The Compact of Magnus the Red
The Last Ang / 40k Crossover
Thanks to OceanPhantom for the advice, also last night I completed chapter 5, making it so I have 18K words written.
Sorry for the late fix my computer is down
Chapter 2
His mountain was crawling with Xenos. Unlike the other searches the Planetary Government had carried out on occasion in times past when those in charge took an interest in him. These were Xenos, not the humans that searched his mountain in the past, but aliens. And it was very irritating these Xenos fumbling around his wards, trying to reach his sanctum without success.
However, he would not give them the satisfaction of leaving his sanctum to deal with them, but that does not mean he can't do anything about their prescence. Magnus headed towards his central laboratory at the center of his tower. This was the one to which his wards were anchored with Prosperan glyphs placed on ward pillars pointing in eight directions, forming a circle. He came to this room not just for the Wards that hid him from sight but because of the power that followed through the room.
Throughout his stay in his new home, he had shifted the natural flow of emotions in the Warp into a nexus where he could easily tap into the emotions of others to fuel his rituals and studies. This locus of power drew from the eight strongest sources of emotions on the planet, most likely the eight most highly populated cities on the planet, but Magnus hadn't got around to checking never leaving his home since he took on the task of remaking his peoples' great works, not even spiritually visiting the sites he drew this power from, all he carried about was that the emotions match his experiences with peaceful civilized worlds although the mix of emotions held more contentment and submission than most of those worlds but not overly so.
This was to say that he could use this as a power source to make a lasting effect, like his wards, that did not draw from his own power, allowing him to cast a spell and forget about it as he returned to his studies.
So he took a seat and began meditating in the center of his ward circle, isolating himself from the rest of the material and the immaterial world as he reached into this pool of emotions, looking for some very specific to turn to his use. What he was about to do was only theorized on Prospero, but he had in his long years of studies in his sanctum, he had moved it from the realm of theory to practice. He found quite quickly what he was looking for and in larger amounts that he had hope, feelings of misfortune, spite, and petty revenge.
Magnus grabbed these feelings coming from all across the world and, with his immaterial power, formed a shell in the Warp to pour them into, while in the materium, he added a new layer to his circle, anchoring the vessel in the Warp to the rune circle in the materium. The Prosperan glyphs he engraved with his will not only bound the vessel but also instructed it. The tens of thousands of glyphs anchored and bound the spirit, and thousands more instructed the newly made proto-daemon. He had experimented with this form of Warpcarft in the past but only put these spirits to work in minor parts of his home, cleaning the unused parts of his sanctum or organizing the books in his work in progress Grand Library.
As the Neverborn solidified in the Warp, he moved to the last step of this working, naming the daemon. Not only as another form of binding but also to give it power in the Warp, now it was just a ball of emotions being stored in one place in the Warp, but a name would allow it to take actions, the name of a daemon is as much a description as it is a focus of power. Hence, Magnus reached into the pool, which he forged his creation from, Seeking a name that would allow it to for fill the purpose he had in mind. And to his mild surprise, a named almost jumped out at him.
"Lady Fortune," he spoke, and with those words in that alien tongue that the local star nation spoke, his spirit was 'born' and released upon the oblivious trespassers.
Another report came across his desk, another mishap, another accident, another setback, another failure. Demagogue Bymonus and six names beside thought as he looked over the most recent report, this time a pack got lost in the woods, somehow, ran into a previously believed Extinct species of predatory feline, which was now Extinct again, and all before breakfast.
Bymonus would have believed this incompetence on the pack's part if it were not for them being some of the best in the Compact, having been on several successful campaigns with the Zealot that got lost, having severed beside Bymonus for several decades. Never getting lost in all that time.
They were in the most recent execution force formed to combat The 'Wound'. If it were not for the extensive briefings and need-to-know information he was given for this assignment, he would question why they were on a backwater, supervising scientist investigating a Triarch-dammed mountain range. But all they found was misfortune and impossible coincidence leading to even more outrages and nonsensical problems.
