[hr][u][b]Year: 001.M31

Before the Triumph of Ullanor

During the Meeting of the Primarchs and Representatives

Aboard the Ark Mechanicum [i]Ineffable Artifice[/i]...[/b][/u][hr]

It was not commonly known by the people of the Imperium whether or not the Emperor's Astartes slept or not. The truth of the matter was that they did and that it remained necessary, albeit an Astartes could go for prolonged periods of time without sleep to no observable ill effect, and required little of it whenever they did. Different legions engaged in different practices and regimes, all accounting for this lingering Human need in their own way.

Amongst the Stargazers, the standard shift of duty for the rank Marine was one-hundred and forty-four hours long between active campaigns, with six hours of mandated sleep at the end of each shift. Upon awakening, every marine spent three hours in concerted prayer and meditation at the Mechanicum shrine of their preference. After this period of worship, the Marine would head to the nearest quartermaster and procure their entire proceeding shift's worth of rations, medicinals, and miscellaneous personal materials. The marine would then head to their personal shrine and tend to it for an hour. These could be located anywhere within a ship. Inside of a maintenance duct, a random corridor, by the savior pods, within an engine bay, or in any other conceivable spot where room had been allocated for one. The sight of a personal shrine belonging to a marine of the Stargazers was a common sight aboard the Ordo Astranoma's void craft, and were often utilized for prayer and devotionals by chapter serfs and Tech-Priests alike as they went about their own duties.

Having tended to their personal shrine, the marine would then head directly to the forge. There, they would either study the mysteries of the Omnissiah with the direction and guidance of senior marines, or else modify or build upon their armor, weaponry, or personal bionics. Four hours was dedicated for this purpose, and thereafter another four hours was designated exclusively for testing, calibrating, and fine-tuning those modifications - all for the express purpose of facilitating the high degree of sophisticated and highly personalized bionics, armor, weaponry, and devices present amongst the Stargazers marines. Any time during that period not devoted to technical development and modification was instead focused on combat training and readiness exercises, often to ensure the various devices and technical modifications to them remained viable in various battlefield conditions.

The three hours afterwards was a mandated 'break' period, with the unstated expectation that most marines would spend their time uplinked with cogitator banks, delving into and researching the secrets of the Omnissiah - though the actual activities pursued by the individual marine during this period were neither strictly defined nor stringently enforced beyond that suggested course of activity.

At the conclusion of that period, the marine would then spend another mandated hour tending to their personal shrine once more. Thereafter, they would begin a four-hour long regime of patrols across their assigned ship, during which time they would assist the chapter-serfs, servitors, and Tech-Priests of the Ordo Astranoma with basic, routine, and essential maintenance and repair routines across the breadth of their ship. The marine would then convene with between four and six others of their brothers, usually accommodating one or two superior officers, and they would engage in a two-hour long, cogitator assisted devotional. At the devotional's conclusion, the marine would dedicate another two hours to combat drills and exercises, typically with the same group of marines in order to foster personal relationships and to form strong personal bonds between the marines of the legion.

This cycle of activities would then repeat anew from the beginning with another three hours of prayer and meditation, with six cycles in total comprising the standard shift, broken up by the mandated six hours of sleep. 

A more frequently speculated-upon topic amongst Imperial citizens was whether the [i]Primarchs[/i] themselves, slept. If, indeed, there was any mortal foible or failing exhibited by their flesh and faculties. Augor Asten, Primarch of the twelfth legion of the Emperor's Space Marines, did not know if the other Primarchs slept. What he imagined was that for them, it was likely wholly unnecessary, and for him at least the practice was a difficult one. His mind, much like the minds of all the other Primarchs as he imagined they all must have been made, operated tens of thousands of times more swiftly than even the most heavily augmented Human brain. Even a Tech-Priest that had crossed the Crux Mechanicum and had replaced significant chunks of their cerebrum with bionics could not think so quickly and across such a breadth of topics as a Primarch. Even a vat-grown Sicarian Praetor, perhaps the equal of an Astartes in most ways and with their very brain-matter being designed from their conception to grow as patterned neuronal circuitry, was utterly eclipsed in its otherwise nearly peerless cognitive capabilities by the immaculate genius embodied in the potency of the minds of the Primarchs.

