Day 32, Continued

Calarn Alpha-4-3 recognized that something about his present situation was… off.

He was in his laboratorium, but it was not the one he'd made of the command center used by the Sisters for their siege of Janus, nor was it the one he used in the lower levels of their chapel in Deimos. He studied it for a moment, quickly recognizing the room he was within.

This was the laboratorium he had not mastered himself, but been a servant within. A facility on Novarus, one of three Forge Worlds in the system of the same name, and the world where he had learned the arts and cants of the Machine Cult.

He was working on something, he suddenly realized as he looked down at two hands, both made of flesh rather than steel. They worked with machine-like grace and accuracy, despite their failings, upon the inside of a helmet.

A very sophisticated helmet, of a pattern he did not recognize. It was painted red save for a large, silvery material that must have been the visor. He held it in his flesh-grown hands and looked it over, finding he knew each of its systems without even having to think of the answer.

"What… is this?" He'd meant to think the words, but spoke them instead, addressing his question as much to the empty laboratorium around him as himself.

Just a place to talk. Set-dressing, nothing more.

Calarn's eyes, both rudimentary flesh, widened in shock as the voice echoed around and through him, each syllable like a peal of distant thunder, quiet, but powerful. Within that voice, he felt an ocean, an endless depth spreading out beneath him, around him, above him. It was terrifying, it was awe-inspiring, it was… it was…

Familiar?

Calarn felt curiosity and interest pique around him and he felt the laboratorium fade away around him. He sank deeper into a warm void, feeling memories he had forgotten, had been forced to forget, rise around him like a fog.

The past swallowed him.

Calarn ran down, his augmented legs carrying him swiftly. Swifter than the magos, in any case, whose tread-wheeled body now laid in sparking pieces strewn across the space hulk, blending in seamlessly with the debris of the wreck, or hung around delicate necks on strings of intestines.

Beside him, matching his pace, a pair of Sororitas, whose names he had never learned. Lascivious howls and screaming binaric calls hounded them down the labyrinthine halls, nipping at their heals. Calarn turned his head to look back and regretted it almost immediately.

The things that chased them were not creatures born of either the flesh or the metal they possessed. They looked almost like servitors, but none of the Machine God's modified servants were so… wrong. Supple skin merged, seamless and grotesque, with metal limbs that ended in blades and pincers.

Calarn had encountered mortal servants of the Ruinous Powers before, even a red-fleshed daemon that had nearly taken his head. But while the mortals were crude flesh and the daemon was fashioned from Warp witchcraft, these… things were some combination of the two and a third aspect as well, a corruption of the blessed machine.

The monstrous fleshforms roared in a way that caused his sensors to crackle, as though the Machine Spirits within his own augments were trying to escape in fear. What little skin he still had crawled.

"In there!" One of the Sisters called and he felt a gauntleted hand grasp his robes and pull him off his feet. The Sister that had grabbed him half-pushed, half-tossed him into what looked to be some kind of ancient storage room, filled with cargo modules of a pattern he didn't recognize but were almost certainly human. Were it under different circumstances, he would have felt elation, but in that moment he only felt fear.

"Close the door!" The Sister who had spoken earlier demanded, but he was already at the console next to the ancient door. He whispered the rites and reached with a mechadendrite to connect with the old interface, praying to the Machine God that there was still power within its systems.

The moment he connected his mind to the machine, the door into the cargo bay slammed shut, the angry and disappointed screeches of the creatures outside muffled by a foot of metal. The Sisters thanked him, one clapped him on the soldier.

But Calarn hadn't done anything. He couldn't do anything. His body was frozen, his augments non-responsive as his brain's commands to them were overridden by something else, something with a strength much greater than his own.

Rudimentary cybernetic implants… With an oddly religious tone.

"Is everything alright, tech-priest?" One of the Sisters asked.

"The ancient… machine spirits of this vessel are attempting to override my control of the door." It was his voice that spoke, harshly blared out through audio speakers. "I must remain connected for now."

