Liriel became herself.

She was still clad in her shagreen armor. Her body was whole and undamaged. But her surroundings were new. The illusion had dropped; there was no reason to hide reality before an insensate husk. She was inside the obelisk proper. The structure was hollow, a single chamber surrounded by nine walls stretching far above and covered in arcane sigils. On the surface of each wall, suspended some twenty metres above the ground, were the bodies of other Seers, still clad in colourful tehra, desiccated by vacuum and age. Scattered across the ground were barely-moving lumps, but she paid them no mind.

Because in the centre of the room, rotating at an uneven pace, was the daemon.

Her eyes ached to look at it. The only constant in its form was change. At one moment it was a feathered toroidal shape with a head like a bird's but viscerally wrong in a way the conscious mind could not grasp. A moment later, a tesseract that shone in lights the colour of a father's dying words to an ungrateful son unfolded out of its center and overtook its body. The tesseract burned from the outside in to reveal a massive teratoma, all beaks and eyes and genitals and teeth, mashed together in unholy marriage. Reality felt too small for the thing, too constricting - it seemed to pull away from itself, insubstantial, as though a mere breeze would scatter it.

Liriel could feel its mind, unshielded and uncaring. It was vast, alien. Cold and twisted. Its thoughts would have been difficult to read, had the thing not seeded a part of itself in her. She could read it as easily as her own mind, limited only by its vastness. She saw images separated in time and space by unimaginable distances. Ancient empires fallen to its schemes, plans that stretched millennia into the future, a mind that stretched fractally, infinitely, into itself. She saw hideous alien monstrosities, constructs of teeth and claws and insatiable hunger. She saw the galaxy not as it was, a formation of physical elements and energies bending to natural law, but as a vast web of intrigue and influence.

Its mind was too vast to be near. It was bleeding into hers. If she allowed herself to remain- But why should she not? This, here, was power. This was the answer she had been searching for. The method to increase her grasp to meet her reach. Study this thing, control it, and she would have power limited only by her imagination.

Liriel could feel the madness encroaching on her, and a wall of rage erupted to block it. No. It needed to die.

It still had not noticed her, but that would not last. She would have only one opportunity. She pierced the veil to the Warp, and power filled her. The daemon had only the briefest moment to react - barely enough time for the hundred-handed thing that it became to twitch in recognition - before she unleashed the chaotic energy into its mercurial form. Lightning and black flames spilled out of her, and raw telekinetic forces physically ripped her foe apart.

There was no fight. In less than a second, the daemon was gone. It had been like taking a wild swing at an opponent, only for them to turn to mist at the last moment. She staggered afterwards, using her every sense both real and psychic to search for its presence.

Silence.

No, not silence. She could hear whimpering, see lines of fate still written faintly in the Warp. Another moment's searching revealed that the lumps she had ignored on the ground were Tellyth's troops. They had lived.

Liriel ran to Tellyth and rolled him onto his back. He stared up, eyes open but unseeing. His mouth moved, but she could make out no words.

"Tellyth. Tellyth!" She shook him, to no effect. The daemon's nightmares still ruled his mind. One by one, she inspected the others. None bore any physical wounds; all were lost in the depths of their torment.

Liriel had won. At the cost of hundreds dead, including the greatest seers and warriors of the last half millennium on her planet, but they had succeeded in defeating this evil. And the victory felt hollow to her; something was still wrong.

She glanced at the chronometer built into the HUD of the faceplate. Months had passed. The daemon's labyrinth had warped their place in time as it had warped their senses. What terror must have been wreaked in their absence? Surely it could not have been so simple?

It should not have been so easy to defeat. Doubt gnawed at her, but she had no course left. Time, then, to face the consequences of her actions.

She picked up the nearest of the warriors and carried him back to the shuttle. She carried each of them, all the while examining her own intuition. She knew better than to second-guess it; a large part of her training as a Seer, and a greater part of her life before then, had revolved around the value of that kind of reasoning.

Tellyth was the last. As she ferried him back to the ship, she glanced above, to the jewel of Mathara hanging silent and proud in the void of space above them, and dropped her charge. There was a scar on the planet. It must have been massive to be visible from so far. Brown and ugly, it spread through forests and rivers, a miasma of corruption.

How? Every other faculty stopped for a breathless moment as her mind raced around that question. What had she missed? What had happened?


There was a memory, second-hand legacy from the daemon's time in her mind. IllMureead, her people called them. Horrors from beyond the galaxy, ravenous aliens that stripped whole planets of biomass. Who lived only to feed. A single hive ship had survived a battle with a mon'keigh fleet and chanced into this system.

Cegorach was laughing at her.

The aeldar were not getting better. It had been a day since Liriel had slain the daemon - that niggling doubt aside - and still they babbled and raved. Their minds had been too twisted by the torture to bear facing reality any more. Time was running out. She could almost see the progress of the stain on the planet. If she stretched her mind into the Warp, she would feel the deaths of her people, hundreds at a time, slain to the rapacious aliens. She turned away from it. There was nothing to be done that haste would not ruin.

Think. What did she have?

Thirty all but useless warriors, and a defenseless ship.

What could she do?

Gather intelligence. The IllMureead ship was injured, starving. It drifted in low orbit, attention focused on the planet below. Any single voidvessel could have driven the thing off; but they were exodites, and had no such technologies. It was waiting for the harvest to replenish itself. It had expended the vast majority of its energy in launching its invasion. There were no troops ready inside it to repel them.