The very notion of sleep was therefore a curious one to even contemplate, let alone practice. How did one willfully [i]stop[/i], cease all conscious thought, when the body did not tire as a normal Human might? The brain of a Primarch did not even excrete the same hormones and proteins necessary to induce a natural sleep cycle, and the brain structures that modulated such a process were either absent or had been replaced. It was, simply, something they had not been made to do. If anything, it was a function that had been largely excised from their capabilities. 

Augor Astren, however, differed from many of the other Primarchs. Being a member of the Mechanicum, he had necessarily indulged in a great breadth of heavily invasive bionic augmentation. His mind, designed by the Omnissiah himself, was far too empyrean and ineffable in its superiority to dare to blemish with anything save the most cursory and externalized of augmentations that would augment or amplify its potency without interfering with it. With other aspects of his body, Augor had more freely cut away his god-given flesh to replace with the cold and adamant perfection of adamantium alloy. For though even his flesh itself was harder and more resilient than battle-steel, even it had limits. The Emperor, knowing this well, had intended the bodies of the Primarchs to act in concert and be augmented with personalized armor rather than relying wholly on the sheer, divine resilience he had infused within their skin. So it was only logical to replace parts of even that hallowed flesh with the strongest of substances ever forged by man, to make the flesh itself an armor beyond reckoning.

Amongst the many benefits Augor Asten derived from the invasive modifications and bionics that wound throughout his body was the ability to focus and canalize the body itself to serve a single thought, a single route of contemplation. The mind of a Primarch could already focus down and unto a single line of thought with conscious effort, capable of obliterating tangled knots of the paradoxical and impossible that would occupy the greatest minds of Humanity for decades in a mere instant, so long as the Primarch in question had the requisite knowledge and temperament to examine the problem creatively. Yet even such focus had its limits. A Primarch had to consciously direct such focus, mentally constrain the flow of thought in their minds to think this way. Some would even shut down the functions of their own bodies to facilitate such focus, and that as well took conscious effort to keep the body in a perfect state of equilibrium while the mind honed and narrowed itself down to a perfect immaculate point, a single epiphanic star of rationality and perfect clarity, only lightly fettered by the penumbral veil of the subconscious mind and the need to continue living. Hypothetically, the Primarchs could cast aside even those limits, and willfully lobotomize themselves and abandon the static equilibrium of the body to attain an even more perfect and singularly brilliant instant of transcendental thought - but it would be just and only that. A moment, followed immediately thereafter by deterioration, entropy, perhaps even death depending on how far they attempted to take that single moment.

Augor Asten had sidestepped this necessity by externalizing the need to maintain the equilibrium of his body into surgically installed bionic devices, mediated by cogitator cores with their own neuronal circuitry to take up the reins, if only for a time, of the subconscious effort needed to do so and to act as a guide for the focused mind. 

Such a method was not perfect and did not work for long. Even the most sophisticated cogitator cores and bionics could not hold aloft the might of a Primarch's physiology utterly abandoned by the mind on their own, such was the immaculate genius of the Omnissiah's design that no form of artifice yet devised was sufficient to sustain it. They could allow Augor Astren to step beyond the pall of death and deterioration to achieve, if only for a few fleeting seconds, a state of truly unbound mental clarity and comprehension condensed into a single channel of raw and unfettered veracity. Augor imagined it to be a fractional glimpse of what the Omnissiah himself was capable of.

Such a state was not lightly entered, however. To do so always entailed the risk of the bionics failing, or of some other unforeseen complication emerging. It was a practice he approached methodically and carefully, always setting aside several hours that afforded him the ability to slowly and thoroughly shut down and redirect every fiber of his being, one sinew at a time, to that state of elevated thought. It was almost like dying, so he imagined - and so Mercaerath had commented during the few times he had been permitted to watch over the Primarch as he underwent the process. Mercaerath even referred to it outright as a death trance. Its uses were also limited - there were few actual practical problems that necessitated such a drastic exercise to unravel, and few philosophical notions or ideals with speculative answers worth the effort. Likewise, while in the trance, it was only possible to think of a single thing at once. Rather than accessing the knowledge of the mind as necessary to consider the topic, it was more as if all facets and motes of the being were considered simultaneously in reflection of that solitary subject. 

