One kilometer from the Black Pyramid
The sounds that came from the Black Pyramid were not what Manfred von Carstein expected, the green light that managed to escape from several openings and though some bigger gaps unlike anything he had seen before. None of this was as worrying as what he could see in the Empyrean. He did not like it at all. He pulled the microphone of his wireless set closer to his mouth before pressing the to-talk trigger.
"Herr Baatz, I do not think you are needed at the Pyramid presently. Please pull back your men to the rally point."
"Thanks boss, we will hoof it in a minute."
"Make it a short minute."
Manfred watched the great army that stood motionless under an uncaring blue sky, saw Settra standing unmoved in his chariot and came to a decision.
"I do believe I would like a better vantage point to watch this. Something like the back of the ridge-line over there."
"Fleeing from the battle so soon?"
"Khalida, my troops have done their part and yours have yet to reach Khemri. Staying here does nothing, but put us into danger. I for my part do not have to prove myself, didn`t you learn something like that during the last millennia?"
"If this is coming to a head as quickly as it seems to be then it will not make a difference. Even we`d need an hour to get there, by that time what is to happen will happen. Didn´t you learn something about style? You may change shape and fly with our permission of course but this way is barred to us."
"May I invite you to a ride in my car perhaps?"
"You think it is so fast?"
"Only one way to find out."
"Now that sounds exciting."
Black Pyramid
The Void Dragon was enraged. Like a giant held down by an army of dwarfs he was confined by the mass of stone around him and the Warp weapons that were used against him. They were so far from the great cannons used by the Eldar, but so was he, at least presently. He found that he could keep those Warp weapons at bay by firing his weapons, that would cause them to intercept those, but there was always another one of them or two to hurt him. Were he free to move as he liked he would have evaded these feeble weapons easily, now he had to endure them. Time to do something about it. He triggered another salvo, raising temperatures to an alarming level again before he threw a mental attack against the local who dared to torment him. He used forces that would have killed major players in the universe he came from just to find that his opponent was no stronger than them, but stranger. His attack should have unraveled the intricate pattern in the Warp that was his enemy`s mind, but while it did just that it reformed with alarming speed. They were stored somewhere else and Mag`laroth suspected they were just a reflection of something that resided wherever the dead went. He had seen that before, but only rarely and it would necessitate a different strategy.
His mind shifted focus once more, taking charge of the myriad picomachines that flowed through the pyramid. If this heap of stone did not contain any machinery for him to subvert he would make his own and use that, at least that had been the original plan. Now he simplified things as he should have right at the start. The streams reformed into something like a battering ram, reconfigured themselves and dissolved stone to make a tunnel between the next outside surface and the chamber he was in. Let the pest who thought he could attack a god survive in a world without a sun. He would endure for a few more minutes and then..
Then the picomachines reached the outer layer of the Black Pyramid. Nagash`s pyramid had been rumored to be made of Black Warpstone, but this was not so, there was not enough of that substance on this world to make it. Instead it formed the outside and was threaded though the pyramid`s structure to channel the forces of the Empyrean. When the billions of little machines came into contact with it for the first time they tried to dissolve it like all the other materials. It did disappear all right, but only to reappear as magical energies in huge amounts. The energy was going right into the machines that tried to absorb the Warpstone, channeling it right into the Void Dragon`s very essence.
Nagash had finally gotten the measure of his catch and if he still were to draw breath this was when he would stop doing that. He had opened a door to a demon that wielded such vast power that he might have very well doomed every being on this world. If he interpreted the few pictures he had gained from the vast mind correctly this was not where the destruction would end. For a moment, his mind had been under an attack that he could not fathom, could not defend against and that was about to dismember him in short order when it ceased without any cause he could discern.
There had been a pause during which he drew on every last reserve of power he had for a last stand when the pyramid was shaken by another scream that would not stop, would not go away and threatened what sanity he had.
Outside of the Black Pyramid
Settra the Imperishable, the Mighty Lion of the Desert stood in his chariot surrounded by an army Nehekhara had not seen in a long time. He wielded a sword that would take down mortals and demons alike. He was rooted to the spot while around him his army was struck by shockwaves that made the ground move like the surface of a sea and blasted by gusts from nowhere that drove grains of sand to the speed of an arrow.
Most of his army did not realize any of that, their minds were subsumed by the scream that bypassed sound waves and physical hearing. The great pyramid before him was clouded in green lightning and if he could trust his eyes the warpstone that made up its surface evaporated like smoke and flew like hot wax off a candle.
His mind did not submit to the mindless scream that carried so much agony, he was Settra and Settra ruled, even if it was just his own body and mind. Currently he used that to watch the events before him in awe and wonder. He could do nothing else.
