The Moment

The stars were weeping.

Selotep thought it must have been a sensors failure on his part. Surely the Celestial Orrery, an artifact of sublime purpose crafted before the War in Heaven itself, before the breaking and chaining of the gods, could not have had suddenly gone faulty.

Yet, his diagnostics showed no problems with himself.

Tears fell, invisible to any sensor that was less tuned to the galaxy's inner workings, the cosmic clockwork of its reality, than it was. But it was not just this galaxy's stars, he realized. The streaks of light that appeared were almost blinding to his single, ocular sensor.

For a moment, the ugly, pulsing wound that stretched across the galaxy, the scar that had plunged the side of the galaxy the crownworld Thanatos, and the Celestial Orrery, were on, seemed dim in comparison, its dull glow of madness bathed in starlight.

The light was all headed towards the same thing and, for a moment, he'd thought it was Thanatos. That somehow the universe itself had felt the workings of the Celestial Orrery and sent some kind of sign.

But no, it was elsewhere. He moved slowly, even now, careful not to disturb the holographic projection of the galaxy or risk setting off a cascading chain of supernovas or something worse. He adjusted his view and magnified his sensors to their extremes. The light was headed towards a region of space, one known to the upstart humans as the Ghoul Stars. Even in the days of the War in Heaven that region had been strange. Selotep knew it well as the home of several tomb worlds that had been corrupted by the viruses that afflicted many of their kind. The Bone Kingdom of Drazak and the Lair of the Destroyer were both tombworlds in that region.

But it was not to these worlds that the star-tears fell. Nor to any other necron tombworld that Selotep knew of in the region. Instead, it headed towards a seemingly unimportant world, one of the many controlled by humanity that had been plunged into darkness by the opening of the wound.

He magnified his sensors further and ignored the system alerts that demanded his attention as his systems began to burn from being overworked. It wasn't pain, for even pain would have been a comfort to the cold metal bodies of those who had once been the Necrontyr, and that comfort was something their gods had denied them long ago.

But, just for a moment, lone Selotep watched something incredible come to be and he felt a flicker of an emotion he had long thought stripped away from him:

Wonder.

Day 33

The strand of blue-white starlight danced around the spires of Limos. It seemed to lengthen and shrink as it moved, sometimes appearing only a few meters long, other times dozens. That was because it was lengthening and shrinking.

Star Roads were… strange. Wonderful, but strange. What Tide saw and sensed with his physical senses, through the two massive tentacles that had wound tightly about the spires of Limos, what he viewed was not really the Star Road itself but a shadow of sorts. The real Star Road existed in a higher dimension. It was why they were normally indestructible. Neural Architecture couldn't be harmed by mundane methods because there was no way for those methods to actually attack the architecture.

Of course, that didn't mean Star Roads couldn't be destroyed.

Tide felt his Keymind shudder at the thought and the hive city of Limos quaked as the act sent shudders through the spires as well. Right, he was the size of a city now, important to remember that.

The reason for his disturbed reaction to the thought of losing the Star Road wasn't a practical one. He'd known what he was doing before this would not be creating an extension of himself or fashioning an ordinary tool as one might create a hammer or a gun.

The Star Road was alive. Not in the organic sense of the word, it didn't have a cell structure or anything remotely close to it. It wasn't even necessarily a form of life that three-dimensional beings could comprehend. But it was alive.

And it was… Happy wasn't quite the right word for it, but it was the closest to describe the feeling. It was 'happy' to see him, to exist, and he was just as delighted in return.

He reached out, though not in any physical sense, and the Star Road reacted. Although it wasn't apart of him like his Flood forms were or even like the Altered were, it still listened to his requests. It even seemed to 'enjoy' them in a certain sense.

The Star Road circled the tower, its ends splitting off into multiple smaller strands, then reforming, then splitting again. It stretched out as far as it could go, nearly a hundred meters, then nearly disappeared from sight as it did the opposite, shrinking to the size of a pinprick.

That was another thing: its size. The Star Roads utilized by the Precursors and the Primordial Flood had been incomprehensibly massive structures, physical constructs that spanned the distance between planets and even star systems. Lightyears long. The Primordial Flood had used them to strangle and tear apart entire planets…

He felt something from the Star Road at that thought, at the idea of such destruction. It was not a nice feeling. Not disgust, not hatred, but something just as powerful and just as oppositional.

Was that normal? If every Star Road was akin to this one and felt as it did, then had the Star Roads the Primordial Flood used simply been different or unable to deny it? Given what he knew of the Primordial, Tide suspected it was the latter.

Which meant… No Star Roads being used as weapons for him, he supposed. He… didn't really mind that all that much to be honest. Yes, Star Roads as weapons could be devastatingly powerful, planet-strangling was only one of their many uses, the idea of using another living thing as just a tool of war… disturbed him.

Besides, it wasn't like Star Roads were only useful for their capacity to inflict death. The Primordial Flood had twisted them to that purpose, likely against their will. However, before then, they were a method of faster-than-light travel.

