SheepGoblin - Maidensdeep: Chapter 1
Chapter I
Ysolde… A voice whispered to the tired bonesinger. Her head lifted sluggishly as it took her whole arm to rub and unseal her dark blue eyes. Ysolde! Heed!
"Yes- wait, who are you?" The mind-shout ran through her body like an electric shock. Finally aware, her meditation cut short by who was – at first – an unrecognised, but venerable forefather, whose soul contained itself within the infinity circuit aboard the Fe'iach. Sporting a population of a paltry six thousand Eldar, their wishful mission to scout and secure all maiden worlds still lent them a great many intelligent rangers, even if they had not nearly known war like the more prominent craftworlds did.
I am the farseer they called Kain-rath, a long, nasal sigh escaped the spirit and reached Ysolde's psychic eardrum. After a short, awkward silence, the voice of the ancient soul resounded once again, Thou ought to steel thyself anytime soon, for I have had a vision with you in it.
He continued without care for a response; his presence gave the feel of one who saw the voidship on the day of its own creation. I dreamt. Soon, we will pass a maiden world untouched by all. I know not her name, and I know not her people. But Exodites are good friends to us of the Fe'iach, hence we must to this planet and instil in them a fine companionship between us.
"Do you know in how long this will be, Kain-Rath? Must I ready a new scouting vessel?" Young for the path of bonesinger, but inexperienced as she may be, the one speaking to the dead man – a superior of herself – is psyker enough to pluck entire combat vehicles of wraithbone from the aether.
That, indeed, he said, however, thou hast one more task from thine ancestor.
"I am honoured, Farseer. Pray tell, what do you ask?"
I tire of being dead, of being bound to the craftworld and its wiring. Can I trust thee to, perhaps, raise me to see the natural beauty once more? This was a tall order in a way; especially for a more peaceful minor world, there was hardly a wraithguard raised of any kind, and the motto of safety for the Fe'iach most certainly extended to the integrity of the soul. Slowly, quietly, the dead man sighed once more as his subordinate rolled the thought over.
Raising the dead? I don't know if I can do it, it's sacrilege! she thought. Caught between a rock and a hard place: she was duty-bound both to serve the living and dead; even then, her job as a citizen was to keep their stones interred, therein. No saying what people would think if she flouted the social norm even once on this matter, hell, there's two: for this purpose, that makes the superior her personal, armoured bodyguard.
Speak to me, he requested.
"And so, you're telling me, Bonesinger, that you'd like to bring back to life such an ancient soul – as a bodyguard?" A living farseer asked. His brow contorted as his glare implored that Ysolde choose her next words carefully. He was freakishly tall for his race but filled out his weight with the same fine muscle and sinews; a lowly guardian once, but tenacious – pugnacious – as all hell, he mastered the psionic arts.
They stood in an all-wraithbone room, but both beautiful and bizarre trophies of foreign lands strewn about the chamber betrayed the fact he was less tenacious as he was struggling with his wants and desires: desire for travel; desire for strength; but she knew him. That thirst wouldn't be exactly dangerous, supposing this museum-man was 500 and still not scared of the fate luxury begets. Sickly, sinful spectacles they were not.
"You misheard me, Shar'an," she muttered, "Kain-Rath insists that I resurrect him. He-"
"Can the dead fall ill, fool?"
That is true. Who in their right mind would subject themself to an afterlife inside a war machine? To not be believed – it is only fair, even for her friend.
"I know- You're impossible like this, you know." He expressed a kind of kingly offense, but after one stammer she shut him up again, "How about we go to the Infinity Circuit and speak to him ourselves? Because I do not lie."
You can really get to know someone in fifty years. Same trick every argument, always works. Insult, he fails to come back, 'let's go see who's right ourselves.' Although when she got this far, she brought both a sore loser and a sore winner out of him. Perhaps his respect for the dead might shut him up this time.
He was very cold when it came to conversation, hated smalltalk but obliged himself to, regardless. "So… His name was Kain-Rath, did you say?"
"Yes?"
"Ah. Never heard of him."
