"So, what do you think?" the stranger said as we both stood looking at one of my paintings. It was the eagle painting I had made with genuine 24k gold. The gold alone that had been used in the painting had cost me $50, and I was very depressed that all some tech guy could offer me was $150 and his stupid square business card. I felt disoriented, as if I was waking from a long strange dream. Hastily, I looked around the gallery, and found myself standing next to a blond man in a sharp suit, who stood watching my painting adjacent to me. He was familiar, but I couldn't place where I had seen him. All I knew was that my show wasn't going very well, and being offered that insulting amount of money for that piece was really upsetting.
"I think that I'm screwed, no matter what I do," I said frankly, eyeing the short glass of bourbon in my hands. Before me, my painting began to move, and the eagle began flapping its wings through a shifting, colorful landscape. Electricity danced across its surface, and I knew that I would get hurt if I touched it. This somehow felt normal, and I walked away from my eagle painting to watch the other gallery attendees mingle. If I didn't start selling soon, I was going to lose my apartment. I was very upset at my situation, and felt utterly powerless.
"That's certainly a pessimistic way of thinking," the stranger said as he followed close behind. "I prefer the hope rather than misery. It is a more positive, productive emotion, far more natural to sing in the hearts of humanity than self-indulgent depression."
What the stranger said did not make sense, so I walked over to another one of my paintings. Maybe he would go away if I ignored him? This painting was of a blue jay flying with a string of pearls. It had sold already, so at least that was good.
The blond man in the suit lurked behind me. I could feel his cold breath on my shoulder.
"You know, there are people out there watching you that have been pulling apart your every word, your every action, trying to figure you out. You should be flattered by it. Did you know how exceedingly rare it is for someone like me to contact an individual directly like how I speak with you? I usually work exclusively through proxies, but you're an exception. I like you! I enjoy you much better than Sebastian, that stuffy killjoy."
"I don't want this," I said, looking numbly into my bourbon again. "I never asked for this." The words came from deep within me as sort of a reflex, and I didn't quite know what they meant. I saw a tiny skull briefly bloom within the bourbon, and then, vanish. Hmm.
"Of course you didn't, but it happened anyway. I wouldn't have given you the challenge if I didn't think you could do it. I wouldn't have bent all these events around if I thought you were just some basic bitch. I'm glad to see that you're rising to the challenge of your hopeful quest!"
I sniffed the glass of bourbon, not really hearing what the stranger was talking about. My instincts told me that I shouldn't drink it. What was wrong with it? And who was this guy talking to me? I felt very dizzy and confused.
"Seriously? You've really got a talent for being willfully thick, don't you? Here, I'll give you a hint," the strange man said. He walked alongside the guy who had purchased the blue jay piece, and slapped him on the back of the head. Immediately, the man dissolved into a pile of fleshy eyes and screaming tentacles.
This definitely pulled my attention away from the suspicious bourbon, which vanished from existence from my hand. I went to face the mysterious cold-breathed stranger. As I did this, I blinked, and in that blink, the gallery shattered into dust, and reformed itself into a twisting hallway of jagged cobalt crystal. Long corridors made up of deep marine-blue crystals glittered in an unreal light, and strange shadows danced just beyond my imagination.
Oh, right, Tzeentch's Crystal Labyrinth. What was I doing here? Can't I have one day without a vision? "Hello?" I called out to the empty air as I shook the residual confusion from my mind. Turning around, I took stock of where I was. I had definitely been here before, and I appeared to be standing in the middle of a wide hallway of mirrors that reached off into infinity. The changing cool air smelled like both menthol and chili peppers. This was a bad place for any mortal to be in. "Hey, Tzeentch! Why am I here? What have you done to me?" A large closed gate formed itself before me through a mirror, emblazoned with a stylized image of an eagle with three eyes. It, like the painting I had seen just a moment ago, also began to animate a flying motion. I could also feel a heavy amount of electricity racing through it, and knew that if I touched it, I would burn up. Whatever was behind it was very important.
"What a delightfully fun adventure!" a polyphonic voice called out from everywhere, echoing loudly across the hall. I whirled around, and there he was.
Floating in midair, Tzeentch was idly clapping his pale bluish white hands, and his ever-present smile was twisted and amused. His dark suit, as always, was perfect, and his alien gold eyes shimmered with his normal wicked intelligence. "Good. You're finally getting somewhere. It took Sebastian awhile to figure this all out, and it looks like you and him are both very close in original temperament. Humility is a good moderating factor to the sort of unique crazy power you Travelers generate so you don't burn out too quickly. And to put you in Evanora's sturdy body of interesting heritage was a good move on my behalf too. I chose well, of course. Now you can get along on your proper adventure. Are you ready to start kicking ass, Erika?"
