Author's Note: For those interested, there are now eight advance chapters on P-atreon (remove the spaces and dash): p-atreon/ SkySage24.
Iyanden was growing.
Literally and metaphorically.
Isha gently stroked the nascent World Spirit that she had seeded within Iyanden. It was young and not yet fully awakened. It would take a decade more for it to mature.
But it grew well and would be a strong guardian for the Craftworld and its people in time. For now, its benefits were mostly passive, making Iyanden more resilient, and more effectively able to heal from any damage it might take.
Eventually, however, it would be able to directly supplement the strength of Iyanden's people with its own, granting them a measure of protection from Slaanesh as long as they were aboard Iyanden itself. Perhaps even away from Iyanden, if it became strong enough.
And of course, the greatest advantage of the World Spirit was it would be able to absorb and shelter the souls of any Eldar who died upon Iyanden. Indeed, the more souls that entered its keeping, the stronger it would grow.
Yet…part of Isha thought she should accelerate the growth of the World Spirit now. Her children were recovering, but they were still fragile and few. Could they wait decades for the World Spirit to grow?
But she knew that it would be folly. There was a time she could have conjured forth a fully matured World Spirit for Iyanden with a flex of her will, but those days were long past. If she tried to make the Spirit grow too fast given both her state and the state of the Warp, there was the danger of something going wrong, of the Spirit forming into something darker and twisted, perhaps outright corrupted.
For now, all Isha could do was tend to the seed which she had planted and make sure it grew strong.
No matter how much it strained her patience to do so.
Isha pulled away from the growing World Spirit, returning her attention to her walk across Iyanden.
The Craftworld was still rebuilding, but it was doing so well. New trees were being planted and shaped into houses, which stuck out amongst the older crystal architecture. Children ran by, followed at a more sedate pace by their caretakers.
A man was sitting on the branches of his new house, painting something with an easel.
A woman was picking apples from a new tree, filling her basket.
An old couple sat on a bench, simply enjoying each other's presence.
It gladdened Isha's heart to see that she had been able to restore some sense of security and happiness to her children if only a handful of them.
Nobody noticed her as she had cloaked herself in a veil. She was alone, and for the moment, she preferred it.
Most importantly, the Emperor was not here. Oh, she could feel his presence in Sol, a blazing star so obvious no one with any sense of the Sea could have missed it.
But he was not focused on her. Even her avatar on Terra was working in the private farms he had built for her, while the Emperor himself was tending to other matters.
It was not truly a reprieve, because Isha still dared not venture too far from the Emperor for fear of the Gods of Ruin.
But it was better than nothing. A little time to herself to think upon all that she had learned recently, and what she was going to do about it.
Eventually, Isha drifted into a theatre, settling into a seat at the back and smiling as a bard put on a play for an audience of several dozen.
Eldar plays were not the same as human plays, of course. There were no actors, no machines to create effects.
There was only a bard with a harp, but that was enough.
The bard was singing, telling the story of how Eldanesh and Ulthanesh had defeated the Hresh-selain. With every word and strum of his harp, images were conjured in the air, potent illusions depicting the ancient battle. Not merely sight and sound, but also smell, the theatre warping into an ancient desert world with a blue sun beating down on them. Isha could feel the wind in her hair, and the sand beneath her bare feet.
It was as if the heroes and their monsters were present and alive, the audience was sitting on the battlefield itself, invisible to all but very much there.
It wasn't exactly accurate. Eldanesh and Ulthanesh had been dark-haired in that particular reincarnation, not silver-haired. Ulthanesh had been the taller and broader one, and Eldanesh had never worn his hair like that.
And the hresh-selain were hardly the nightmarish foes of old, but rather monsters more palatable to an audience looking for entertainment and reprieve. Isha wondered how her ancient enemies would have reacted to being depicted as four-legged, three-headed mindless monsters that vaguely resembled dogs, and the thought amused her.
Eventually, the play ended and the desert shifted back to being a theatre. The bard bowed on the stage as the audience applauded, Isha joining them with a smile.
The bard was very good, all the more so for having been able to recapture his craft despite how the Birth of Slaanesh had made it difficult for her children to wield their powers.
But as she left the theatre behind, Isha could no longer ignore the worries gnawing at the back of her mind.
