I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex
Signal
997.M41, Solar Segmentum, Deep Space
They had taken a forgotten symbol of the triumph of science and discovery, and made it into an abomination.
The Disciples of Blessed Numerology had been forced to flee their homeworlds when their Sector-wide conspiracy to use the very architecture of their hives to bring forth a series of Warp Storms had been unmasked by the Ordo Hereticus. After spending the better part of three centuries engineering the civil wars that had left the hives desperately needing rebuilding and infiltrating the great reconstruction projects, all it had taken to bring the Disciples down had been a single Acolyte stumbling upon evidence that someone was blackmailing one of the Administratum officials in charge of the assignment, and it had all unravelled from there.
Most of the sect had been decimated in the following purges, but a not inconsequential number had managed to escape, using the ships of their most wealthy members. They had taken along with them most of their unholy research, as well as the abominable Thinking Engine they had crafted from the brains of their own members whose bodies had reached the end of their natural lifespan.
Despite their exile, the Disciples had kept heart, for as they fled from the Holy Ordos' fury, they had received visions of a great, golden being, that had whispered into their souls secrets far greater than any they had uncovered in their generations of plumbing the depths of sorcery through the forbidden arithmetics of the Empyrean. This being had set them on a quest that would earn them the eternal favor of the Dark Prince, who in their quest for mathematical transcendence of the mundane world the Disciples had served for centuries.
The first of the secrets the Disciples had received as a set of coordinates located within the Solar Segmentum, far from any known star system. Their Navigators hadn't survived the rigors of the journey for long, as they were forced to sail beyond the reach of the Astronomican to avoid detection. When they had died, their souls sucked from their bodies by the nameless horrors of the Primordial Sea, the Disciples had stepped up, using their unholy calculations to divine a path through the eternal storms raging in the depths of the Empyrean.
After years of travel – which left their already threadbare sanity in even worse shape – the Disciples reached their destination, and forced their ships out of the Warp. The brutality with which they did this, in order to be as close to their target as possible, broke their Warp engines beyond all hopes of repair with the resources they had available, leaving them stranded – but they did not care.
For on their auspex, they had found what they had been looking for – the ancient artefact that would help them achieve their golden patron's command.
The object was small, barely a few meters wide. It was an inclined disc, to which were attached devices of inconceivable age. Though the metal had been bathed in cosmic radiation for tens of thousands of years, the faintest trace of letters could be discerned on its base, written in a language that had been dead long before the Emperor had begun His Crusade.
Voyager 1, said those markings.
The Disciples began their work at a frenetic pace. Cladding themselves in void-suits, they built a workshop around the antediluvian device. They could not bring it aboard their ships – it was too old, too frail, and such an action would have undone the very conditions that made it a key part of their patron's designs.
In the cogitator rooms of their becalmed ships, the Disciples calculated the distance between their current position and Sol, using the distant light of the Throneworld to determinate the current and future position of each of the system's spheres. Even as life supports began to shut down, they continued their calculations, transmitting the results to those working directly on the artefact so that they would adjust its position and alignment with their bare, void-bitten hands.
For months, the Disciples worked, constructing an array of unholy technology around the ancient probe. They transformed it into an infernal broadcast engine, mixing the ancient technology – which was, by the standards of the Imperium, incredibly primitive – with the mysteries of Ruinous engineering. Even as their supplies of food, water and even air started to run out, they continued their work, driven beyond fear by the compulsion that devoured their minds, the all-consuming obsessionto see their work reach completion, whatever the cost.
Other Disciples worked on preparing the message that would be broadcast. They contemplated the mysteries of Chaos, piecing together the unholy knowledge bestowed upon them by their patron. Each of the Disciples had been granted a single syllable of the Dark Gods' own dread language, and it was their task to extract this dark truths from the depths of their own shriven souls to combine the fragments into one, terrible whole. They desecrated the bodies of their own dead to force their departed spirits to return in order to interrogate them and recover the fragments that they had received. Through the techniques developed by the sect over the centuries, they pieced together the True Name of one of the Dark Prince's greatest servants, and put it down in a format that could be transmitted across interstellar distances.
And now, at long last, the work was done.
All members of the Blessed Numerology cut their own throats, releasing their souls at the precise moment the device they had crafted unleashed its payload into the void. Their deaths granted additional strength to the transmission, and their souls were welcomed into the Silver Palace, where their rewards awaited them.
Whether those rewards were anything like what they had imagined, none but the Dark Prince would ever know.
The Deep Signal's emission obliterated the device that had broadcast it, shattering the forty-thousand years old relic at its core in the process. The Warp boiled with the power unleashed in this single, focused beam – but so far from any soul, so far from any of the Warp Routes, no one would pick up on it until it was much, much too late.