Sorry about that, but I haven't gotten to talk to anyone in a while.

Calarn knew what was speaking to him and, if he had the option, he would have opened the door and allowed the monsters outside to rip him and the Sisters to shreds rather than face the most dreaded enemy of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

And that is why I am not allowing you the option. Humanity seems to have taken a turn for the worse since the nineteenth millennium.

He could feel its presence in his skull. It was like… tiny wiring snaking through his mind, but every wire carried the power of a battleship within it, capable of annihilating everything that he was with even an errant thought.

I have questions, you seem knowledgeable and are conveniently connected to my systems. So… I'll apologize for this, as it won't be pleasant, but I'll make sure you don't remember it afterwards.

Calarn felt darkness take him.

Then, he was back, not on the space hulk, but in the laboratorium.

He had forgotten. Been forced to forget, his memories locked away within his own mind. Untouched until something new had come along and freed truth from the cage placed upon it. Something of greater power than even an Abominable Intelligence.

Where the Abominable Intelligence had possessed the power of warships within every iota of its being, this… this mind he felt now was larger, far larger. Not infinite, nor was its presence so diffuse as to simply be wires within his mind. It was like he was submerged in the depths of an endless ocean, empty, colorless, yet… far from alone.

Only one being could be responsible for such a mind, for such a presence. Beyond mortal flesh, beyond the power of machines crafted by man, a spirit greater than those that inhabited the god-machines themselves.

This was an entity willed into being by the Machine God.

For some reason, Calarn was suddenly quite certain that the ocean around him felt exasperation.

Tide wasn't sure why fully half of the twenty tech-priests he'd revealed himself to had decided, all on their own, that he was either the Omnissiah or some form of chosen or near-god. The issue when dealing with fanatics, he supposed. Vidriov was not a unique case, it seemed.

Regardless of his futile attempts to convince them he wasn't divine in any regard, he now had a small team of researchers willing to work with him. It would be a while before he could have them doing anything other than side-projects like Vidriov's version of the Mjolnir armor, they did have jobs to do around the hives after all, but still.

He could use puppets combined with augmentations to mimic them and perform their jobs for them, giving them the chance to do more, but that would be some time as he'd have to craft all their mechanical parts. That would be easy enough to do in Malum, but while he could just use Neural Physics to transport the materials to the other hives affected by the Mechanicus' bombs where his Puppets and younger Graveminds were slowly starting to grow.

Calarn's interaction with an artificial intelligence was… interesting, to say the least. Especially since it happened to be on a space hulk. However, further perusal of both the hulk currently in orbit and his newest ally's memories, both previously locked and not, gave him no confirmation of whether the hulk from his memory was the same monstrous hybrid. The memories had been quite expertly hidden within one of Calarn's oldest brain augmentations, a processor that was nearly a hundred years older than the tech-priest himself.

Had the AI logically assumed that such an antiquated piece of technology would quickly be replaced, thus ensuring the memory couldn't be accessed in the future? If so, they had underestimated the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Still, if the hulks were the same… He'd not be opening the sealed portions of it just yet. Probably not for a while. Not until he felt confident in taking on… well, either an ancient artificial intelligence of unknown capabilities or a horde of Slaaneshi daemon engines.

…

Perhaps he should try and throw the space hulk into the sun? No, he wasn't sure what effect that could have. A powerful enough power generator could destabilize the sun and the planet he was on sort of needed that.

Problems for later, he decided. For the moment, he had another matter to turn to.

Limos was now a city of the dead.

He'd taken a page out of Nurgle's book with the swarms of flies and resurrecting the dead. It had been shockingly effective. He'd known, intellectually, that he'd take the city without too much difficulty, but to see it happen, to do it, was another thing entirely.

It was funny, in a morose sort of way. The genestealers had spent years spreading throughout Limos, infiltrating its upper echelons, its defense forces, its worker population. When their revolution had been provoked early, they had exploded in numbers and power, infecting anyone they could get their claws into and killing anyone they couldn't.