In more than a century of having practiced the technique, Augor Astren had discovered only a few objects of interest worth entering the trance to contemplate. Fewer still, that merited repeat visitation. Some of them had been unraveled and mastered immediately. Some, though, had proven to remain beyond even the outermost boundaries of comprehension by a Primarch in such a mental state. They required repeated trances, the Primarch accumulating additional insight into the object each time, the trance always rebuilding upon the knowledge gained from previous attempts to eventually pierce through all barriers to true comprehension. Only two objects of thought remained that Augor Astren deigned to still be worth the practice.

The Barrier, and The Cube.

Neither of which Augor had revisited in some time. In the wake of the conquest of the Ullanor System and in the days preceding the Triumph itself however, he found himself with little else to devote his time to. The Campaigns in the near future he already intended to wage were planned. The artifice of his armor, his weapons, and his bionics already incorporated his own latest improvements upon the latest of innovations to have been relayed through the Great Transmat Link of the High Altar of Technology. In his own judgement, he had already dealt with all the matters concerning the management of the legion that would benefit most from his personal involvement - leaving the rest to his most trusted senior aides and staff. To interfere further would cause their own gradual growth and improvement to stagnate, however slightly. Though there were a number of administrative and formal matters he could have hypothetically attended to upon Ullanor Prime - such as the meeting of the Primarchs that had been convened at the request of Micholi Vakrain - Augor Asten could not be bothered. The matters that would be discussed there had little if anything to do with the Ordo Astranoma and he imagined the other Primarchs and agents of the Omnissiah's Imperium could manage well enough on their own[sup]1[/sup].

[sub][sup]1[/sup] An assessment that proved to be tremendously wrong.[/sub]

So as the Primarchs met upon Ullanor Prime, Augor Asten remained aboard his personal flagship, the Ark Mechanicum [i]Ineffable Artifice[/i], at the periphery of the Ullanor System near the edges of the original wall of battle the Ordo Astranoma's macroclade fleets had formed upon arriving in the system. He had shut himself within his personal quarters with orders not to be disturbed under any circumstance, with Mercaerath standing by to handle any matters that would otherwise have demanded Augor's personal attention. Under the Primarch's personnel schedule, the four-hour span of time had been marked off simply with 'sleeping.'

It had seemed as good a label as anything else.

Nearly three hours had passed, and Augor was preparing to enter the deepest possible state of the trance. The Primarch sat stiffly upon his control-throne, adorned only in simple Martian robes, foregoing his power armor and servo-harness for the sake of the trance. His blind, empty eye-sockets gazed into oblivion as his breathing continued to gradually slow. The myriad cogitator banks Augor had linked himself with via a wreath of cabling hanging about his chest all began to shine with a dazzling constellation of lights, their frames already insulated so as to reduce their sound emission as much as possible. They, the rest of the room, and the entirety of the material plane began to fall away.

Now came the moment, in the space between the self and unfettered epiphany, to decide what he would be thinking about.

The Barrier stood as the single greatest mystery Augor had ever contemplated. He had discovered it within the depths of his thoughts more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when contemplating the defeat he and his legion had suffered during the Rangdan Campaign. He had spent decades compiling the raw data that had been recovered from the numerous pict-recordings and cogitator-archived machine spirit whispers. Decades spent questioning members of the IA who had participated and survived, examining shipping records and manifests, the logs and reported minutes of various staff meetings. All for the purpose of attempting to divine - something. Anything. Whether such an end could have been averted. Whether it meant anything. Whether anything would come of the losses and shame suffered that day.

Whether anything would come of more than a hundred thousand Astartes cast like dice into the uncaring jaws of a ravenous beast.

The trance had its limitations. He could not unravel a mystery that had no answer due to insufficient data, or in which he did not understand the subject being contemplated. After several fearsome and accomplished campaigns and the gathering of sufficient information, he was convinced he had everything he needed. Year after year this deeply-held conviction redoubled, but every time he attempted to contemplate the matter, he was stopped just short at the final threshold before the unclouded truth.

Barred from absolution, vindication, by the Barrier.

