When Loki came back to himself, he knew he was in big trouble.
The Stormlord is going to be angry with me. General Manric is going to be angry with me. For a common soldier like Loki, that was an awful place to be. Would he be posted to some backwater fringe world? Put on KP duty for a year? Banished back to Luminous or even Hope? Loki didn't know, but he was strangely okay with it. I did the right thing. It wouldn't be the first time he'd been punished for doing the right thing.
"Oh Loki, you're such an idiot," Calder's voice sounded so far away. Loki turned his head to see him and he was wavering like he was underwater. "Why did you have to do that? Manric could have taken care of himself." …No… no, he really couldn't.
"That's not how things work Calder," Loki said and marvelled at his own voice. He could see the words! They looked like puffy little clouds of color, wasn't that crazy? "What happened…? With everything?" Sure, they'd been part of it but they'd been busy fighting Chaos spawns and then that Space Marine. He'd been really good too, Calder and Loki hadn't gotten him, they'd just hurt him pretty bad and made him fall back. And that was after he'd tried to help the Daemon Primarch against Imotekh and hadn't gotten killed, so he was awfully good.
"Well, the whole invasion took only a few hours." Wow, that was quick! It had felt like longer. "Civilian casualties are at roughly three million." Oh no. "They destroyed multiple apartment blocks, great towers… we're honestly lucky it wasn't worse, the whole thing was very uncoordinated and a lot of civilians managed to flee. The worst casualties were definitely from the apartment blocks closest to the park where it all started." A park… that suddenly made Loki feel so sad. People had just been enjoying a lovely spring day with the kids and suddenly this happens. "The PDF got in quite quickly, they have a barracks in the city. They held the line long enough for us to join it, but you know that part." Right, he'd been there. "The ships had some blackstone pillars for exactly this sort of thing, and the park has already been cleaned out and a great blackstone spike placed where the Warp Rift occurred." Smart! Loki wondered if the Imperium would ever trade Sautekh for blackstone, or start making their own? Sure, they weren't nearly as good as the pillars of Cadia had been, but a nice big chunk of negatively charged blackstone could do some work!
(given the amount of blackstone the Pharos would require, and the energy needed to make it, the Imperium would not be using blackstone that way for a long time)
Then suddenly a Cryptek's face intruded in Loki's vision and surprisingly, it was someone he recognized.
"Oh hi Tarek, thank you for the poem you sent me, I love it," Loki said. That was a poem of runes that Tarek had made himself, it was nice. Tarek tilted his head to one side, a birdlike motion, before making a glyph. To his distress, Loki realized he couldn't read it, the lines were wavering too much. So glittery and pretty though!
"Can you read that?" Oh!
"No, not at all. Also, is it normal to see words?" Loki said, realizing in the back of his addled mind that he was feeling like he was flying high on really good painkillers. Although this was nothing like that, this was problems with his mechanical brain. Tarek vanished from view and Loki felt it as he was worked on. Things got sharper, somehow. "Testing, testing… I don't see my words anymore." That was sad, they had been so pretty, but still good.
After a bit of work they got him all sorted out and Loki was able to get up and stand. As he did, he realized he was back at the government facility they'd been using to question the families. What was the purpose of this place normally? Loki honestly wasn't sure. He suspected that maybe it had been built by Ke'yanakh for his own work, since it was definitely suited to necron sizes. They could easily walk through all the doors and the ceilings were no problem. The décor didn't give him much of a clue, it was very generic government building, in Loki's opinion. Beige walls and some plants, boooring. Probably intentionally boring though.
Loki and Calder were left alone for a while – everyone was very busy sorting things out – so they went to find their datapads. They had kind of just dumped them when everything began, but they were really good models with tracking capabilities so they could easily hunt them down. They were exactly where they'd left them, discarded on a table. Loki looked at them, a bit ruefully.
"We really weren't ready for a fight at all." Loki and Calder were normally warriors with gauss flayers, switching to power weapons up close. Gauss flayers were huge and imposing, clearly just weapons of war, so they hadn't brought them for the investigation. Oddly enough, things like Imotekh's staff looked less scary… sure, it was a weapon but it also looked like well, a staff. It felt more normal to see it. Calder made a glyph of amusement.