For eight-hundred and twenty days, the Deep Signal crossed the void, unheard by any soul. Until, carried by the cosmic waves, it hit its intended target : the small planetoid at the edge of the Sol system that, in ages past, human scholars had debated whether it deserved the classification of planet or not. Through the calculations of the Disciples of Blessed Numerology, the Deep Signal had hit the precise point it needed to. Despite the unimaginable distance between Voyager 1 and the frozen orb, thanks to their God-given obsession with mathematical perfection, the Disciples had accomplished their appointed task.
On Pluto, in the pits where the Ninth Legion had battled monsters at the dawn of the Great Crusade, the cultists of the Gifted Tithe sacrificed six-hundred-and-sixty-six newborn to the one they called Glorious. The sheer monstrosity of the deed, which was the culmination of weeks of ritual debaucheries held in secret within the depths of the frozen world, lit a spark in the Aether. That spark drew the Deep Signal to it, and what had only been nightmarish potential became reality.
Flesh ran like wax. The corpses of sacrificed infants melted together, providing the matter from which arose a powerful daemon, brought forth from the Empyrean by its True Name embedded within the Deep Signal. The cultists of the Gifted Tithe were engulfed in the tide of flesh, their souls devoured by that which they had called forth.
And so, the creature that was known in the darkest myths of the Children of Isha as Zerayah, the Song of the Deep, was reborn in all its awful glory. In the sealed records of the Black Library, Zerayah's legend was inscribed in silver letters upon psy-neutral scrolls. According to those records, the being that would become Zerayah actually predated the birth of She-Who-Thirsts, having coalesced into the Empyrean from the narcissism and perversions of a particularly depraved segment of the Eldar Empire. Only when Slaanesh itself had risen from the Fall had the Song of the Deep been brought to heel by the greater Power, forced to submit and assimilate into the Courts of Sensation. By the Dark Prince's awful will, it had been stripped of much of its strength and transformed into one of Slaanesh's Keepers of Secrets – yet even after its diminishment, Zerayah had remained one of that terrible kind's foremost members.
So powerful was Zerayah, in fact, that never had it been brought into the Materium before – never had it been summoned by deluded cultists or unleashed upon a doomed world by a Warp Storm. Yet now, at Light's End, the Song of the Deep would be heard. For such was the will of the Disciples of Blessed Numerology's patron, who had heard the secret of Zerayah's True Name from the very lips of the Profligate One. In Pluto's depths it rose, immense and terrible, opened all of its six mouths wide, and began to sing the song that would end the world.
Zerayah's voice echoed across the tunnels of Pluto, and all who heard it went mad. The whole of Pluto became a kingdom of the lost and the damned, every heartbeat seeing it plunge further and further, ever closer to becoming a fully-fledged daemonworld.
Zerayah sang, and reality screamed under the strain of the Deep Signal's true form. Nearby ships patrolling the Mandeville Point or just arriving into Sol heard the song over vox or into their heads, and they too were lost. Merchant and pilgrim vessels veered off-course toward the frozen world, while aboard them Navigators and psychically sensitive individuals were turned inside out to provide gateways for manifested Neverborn called forth by the Song of the Deep to join in the celebrations.
Zerayah sang, and in the Silver Palace, sat upon a throne fashioned from the souls of its victims, Slaanesh smiled in nostalgia, and hummed along the tune.
AN : To anyone who want to challenge my math : I don't care. I spent entirely too long calculating how far away Voyager 1 would be from the Solar system when I came up with the idea for this Interlude, and I will blame any mistakes on the Warp and the cataclysmic weapons unleashed during the War of the Iron Men.
Well, that took longer than I had planned. I have been busy with work, and my writing got delayed as a result. Thankfully, the next Interlude was done weeks ago, and will be up tomorrow once I have checked it one last time.
Am I escalating with every Interlude ? Perhaps. Should you be worried about what will happen in the last interlude before the actual Angel War ? *Malevolent laughter* Oh, yes !
By the way, this is Interlude number 10. There will be a total of 14 of those, and then I will need to work on the Angel War actual chapter. I fear it's going to be another lengthy one, and I am still thinking about the structure I will use for it. Total length is likely to surpass The Hunt for Cypher - I am over 8k words already, and I haven't even really started. Maybe I will split the Angel War into several chapters but publish them all at once, if only to facilitate reading. I am sure I will only publish it once it's all done, though, because the storyline is going to be quite intricate and I want to be sure to get it right.
That's all for now. Thanks you all for your support, and see you tomorrow !
Next : Tyrant
Zahariel out.