They continued, semi-quiet, until they reached the chamber. Others there spoke with their ancestors, their loved ones, and so on. But bonesingers, especially, had a knack for making new friends or speaking to the newly dead. It was strange to be here on almost a whim, as the whole sepulchre of a machine throbbed with psychic energy like a million brains. It only took this long before the placement of nodes in the circuit became haphazard, although for the very first starfaring generations, they would be carefully placed right at the end of the temple-like structure, before filling out to the front.
Indeed, it was a million or so souls coursing through the ship's veins, with just a single aura to sense out of them all. If she could not call upon Kain-Rath now, then she isn't bonesinger material. There was one thing that she could sense, different to most other souls, and it was some sort of distorted feeling; earlier she thought that feeling in the conversation was just nerves, but she guessed it could be anything from his age to chaos corruption. And she tugged at the weird electron of a soul with her mind, like pulling a dog on a leash.
Ysolde. Is thy mind set? His voice carried a faint echo of pixelation. Perhaps ignored or overlooked when he spoke to her last, but that 'illness' concept seemed to have changed the very acoustics of his telepathy inside her cranium.
"Kain… Rath?" Said Shar'an, sheepishly. No figure floated before him, yet he felt the revenant's watchful eyes scrutinise him.
Fellow Farseer? Art thou with Ysolde?
He straightened himself and started talking more like a student to a teacher, "Ahem. She's a friend of mine, yes."
I see – so I understand she hath told you for what I need her.
"She has. But why exactly do you want to subject yourself to – to that?"
Bored of death he may be, Kain-Rath still bumbled when explaining exactly what he meant. Like the very concepts he tried to explain were simply erased from his memory. And it was more serious than a plucky dead man when closer to the stone.
Shar'an experienced the same glitchy, radio-static note in the ghost's voice; soon he and the bonesinger pre-occupied themselves with the state of the wall. Their eyes scaled up snaking psycho-plastic wire, and onto and between the embedded spirit stones that embossed the walls. Commonly seen were thin bone strings cradling the small, jade orbs; however, almost never did any course through the inside.
One lone soulstone buried under and hastily glued with the wraithbone wire. Inconceivable and existentially terrifying. Now knowing that it's entirely possible to survive with a damaged essence of being: how can someone after-live like this? Why did it happen, even? Kain-Rath: frankensteined together after some calamitous death, they believed; so unfortunate, and so, so lucky not all his soul became consumed by She Who Thirsts.
He then revealed himself as a thoughtform, and stopped trying to hide his affliction as some desire or missing part of his psyche. Only shown was his naked upper body, which shimmered as a lime-green light. A crater in his temple, when wounds traversing the other side was a fate of ancient human superstition, rather than what should be pure, psychic electricity.
I was… Ssstruck down… He turned solemn, when once a senile, esteemed self. From what battle, I remember not-t – but my friend…end… She said the enemy tried to shatter me, and in the heat of it all-all, missed a clean blow…
He pointed to the rivers of wraithbone like they were a war veteran's traumatic scars. Ugly as they may be, a fighter of a worse-than-death fate half-admired his own wounds at the least. And a-as you can sssee… She – saved me from being devoured by Chaos-os.
"But how?" Ysolde pleaded, "How can you still float here and say you wish to fight again?"
He had tried to answer this, quite a few times, to them already. Mmmaybe, I lossst… just a part of my sssoul…
Maybe that was true.
He could not rest in peace, and he was unsatisfied. For nine or ten millennia.
"This is different, I feel," Shar'an muttered. "Ordinarily we'd ostracise any necromancy. But this seems less a matter of 'could', and more that we must. Bring him back, I believe it is the right thing to do."
"I'll construct the shell. Are you going back to the trinket-hollow?" She sat down in her meditative position.
"My study? Yes, I'll be waiting." He bowed deeply to the spirit before leaving the way he came. Now the senior farseer and the bonesinger were together, to design Ysolde's personal guard. He still reviled what he let her do, as she clasped her hands and closed her eyes.