Kill the queen. The weak link, the central node of the hive that the daemon had planned to slay. A single target that would disrupt the control and coordination of their foes. An exodite world, even one as weakened and soul-sick as theirs, was never defenseless. Kill the queen, and the vicious things on the surface would be easy prey to the World Spirit, newly invigorated by the spirits of all those slain by the alien forces.

So be it. Liriel turned to the first of her warriors, raving at shadows and scratching holes in his skin. Ollien.

She dragged him to the table in the dining lounge and forced him down upon it. He would not relax, thrashing in her grip, but she lashed him down with telekinetic force until his struggle exhausted him. Liriel placed her palms on either side of Ollien's head and reached into his mind, assessing the state of the damage there. A technique stolen from the daemon, repurposed to her own ends.

It was worse than she had feared. He had not done as she had, isolating parts of the mind as sacrificial to save the whole. Every aspect of his psyche had been rent asunder by pain. There was no memory that had not been despoiled, no thought absent the corrupting touch. There was nothing left to save.

She clung to that thought. It made her next action easier.

Carefully, deliberately, she carved away his memories, his thoughts, every part of the mind affected by the daemon's torture. She left the autonomic functions and weapons training - she still had use for them - but Ollien's personality was unsalvageable. When she was done cutting away at his mind, it resembled a plant more than an animal, much less a sentient being. But it still needed an animating force, a will to drive it.

Liriel had dim recollection, from that place of horror, of building herself up, one memory at a time from nothing. She tried to replicate the process here, clumsily and imperfectly though her efforts were. She germinated a mind, seeded from her own, in the fertile, empty ground of his brain. She fed it with basic memories until it sprouted, strong enough to hold on to the body proper and animate the thing. She dared not touch the infant mind directly. It was fragile, and her own raw-edged mindstate could only harm it now.

In the end, she was left with something less than a lobotomy patient, something that was not an aeldar. She stood back from him and said, "Rise."

It took a moment to comprehend her, but the thing once called Ollien levered itself into a sitting position and turned to face her, expression blank.

"Stand there," she said, indicating an empty section of the lounge. It moved obediently, the automatic functions of motion still available to the body even if the mind inside was incompetent. A success, if a qualified one. Now to repeat the process.


She tried not to think that she was killing them. Surely they were already dead. Surely if they had been able to communicate in anything other than panicked cries they would prefer silent oblivion to the torments of their memories. Surely it was not wrong to continue to demand more from them, to use them as she planned to. If not them, who?

She told herself these things, and wished that she believed them, and bent to kill more of her people.

Some had fought hard to retain their sanity, and managed to protect some core fragment of themselves. Pilathris, Hyla, and Tellyth counted among that number. Liriel took special care to preserve those fragments, incorporate them in the fledgling mind. It eased the guilt of what she was doing.

She had thought Palail the same, but as she commanded the woman to rise, the warrior began to weep, then scream, then thrash on the table once more. It took Liriel no more than a moment to discover that the last fragment of her personality had also been corrupted, some dark seed of memory implanted deep within it and overcoming the tiny, trembling will. There had been no way to cut it out without damaging the necessary functions of the body, this time. Her clumsy efforts at psychic surgery, her optimism, had doomed the warrior.

After that, Liriel returned to the others fragments she had previously preserved and ruthlessly cut them out. There was no room for sentimentality here. She could not risk failure.

When she was done, all that was left was rank after rank of puppets staring blankly at the wall. Tentatively, she reached into the Warp, linking her own will with Tellyth. It was an unusual feeling; to even read a mind this way, one usually encountered resistance. People fought against such invasions, at least subconsciously. But a mind seeded from her own, and so weak, ceded its control easily. She found herself in control of both bodies, able to move almost as well as Tellyth as she did in herself.

Liriel extended herself again, taking control of the next aeldar in the line, then two others, until the entire group was under her direct control. It was easy to move them as one, but useless. A tinker-toy army marching in lockstep would be slaughtered. To fight as a group, she needed individual control. She practiced giving them orders through that mental link and allowing the nascent wills within them to perform simple actions. It worked, faster than any spoken order could. Less direct than moving them as she did her own body, but now she could spare the bulk of her attention on herself.

She tried to share their senses as well - see out of their eyes, feel as they felt - but she was immediately overwhelmed by the sensory overload and her control wavered, threatening to fall completely. Disappointing. She would be unable to use them as scouts.

On the third day, the course of the scar on Mathara was clear. A full eighth of the planet's sole continent had been consumed by the invaders, and as the planet rotated in the morning sun Liriel could scry huge spires being erected that would eventually pump biomatter into the waiting hiveship.

They were out of time. Liriel was not yet ready. She did not have full confidence in her ability to control her puppets - she wanted to call them soldiers but could not lie to herself - or enough knowledge about what she would face within that alien organism. Her hands trembled when she placed them on the cockpit's controls.

She realized what she needed to do even as the greater part of her mind recoiled at the thought. Before she could reconsider, she turned her psychic scalpel inward and excised the capacity for doubt from her mind.

It was as if a fog cleared from her mind. There was no risk of failure, no fear of death, no hesitation about her path forward. Liriel was ready.

Silently, the shuttle lifted off the surface of the moon.