward appearance unchanged while remaking what laid beneath. No doubt Mikail thought of these as boons, too blinded by pride and power to see them for the curses they were – each one another hook in his soul, dragging him forever closer to She-Who-Thirsts' waiting maw.
He saw other things – too many, in truth. His brain remained only a human brain, not capable of processing all that even one singular Eldar mind was capable of – and he had six working together with him. He couldn't understand everything, but he didn't need to.
The rune-marked sword cut through his flak armor and scored a wound on his leg. The entire limb started to burn, and the stones in his arm flared as they fought off the curse spreading inside his flesh. Tarek fell back to dodge the follow-up flurry of blows, propelling himself into the air backward until his back hit the wall, at the foot of one of the statues lining the pit of bones.
Tarek forced his lips into a smile.
"Come on, Alburt," he said, taunting the Chosen. "Show me what you are really capable of."
The Chosen's perfect face was distorted by a grimace of violent hatred as Tarek threw his old name, the name he had abandoned when his path had crossed that of the Awakened One, right in his face. With a wordless shriek of outrage, he leapt at Tarek, all notion of playing with him abandoned. The rune-marked sword battered Tarek's chainsword aside, and the black hand buried itself in his chest and burst out of his back, holding his beating heart. Fresh blood poured on old bones in torrents, and Tarek knew that he was dead. No amount of psychic power would save him now, but it could keep him alive just a few more seconds, long enough for him to make his last gambit.
"Your torments are only beginning," hissed the champion of Slaanesh.
"No," replied Tarek with something like relief. "They are finally ended."
Because Mikail – Alburt – now stood exactly where Tarek had needed him to.
He spoke a single sentence in the old Eldar tongue, forcing his human mouth to form words meant for xenos lips. Mikail cocked his head, frowning – and then the ancient security systems of the Archive of Loss, dormant for thousands of years, were activated, fuelled by all the power the soulstones could channel and turned on by a being just Eldar enough to trick them.
The statue behind Tarek moved, impossible fast for something its size. Even so, Alburt saw it coming, but Tarek clasped both hands around his forearm, where Dark Tech met gene-forged flesh, and held him in place.
The Chosen of Arken had just enough time to start screaming before the giant golem unleashed a stream of white fire from its open mouth. Skin and muscle burned first, then bone, then the metal of the black hand melted, before the red jewel cracked and exploded, sending the howling thing that had been bound within since the Dark Age of Technology hurling back to the Realms of Chaos.
When the fire finally stopped, only six soulstones were left, resting on the floor of the chamber – until the sea of bones shifted, and they vanished from sight under the tide of Imperial remains.
Back in the domed chamber, Elythrea and Elydeos heard the eldritch fire being unleashed, and felt its heat through the hole Tarek had made in the wall.
"Was that … ?" asked the Inquisitor hesitantly.
"Yes," replied the Eldar. "They are both dead."
She gestured with her staff and her free hand, weaving arcane patterns in the air. The fragments of white stone twitched, then rose, as if a pic-recording were playing in reverse. But saying it like that undersold the complexity of the task. This wasn't like putting a puzzle together with telekine power : some of the fragments were no larger than a grain of sand, and others had been vaporised completely. The Farseer was effectively doing nothing less than reverse the flow of time, restoring things inside a small space to what they had been before Mikail Korzhanenko's desecration.
Eventually, the pieces reformed into a stele covered in arcane symbols Elydeos was fairly certain were a star chart of some kind, with a wicked-looking rune at the center he took to mean the location of the Riaway Noara itself. With a sigh, Elythrea let go of her spell, and the stele shivered and crumbled back into pieces.
"Do you have it ?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered, sounding as exhausted as he felt. "I have found the path that will lead us to the Anchor of Vaul."
"Good," said a third, equally exhausted voice.
The Farseer and the Inquisitor Lord turned to see Alphon enter the room. His power armor was dented and splattered with splashes of black liquid. He held his drawn sword in one hand, and in the other an oversized skull that was still biting at the air, lidless eyes open wide in horror.
"I dealt with our pursuer," said Alphon, lifting up the morbid trophy. "We're going to need to find somewhere to lock that away, though : nothing I did to it seemed to kill it." He looked around at the room and the corpses.
"Where is Tarek ?"
On the surface of Nerel, Orpheus breathed out, still kneeling at the center of his summoning circle. He had sensed the death of Mikail, the passing of the Chosen echoing through the Sea of Souls, and knew what it meant.