The whole process took from a few hours to a whole day of continuous exertion – both passed at around the same rate to Aeldari. Her psychic footprint she released was immense, as micro-tears into the warp produced the magic steel, which she weaved into indomitable chitin. There's no true manual except for the strength of the caster, amorphous psycho-plastic blobs expanded and rapidly hardened as interlocking plates in the terrestrial colour scheme of brown and green. The helmet a kingly, elongated skull, the colour of dew-seeped grass. What cut down the extravagance was the thorns, every outer joint a spindle at its end: assassin's elbows and piercing knees; a long, curved sword in an enclosed hand. Be it humanoid on the outside, every single wraithguard was a martial automaton powered by the will of two minds: the height and stance of a man, made to take down dinosaurs and yet bigger things.
Now the most dangerous part: she gave a weak twist to the wall emerald, surging its protector with psychic impulses until Kain-Rath's soul ejected itself from the circuit. The CPU – the brain of the warp machine – jammed into a groove deep inside the head and part-sealed once again. The energy pulsed through the whole of the machine. Kain-Rath used his wraithsight for the first time and his head creaked to the right posture to face his student and master, Ysolde.
I Tha-tha-thank yyyou… Like a toy with a dying battery. It's exhausting just to get moving again. He was fully aware of his speech impediment, now the words became so garbled on his non-existent tongue. Rather, he silenced himself until he could wish his rehabilitation period a swift goodbye.
She'll keep a close watch on him. Kain-Rath was a rare specimen. So much for being willingly reforged, but now how will the psychic energy react with the cracks and chips themselves? Like a prototype, there's always a chance. That psycho-organic device might explode into a fiery 5D bomb when she least expects it.
In the following weeks, he learned to walk, talk, run, multitask, brawl with fists tougher than tungsten, and do it all without fail. Under command of the bonesinger, a master swordsman; under his own, a grappler of mammoths. He still whirred whenever he uttered anything, as if powered by industrial motors and cogs. However, his prophetic dream elaborated further the closer the ship moored to the source. When Ysolde and Shar'an heard two months remained, when the maiden world finally reflected a spec of its double suns' dim light into their eyes, they rejoiced. Already, they knew the land lay untouched.
Farseer Shar'an took leadership of the scouting mission. To get any similar task past administration is quite easy; it was the discovery of a lifetime to them, every time they discovered something. Food, crew, claiming a spaceship, all menial tasks once he gained the council's approval.
Day by day, the planet grew bluer and bluer. White clouds stirred around a central nexus in the north and south. The two poles were frozen all the way down to 60 latitude, which, of course, was measured from East to West. Interlocked in a binary system where it orbited through and around two young red dwarves.
Closer still, a few days left to prepare. It was a barren, navy blue. Blue, white and only tiny blobs of grey and green. Ocean was almost the entire surface of the planet.
And from a day's trip away, everyday optics allowed them to take interest in the world's finer structures. Tectonic activity was hyperactive, accounting for the deformation planets undergo in elliptical orbits, volcanoes billowed constantly, bubbles causing as many waves as gravity itself. A great wall was also visible from space, a grey viaduct complex that ran rings and branches around the sea. Stonework. Civilization. Half of it fell beneath the tides; still, there is hope abound for that legendary world, untouched.
Only hours were left on the clock before deployment now. Shar'an, Ysolde, Kain-Rath; three rangers, six guardians. The units' determination beat out their aversion to the necromancer and her decayed spirit pal. Not that they'd show disgust to their second-in-command, anyway, in case she decides to atomise somebody to build another.
The small scouting ship, which they soon stepped into, was driven via telekinesis. The craftworld slowed down as it undertook the role of satellite, eagerly awaiting their return in one piece, no matter how long that may be. Then, after one final check of supplies and manpower, the vessel zipped towards its destination at lightning speed. The air ignited around it as it entered the atmosphere, leaving just the last sliver of time left to face horizontally, before landing safely on the flattened side of a damp mountain, in a sopping grey-green hill range, in the middle of wet nowhere, where these twelve astronauts opened their doors at last.