"I want to know why you brought your cross. And was that your mum's necklace on it?" Loki nodded, picking up his datapad.
"The one she gave me before I went off to join the army." It had been a special gift for that. "I brought it because well, reasons." Loki wasn't sure he wanted to go into all that. It seemed kind of silly and he wasn't sure he wanted to talk about it. Calder respected that – Loki thought he probably knew – and tapped on his datapad.
"I asked the General if we should do anything, and he said to stay here." Oh, Calder had done that? Loki hadn't thought of it! "So why don't we play a game as we wait? I've checked the networks here and they play Guard vs Xenos, we can join up." YAY!
"That would be fun!" Maybe it was in poor taste, considering they were necrons, but Loki didn't care. They might get put in the xenos team anyway. It was funny though… Loki had heard that before the Sautekh Empire had taken over, the xenos team had three different 'types' and one of them was necron. That had been pulled out and a new, Tyranid style xenos put in instead. Loki was a bit surprised it hadn't already had that, but he'd heard no one was really updating it anymore. "You know, I think they should have kept the necrons, wouldn't it be fun if we could play them?"
"A bit undiplomatic." Yeah, that was true. "Oh, we're Guard anyway." Darn! The xenos were way cooler.
Loki and Calder had a good time, but the rest of the team was a typical pick up group and were pretty awful. The xenos side was more organized and Loki suspected they had a core of players who were friends and joining up as a team. Not all of them… the teams were ten people and Loki could tell some of the players on the other side were really bad, probably just randos. The Guard lost, not surprisingly. Loki was the final holdout, managing to hold a sniper position for an impressively long period of time before they winkled him out and killed him.
I love how we can play games like this on a datapad now. That was truly wonderful and worked because they were necrons. They could control the movements of their little avatars without the use of controllers. Loki was vague on how it worked, but it worked very well. "Should we do another round?" Loki asked and Calder shook his head.
"I don't think we have time, someone will be back soon. Let's just read something." Loki nodded, pulling up the War in Heaven. He could get to work on Act 10, it was kind of exciting even if it went on too long.
It wasn't long at all before Imotekh, Ke'yanakh and Manric returned to the command post. Loki put away his datapad and tried to look bright and eager, although he was pretty sure he was about to get a massive dressing down. Hopefully the consequences wouldn't be too bad.
"I will give you a chance to explain yourself, before I determine your punishment," Imotekh said, staring at him and Loki felt deeply intimidated yet also, serene and sure of himself. He knew this feeling… he'd disobeyed orders in the past, when he knew darned well he was right, and then been proven right. This was how he felt when he got punished anyway and just had to take it. It wasn't fair, the universe wasn't fair, but he knew he'd done the right thing.
"Yes sir! Sir, do you understand how sorcery fundamentally works? The basic laws of magic?" Loki asked, hoping he did. Imotekh made glyphs of derision.
"Sorcery has rules?" Huh!
"Uh, you actually just made an excellent point sir! That is the biggest downside to using sorcery because the rules are always subject to change and they will always change at the exact moment that screws with you the most," Loki said, although he suspected part of that was just the perspective of the user. On the other hand, he wouldn't put it past the Warp to really be that malicious. "However, generally speaking, sorcery does have rules… the rule of similarity, the rule of contagion, stuff like that. But what I'm referring to is the real basic law of magic, the fundamental reason that it works in the first place." Ke'yanakh seemed really interested, looking at him intently.
"The Warp is the great collective of the subconsciousness of all sentient races. As such, patterns become etched into it, created with belief and repetition." Loki hoped he was putting this well. "The purest essence of sorcery is following those patterns. When you inscribe a glyph, or a summoning circle, you are doing it exactly the way someone did before you to get the same result. The pattern of the glyph is like a well-walked path, all the brush beaten down and nicely tended. As long as you follow the path, you'll get where you're going, as long as the rules don't change."
"If that is the case, where do new spells come from? How were they created in the first place?" Manric asked and that was a really interesting question!