"Why am I here, Tzeentch? Put me back in the Materium!" If I was indeed a holy-aligned psyker of extreme potential strength, I had to stop letting this Chaos power push me around so much. If Sebastian could fight back, I could too! I willed my Corona to pull into existence. Instantly, an aura of pale golden light surrounded me, but it didn't seem to bother the god, who burst into a fit of amused giggles.
"You're just so cute when you're trying to be courageous! This is like watching a kitten trying to scare off a tornado! But, hush! Be not afraid, little Inheritor. Your body is still in the Materium. You just lost consciousness for a moment, and I stole that moment and dragged it out long enough so that we could have this little chat."
"What do you want?"
"A good architect will always enjoy feedback on what he creates, my dear. I, like you, consider myself an artist in that regard. Don't you like getting feedback on the things you paint, and the stories you write? It's the same for me, only I'm a lot more important. I'm a Chaos God, after all."
"You want feedback?" What is this, a fan fiction? Tzeentch wants more comments on all the crazy shit he's putting together? "Uh, its all very realistic?" I muttered. I noticed that my voice sounded odd in this strange place; I almost didn't recognize it.
"Of course it's realistic; reality is realistic. I planned it that way, even the realities that aren't real," he said as he rolled in a lazy somersault in the fluid Warp air. "Well, truthfully, I don't really even need you to tell me directly. I can always hear when you think 'Holy shit, Tzeentch planned all this, wow!' so I definitely know that you're impressed by all of this. What I'd really like to know is if you've been considering my wisdom concerning your future. And, I want to show you something."
The god turned toward the eagle gate, and with a wave of his hand, the gate opened from a crack at its center. I felt myself be pulled along a long white corridor until we reached the large domed room that had contained the Heart of Worlds. Ringing the curved walls of the room, I saw strange black crystals that resonated with time and displacement. They caused the image of this space to shudder violently as if resisting our presence. These crystals were keeping the room under some kind of temporal lock, I knew intuitively. "Irritating," Tzeentch grumbled as he flicked a clawed finger at one of the crystals, causing it to shatter. The room stopped flickering. A rush of watery warm air lashed at my skin, and I was now standing over the broken halves of the artifact that had been an Empire's doom in Sebastian's hands.
"You did this," I said as I turned to the god. I remembered what had happened in this chamber. "You... you did something to Sebastian and distracted him, and pushed him into causing the apocalypse!"
Tzeentch grinned wickedly in self-satisfaction as we floated in the domed room. He pointed an index finger up to his cheek while cocking his head, like he was an anime girl trying to look as cute as possible. "Who? Little ol' me?" the god cackled in mocking innocence. "Sebastian's shadow has been bothering you, hasn't he? And if you saw his little misadventure in genocide on Nubua, maybe you saw..." The Chaos God's face and body shifted and molded like fluid metal, and then, I saw the figure of Sebastian's grinning "wife", which was really just a female version of his male form, but with very long blonde hair that fell about "her" in liquid flames. It made the god look like some kind of alluring Lovecraftian mermaid in this watery blue atmosphere. The alien Chaos woman entity smiled at me. "You like? Do you think this body works better for my vibe? I can keep showing up as this one too. I'm thinking of redoing my image for this next aeon. Being a woman is also rather fun, but my true gender is actually Chaos, if you were curious."
"Get to the point," I said, impatiently crossing my arms. Strangely, I definitely noticed again that my voice was different, and that when I saw my arms move before me, they were thin, long, and ended with hands that had too many fingers with long claws. It was just like my vision in the Warp when I had been pulled out of the Divine Retribution. My body felt wrong.
Tzeentch smiled and shrugged. "Alright, alright, fine..." the god's face glitched back to his male form. "I'm just messing around. Sebastian never could take a joke. Let's have a little talk, my darling little Inheritor, my little lady baby Empress-thing." The Chaos god waved another hand, and I saw the translucent gold shade of a familiar man kneeling over the two broken halves of the Heart. From the motion of his body, it seemed as if he was weeping. Two women in gold masks stood near him, their backs turned in a gesture that suggested that they were shunning him. Tzeentch waved his hand again, and the domed room vanished.
