Author's Note: For those interested, there are now eight advance chapters on P-atreon (remove the spaces and dash): p-atreon/ SkySage24.
For nearly ten thousand years, the Ruinous Powers had dominated the Immaterium. Fed by the Gene Wars, the Cybernetic Revolt, the Age of Strife and the Fall of the Eldar Dominion, they grew stronger and stronger, vultures gorging themselves on the pain and misery of a galaxy in flames.
The taint of Chaos spread across the Sea of Souls, no longer a disease but as if the very Sea itself had become the disease. And over almost the entire Sea, the Four Gods of Chaos held sway, their domains vast and unmatched.
Almost.
A handful of places in the Immaterium remained beyond the reach of the Four, held by other forces. The Twin Gods of the Orks continued their endless battle with each other, and not even Khorne dared to broach upon the storm that raged around them.
A select few daemons, bold (or perhaps stupid) enough to seek independence from their masters sought to carve out their own realms, craving ascension to godhood, to be kings and not mere servants.
Most of these upstarts were swiftly dealt with, and punished by the Four for their hubris.
But some, amazingly, survived.
And among these survivors, one domain stood above the rest.
The Forge of Souls.
The Forge stood as a great hub of industry amidst the endless Realms of Chaos. An infernal machine, disciplined and ordered according to its master's will, a stark contrast to the Chaos that surrounded it.
(And if one wonders how and why a Realm of Chaos, even a small one, could be ordered…well, Chaos has always been contradictory at its heart.
Not for nothing have many philosophers questioned whether Chaos truly deserves the name it has chosen for itself, for how predictable and utterly evil it truly is.)
The Forge was a mystery to most, even daemons. Nobody was truly sure what it was. The corrupted remnants of some ancient working of the First Ones? An echo of something that never was, brought into reality by the wars that had once torn asunder the very fabric of time? The corpse of some long-dead god of machinery?
No one knew, save perhaps the Four themselves, and they would not speak of it.
The Forge had remained independent for countless ages, unclaimed by any Chaos God. Once, the Eldar Pantheon had kept the Forge sealed, buried under divine enchantments and guarded by legions of the spirits that served them, but those days were long past.
Now, though the Forge still did not fall under the sway of a Chaos God, it had a new master.
Vashtorr the Arikfane, they called him. A true Daemon King, not merely an upstart seeking to rebel, birthed by the sins of humanity as they discarded all morality and compassion in their relentless pursuit of progress.
Though he was not even ten thousand years old, none could doubt his power and cunning. He had conquered the Forge of Souls after it had stayed independent for millions of years. The Iron War that had brought him into existence had made him strong.
Vashtorr had even clashed with the Anathema himself and survived.
Some whispered that Vashtorr had been but inches away from becoming the Fourth instead of the Dark Prince, that only the Anathema's efforts had denied him, but there was no proof of such things. Neither the Master of the Forge nor the Dark Prince spoke on such matters, nor did there seem to be the enmity between the two that one would have expected if this were true.
Instead, Vashtorr supplied the forces of the Dark Prince as he did any other, taking contracts and building weapons of such horror and terror as to impress even the Youngest God's fickle court.
So it was that Vashtorr survived and thrived, building weapons for all the Four, making himself so indispensable and invaluable, the potential cost of breaking their contrasts to displace him so ruinous that they would rather maintain the status quo instead.
How long this state affairs would last was an open question. The Gods of Chaos were fickle and did not brook rivals. Even if no one could be sure whether or not Vashtorr had nearly become a god, none doubted that he wished to.
That was the very nature of Daemon Kings and had been since the first of them had clawed their way out of the wreckage of the War in Heaven.
At the same time, once bound by a contract, not even gods could break them lightly. Power was not everything.
So for now, the Four seemed content to barter with Vashtorr.
And thus the fires of the Forge remained lit, the great gears continuing to grind away as Vashtor's slaves continued to toil away to build the engines of destruction that their master demanded.
And what of Vashtorr himself?
The Daemon King sat upon his throne and plotted, and waited for his opportunity to come.
Unlike so many of his peers, the Arifkane understood the value of patience. Yes, he had lost to the Anathema, the fool who now called himself the Emperor of Mankind. His opportunity to drink from the well of power built by the Old Ones was gone.
But the Emperor had been too cowardly to drink as deeply from the well as he could have. He had limited himself and sipped only enough to become strong enough that he could delude himself into believing he could win.
But not strong enough to achieve victory.
Mankind remained as it had ever been, driven by greed and curiosity. They had fallen from their heights, but their base instincts had not changed. So many humans still believed in what Vashtorr embodied, in the truth that there was no price too high for progress. Even the Anathema himself was among them, in many ways, for all that he would have denied it.
The Forgeworlds of the Mechanicum, the Olamic Quietude and a thousand other human civilizations continued to feed Vashtorr through their actions, whether they knew it or not.
The servitors in particular were such a delightful cruelty that even the Arikfane could not help but admire them. The sheer scale of them, how the Mechanicum had become dependent on them and inured themselves to the monstrosity of it all, and in doing made his power swell.
And his power would grow in the centuries to come. His greatest rival, Be'lakor, had been slain because of his foolishness, overcome by his greed and impatience as he sought to devour the last goddess of the Eldar.
Vashtorr had no interest in the Goddess of Life, save for the fact that she was his enemy's ally. There were greater paths to godhood than obsessing over the last survivor of a failed pantheon.
No, Vashtorr's ambitions were far greater as he scavenged the graves of the Old Ones, searching for their secrets, hunting for their knowledge. He ripped lost knowledge from primordial daemons, exchanged masterworks with the Four in exchange for scraps and dug into the deepest depths of the Forge he had conquered.
It would all be worth it, in the end.
And in the meantime, as he prepared for his ascension, there were other opportunities to be had. There were mortal civilizations vulnerable to the whispers of Chaos, whom he could corrupt into his service and use to obstruct the Anathema's plans.
But there was a prize even greater than that.
The Anathema's sons were vulnerable, far from their father, and ripe to be moulded and shaped. Many of them had already been claimed for their own by the Four, and those, the Arifkane did not dare touch.
But the destinies of a few were still flexible, still possible for Vashtorr to influence. Normally, the Four would not tolerate even this much of an overreach, but Isha's escape had changed things. Destiny had been changed, and the future was in flux once more.
The Dark Gods had to move earlier than expected, to take measures to ensure their victory. If it strengthened the Forces of Chaos and weakened the Anathema, they would not permit Vashtorr to claim a single one of the Anathema's sons without retribution.
Just one.
Which of them should he select, the Arikfane pondered. The Second, who was destined to be erased from history? The Fourth, who dreamed of building wonders? The Eighteenth, who would craft such terrible weapons in the centuries to come but would be too cowardly to use them?
Which one would be the best tool in his service? Which one would cause the Anathema the most pain?
Vashtorr considered the question for a moment or perhaps for an eternity. He deliberated with the patience of a god yet calculated his odds with the speed of the most advanced supercomputers built by human hands during the Golden Age. The spite of humanity and the cold logic of an Artificial Intelligence blended, leading the Master of the Forge to a single, inescapable conclusion.
Vashtorr smiled as he made his choice.
Soon, the Anathema would regret his weakness.