"Well sir, there's two ways, although the first is just a theory. The Warp is non-linear so it's theoretically possible that some patterns are kind of loops. They exist because they've always existed, there is no beginning or end. I suspect that a lot of the information in grimoires, real grimoires that can take your soul, is that kind of pattern." Imotekh's eyes glowed and Loki was sure he wanted to say 'sorcery!' but was holding back. "However, with a lot of work, a mortal sorcerer CAN create a new spell. That's basically like breaking trail… it takes a lot of work, beating down the brush and making it work and it can all go wrong. However, once it's done, the spell gets established and then someone else can just take it and make it work."
"However, we're getting a bit off topic, I was trying to explain what Ishtar was doing and why I had to intervene. Have you heard of the myth of inheritance?" Loki asked and Ke'yanakh shook his head. Manric and Imotekh just listened. "It's this idea some tribes had that if you perfectly replicated the actions of someone who came before, the same fate would befall you. Like if a sick deer walked a certain path, at a certain time, and then a healthy deer went down the same path at the same time of day, the healthy deer would also get sick. It's replicating patterns again sir… patterns have power."
"Stories have power sir, legends and myths have power." This might annoy Calder, but Loki couldn't think of a better example. "If you perfectly replicate a sacrifice to God, the way it was done in the past, the odds that he will notice and talk to you go WAY up."
"Loki, don't blasphemy. Also, we don't sacrifice to God like that." Yes but…
"I mean the story of the old testament Calder. You know, the story of Abraham and Isaac. If you really did that, with perfect sincerity, God might respond exactly like the story because patterns have power. But the thing is, I just said 'might'. We're only mortal, and this is much harder to do than actual sorcery. The patterns of stories are really hard to get right so most of the time, we will fail."
"However, Ishtar is NOT human, she is a goddess," Loki said, finally getting to the meat of the matter. "Sir, I HAD to intervene because she was starting up the myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. If she had summoned the Bull of Heaven, it was all over. I had to stop her."
"Loki, I am fully capable of defending myself. No matter how strong this Warp entity is, I could have handled it," Manric said and Loki vehemently disagreed, making glyphs indicating his intense disagreement. Manric tilted his head, seeming a bit surprised that Loki was so sure of himself.
"Not to mention myself, and the forces being brought down from the ships. A C'Tan shard was being readied to be deployed. Do you truly think we could not handle this creature?" Imotekh asked and Loki saluted before replying with pure honestly.
"Correct sir! You could not! That's the point of the story sir, to get a predetermined outcome. She was trying to railroad you with fate sir!" Loki knew he might have trouble explaining this part. "If she had successfully re-started the legend, it would have had its own momentum sir. And because Manric was being placed in the role of Enkidu, his fate would have been sealed. No chance of survival, a guaranteed recall failure, he would have been done sir. Sir, did you wonder why she didn't just kill me when I talked back to her?" Loki answered himself. "Because she couldn't. That would have ruined the start of the story. She had to push me aside or talk over me, to get the myth going, if she'd killed me it would have messed it all up. The legend of the Bull of Heaven doesn't start with Ishtar killing some random retainer who told her to go to hell. She knew that."
"Forgive me, but why was Ishtar so intent on replicating this story in the first place? Why did she wish to kill General Manric?" Ke'yanakh asked and that was a really good question!
"Well, this is just a theory sir. I can't prove anything, I'm just going on instincts. But I think it would have empowered her, brought her strength," Loki said, thinking about it. "It would have reaffirmed her worship, in a way. And that's why she panicked when I threatened to summon Ereshkigal… starting THAT story would have diminished her. Maybe even hurt her really bad, since Ereshkigal is basically a face of Nurgle now." Loki was sure that Nurgle could put some real pain on Ishtar and the story would have compelled him to do that, even if he didn't want to.
"I still find it difficult to believe that I would have had no chance against the Bull of Heaven… my spear is capable of altering fate," Manric said, tapping the haft of his spear with his fingers. "It is a thing of the Warp, over sixty million years old. Do you truly think this story could have overcome it?" Loki decided not to argue about that and go somewhere else instead.