Ritual Chamber, Black Pyramid
He had awaited the next attack, putting up defenses on top of defenses. None had come, but for the scream that conveyed so much pain and fury. It took Nagash a whole minute to decide that his enemy had made some error, maybe a spell had gone wrong? Whatever it was now was the time to attack.
Using power levels he never had dared before he opened another warp vortex of size and sent it forward. He was rewarded with a different pitch of scream and more green beams which went everywhere, but in his direction. Now, now was the time if ever.
Releasing even more warp attacks he pushed his mind to where the being`s mind should have been and burned through what defenses were still active.
Even in his much weakened state Mag`laroth was vastly more powerful than Nagash. A good analogy might be that he was an 180 kilogram bodybuilder that was attacked by a sickly six-year old.
Just now he was a bodybuilder who had grabbed a live wire and his cramping fingers would not release it while the six-year-old had grabbed a baseball bat and started to smash away.
He could hardly fend off the attacks and every one of them made it harder to focus on what needed doing. It was in this state that his attacker pried open the walls that protected his being and walked in to take over.
Defenses that had been hard-wired into the Void Dragon before he became a star-consuming deity kicked in and burned both minds with the same flame. The vast energies used to attack and defend went out of control, as did those released by the evaporating warpstone. Stone, iron and warpstone ran and reformed, the air itself burned and the battlefield was about to explode in cataclysmic fury.
Outside of the Black Pyramid, a couple of kilometers off
The G-Wagen was one of the best off-road cars ever built. Designed as a somewhat stodgy vehicle for various armies it usually lacked great speed and acceleration. That was until sheiks and rap stars had "discovered" the brick-like SUV. Then Mercedes had started to equip it with V-8 engines, huge chrome wheels and the inside of a luxobarge.
Of course that was not enough for some and so a couple of companies added on top of that. Manfred von Carsteins G-Wagen had six wheels instead of four, bits and pieces of luxury automobiles, a machine gun, armor and 700 horsepower. It was a ridiculous machine, totally overpowered and made no sense, but as a status symbol. Currently the engine was screaming at full power, all wheels threw up clouds of sand while propelling the G-Wagen to speeds that would be dangerous on a German autobahn. The car was tossed this way and that when it hit something, bits and pieces were falling off and all who were in there wanted it to go even faster. Somewhere behind them forces unfolded themselves that would end them all if they could not get away in time.
They barely glimpsed the ridge line before them that offered salvation when something immensely bright managed to penetrate the dust cloud behind them. Less than a second later a shockwave threw up a wall of sand many meters high. As fast as the car was, the wall was faster and many tons of sand buried the Mercedes and its inhabitants, leaving no trace that they had ever been.
Inside the Black Pyramid
The two minds could just watch their own destruction as they were burned bit by bit. They saw the destruction wrought by out-of control energies, watched memories that defined them being deleted and their world end. They were not the only minds that were at work. There was another, one which just took shape.
The Black Pyramid had been used to channel the energies of thousands upon thousands of souls, had stored them and released them when its master needed them. The Black Warpstone that made it work and the many magical artifacts used in it got more than a little imprint from those. What mind it had had always been weak and unorganized, subsumed to the will of its master and without aim.
It was currently in intimate contact with billions upon billions of small machines, machines that could manipulate at subatomic scales. They had an immense computing capacity, but no personality of their own, being a part of the Void Dragon. Both had few aims that were not suppressed by their masters, self-preservation being the most important of them. A few moments ago both had lost the guidance of their masters and now both could watch only helplessly as they were destroyed by a combat already ended. Or could they….
Picomachines perfected to manipulate the physical merged with entities of the warp. Again, matter started to flow, to take new shapes. Out-of-control defenses were reduced and stopped, the energies put to good work. Data taken from the destruction of two minds was downloaded, analyzed and stored. These memories held a shape that would serve the new entity well, provided aims and goals important to the old masters and the new entity decided to follow these guidelines a last time.
The shockwaves had buried the town and the army in shifting sands, had pushed the river Mortis into a new bed and downed the drones that had so far reported to far-off Germany. There were no witnesses when the Black Pyramid shifted into the shape it had chosen itself, when new apertures and protrusions formed and when it rose from the ground to bring havoc to a world which had never seen its like.
Bundeskanzleramt, Berlin
The mood in the room was somber, nobody tried to use their smartphones during the briefing and all tried to look professional while several asked themselves if they would measure up to the occasion. This room had seen several briefings like this during the decade already spent on the Warhammer World. Briefings that dispersed information about events that might well shake up Germany`s status in this world and at least two of them had been about continued survival for all. Due to the change of government and the passage of time most of those present were new to this league of decision making. How this would look to the voters was not important, how this would be viewed by the next party conference was not important, survival was.