He… likely wouldn't be heading out far, at least relatively. He had an idea of how long the range of his control over the Flood would be with his new Key Mind form, roughly three lightyears in every direction. A truly massive area that stretched well beyond the outermost reaches of the Monstrum system, but also a mere rain drop in the vast ocean that was the galaxy. The next closest system was over five lightyears away. He wouldn't be sending the Star Road outside that range and likely not even outside the system. He wasn't certain he could maintain his connection with the Star Road if it was too far away and he wasn't going to risk it.

That said… he wasn't against doing a bit of in-system exploring so to speak.

The Star Road zipped down in a flash of dazzling speed, reaching the surface of Limos faster than Tide could even think. Despite such a display of speed, there was no shift, no compression of the air or destructive vacuum left behind as a more mundane craft might have caused. There wasn't even a whisper of noise.

The Star Road came to a stop in front of one of his tendrils that had wrapped around a sturdy building for support. A portion of the tendril began to grow like a bubble, larger and larger, before reaching the size of a human head and – POP – it opened.

Crawling from the remains was something similar in appearance to a Flood infection pod. A set of spindly, vine-like limbs, a bulbous body, and a trio of red, sensor stalks emerging from what could have been its mouth. Unlike a normal pod, however, this was not a creature designed for spreading the Flood infection, but one with something like an advanced sensors package. Nothing as capable as what machines could accomplish, but the best of the organic components he had access to.

The pod leapt off the tendril and onto the Star Road, which wrapped gently around its passenger. As it did so, the strands seemed to seal almost like a gelatin of some sort, fully enclosing the tiny Flood form.

And then… they were off.

If the Star Road were any other kind of craft, the Flood form would have been transformed into a paste only a few crushed atoms thick from the sudden acceleration in underwent. Fortunately for the bioform, the Star Road scoffed in the face of something as paltry as 'basic physics'.

In an instant, the Star Road was in orbit. To the sensors he had trained on it, both mechanical and organic, didn't seem to move so much as simply disappear and then reappear. Exactly how it did that, if it was simply moving itself so fast that physical senses couldn't keep up with it or if it was similar to the 'teleportation' he used through Neural Physics, essentially skipping like a stone across the face of the multiverse, Tide couldn't say for sure.

The Star Road was made of starlight or looked to be such, though it quite helpfully seemed to be able to change this. It became virtually invisible for the sake of its passenger.

Relative to Monstrum he'd have been looking down. What he saw only confirmed what he already knew. The world was like a servitor. Dead, but kept functioning by machinery, an entire planet on life support. Across the face of the planet was a sea of black smog. The only island of light was the Barren Lands, scoured into a half-melted desert by the undiluted light of Monstrum's sun, like a brazen, blinded eye looking up into the star's fury. Within that island, three pillars, like claw marks, shined like beacons in the dark. He could certainly see why it received comparisons to the Astronomicon, though he suspected Navigators and anyone else who had seen the real thing would see the three pillars as pale imitations at best. It had been powerful enough to at least flicker through the darkness that smothered it in the Warp, after all. He turned his gaze away from the depressing sight of Monstrum and out into the wider galaxy.

If Tide had still been a human, his breath would have hitched in his throat.

In another life, he had been fond of gazing at the stars. He'd done so only a rare few times since most of his days had been spent within a city or urban areas with large amounts of light pollution. Yet, the rare few times he had been in an area with enough darkness to look up and see the galaxy staring back…

Something that had always struck him was the sheer number of stars. On a night in a city, he'd be lucky to see a dozen or so dim lights, if even that many. Yet, from better viewing points… there had been countless. And not just stars, but nebula as well. Planets if he had planned and shooting stars if he was lucky.

It hadn't prepared him for this.

Thousands of stars, like eyes that glinted in the darkness, stared back at him. Nebula stretched across vast expanses of them. But what he felt was not the awe and wonder he'd felt in his past when going star-gazing, even with this perfect view. Because something else was holding his gaze, something that did not belong.

Stretching across the center of the sky like an ugly scar was a line. It looked almost like a nebula that had been stretched out, but this was no star-maker. Red, purplish-pink, blue, green, and a thousand other hues, many of which should not have existed, pulsed within the open wound. He could feel it more clearly now, like the slow twisting of a knife.

The Cicatrix Maledictum, the rent in the galaxy, in the universe, caused by the Chaos Gods and the fools that worshipped them. It was a malicious grin carved into reality's flesh and he could feel the hunger and insanity between its lips.

Like the sight of a car crash, it was difficult to tear his eyes, in as far as they could be called eyes, away. However, he managed it. He had other things to do. More important things.

His tiny body and the spherical vessel it sailed in moved, freezing to a halt near the space hulk that hung in orbit. He'd never had an outside view of it, save for the occasional glimpse through a telescope from the very height of Malum's spires beyond the black smog. It was easy to forget just how massive even a single vessel of the thing was, even as he was spread across nearly its entirety.

It was a wretched thing, almost egg-shaped. If he'd only had the silhouette to go off of, he'd have thought it was just a particularly ugly asteroid. However, he was less interested in the forest for the moment and more so in the trees themselves.

Slowly, he zigzagged around the hulk, the Star Road purposefully moving slow enough for him to still be able to study it, though their speed was still quite a bit faster than what most spacecraft should have been capable of, not to mention the ability to turn and change directions in an instant.