"Okay sir, lets assume you could break the story. You'd still have been fighting the Bull of Heaven! Do you know sir that Nurgle is an actual ancient Sumerian god? A god of pestilence and plague?" Maybe he didn't know about that. "That indicates to me that back in ancient Sumeria, something happened. I think we might have come close to extinction sir!" Manric seemed taken aback and Ke'yanakh was really interested. "If the Warp was really close to the surface back then, what if Gilgamesh and Enkidu weren't just myths? What if those events were real? That would indicate the Bull of Heaven is a super weapon, probably on par with an ascended C'Tan shard. You could have been killed sir, even without the myth warping things!" Loki was sure of that. There was a long pause, and Loki had the feeling that the three of them were conferring.
(they were actually discussing that if Loki was even close to right, the conflict would surely have destroyed the entire capital of Hemingway and devastated the local PDF, in addition to possible recall failures)
"This will be your punishment," Imotekh finally said and Loki felt Calder go very still. Loki himself just felt okay with it. "You will stay on Hemingway for the next two years, assisting Ke'yanakh in his work." Huh?! "Then you will return to Manric's forces, to join the assault on the Pariah Nexus. We will determine what else to do with you after that."
"That's a punishment – OW!" Loki elbowed Calder sharply.
"Shut up!" He hissed and Calder made a glyph of apology. Manric made a glyph of amusement.
"You're also on KP duty for a month." OH COME ON! "Or cleaning duty, whatever is most practical."
"Just don't make me clean a toilet with a toothbrush sir, it's all I ask. I'll even do the grease traps, just not the toilet again…" That had been the absolute worst. Calder made a glyph of resignation in the face of great difficulty.
"That wasn't even the worst thing that happened. Remember when you got fired from your construction job?" Oh, that. Loki hadn't actually minded that at all, that job had sucked. He'd only taken it for the money.
"This is no doubt pointless idiocy, but what happened?" Imotekh asked, to Loki's surprise. Well, if he wanted to know…
"I got a job taking down an old amusement park, sir, so the land could be built on again. I'm not a Field Engineer or anything but I can do math and I'm good at eyeballing things so I figured out pretty quickly that if we kept working like we were, someone was going to die. I told the foreman I wasn't going up that old Ferris wheel and he couldn't make me and he fired me on the spot. A week later, someone did die and I spoke to the press about it and that's how I got blacklisted from the construction industry in New Hope." Loki shrugged. "I didn't really care, I only took the job for the money. I liked my job at the bookstore way better." Sure, it didn't pay as well but Loki actually loved recommending books and helping people find things.
"Blacklisted… that's illegal!" Manric said and Loki felt sorry for him again. His upbringing as a Duleth really meant he didn't understand.
"Technically sir, but good luck proving it. They don't write things down, they just spread word verbally, 'don't hire that guy he's a problem'. Life isn't fair and I knew what would happen when I spoke to the press, but I thought they needed to be held to account." It wasn't right, what they'd been doing and they'd been trying to spin it as a tragic accident. Loki had blown that out of the water. "I believe in doing what's right, sir, even if I get punished for it."
"Commendable. But if you intend to disobey your orders, you had best be correct," Imotekh warned and Loki nodded, making a glyph poem about the value of humility and understanding your own limitations.
"I don't do that often sir! Only if I see something that's really critical and I HAVE to. I'm not going to second guess my commanders all the time or anything like that!" That was bad and how you got in real trouble. Even if a commander was making a mistake, it was usually better to go with it and make it work rather than second guess him. Maybe he knew something you didn't! Loki only took actions like this when he was really, really sure of himself and the consequences of not acting were really bad.
"Good. Ke'yanakh, I leave him to you." Imotekh and Manric both left and Ke'yanakh took over.
"To start with, let's find you some things to clean." Oh no! Loki drooped for a moment, but then squared his shoulders. It was only a month! It would be over in no time! Then he could do really cool things, helping Ke'yanakh in his work against Chaos! Loki really liked that idea and maybe he'd even be good at it.
He could hope anyway!
I am Ahthap the Starsworn and this is my story.
I was born into quasi-humble conditions. Not a commoner, I was the child of an unmarried noblewoman. Yet, my mother was informally married to my father, in a system that actually had a name. Theshka, I believe we called it. It was not well thought of, not at all.
