The presence was a raving whirlwind, a scouring pain that left her mind hollowed and defiled. She raged against it, every hint of the outside world and dread whisper of its plans fueling her desperate struggle.

And, suddenly, her mind was her own again.

I led them here. I led them to their deaths.

Liriel emerged from one nightmare into another. An elegantly tiled gallery of her own body, hundreds of copies of it, broken in every way possible. She walked past mounds of her torn viscera, bodies missing chunks of flesh, with internal organs spilling out onto the tiled ground or gnawed down to the bone. Rows of charred figures, contorted in the pain of death. Her dead staring eyes following her from a head impaled on a spike. A dozen of her own mangled corpses were arrayed around it, crucified in a dozen different ways. More, worse.

This is my fate. To be the plaything of a daemon.

She did not know how long the gallery was. She ran through it, blinding herself to the images within. Lies. More manipulations. Until the ground underneath was not marble tile but rough gravel made of crushed soulstones, and the walls were covered only in the indecipherable scrawlings of madmen.

That's all I ever did. Run. Betray my people. Betray my family. Betray everyone who ever put their trust in me.

The ground sloped downwards, steeper and steeper, until she was not running but crawling, climbing, sliding. Falling, one arm wrapped desperately around her staff.

And this is my just reward.

It was not a long fall, and she landed on her feet. Around her were dozens of children. Aeldar toddlers, barely the height of her thigh. They stared at her. Their eyes were dead and black and soulless. Beyond, she could see a tunnel further into this madness. The children opened mouths filled with row after row of razor sharp teeth. She ran for the tunnel, tried to dodge through the press of bodies, but they moved with supernatural speed. They swarmed over her, biting at her flesh, ripping away chunks of her.

Suffering.

Liriel died, screaming.

Liriel awoke on a pile of bodies. Her bodies. Her flesh was smooth and unmarred, and she realized that she was still in the room filled with corpses. But now there was one less corpse. She looked across the gallery of her own dead bodies and something inside her mind just broke. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

And finally, she understood the nature of the labyrinth.


Liriel landed on the balls of her feet, batting aside the first aeldar-thing, crushing its body against the wall. She swung her staff again at the next, but it dodged. The others crowded closer, and it was all she could do to keep them off her, keep them at a distance. One slipped under her guard - there was nowhere to run, her back against a wall. She tried to kill it, but had no leverage this close, and the others took advantage, piling onto her again. Their bodies weighed her down even before their teeth ripped at her. She snarled and fought and it wasn't enough.

Liriel died to the children half a dozen more times until she learned how to kill them all. She became one with her weapon, moving as one sinuous form, never stopping, never slowing. Every dodge was simultaneously a strike, every attack gained her more ground against the savage assault. And as she stood among the corpses, peaceful and cherubic in the stillness of death, one thought circled in her mind, strident and insistent. Why should I live while they die? She climbed to the exit, the thought only gaining in urgency. Everyone I've met, everyone who ever tried to help me, I slew for my own gain.

The horror of it threatened to overwhelm her. The blood on her hands, the echoes of the screams, the feel of the tiny bodies breaking. All of it sickened her to the soul. She was going mad, she knew. But she remembered the tricks of the daemon that had possessed her, the way it could alter memories and thoughts. Liriel realized what she needed to do.

Like a doctor amputating a finger to save a patient, she sequestered her memories of the chamber into a corner of her mind and twisted it, locking them away from herself. Unaware of what she had sacrificed, she moved through the tunnel to the next horror, her blood-slick grip on her weapon tight and tears already drying on her face.


More chambers, more deaths, more lessons. And every time, a little piece of her mind locked away, sacrificed to keep the rest intact. The voice never left her. Her voice. No! It spoke with her voice, but was not her. She had to remember that. The voice was not her. She was not herself. She was nothing. She was worth nothing. She killed all of them, and deserved to die herself.

The last chamber led into a vast pit. It was not a room, but a pathway of crumbling stone and steel, girders and rods and abstract shapes in every direction and piled against one another. It went on, down and down and down into stygian depths. She could do little else but descend.

Every so often, she was attacked by other aeldar. Sometimes they came with swords and knives and guns. Sometimes they clawed at her with bare hands, faces twisted into a rictus of hate. Sometimes they wept and pleaded for help. She slew them all. They were not real, she knew; they could not have been. This many aeldar could not have lived here, could not have had these familiar faces. Hundreds, then thousands fell to her staff. It became routine, eventually, the horror of bashing the skulls of her comrades or family until they resembled ground meat fading to numb acceptance.

The hunger was harder to sate. She fought it for a while, subsisting on the meagre provisions she had brought with her. But days turned to weeks, and the hunger only grew. It grew far greater than it had ever been when she had starved in truth, as though there was no limit here to the depths of sensation. Pain simply compounded. She held off as long as she could. She found a pool of putrescent maggots in the shadow of one half-collapsed wall. She ate them until she vomited, then forced herself to do it again until they stayed down.

But such luxuries were rare. So many chambers were made of nothing but cold stone and dust, and the endless assaults of other aeldar. She tried to fill her belly with stones, but it was not tricked. Eventually there was only one thing she could eat.

She tried to weep that day, but no tears could emerge from her desiccated eyes. She kept moving.


Liriel twisted off a part of her mind again, and then there was nothing.

She stopped. She? Who was she?

A voice said, I led them all here. I killed them, but there was no "I" nor "they" that mapped to anything.

There was something, long ago, but memory was the last shreds of a dream, fading like mist in the morning sun.

The voice said, I could have saved everyone, if I just did what I was told, but she did not know what she was told.

A mantra. A mantra of the gods, but not to the gods. Never to the gods. Why? Why could she not remember?

The voice said, They died for nothing, and she did not understand.

Things came to hurt her. They stabbed and bit at her, but she did not respond. She could not - she didn't know how to move her arms or legs or cry out.

They stopped, looking at her oddly, then dissolved.

The voice - her voice? - bubbled out of the cracked frieze of her mind, Why are you doing this? It was not sad, or scared, or angry. There was no room for emotion in her mind any more, nor the ability for such complexity of motivation. The question rose merely as a ghost of a memory.

This time, the voice that answered was not hers. The voice screamed and thundered. It spoke words of burning hate and twisted pain. Every syllable was wrought from images of flesh scraping across ground glass, every intonation the thundering of thwarted fury;

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. I HAVE TENDED THIS GARDEN, CULTIVATED ITS FRUIT, PREPARED FOR THE HARVEST. AND NOW, IN THE MOMENT OF MY TRIUMPH, MY PRIZE WILL BE STOLEN BY BASE ANIMALS!

The voice shattered thought. A razing tempest that tore apart every memory, burned out every neuron it could find in its rage.

YOU CAME, A GIFT - MY LAST RESORT GRANTED BY LORD TZEENTCH HIMSELF. AND YET YOU STILL DARE DEFY ME! YOU STILL DARE TO RESIST!

It ranted for a while, destroying whatever it could in the remnants of the mind. Then, seeing no further benefit to its tantrum, it simply abandoned its victim. The thing was all that was left, slumped on the floor.

Empty.