[center][h1]The Horror Beneath Carcinus[/h1][/center]
[b]Year: 001.M31[/b]
[b]The Homeworld of the Primarch Sarghaul, Carcinus[/b]
[b]Eiohsa izva Bronakavh[/b]
[b]Legio IX "Abyssal Lurkers"[/b]
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[img]https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/original/13/137381/2877369-soma_ocean.jpg[/img]
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With a shudder and a groan, the atmospheric transport pried itself from the floor of the hangar and lazily drifted out of the hauler's cavernous belly. It was an old, worn craft, crumpled like a carelessly abandoned piece of parchment on the outside and stinking of rust and moldy wood on the inside. Its engines sounded like they were about to give out in a whimper at any moment, and the whole metallic carcass creaked ominously as it plunged into the skies below, faintly warping in those corners where the outer insulation had grown threadbare dozens of entries ago. Yet it held together, whether thanks to the rugged strength of its construction or the little gilded icon that the pilot, in superstitious defiance of the Truth revealed to mankind, insisted on keeping in the cargo hold's most remote corner.

There was a resounding clang as the transport landed on firm soil, accompanied by a chorus of piteous wails from the battered craft. The sound of voices came from outside, an exchange of shouts which quickly descended to a distant murmur. The by now familiar speech of the Calixian haulers mingled with a new accent, a stream of long, drawn-out vowels punctuated by alternatingly explosive, hissing and guttural sounds.

Someone stepped into the dark hold, stumbled over one of the lower crates with a curse, then walked over to the rear doors and forced them open with an almost recalcitrant grinding noise. Fresh air streamed in, smelling of warm earth and sea, and with it a ray of blinding, unmerciful daylight - the dusty, brackish welcome of Carcinian summer. The day outside was clear and scorchingly hot, as though a vast crystalline focus had been placed beneath the planet's gleaming golden star. Faint, wraithlike clouds drifted far away in the distance, where the sound of rushing waves whispered from beyond a jagged line of squat sharp-leaved trees and aromatic shrubs. The landing pad was a rough square of dry earth surrounded by greenery, with only one side of the natural fence cut open by an unpaved road leading away towards a cluster of plain white buildings.

A young woman stood in the opening of the hauler, stretching her limbs in the glaring rays of the sun. She was of a tanned complexion, dark eyes scanning every inch of her surroundings with purpose, and dark hair that cascaded down her shoulders. She looked every bit the image of a Carcinian native - save for her clothing. Unmistakably clad in the attire of an offworlder, she needed to find some local clothing to blend in, in order for her mission to go successfully.

Eiohsa took a deep breath, allowing herself a moment of relaxation after the long trip across the galaxy, stowed away in hiding. It was not something she was accustomed to - or ever wished to become accustomed to. Hiding sat ill with her, and she would have far preferred to confront this world head on. 

She snuck away from the hauler, doing her best to mingle with the crowd milling about the vessel. They were locals, with dusky skin and brightly coloured, coarse work clothes hanging baggily about their frames. No one paid her much heed, as just at that moment an alarmed murmur spread among them: “Governor’s coming!”

A group of four figures was approaching the landing pad, their size and the pace of their steps so incongruous with each other as to seem surreal at first glance. At their head was a short man, almost a head below his closer companions, hurrying ahead with a twitchy, impatient gait. His attire, though fine and well-tailored, was clearly trying to be sumptuous beyond its means: a relatively sober black silk ensemble was surmounted by an exaggerated, almost comically wide ruff around the neck, and his broad-brimmed hat was set with a green feather as long as his arm. The green kid gloves and rakish short cape behind his shoulders only added to the grotesquerie of this miserly display of excess. The face under the bobbing cap was thin and clearly aged, but fresh and combative, with sharp eyes over a hawkish nose and a slender mouth that looked ever ready to either curl into a sneer or break into a malignant smile.