Their drawn faces and nervous tics mostly went unnoticed in the gloom that faciliated the slides and videos. The briefer was new as well, having been rotated into this post a few weeks ago. He was as least as nervous as his audience, but coped in other ways.
"Yesterday, on Königstag an event registered with our Magic Detector Network, nearly all Reiksbund-registered mages and ournational technical means . The event occurred in Nehekhara, close to the capital Khemri. We measured the release of significant amounts of both physical and magical energies over a period of 22 minutes. As intelligence reports had warned that local forces would engage the assumed location of a major Necromancer called Nagash a drone was deployed during this time, but it was destroyed by the event. We cannot say if this was a deliberate attack or a side effect of the event itself.
We sent a flight from Saratosa to provide reconnaissance , yet we lost contact with both planes about two minutes before they could pass the area of interest. DLR redeployed so its orbit would pass the site of the event more often. The spacecraft has excellent optical instruments and together with other satellites we have enough data on the site to speculate on the event. Comparing the site from prior reconnaissance:"
The picture was monochrome, like all visible-spectrum ones taken from orbit. The screen showed a picture of several huge pyramids, one of them markedly darker than the others. There was a river to their right and an assortment of buildings on the far bank of the stream.
"The newest take has a marked difference."
And that was the understatement of the year. There was a huge crater where the dark pyramid used to be. The town was partially buried in sand and many of the still-visible buildings were obviously damaged. Even more impressively the pyramids still there had signs of damage, whatever had happened had blown off their marble cladding and had taken bites from the underlying stone that were detectable from orbit.
At the edge of the picture something black could be seen. As the view was from more or less straight up it was hard to see a shape at first and several things about it were off.
"We have analyzed the object, combining all available sources and are 90% confident that the object here looks like this."
A new slide gave a computer-generated image. It displayed a truncated pyramid that had cutouts at all faces and something which looked conspicuously like gun barrels stuck out in all directions. At least two members of the audience could be heard to gasp and one "This is not bloody possible" could not be placed on anybody.
"We cannot identify this object with certainty, but there is a remarkable resemblance to something known as a Necron Monolith."
"That is a piece of fiction, something dreamt up by nerds in Nottingham."
Simone Peter, heading the environmental ministry, had a position that would normally not bring her to the Security Cabinet. As she was the senior member of the Realo Green party, one of the three parties that made up the current German government, she was in.
"I do not say that the Staff believes that the object is indeed a Monolith, just that it looks like one."
"Sabine, a little more than ten years ago we would all have declared this very world a piece of fiction. And if I remember our briefings correctly, then we already had a well-documented visit by someone from the "fictional" universe this thing may have come from. No, I do not say it is a bloody monolith, but we should not rule this out."
"Yes Olaf."
"Oberst Wörner, please continue."
"Thank you Herr Bundeskanzler. We have checked on the object`s behavior during the last 12 hours more directly through a "Hammer Hawk" drone which keeps a minimum distance of 50 kilometers. The Object basically shoots anything moving. We received this video two hours ago."
The video was blurry as it had been enlarged as much as possible. It showed something buried under the sand which started to move. It was hard to tell exactly from the video, but what dug itself from the soil was a lot bigger than a human.
"We have identified this as an Ushabti, an animated stone statue which is often a part of undead armies in Nehekhara. This one was probably buried by the event and has succeeded digging itself up at this point."
The Ushabti could be seen turning this way and that in a slow and deliberate manner. It started to lift an enormous spear when something lit up the statue. It seemed to become thinner by the minute as if something blasted off layer after layer of it. Within seconds there was nothing left to be seen except for the sands.
"This does not seem to be an isolated case. We have more video of similar incidents and pictures of things which are simply no longer there after the object has passed. The destruction of the Ushabti lends additional credence to the theory that the object might be Necron. Our sources describe weapons called "Gauss guns" that somehow disintegrate their targets layer by layer. This video seems to show exactly that."
"Oh joy."
"Yes Frau Peter, if this were true the object would make for a formidable enemy."
"We do not know if this object is Necron, we do not know it is hostile, but we already know it is an enemy and needs to be destroyed somehow. I start to understand why we had to fight so many wars on this world already."
"As the object is radiating in the electromagnetic spectrum we tried to contact it already. With Herrn Scholz and Herrn Lindner`s approval the AI Hypatia tried to establish contact. She was able to establish a semblance of communication, was attacked cybernetically in several ways and described the object`s transmissions as "howling madness". We have tried to come to an understanding and failed as of now."