There were hundreds of ships making up the outer layer. Some looked almost like they had rammed prow-first into the body and it was only the lack of damage around their bodies that allowed him to determine they had been fused with the body like the rest. Several massive engines that were clearly built onto the hulk itself rather than any of its vessels stuck out like sore thumbs, though it would have been easy to mistake the protrusions as just being random scrap bits poking out given the look of their construction and state of disrepair. Ork technology, almost certainly.

He'd tried before to figure out where exactly the Ork command center on the hulk had been. Tide believed he had eventually found it only thanks to the presence of a red button roughly the size of a large dinner platter, labeled in the Ork language as 'Go'. He'd carefully checked everything the button was attached to and found it was simply connected to a box filled with various bits of metal and wire held together by duct tape. He had not pressed it, just in case.

His small body zipped about in its unique vessel. A part of him wondered if he shouldn't make more Star Roads. However, if he did, he would need to concentrate on the task with everything he had and that was something he was hesitant to do again. While he hadn't lost control of anything and nothing bad had happened this time, almost every one of his bodies, including his puppets, had paused in what they were doing.

He wasn't sure what had possessed him to share what he was doing with all the Altered. Part of it hadn't even been intentional. There didn't seem to be any serious repercussions for that just yet, though he was already being asked about it by almost every one of those Altered he had revealed himself too.

He was fortunate enough that the pause in his puppets was masqueraded by the pause in the Altered. He wasn't surprised many were taking it as a religious sign, even if he wasn't overly pleased by it. Vidriov was all but frothing at his non-existent mouth, asking to get access to the Star Road and to bear witness to the next Star Road's creation.

He'd deal with that… later.

Tide noted the most 'whole' vessels, which were only partially fused into the rest of the body. There were three in particular that caught his eye.

The first was a smaller ship, what he recognized as a Sword-class Frigate. Its prow looked like it had slid into a far larger xenos cruiser whose origins he couldn't determine. From the inside, he quickly determined its location and found his way into the frigate with tiny, fly-sized scouts and MOAs. It was pretty easy to determine that the bulk of the ship was intact, if covered in Ork filth and in serious disrepair. It would just be a matter of sawing off the rest of the vessel from the stuck prow and replacing that.

The second was a bulkier craft, a transport of a class he didn't recognize but was unmistakably of Imperial make. It sort of looked like a Sword-class frigate whose prow had been squished inwards, though it was nearly twice the length of the frigate. Unlike the frigate, the transport wasn't buried into the hulk but instead looked almost like it had landed onto it. This was merely an illusion, however, as the transport possessed something like the tailfin of some ancient sailing vessel and it was this that had fused into the space hulk. Like the frigate's prow, he could saw that off and replace it.

Finally, the third and largest vessel was an Imperial cruiser, five kilometers long, far bigger than even the transport. From the memories of one Mechanicus member, he recognized it as a Dictator-class cruiser, one that likely belonged to the Mechanicus given its relatively sparse aesthetics. It looked almost like it had been submerged at an odd angle into the rest of the hulk, only parts of the upper half of its body and the prow able to be seen. It would be far more difficult to get at than the other two ships… but far more lucrative as well, because of the weapon at its prow. Poking out into the void like some menacing blade challenging any who would dare face its wrath was a nova cannon.

Tide didn't consider himself to be a violent person, but even he was a fan of 'Big Gun'.

He'd have to get Vidriov and some other tech-priests up here, once he'd found a way to excavate the vessels. While having them as ships would be immensely beneficial in defending Monstrum from any would-be attackers, not to mention possibly letting him depart the system and allow to begin expanding across the galaxy, there was another reason why he wanted to excavate the ships.

Namely, he wanted the tech-priests to rediscover the technology that went in to make each of the vessels and replicate it for himself. He already had a few vague designs of future vessels he might be able to create, though they wouldn't get further without knowing more. He'd have liked if at least one tech-priest had possessed such knowledge already, but it seemed Monstrum wasn't in great need of starship designers.

Of course, even if he could construct a fleet, the method of travel was another matter. Tide wasn't exactly enthused about the idea of sending his physical forms hurtling through hell, even if his mind was probably safe. The Star Road could grow with time and effort on his part, he knew, but it would be a long time before it'd be able to transport something like a fleet or even an army. And… he didn't like the idea of doing that, as it felt like he was circumventing the Star Road's 'desire' to not be used as a weapon.

Fortunately, his recently expanded awareness had opened a new possibility for him. Or, rather, confirmed an old possibility: Slipspace.

He could definitively state that the eleventh-dimensional space existed within this universe. He wasn't sure how he knew that, how he could sense Slipspace, nor was he sure how he might be able to access it… But that was part of the reason why he'd revealed himself to so many tech-priests.

In an instant, Tide looked through those he'd recently appeared to and found one suitable for the task he had in mind.

Logis Sathar.

Sathar paused in their work, looking up in spite of the fact that they knew no one would be there. It was still strange to them, the idea of having a voice in their head other than their own.

"Tide, did you need something?"

How would you like to discover a new kind of faster-than-light travel?