He looked back down at the report; at least there was no one screaming about there being no stars this week, but it many be too early to tell, he thought, shivering at how some of his best men could turn into gibbering wrecks after spending too much time searching the mountain for whatever "Magnus the Red" is.
He had been stationed on Rally for almost a year now, and he had to send a full platoon home discharged, never being able to serve again because of this Triarch-dammed mountain range. The scientist spoke of powerful energy feels and arcane uses of Shock Space to hide from their searches and affect probability in weird and bizarre ways.
While he saw the value such technology could have in benefiting the Compact, he just could not bring himself to sacrifice more men on a search that was clearly going nowhere; there was no more use in having a full fleet around Rally. All the insights they could gather about the Wound were already gathered in the one encounter they had with the newly codenamed "Wiseman," and the best course of action left to them was to assign an outpost to watch over the Mountains from a safe distance and have the fleet get back to hunting The Wound.
Or at least that was his opinion, and he was making that clear to the Bastion leader.
But Bymonus just didn't want to lose any more men to a pointless search.
Magnus was getting frustrated; after creating the spirit to torment the Xenos, he realized that he didn't actually know how much time he had spent in his sanctum or where it was in relation to, well, anything really. He was too busy taking advantage of the calm Warp to pay attention to such insignificant things. But now that the locals have gotten really insistent on getting into his sanctum and rather than ask the annoying Xenos where in the galaxy he was. He decided upon divining his location from the empyrean and then that of Prospero so he could see to retrieve relics.
But after roughly identifying his position as Ultima Segmentum in the Korianis sector, he ran into problems. He used his position relative to the galactic core to find were he was but went to visit Prospero via astral projection; he found nothing
Prospero was not where it should be; his instinctive link to his homeworld was gone, so he looked where it should be in relation to the galactic core, and again nothing. Then he tried to use the Eye of Terror and the Astrinimican to triangulate it. However, he found that both were missing, which raised more questions. But he focused on finding Prospero before he tried to understand how someone could close the Eye of Terror without him noticing.
The next method he tried was to locate Terra and use that as a reference to find Prospero. There were humans on this world, so there must be a Terra. However, it was harder to find than he imagined without the Astrinimican; he had to use the associations of ideas to locate humanity's birthplace in the Warp. However, his first attempts failed; it did not resonate with his father's power nor the heart of humanity, nor even the industrial might of Mars that would lead him to the Sol system. Only when he focused on the ancient history of Terra could he find it, and it, like Prospero, was not where it should be. It was in Segmentum Tempestus in the Garon Nebula sector rather than anywhere close to Segmentum Solar. But that didn't allow him to locate Prospero either.
So in order to understand what has happened to the galaxy, he had to do astral navigation the hard way, first by comparing the stars around Terra to his knowledge about Segmentum Salor in order to find a pattern to the stars' dislocation, but that would take a while, orders of magnitude greater than the time he had spent to come to this conclusion.
Bastion leader Elmer Torres was getting frustrated with the lack of progress in hunting 'The Wound.' When he was given the task, he believed he would be able to put an end to it once and for all. But as his pursuit continued and he reviewed the logs of his predecessors, he found that he was mistaken. But then the 'Wiseman' came to the Execution Force's attention, a Broken that held great knowledge on Shock Space, knowledge that would give him insight into its Godkiller, its Breach Core, and most importantly for his mission, its Warp Drive. He thought he had a new lead, a new tool to end the abomination once and for all. But now it had been more than a of year of fruitless searching of those mountains.
He, like the Thoughtful he was, had been meticulous, starting with ground searches, then moving on to full M-wave scans and more exotic scans besides, then onto destructive searches, literally tearing the mountain apart to find any traces of 'Wiseman.' They would have ended the search months ago as a mistaken or fake report if it were not for the one thing they found; his analysts called it a "probability distortion field" which stretches out around the mountain nine kilometers. And events within were unlikely, scientifically so. One of his analysts found that all dice rolled within the field would roll a one, and events that were unlikely became almost inevitable in the area.