A Barrier thrown across not only his mind, but seemingly space itself as well - crossing, as far as he could tell, the full breadth of the galaxy. From the heart of Terra and far beyond the reach of the Astronomican, which had been when Augor had realized it was not a construct of his father's making. This was something else. Something primordial. Whenever he touched upon the force that obstructed him, it pulsed with evident pangs of resonance. Four distinct timbres of power and flowing current that threw themselves across his vision like bars across the stars. Even with repeated visitations and trances, comprehension of the Barrier's true nature eluded him. It seemed to defy the unsullied clarity of thought the trance bestowed - in fact, it always seemed to evoke a wellspring of emotional upheaval within Augor that he scarcely experienced otherwise. Rage. Hunger. Euphoria. Doubt. Some sensations he was already intimately familiar with - others which were completely foreign until that moment. Always, they seemed to call to something within Augor himself. Something unrealized or forgotten, thought the notion was absurd in light of the comprehension embodied in the trance. A Primarch could not forget anything.

Augor had last contemplated that turbulent and mysterious force more than a year ago, and he suspected he had not encompassed enough experience and knowledge to make any substantial progress on that front. Instead, he turned his mind to the Cube. As that decision was reached, the world dropped away, and Augor was left in the veracious void of his own mind, lain barren and refracted through a fractal, infinite palace of mirrors, all that he was turned inwards and upon the object of his contemplation. 

The Black Cube was over somewhat under a third of a meter in length across each axis. Large and cumbersome to a baseline Human, but the perfect size for him or another Primarch to grip in a single hand. Its body was wrought from a glassy black stone that shimmered with a dusken, iridescent sheen in a lit environment. The corners of the cube were capped with prong-shaped triangular points of pure, pitch-stained adamantium. One face of the cube was engraved with the cut of an eight-pointed star, its four cardinal extremities extending across the edges of the cube and running along the four adjacent faces, all terminating and leaving the single blank face upon the rear. The cube was denser than it appeared, weighing four fifths of a ton.  

It has been recovered during the Nurthene Campaign. It had been in the possession of Human Cultists who refused to submit to the Imperial Truth. They had been so desperate to resist the forced Compliance of their people that they had unveiled the weapon in a final bid of desperation. Intercepted communications and orders between their command elements revealed that it was a weapon of untold, portentous destructive might. One that operated upon curious principles. There were no mechanisms, no spirits, no circuitry or compartments within it - it was solid, seamless stone throughout. 

The Nurthene had believed that had they activated it, the entire planet would have been destroyed, and that he, the Primarch and his Legion alike, would have perished in untold anguish. They had also believed that the only fashion in which the cube could be activated was through blood sacrifice. Their final gambit had been an attempt to bait the Stargazers into a full-out assault on the last bastion of the Nurthene rebels, and to use the ensuing slaughter to awaken the forces within the esoteric artifact. A gambit which, due to intercepted intelligence, the Stargazers had not entertained. A cordon had been established around the bastion to prevent the rebels from escaping, and the site had then been stasis-bombed from orbit. Though the fighting that had transpired up until that point had been cursory, the limited augur readings of the interior of the fortress had shown a mounting surge in ambient radiation, and when the cube had been retrieved from within the stasis field the surrounding atmosphere had been suffused with anomalous and exotic, diffuse energies. There had been nothing else within its secure chamber to explain how it might have been powered. No control throne, no cogitators or activation runes, scarcely any devices save the lighting. Yet somehow, it had been beginning to do...something.

With every contemplation of the Cube Augor had indulged in, the more he became certain the Nurthene Rebels had been correct in their beliefs, sick and twisted as they had been. The Cube was a weapon. Some arcane, alien weapon of unknown function. Moreover, the rebels had also been correct in their belief that the cube would have destroyed the planet - and of more imperative interest, they had also been correct that it would have killed even him. Heretech, that was rightly sealed away within the depths of the [i]Ineffable Artifice[/i]'s black vaults. To study Heretech with the desire to replicate it was heresy, but Augor hoped that the underlying principles themselves, once understood, could be achieved through more mundane and cleaner methods that would be approved of by the Synod of Mars. Abstract, scientific principles divorced wholly from unclear xenos form. 

All of his being collapsed inwards upon the contemplation of the Cube. All that was within him considered it. The latest discoveries and reports from dark and void regions of space the Stargazers explored, the most recent imagery and depictions of cultist iconography from myriad worlds, the templates and secrets of recovered archeotech and heretech alike compared and considered.