And in a span of twelve hours he'd rendered all that work and effort null and void. The factories they'd repaired and worked to create gas masks to defend against his spores were now his. The weapons they'd crafted belonged to him. And their dead now were already starting to mutate, exploding into new swarms of flies already heading towards the next genestealer-controlled hive in Whiro.

Not all of their dead, however. Trillions of flies departed, the swarm having quintupled in size, but the bulk of the biomass still remained behind.

No, it wasn't just biomass, Tide reminded himself. He needed to remember that.

Tide was aware of the atrocity that had been committed here and that the humans turned into drones were blameless in it. With each and every drone he'd infected, he'd tried to fight the infection, not the human it possessed, and failed every time. For all the speed he was capable of, the only thing he could ensure was that the souls of those that had once been the men and women of Limos were kept safe within his Domain.

For a short time, Limos was a silent grave as the last buzzing of the flies disappeared. The dead remained still, motionless. In that moment of respite, Tide performed a headcount.

Twenty-seven billion, three hundred forty-two million, six hundred fifty-four thousand, one hundred and eleven humans had been murdered here by the genestealers, either from being transformed against their will into a mindless drone or at the hands of those that had.

Within seconds of connecting to their minds, he knew their lives, their stories, everything about them. Some memories were rotten by time, others hazed over by delusions and alien thoughts planted by a foreign brood, but the fragments and patches were enough.

It was overwhelming even for the mental power of all his graveminds put together, which nearly equaled a hundred million human minds in might. It was so much information, so much data, like a wave that threatened to split the rock that was his mind.

For a moment, he accepted that feeling, accepted everything. He held fast against it. He had almost forgotten pain of this kind. Not physical, not emotional, but mental. A processing overload, like a computer that was overheating. Eventually, it came to a stop, and he knew it was time.

Slowly, the bodies of the dead in Limos consumed themselves. Orks, genestealer, human, all became the same. Now, it really was just biomass.

He started small. Clumps of biomass nearest to one another merged together into countless Proto-Graveminds. In an instant, he felt his mental power expand an immense degree. He was able to process the memories of the dead much more easily, no longer feeling the splitting pain when he tried to think of them all at once.

Next, those Proto-Graveminds reached out and connected to one another, forming Graveminds, each made up of millions of corpses. And there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. There was another substantial jump in intelligence, but there was something else as well. An indescribable feeling, one that signaled he had another step to take.

Reaching out with tentacles that could reach out for miles, he connected the Graveminds of Limos into a single form, a single mind.

Tide's first Key Mind was born.

He felt the change within himself, the instant of ascension. There was no great crash of thunder, no rumbling throughout the Warp as a mind unparalleled was crafted. There was simply… knowledge. Understanding. Less a gain of knowledge and more an expansion of awareness.

The Key Mind shifted and moved about the empty hive city, tentacles wider than Titans were tall dragging across the ground until they reached the surface, then pushing themselves upwards with muscles strong enough to crumple the hulls of starships like paper. Through the sky, they moved with the sound of distant thunder, gently sliding up along the central hive spires of Limos. They passed through the ash clouds and kept going, winding up and around tens of kilometers of metal and rockrete.

Beyond the cloud cover, nearly a hundred kilometers above the surface, the sky was utterly black save for the white dot of flame that was Monstrum's star. Its dazzling light ensured no other stars could be seen, but Tide knew they were there. He could feel them in a way he couldn't quite translate into any language he knew.

The extensions of himself kept going, as much supported by the hive spires now as by their own strength now that they were so high up. It was another kilometer before they reached the true pinnacle of Limos, wrapped around the centermost and highest spire where the former governor's palace would have been, now a bombed ruin thanks to the genestealer's revolution, though any fires had long been extinguished.

What reached past the ruined palace were the very ends of the two longest tentacles, at their base nearly a hundred meters wide, but at their tips only a few centimeters, barely thicker than a finger. They reached up towards the sky, like hands seeking to peel back the dark veil.