The most pressing, of course, was the Emperor's Webway Project. Now that she had some distance from the revelation and the ominous Golden Throne, Isha could not help but wonder if she had overreacted.
She could not assess the status of the Webway without actually venturing into its depths, but if it were so fragile that a single pseudo-Dolmen Gate could topple it, surely Cegorach would have said something in his message? Even the people of Iyanden would likely have noticed something of that sort while they had travelled across the galaxy to find her.
Had she let her fear overcome her, push her to share her secrets with the Emperor too swiftly?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Isha truly did not know how much knowledge of warp tunnelling the Emperor had inherited from the Old One who had died to create him. The mere fact that he had constructed a Warp Gate of any kind suggested it was more than she would like.
And even her most cynical estimates of the Emperor's Webway Project suggested he would be able to pierce into it in a few short centuries at the latest.
A long timespan for humans, perhaps even for the Emperor.
But far, far too soon for Isha to like the idea. She did not bother to delude herself into believing her children would have rebuilt and her full strength would be restored in just a few centuries. The idea was laughable. Rebuilding the Aeldari, especially in such a way as to ensure that her children would not repeat their mistakes, was an endeavour she would be toiling away at for thousands of years to come.
She could not, would not concede the Webway, the last true refuge left to her people, to anyone. Not the Emperor, not the Dark Muses, or the remnants of the pleasure cults.
And of course, that led her to her other problem, Isha mused grimly as she sat down on the wood, leaning against the trunk.
The Blackstone Fortresses.
The Talismans of Vaul.
The greatest and most powerful weapons her brother had ever built.
The Muses of Slaanesh were already on the hunt for them, while Isha was trapped here, unable to leave without the Emperor.
And Isha truly dreaded the idea of telling the Emperor about the Talismans. They were weapons from a bygone age, weapons powerful enough that all six of them combined could make whoever possessed them into a galactic superpower in their own right. They had been built to fight the C'tan, and few of the weapons that had been created for that purpose survived to this day.
Isha still had the authority to control the Blackstone Fortresses. She did not understand them as well as Vaul, but they were programmed to obey her as well.
If she was able to claim all six, she would be in a far better position. She might not even need the Emperor's protection, at least within the Materium, for the Talismans grew exponentially more powerful as they were brought together and synced. She would have a concentration of force sufficient to cow even the most recalcitrant of her children, to shatter the Orks before they become a threat.
But that was precisely why revealing their existence to the Emperor was so dangerous. No doubt he would want them destroyed or he would claim them himself.
The Emperor could not override her authority over the Talismans, but he could keep her from going to them.
Perhaps even destroy them. The Talismans were powerful, with potent defences, but they would have been inactive for a long time, as her children retreated into their decadence. Not to mention any damage the systems would have taken during the Fall.
Isha was confident that the Talismans would be virtually invincible, once they were all together and fully activated, with all systems running at peak capacity.
But dormant, inactive and scattered as they likely were at the moment? There were forces in the galaxy that could break them. It was not easy, but it could be done.
And if anyone could do it, it was the Emperor, the most powerful Incarnate God that still lived.
But at the same time, Isha could not claim the Blackstone Fortresses without his aid.
The goddess ran her hands through her hair as she arrived at the World Tree and began making her way up the branches, wishing desperately once more that anyone else had survived with her, that she had a member of her family she could truly rely on.
Even being in the depths of the Black Library with Cegorach would be better than this. Mad and broken as he might, Isha knew he would never harm her.
Instead, the only surviving member of her family nearby was that thing buried in Iyanden's depths.
Isha had done her best to ignore it, having sealed it as strongly as she could. Yet, she could not silence the shard of her father entirely without destroying it, and that she dared not do.
It was tempting, a thought that had come to her more than once. A small measure of vengeance, of justice for all the pain her father had inflicted on her. She could erase a piece of him from the universe once and for all.
But loathe as she was to admit, the shard might come in useful in the future. As a weapon she could hurl at her enemies in an emergency…or, if all else failed, something she could assimilate for a little more power.
Isha hoped it would never come to that, but she could not discount the possibility.
As if sensing her thoughts, Isha felt the shard pulse, its power straining as it tried to melt through the ice that held it. Scowling, Isha channelled her rage and hate into tightening the bonds, forcing the shard back to sleep.