And there, the first glimmering of insight bloomed. The Three Swords of Laer. Entrusted to the Macroclade Fleets and Malagra Dinwright by the Night Watch. The sickening forms of the xenos weapons had seethed with barely contained warp energies that Augor could sense from the moment they had been brought aboard the [i]Ineffable Artifice[/i]. He had personally overseen the interment of the sickening Heretech within the Black Vaults, and all that his mind had perceived of the blades then turned what he could discern of them to the purpose of contemplating the Cube.

The Blades had whispered to him. According to reports, any Adept who lay hand upon the blades were overcome with violent and indiscriminate fugue, attacking friend and foe alike and becoming overborne with inhuman vigor and monstrous strength. Weapons of this nature had been found before, and though the Mechanicum and the Ordo Astranoma's reports on them were light on descriptive details for fear of perpetrating Techno-Heresy, enough had been observed simply by frequency of encounters for observers to determine that such weaponry was commonly [i]aspected[/i] in some fashion, with common themes and perils shared between them - and generally, the cultists and traitors who wielded the weapons when finally lain low and interrogated claimed that the implements spoke to them.

And somehow, the murmurs that had emanated from the blades when Augor had gazed upon them with his sightless hollows had revealed a new facet of the Black Cube's true nature.

The Cube had not always been as it was now. It had originally been made as a weapon of war by an ancient, now extinct xenos species, and from there it had then been tainted, corrupted, and altered through deliberate exposure to the energies and vagaries of the warp. Much like the three Laeran Blades themselves had been. The Blades also reacted to each other with a resonance, a resonance that within certain distances could be used to locate more of them. Useless at interstellar ranges, but might have proven useful on Laer itself hd the Prefecture Magisterium not ordered the Exterminatus of the planet.

This knowledge, turned and refocused upon the Cube, revealed a similar quality. The Black Cube bore a resonant form of energy. Unlike the Laeran Blades however, the Cube pulsed with an eminent intensity that held true across immense distances. It was then that Augor knew: The Black Cube was not unique. There were more of them...

Augor sucked in a breath reflexively as the trance ended and his bionics mediated control over his bodily functions back to his unconscious mind. Slowly, he turned his sightless gaze towards the floor and looked blindly down, down - into the belly of the ship, at the exact spot where the Black Cube was contained inside a Null Box within the Black Vaults. It was impossible to discern what form of resonance the Cube had without removing it...

Just as soon as the thought came, Augor dismissed it. Down that road lay only madness and betrayal. The Black Cube would never know the outside of the vaults again.

...And that beside, even without knowing the exact characteristics of the Black Cube's resonant energies, he had witnessed it before and contemplated it long and often enough to be able to at least formulate a number of guesses. Augor rose from his dais and made for his chamber's foyers, his purpose now clear. However many more of the Cubes existed in the galaxy, they could not be permitted to remain outside of Imperial control. Locating and containing them would be added to the Ordo Astranoma's foremost priorities. His honor guard fell into step behind him as he left his chambers and made way for the nearest conveyor shaft, already sending advance notice of his intent via vox after a brief instruction Augor wordlessly conveyed to them with his impulse unit. 

Twenty minutes of navigating the interior of the massive Ark Mechanicum later, Augor and his guards arrived at an area of the ship that might have been considered unusual aboard any Voidship outside of the Mechanicum: The Extreme Range Deep Space Augur Manifold. A rare instance of a passive augur system tasked with the singularly challenging task of passively listening for distant places and objects of note, rather than most of the warfare-oriented active augur systems that screamed high-powered energy emissions in every direction to forcibly reveal everything nearby. The Manifold was colloquially referred to as 'The Lump' by the crew, as the device itself was little more than a solid block of exotic alloy with delicate interlaced relays, which acted as the primary receptor for the augur's passive scanning array. The Lump was larger than most Imperial Knights, suspended in the midst of a massive hangar dedicated solely to its maintenance and servicing. The crew charged with servicing it had been momentarily dismissed from the chamber to convene in a nearby shrine for an unscheduled devotional while their seneschal and overseeing Tech-Priest waited to address the Primarch personally.