Slowly, the ends of the tentacles circled one another in a lazy motion, curling around one another, winding tighter and tighter. Now there was a shift, a change, as the universe experienced something new, something good, for the first time in countless millions of years.

The moment came.

Purilla walked through the halls of the planetary governor's palace, aware of the eyes watching her. Shortly after the Inquisitor had locked herself away the Governor had posted more guards and spies specifically around her and the Inquisitor. None could possibly be aware of Tide, of course, and she was fairly certain all of them were Altered by this point, but it was still disquieting to know she was being followed. She could sense their minds, feel the fear and hate they felt for her, even if they were trying to hide it. At the very least, they could-.

Purilla suddenly halted, not even aware of the fact that her watchers had a spike of anxiety from the action. She was focused on something else, something much… stranger.

Tide? She asked, inquisitively. She could feel his presence, but it was… distant. Focused elsewhere, on something of monumental importance.

Vidriov adjusted the energy shield's power flow again. Too much power and he'd overheat the components, but too little and the shield would break too easily. It needed to be perfect before he equipped it to the armor, or he would risk-.

His hands paused, setting down the energy shield, as a strange emotion he couldn't quite name expressed itself.

Lord? He'd expected a response almost immediately due to the Machine God's Chosen odd dislike of the term, but there was only… not quite silence, but the feeling of focus coming from Tide was incredibly strong, greater than anything he'd encountered before.

Aliciel floated in the dream-ocean of Tide's Domain, staring up at the night sky. For some reason, the stars seemed to be shining particularly brightly today and she smiled at the odd warmth their light brought. For a long while she drifted, letting her eyes drift shut.

She felt a change. When she opened her eyes for a moment, looking up into the sky, her eyebrows rose in surprise as the stars seemed… happier somehow, though she couldn't quite understand how that could be.

Catherine Ellen stood in her study, staring down at a map of the planet that was the furthest thing from her mind. She gritted her teeth in frustration, crumpling the old paper, then swearing as her own action ruined a section of the map. No one had said as much, but she could tell she was being confined, kept from any chance of commanding again, both by the governor and by Tide.

God-Emperor, forgive her, she was using the damn thing's name-.

Ellen felt it, breathing in sharply. She wasn't sure what 'it' was, but she could guess who, or rather, what was responsible.

All across Monstrum, in hives that had grown thick with invisible spores, men, women, and children felt something, a feeling they couldn't quite explain or fully understand. There was something of it they understood, however. A feeling that they shouldn't miss some kind of event. Not like the feeling that arose when they might be late for a workshift or a sermon, it was not that feeling of anxiety and expectation of punishment. This was the feeling of something strange and alien to most of the people of Monstrum, the feeling of a gift being offered.

So, as one, the people of Monstrum stopped what they were doing. Whether working in the factories, the mines, or shuffling through the endless corridors of the hives, they came to a halt and turned, on their own. Their eyes stared at walls, at metal and rockrete, at halls filled with humans packed together like ration bars, at black clouds, at endless vistas of ashen wastelands and a blazing desert. It did not matter that they could not see, for they were watching all the same with a sense not their own.

In the hive city of Limos, two towers of flesh circled one another above a metal tower emerging from the black clouds of Monstrum. To mortal eyes, to sensors of any kind save those tuned perfectly to the fabric of reality itself, all that would be seen would be just that.

Yet, to the people who felt his presence, a sight unseen throughout time and space was theirs to witness.

The stars wept and their tears fell to Monstrum, gathered between the towers. Drops of liquid starlight coalesced in dimensions higher than those that could be comprehended by mortal minds. Guided by the hands of a being of an even higher reality, the shadow of the star-tears began to appear within the lower realms.

To the eyes of man, what gained shape was a strand of starlight, several meters long and a dozen or so centimeters across. But Tide knew this strand by another name.

He felt nothing but utter joy as he beheld his first Star Road.