They had failed in their mission here. Somehow the allied Imperials and Eldars had found a way into the Archive. Maybe Mikail had managed to destroy their target before their arrival, maybe not – in the end, it didn't matter. There was no reason to stay here anymore.
The other Chosen really should have taken more of an escort than that old monster Garguestiel and his pets. Even the gifts of the Dark Prince and the surgeries of the Fleshmasters could only do so much to turn the daughters of corrupt Imperial nobility they had conquered in the Wailing Storm into effective fighters. But Mikail had been convinced he needed no protection, and truth be told, after seeing him use that hand of his, Orpheus had been unable to argue the point.
He turned on his armor's vox, reaching out to his brothers in the void. Despite the distance, the link was quickly established, filling the Sorcerer's ears with the pleasant sounds of screaming and battle.
"Tacitus," he called to his Legion-brother. After a few seconds, when no reply came, he repeated, louder : "Tacitus !"
"Lord Orpheus ? My apologies. I am -" there was the sound of flesh tearing apart and bolter fire - "a mite busy over here."
"I am aware, but I'm afraid I have to interrupt your fun. Get your warriors out of the Eldar ships and back to the fleet."
"What ? Why ?"
"Mikail is dead," said Orpheus bluntly. "The enemy has what they came for. We've no reason to stay here any longer."
"We've plenty of reasons !" objected the Chaos Marine. "There are thousands of Eldars in this system to send to Slaanesh."
"We are losing this battle, Tacitus," the Sorcerer explained with a patient tone honed by decades of managing the Slaaneshi devotees of the warband. "Only my sorcery keeps the Imperials and their xenos allies at bay, and there's no point defending this place if the secrets it keeps are already in their hands. Sooner or later my strength will wane, and we'll be crushed on the surface. And once the descendants of Sanguinius, thin-blooded or not, join the battle in orbit, do you think we'll stand a chance there ? No, we must depart immediately. I'm calling a gunship to bring me and my retinue back to orbit, then we'll fight our way out of the system."
For a moment, Orpheus thought Tacitus would disobey him, too caught up in the joy of hunting Eldars aboard their own vessels. But in the end, either his respect for the Chosen's authority or his own self-preservation instincts led him to agree.
"Very well, lord. We'll return to the Oblivion's Keeper."
"Do so," replied Orpheus, cutting off the link and opening a new one.
It took several minutes to convince the captain of the Bite of Darkness, Mikail's personal ship in the fleet, that his lord was dead and that Orpheus was now his superior, by virtue of being the only Chosen of Arken left in the system as well as being able to fry his brain from the surface with a psychic effort if he continued to refuse him. From there, orders were spread to the rest of the Chaos ships in the void, and by the time the gunship delivered Orpheus to the landing bay of the daemonship Oblivion's Keeper, the Slaaneshi host was in full retreat.
Their enemies immediately took advantage, forcing Orpheus to sacrifice several of the weaker and most damaged ships to cover their retreat. In the end, only the Bite of Darkness, the Oblivion's Keeper, and a handful of the Sha'eilat own vessels. Nearly all of the Slaaneshi Eldars had perished on the surface, but enough had remained in orbit to keep their ships under control. Already resurrection rituals were beginning in their depths to return the slain to life, though it would be many months – years, even – before all of the dead walked once more in the realm of flesh.
Orpheus hadn't been completely honest with Tacitus. With his necromancy and the flesh-forges of the Sha'eilat, they could conceivably have reinforced their ranks and turned the Battle of Nerel into a protracted campaign, hunkering down on the planet and taking refuge in the catacombs. But he knew something the other Forsaken Sons didn't : that the Grey Knights were coming, and would join with the Imperials soon. At that point, one of two things would happen : either they would kill every asset of the warband in the system, or they would take the information extracted from the Archive of Loss and leave to deal with the greater threat that Arken represented.
Given what he knew of his lord's plans, Orpheus was inclined to think it would be the latter, but he saw no reason to risk his life on a gamble that, in truth, would bring him nothing. Oh, they could have some fun with the Nerelites, true, but there were many other worlds in the Azarok Sector that were poorly defended and full of many, many more people than the cemetary-world.
No, his part in the Black Crusade was over. Now it was time to ensure he would survive it.
AN : No, the scene of Alphon fighting Zarl Korak isn't missing. Its absence is deliberate.
I'm currently still working on the finale of this story, and I actually think I may meet my self-imposed deadline of the end of this year. We shall see.
As always, please tell me what you thought of this chapter. Don't forget to ask me about your favorite characters too : I have a list of the eventual fates of everyone I could think of, but given how long this story has run, it's all too likely I have forgotten a few of them.
Zahariel out.