It was a practice Augor had grown to prefer when it came to dealing with the Legion Serfs and Mechanicum personnel who crewed the ship. It was inefficient and time-intensive for them all to break from their tasks to offer distracting praise and worship to him wherever he went, but would have been improper decorum and upset most of them to insist on more subdued behavior. The obvious compromise being to clear the paths and chambers the Primarch moved through aboard the ship in advance of his arrival, usually in the form of the impromptu and unscheduled devotional, breakfast, inspection, and even the occasional outright early break.

Which still left their superiors to contend with.

"Glory and reverence unto you, hallowed and honored child of the Omnissiah. To be blessed by the unmatched joy of your presence in our humble shrine of knowledge is a most divine endowment beyond what we deserve-" The Tech-Priest, a junior Magos by the name of Mykidrios who had likely cursed their assignment to the augur manifold as a punishment in the first place, went on, bowing deeply and repeatly, raising and lowering their arms as they went. Besides them, the seneschal for the legion serfs who worked alongside the minor Tech-Priests within the section was prostrate on the floor, audibly chanting a semi-incoherent canticle to serve as a backdrop to the Magos' praise.

Augor entertained the lavish exultations of the Tech-Priest for nearly a minute and a half before identifying what was (probably) a full grammatical stop in their speech to raise a single hand in a placatory gesture and bring the Magos to a halt, even as the seneschal continued to chant aloud beside them.

"Magos, a new priority task for you and your staff has been divined." Augor began with a practiced, cultivated intonation acquired over a century of talking graciously down to people. "This matter is, in fact, to be listed amongst the greatest priorities your staff are to be entrusted with. It is of such import that I will be tasking a number of other Ark Mechanicums in other Macroclade Fleets to assist in the endeavor. I will hereby be charging you with not only overseeing this task, but with coordinating the Magos serving as your counterparts aboard these other vessels. You shall be their direct superior in this matter, and I will arrange for a new cogitator archive to be assigned to your staff for the purposes of facilitating this project."

The Magos' reaction was nothing short of rapturous, falling to their knees beside the seneschal and launching into a full-blown sermon of adulation vocalized entirely in the sharp, static hiss of Lingua-Technis. Augor carried on, gauging that the tech-priest was now sufficiently overwhelmed with adoration to feel any ire at being interrupted.

"The task is of a particularly sensitive nature, and as such I will be assigning additional permanent guards to your section. Members of the Prefecture Magisterium will also be making regular check-ins with you and your staff - this is not a punitive, and merely a precautionary measure due to the risks that will be entailed."

The Magos seemed to deflate at that, finally breaking off their sermonizing to stare blankly up at Augor. The seneschal had likewise stopped canting and was aiming a conflicted, confused expression up at the Primarch.

"Risks, most righteous champion?" The Magos inquired. "May I beseech you to impart upon this humble servant what sort of risks my staff and I might expect to encounter in performing this task?"

"None that you are not already aware of. The same variety of risks that come from monitoring warp storms and the furthest reaches of void regions beyond the light of the Astronomican." Augor offered in a conciliatory tone. "I have every confidence that your usual precautions and measures against the adverse effects of monitoring such realms will serve you ably in the performance of this task as well. Consider the additional security of an honorary nature, for rest assured, you and yours will be performing the work of the Omnissiah."

That endorsement caused the Magos to swell in confidence once more. "A most vaunted benefaction, oh beneficent Primarch! Pray tell, if it pleases you to say, what task do you require of us, and what other Arks shall I be coordinating with?"

"As to your second question, I am not certain offhand. I am not personally familiar with the specifications of every Ark Mechanicum within the Ordo Astranoma's Macroclade Fleets." Augor indicated with a genial wave. "Likely they will be whichever vessels possess manifolds or augur systems equivalent or similar to this one here. I have seen enough of them to know they are not as common as one would think. As to your first question," He gestured for the Magos and the seneschal to rise as he walked around them. "Come. I will be personally configuring signature parameters. You will be looking for geodesic perturbations coinciding with the presence of ambient exotic radiation..."

Several hours of discussion later, Augor left the manifold chamber and abruptly stopped in his tracks as he received a priority alert via vox. Communications had received a priority message directly from the [i]Fearful Symmetry[/i], the Ark Mechanicum of Archmagos Rarnet - the seniormost Tech-Priest presently within the Ullanor system short of Augor and Mercaerath. Though unexpectedly, the message was not from the Archmagos.

It was from none other than Usriel - the Primarch of the Nineteenth Legion.