For a moment, she almost went a step further, using the ice to pierce the shard, to torment it, to make it feel some of the pain she had once felt.
But then Isha gritted her teeth, and pushed her anger down, settling for merely containing the shard.
She would not torture a helpless prisoner who could do nothing to her for no other reason than to indulge her desire to cause pain.
She would not. She was not her father.
Once Isha had a grip on her anger, she sighed wearily as she noticed the streaks of white in her hair, the ice and frost spreading out on the World Tree around. The signs were already fading, but here was yet another cause for concern, the goddess thought morosely as she sat down.
The newest, darkest part of her.
Isha had feared it ever since she had seen the changes in herself when her rage and sorrow had burst when dealing with the Emperor after he had threatened Iyanden.
At first, she had hoped it was merely the Huntress aspect resurging, a little different after being suppressed for so long, but not fundamentally so.
But that was not it. Isha the Huntress could be capricious and vengeful and angry, even cruel. But this was not this.
The wrath of the Huntress was something Isha knew well, and she knew how to handle it, how to channel it. Even when she lost control of it as she almost had over Mars, it did not come with this blinding grief, with this anger that burned cold instead of hot, too deliberate and calculated to be the Huntress.
This despair clawed at her mind and heart even now.
Isha was developing a new Divine Aspect.
It was not entirely surprising. It was true that the Eldar Gods were less bound to their people than most. If they fully reflected the minds and souls of her children, then the Pantheon would have fallen to madness long ago, during the War in Heaven.
And that the Old Ones could not allow. Their weapons needed to be controllable, after all.
Even so, Isha would be lying if she was not grateful for the independence the Old Ones had given them. That independence had both blessing and curse, for it had allowed Khaine to refuse to ever move on from the War, yet it had allowed Isha and her family to remain themselves even as the pleasure cults devoured the Aeldari from the inside out.
But that independence was not absolute or perfect. Great events that sufficiently impacted the cultural psyche of the Eldar, impacted even the gods themselves…they could force the gods to change, even if they might not wish it.
And the Fall was certainly such an event. Her children were shattered, her family devoured and despair had seeded itself deep in the hearts of Isha and all her children.
If any event could force Isha to change against her will, this certainly could.
A new part of her was growing, shaped by the tragedy of the Fall, of the despair that had held her for so long and was not gone yet. Isha did not fully know the shape of this new Aspect, but she knew it was dark and grim, cold in ways that no other aspect of hers was.
But she could not stop it. She could only pray that she would be able to keep control of it.
The ice had melted away, and her hair was fully back to red. Yet, deep within Isha, the darkness still lingered.
Wearily, Isha set the thought aside for now. There was nothing she could do at the moment in any case.
And other matters demanded her attention.
Such as the matter of the Astronomican.
The Emperor's plan to use the psychic beacon to begin carving out a domain in the Immaterium was simple and brilliant in its own right, and Isha had no objections to it, truly. It was the only way to truly fight Chaos on its terms, to reclaim at least some of the Sea of Souls from them.
What bothered Isha was that she could not do the same. To ignite a psychic beacon like the Astronomican would only be exposing herself to Slaanesh.
Unless she and the Emperor powered the Astronomican together. Her power would reduce the strain on him, and his strength would shield her from Slaanesh, compensating for her weakness to the God of Greed.
But to work with the Emperor closely, to bind their power together in such a way…Isha did not know if she could do it. If she could trust him that much.
Yet, there was no other way she could even begin to reclaim her old domains in the Warp, to expand her strength once more. Even if she successfully reunited every last one of her children beneath her banner, Isha's weakness to Slaanesh would remain.
It could not be erased until and unless she achieved a great triumph over Slaanesh, a triumph equal to the defeat that Slaanesh had bestowed upon her by devouring her children and destroying her family.
And the only way to achieve such a triumph was…to bind her and the Emperor's efforts together.
Isha buried her face in her hands. She knew what she had to do, and yet she dreaded it.
But she must.
For her family, for her children. For all the innocents that her children had inflicted ruin and devastation on through their madness. For everyone that was suffering out there at the hands of Chaos even now.
Getting to her feet, Isha steeled herself and mentally began composing the arguments she would need to convince the Emperor that they should power the Astronomican together.