We now floated beside a monstrous throne apparatus of savage psychic metal. A desiccated corpse sat in perpetual agonized death within the gold machine as it caused him great pain. The twisted man within was impossibly alive, impossibly strong, and had an impossibly keen memory of his past transgressions. In all this time, he had never stopped remembering what he had done, and who he was. I could tell that Sebastian had never forgotten the previous scene, and that it was currently assailing him in a nightmare.
Something in the corpse's hollow eyes found me, and recognition sparked within his mind. Before anything could be communicated, Tzeentch floated ahead of my line of sight, blocking my view.
The god motioned to the tortured scene behind me with a rude gesture. "Look at him. Absolutely pathetic. Tsk, tsk. Trying to bend his fate away from what I had already written. If he had only paid me respect, he wouldn't be in his awful situation, in the past and in the now. My point in showing you this is that this is what awaits you if you go against me. As cute as your defiance is now, my patience does have its limits, so be warned. But, for you, since I like you, I've decided to give you a teaser on what awaits you should you continue to please me."
Tzeentch grasped me with a cold hand, and pulled me along back through the mirror hall and away from my vision of the Golden Throne of Terra. He stood me before a mirror which swirled with an inner light as if it was deciding on what to reflect before me. "Look," the god instructed.
I watched the mirror, and instead of seeing myself, I saw a slender creature with six wings as white as if crafted from moonlight. The reflection wasn't clear, and it buzzed in and out of coherence like an old television trying to find a signal, but I could make it out. Two of its hands covered the creature's face in a gesture of either modesty or shame, and it was turned away from me. The three pairs of wings gently held it aloft where it floated, and I could see that on each of its primary flight feathers, a blue mark of Tzeentch was displayed prominently.
"So, what do you think?" the god asked me again. This time, as I saw him speak through the reflection, he did not appear as human. I was now able to discern that the Chaos God was actually holding the figure up by the waist with three pseudopods. A changing blue hand with numerous vicious long claws opened in a gesture of offering before me within the mirror. Shifting eyes and gnashing fanged mouths all asked me this question, and he even lightly shook the figure in his grasp in the mirror as if displaying a doll as a gift to a child.
I felt something on my waist pull and gently shake me, just as the creature in the reflection was jostled. A revelation struck me, and I held up one of my hands.
It was the same hand that the creature in the mirror possessed. I had six white fingers with long claws.
"I can customize it further if you want, but this is what I'm currently thinking. Just keep this in mind, my dear. Make the right choices, and prosper under my eye," Tzeentch said as his eldritch mass of eyes, claws, and mouths began to shift and manipulate themselves back into a more coherent form within the mirror. The figure covering her face began to dissolve into vapor. Watching this was painful, so I turned to the human representation of the god that still stood beside me. He stood smiling, and I saw that he held a white doll figure in his hand that quickly dissolved into nothing with a snap of his fingers.
The message was clear, I felt. Please me, and be immortal. Displease me, and be tormented forever, the god seemed to say.
"And now, I return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress," the god playfully quipped. I felt someone push my back, and I began to fall.
"Woah!" Null said as he caught me with his mechadendrites as I toppled backward. My vision had greyed out, but was rapidly returning to color. Cold sweat began to race across my skin as the tech-priest steadied me. "Are you well?"
Around me, I also saw Lian and Alberich looking at me in concern as I struggled to pull my wits together again. The painting ahead of me was now fully illuminated by Null's light mechadendrite, and I saw that it wasn't actually Tzeentch in his Crystal Labyrinth, but that it was the iconic vintage painting of the Emperor on his Golden Throne done in stylized traditional media. It was another famous illustration that had somehow found its way into this reality. I blinked repeatedly, feeling sick. That last vision definitely felt like a threat. "I'm fine. I'm well. I just had another vision."
Null followed where I was looking, and observed the painting of the Emperor I had fainted beside. "I... suspect that this pyramid may have some Warp-amplifying properties for you to be this dramatically affected. What did you see?"
"The Emperor," I said, telling a half truth. "And I know that the things that can mess with time that you're looking for are behind that sealed eagle door there. The things you want for a stealth field. They're black crystals," I pointed toward the large gate with the three-eyed eagle a short distance away. "We should go through there." I felt nearly incoherent. Bile rose in my throat.
"What specifically did you see?" Null pressed. I could feel a slight tremor through his mechadendrites as they held me, and a slight wind of fear radiated from him like static electricity.