"So what does this "object" do presently?"
"So far it hovers around the battlefield, settles down at random and then resumes its course again. Generally, it follows a course that might bring it to Zuwarrah during the next months."
"Thank you for your presentation Oberst. Kindly keep yourself available if we have any further questions."
"So, what do we do about this…thing?"
"Well Olaf, it has refused all communication and has killed four Germans already. It has demonstrated hostile intent. I say we destroy it."
Markus Söder was the odd man out in the group. Being a member of the CSU he had retained his job after the election to placate the armed forces who feared huge cutbacks. So far he had worked well with the government and his second job as sacrificial lamb had not come up yet. That his party and the Greens were at odds at most things was a given.
"This is so typical of you Markus. We have an agreement that we will try a peaceful solution first in all cases."
"Sabine, we have tried to communicate already. It attacks anybody and everything that approaches it and you may remember that Hypanthia reported attacks on her when she tried to establish communication."
"You say this thing moves randomly and it is in an area that is as dead as it can be. Can we not leave it be for the moment?"
"If we take care of it now we will cause no appreciable collateral damage. If we wait too long this might change."
"If this thing just arrived it might be confused. Remember when we were brought here, we were confused also. What would have happened if the Empire would have started shooting every German on sight?"
"So what do you want us to do?"
"Give it a little more time, try harder to find an understanding."
"Sabine, if this thing is indeed Necron then it is a danger to all living things on this planet, maybe more. Let`s kill it while we can."
"Markus, can you prove that the Object is Necron?"
"No of course not."
"So we kill on maybe?"
"No, we defend after demonstrated intent. "
"You do not know that."
"Oberst Wörner, if we decide to attack, how long would the armed forces need to plan and prepare?"
"That depends on how we want to attack. If we use a missile from Libenau with a special warhead then we can do so within the hour."
"I cannot believe we are talking about the use of nuclear weapons already. Once was.."
"Sabine, nobody does, at least not at the moment. Oberst, what is the next option?"
"Herr Bundeskanzler, if we use conventional weapons a couple of days as we need to collect and program enough stand-off weapons."
"Then we will prepare for this contingency and observe the object during that time. Markus Söder, please instruct the armed forces accordingly."
"Yes Olaf."
Black Pyramid, Nehekhara
The Pyramid`s inside was indeed a howling madness. The Void Dragon`s and Nagash`s physical bodies were gone. Nagash`s focus had burned up, the Dragon had fallen apart into a mass of picomachines. There were silver-black streams that flowed through the great edifice like small rivers or huge silver snakes. They formed what materials they found into great engines, sensors and weapons. They changed the undead on board to their image and rebuilt the pyramid from the ground up. They followed the plan that had been used 60 million years ago for the first time. The picomachines formed a great network that was paralleled by another, less physical one. The parts of the pyramid that had been warpstone, sorcery and Nagash were there as well. They were not using chemicals, the electromagnetic spectrum or entangled quanta for communication, they sent ripples through the warp. Two days before the picomachines would have been unable to sense such communications, let alone decipher them. Now they did that and partook in the exchange.
The amount of data exchanged was immense by any measure. It was also very varied, ranging from the data needed to keep the Pyramid up and improve it, the memories of those sacrificed in the Pyramid who had left something behind to the memories of the Void Dragon and Nagash. The picomachines experienced emotions, the souls kept in the warpstone could change and experience the physical universe for the first time in a long time. Both found the new abilities immensely satisfying and would not do without them any more. Conspicuously absent was any order, some higher purpose, some plan, a mind to assign priorities and allot resources to tasks. Instead there were shrieks of hate, whispers of regret, tears for loved ones lost thousands of years ago and a sense of wonder.
The Pyramid functioned on the most basic level and had the simplest of priorities. Protect itself, consume raw materials and multiply. The picomachines had always been programmed to do so, being kept under control by the Void Dragon`s will. Now that that this was gone they would multiply as much as they could. Given their starting mass they would have converted great parts of the Warhammer World into more of themselves within 104 hours. The old picomachines would have done exactly that, but these were the new and improved version. The version that could experience the horrors and wonders of the Empyrean, the one that had capabilities that exceeded their old selves so much. The version that needed Warpstone, preferably black Warpstone to reproduce. And there was a decided dearth of Warpstone to be had around the Pyramid.
The Tomb that held a deceased god and demigod , plans to sunder worlds, suns and more besides hovered a few meters above ground and began its aimless wanderings in search of more Warpstone.