But that was all his teams had found, no traces of 'Wiseman'; the current leading theory was that he used his mastery of Shock Space to create what amounted to a pocket dimension by matching his velocity with that of Rally and keeping his location on the undermost levels of Shock Space, so close to real space he could open breaches easily without needing to come fulling into real space. But it was just that, a Theory.
So with this lack of progress and 'the Wound' being spotted, he had decided that they would level the mountains before leaving to continue the hunt. Hopefully, it would harm it in some small way, but more so, it would allow them to search the area for anything hidden by the field and stop any Broken, let alone 'The Wound, ' from meeting it.
There would be a cover story made for why the mountains were being destroyed, like there was one about why his fleet was in orbit, but he had no clue how they were going to explain it away. And pity whatever poor fool had to do it.
Magnus was rudely interrupted from his astral navigation by his Wards. It was not a minor alert like the ones he had been ignoring, but a major warming from the Warp, and seconds after acknowledging the precognitive warning, his mountain exploded.
This was definitely an escalation in tensions he was not expecting. He believed they were just going to leave him alone after they realized they could not reach him; now, the mountain his tower was hidden inside was completely gone through the use of some arcane technology. And will he warded his sanctum from their eyes, they would clearly be able to see that something was there. His tower was still in the materium, and even if they could not see it with their scaners, physical matter would still interact with it, and the dust created by this attack would surely reveal him.
Thankfully the wards were able to shift the damage he would have taken into the Warp and away from his tower. But he needed to act quickly to discourage further attacks against his sanctum. He looked over his observatory, where he had narrowed Prospero down to a few hundred light years, and saw one of his equations against the wall that gave him the perfect idea to make those annoying Xenos stop.
Elmer Torres was pleasantly surprised when his Janissaries on the ground reported a towering structure revealed now that the mountain had been removed. Of course, all electronic sensors reported nothing as they had since the search began, but his men could see something, but only by seeing what was not there; dust-covered something, but they could not see what that was. But the aggressive nothingness gave away that something was there.
Elmer reached for his communicator, calling up someone he had become very familiar with over the past months "Demagogue Bonus," he said.
"Yes, Sir, I see it," the voice on the other line answered as professionally as ever.
"Good, send in your men; I want the site secured within the hour and breaching attempts to start after that," He ordered.
"It will be done," the Demagogue said before Elmer cut the line.
Elmer returned to his desk where a live feed of the mountain was, he could not see the tower from the screen, but he could see Bymonus men set to work; maybe there was hope for this lead after all.
Standing orders for observation Post Rally Alpha-one
From: the desk of The Inner Council Minister of War
To: Commanding officer of Rally Alpha-one observation post
The primary objective of this observation post is to maintain the quarantine set up around [Data Expunged] by Execution Force [Data Expunged]. Nothing is to enter or leave the quarantine zone under any circumstances. The Zone is nine kilometers in radius centering on [Data Expunged]. Anything that leaves the quarantine zone is to be captured and held on-site, with a courier dispatched immediately to CIS HQ.
Anyone or thing that enters the quarantine zone is to be considered lost and no retrieval efforts made. Any of your men that enter the Zone and then return are to be questioned and then kept in isolation until a CIS agent arrives to take custody of them.
Surveillance should be maintained at all times around the Zone, with the camera and sensor network integrity of paramount impatience. Manned teams should be on constant rotation around the Zone along with the electrical Surveillance. Any reports of odd dreams or visions are to be reported immediately, and personnel transferred out of this posting.
The secondary objective is to maintain the cover that the site is a radiological leak for one of the old ships that the Broken used to travel to Rally.
End Chapter 2