"Not talking about it right now, Null. I can stand, let me go." The tech-priest withdrew his mechadendrites.
I tasted blood on my tongue, and I briefly lowered my mask to spit on the ground as I centered myself. At least I wasn't becoming incapacitated whenever I had a vision, but I was getting tired of being this way. "Let's go, boys," I said, forcefully blunting myself from what Tzeentch had said, pushing it down into my subconscious so that I could deal with it later. Was I going to end up crippled on a Golden Throne if I didn't make him happy? As I walked ahead of my companions toward the gate, I realized that I was already on a golden throne since I was the pilot of the Divine Retribution. Fuck.
Our group stood a few meters ahead of the doorway. Null stepped forward, and began scanning the door with his hand, causing a green light to shine across its metal surface. "Temporal lock, and a powerful ward," he answered with frustration after withdrawing his hand. "I don't really know how to advance past this sort of thing. There's an obvious energetic current moving through the psychically active metal, one connected to some kind of stasis lock. Immense energy moves through this barrier. I will need time to-"
"Oh, come on," I interrupted, rolling my eyes. We needed to get through here, and that was that. Clenching my jaw in anxiety, I walked past the tech-priest, and willed my Corona up again. In my heightened emotional state, I could feel that it was brighter than normal, and its fire lit this expansive area in a warm light. I rolled up my sleeves as I walked ahead of the group.
You want me to go in here, huh Tzeentch? I barked telepathically into the Warp as Null started to yell at me that it was dangerous. If this is trapped, and I die, then I can't entertain you anymore. And if I die, you don't get to see your plans to fruition.
Unexpectedly, the god actually responded to my sass. I felt a delighted sense of amusement. Oh, oh... alright! You got me there! How can I say no to that adorable recklessness I missed seeing from Sebastian so much?
Null continued to warn me, but made no move to stop me as I reached forward to the metal eagle gate. Just before my fingers met the barrier, an electric blue shield surrounded me. When I finally made contact with the surface of the doorway, a wave of fierce explosive energy raced outward. However, I remained completely unharmed. An electrical flash washed over me harmlessly as a shower of multicolored motes of light. At the edge of my psychic hearing, I heard Tzeentch madly giggling.
How I missed this sort of fun! Carry on, Erika!
Behind me, I could feel that most of my companions had been blown back and knocked to the floor, and ahead of me, I sensed that a black time-bending crystal had shattered in the domed room, just like I had witnessed minutes ago. My companions staggered to their feet, and only Lian remained standing, but even he was unbalanced. I could easily now tell that the door no longer held any kind of charge. I turned around to face my crew, who stood stunned. "There," I said, lowering my mask again so that I could spit on the floor. "I fixed it."
The sandy floor below me was blackened, and the faces of my companions were singed. Null's previously mostly clean red robe was now smoking and charred in places. I could sense that he was about to scold me for my impulsiveness, so I ignited my Corona again, and stared him down through my goggles. Immediately, the tech-priest halted his tirade before even uttering a single word. Fear rippled through him.
This was what they wanted, wasn't it? They want someone like this. They want a bully to beat this galaxy into submission! My anger caused my aura to glow even hotter. I felt as if I was broiling. Well, I'll show them!
Erika, calm down! I heard Alberich's voice plead to me in mind as he shielded his eyes. Null was only concerned! Do not hurt him!
I turned away from intimidating Null, and regarded my companions. My Corona was still aflame around my head and shoulders. Okay, yeah, I needed to calm the fuck down. I didn't need to take my personal anger out on people who didn't deserve it. I took a breath, and pulled my halo back within me. "Sorry," I offered as a lukewarm excuse for my outburst. "Still getting the hang of this. It's safe now. The ward has been broken, and we can get through that gate. Watch."
I held out one of my hands, and with a short psychic push, the eagle gate split at its middle, opening outwardly with a groan. I could still smell electricity in the air as I felt wind push through the open entryway, equalizing the pressure between this room and the interior area of the pyramid. I turned around, and beckoned everyone forward to follow me.
Lian was the first to begin proceed, his expression unreadable. He hadn't said a word since confirming me as Inheritor. Alberich followed close behind as he held Valkyrie stiffly, the tips of the feathers on his cheeks singed. Null was last, head bowed as fear raced through his circuits. Wolfie was nowhere to be seen, probably spooked away by me blowing up the gate.
Putting one foot ahead of the other, I began to walk further into the interior of the pyramid where I had seen both a civilization and Sebastian's dreams of passivity die away into dust.