Essentially, my mother's side of the family were low nobility that had fallen onto extremely hard times. Deeply impoverished, due to bad luck and bad investments, they had only their nobility as an asset. That led to an informal union with my father and his powerful trade house. Extremely wealthy commoners, they had built a great network of trade between multiple planets. My father was the scion of the house and while he could not formally marry my mother, she could still bear his children and he could name them his heirs, elevating his family into the nobility via the backdoor. It helped that they had already met and fallen in love, long before the arrangement was formalized. I am told that it was my mother who suggested and advocated for it.
The reason my mother had to advocate for it was because this was a matter of great shame for the noble house involved. My grandfather resisted for years, insisting he could bring their fortunes around, before finally facing the brutal reality and assenting to the match. My father quietly took care of their debts and made sure some lucrative deals came our way, bringing back our noble house to good fortune. Painful for my grandfather but he swallowed the shame and honorably adhered to the theshka.
That did, however, limit the rank of us children. I was mother's sixth child and a great prodigy of many things. I would have made an extremely fine military Lord or Overlord, but I also had the rarer abilities of a Cryptek and grandfather suggested that was the path I should follow. As a Lord, I would always be limited by my birth. As a Cryptek, I could grasp the very stars.
I followed my grandfather's suggestion and heeded his words. I set my eyes on the stars, intent on becoming the greatest of Plasmancers. I achieved all my dreams, uplifting myself to the ranks of the true Luminaries and my whole family was proud of me. I brought glory to their name and if history had continued as it should, I am confident my family would have continued to ascend. Alas, all that came to an end along with the Flesh Times.
For myself, however, I cannot regret the time of biotransference. I had been stricken with ill health. Not the Curse of the Bitter Star, but something almost worse in its abominable progression. 'Benign' tumors, similar to those that afflicted ancients like Trazyn, but they began when I was barely twenty-five. That was a poor sign and they just continued to appear, like mushrooms out of rotting wood. My first surgery to remove them was at twenty-eight. It would only get worse from there. They began appearing in very difficult locations, and began pressing on my nerves. Operation after operation, neural blockers to prevent the pain, more tumors, more operations. I was in a downward spiral of constant medical attention and by the time I was forty, they had come to make me hate my life. This is not an exaggeration: I was considering honorable suicide when word of biotransference reached us. I could not have been more grateful.
Was I married? Ah, this is actually a little embarrassing… no, I was never married. As the sixth child of the family, there was no need for formal offspring and I regret to say I always had a fine appreciation for female flesh. The palace prostitutes were fond of me and I was fond of them. There was one female I might have fallen in love with, but alas, she died. The Curse of the Bitter Star again.
As for children, ah, I had so many! When a child was born to a palace prostitute, they were always genetically tested and correctly labeled with their father, be he noble or otherwise. This was important, as a noble father offered more opportunities and we also needed to avoid incest. So I know I had seven daughters and three sons. Of my lovely daughters, four followed in their mother's footsteps, honorably entering the pleasure caste. One was regretfully unattractive and not intelligent enough to be a Cryptek, but a hard worker. I recommended her to my father's family and they took her under their wing. Another had a great passion for the culinary arts, and was able to make a lateral transition to the palace servant caste. My final daughter was, alas, a greedy and selfish girl. She also joined the pleasure caste, but was relegated to slavery for thieving some jewelry. I could have intervened, but chose not to.
My sons, though, brought even more honor and joy to me. As many of us do, I paid attention to any children registered to me and all three of them chose to follow in my footsteps. Ah, I loved them all so much. Two of them died honorably in the War in Heaven and the third is still here. I am so happy to remember my Nebuseneb. He is not close to my level, of course, but he is an honored Plasmancer. After my resouling I greeted him as my son. He was so surprised!
I am so glad, in this twilight of my existence, to find my darling Kamia. A gentle and simple girl, but now with a surprising gift for simple but beautifully eloquent poems. The way she can craft the glyphs is so beautiful. Do I love her? Honestly, I am not sure, but I do know one thing.
I want to find out.