The two following at his heels were far less striking. They wore carapace armour painted green and black, the colours matching those of their leader’s clothing, with visored helmets and regulation lasguns slung over their shoulders. Though the upper halves of their heads were hidden, their exposed jaws looked poorly shaved and far too pale to be Carcinus natives. One of them was smoking a drooping lho-stick.

The final shape loomed over the rest even as it lumbered in their tracks. It was a hulking ogryn, considerably fatter and burlier even than what was common among its gigantic kind. Its torso had been forced into an oversized version of the armour worn by the soldiers, but even its magnified proportions struggled to enclose the mass of lumpy sunburnt flesh. Arms like tree trunks erupted from beneath its shoulder guards, and where its abdominal plates ended a distended paunch wobbled outwards, barely contained at its base by a belt made from the grey hide of some huge sea creature. A monstrous ripper shotgun dangled from a bandolier at its side, as superfluous as any weapon would have seemed on the person of such a brute. The ogryn’s face was graced with a protruding lower jaw, crowned by an overgrown yellow tooth jutting out like a tusk, which gave it a peculiar look of dull ferocity.

The dockers recoiled as the short man stormed into their midst and cast an imperious glance about the pad and the craft’s interior.

“Well? What’s this? Was this scheduled?” His voice was unapologetically loud, snapping, as one could have expected from his features. The local Low Gothic rolled fluently in his mouth, but was overshadowed by a sour, grating accent.

“For the fields, Don Salluste,” the foreman ventured, shrinking more under the dignitary’s onslaught rather than the ogryn’s towering presence, “From the paper last fortnight.”

“Yes, yes, [i]the fields[/i],” Salluste scrunched his face without so much as looking his way, taking on a mock-lamentous tone, “I have nothing better to think about all day than some baubles you’re getting for [i]the fields[/i]. I keep this whole sorry planet spinning on my old shoulders, and you ingrates expect me to know about [i]the fields[/i]. What next, will you expect me to hold your hands while you till them?”

The murmuring crowd parted as Salluste and his cohorts made their way to the transport. Some had already begun to haul out the crates, but they were stopped by a gesture from the dignitary.

“Hold on, we’ll make order here,” he poked his predatory nose into the cargo bay and began to point almost haphazardly into the darkness, “That and that are for you, and that, that, that, and also that are for me…”

“Don Salluste!” one woman close to him exclaimed, “The town they’re setting up on Iirdna island, they’ll starve without this! What’s it good for to you?”

“I’ll sell it to them!” Salluste replied impassively, “If they need it so badly, they’ll pay well for it.”

“Pay with what?!” the crowd around the challenger parted, giving Eiohsa a better view of her. She was young, solidly built, and could have been beautiful even under her plain clothing were she not already worn by years of heavy labour. “They barely had a harvest this year and the sea’s full of lurkers, they haven’t two bones to scrape together!”

“Then I’ll make them pay double!” the governor grinned, “The poor are made to be very poor and the rich to be very rich, so there!”

The woman and a few others around her clenched their fists and seemed about to lunge at him, but a grunt from the massive ogryn stopped them in their tracks. The soldier who was smoking the lho-stick tossed it to the ground and emphatically ground it under his boot.

“What is it to you?” Salluste finally turned to look directly at the woman. She swallowed, but kept her fists closed and held the gaze of his glinting eyes.

“I’m from Iirdna. Came over the sea to make sure we take what we need.”

As she forced the words out of her throat, a man about her age, but a good deal leaner - he clearly had been eating poorly for some time - stepped forth from the group at her back and laid a calloused hand on her shoulder, as if to lighten the burden of Salluste’s prying gaze. She did not react in any visible way, but Eiohsa’s psychic acumen could feel a grateful warmth surging within her.

“Is that so?” the governor said at length, a mask of wicked desire spreading over his features. “Well, let it never be said that Marquis Salluste Leopold des Bazan-Saroyan is second to anyone in generosity, nay beneficence! I will cut the price by half, just for a small favour. Come along!”

With astounding swiftness and strength for his unassuming frame, he snatched the woman by her arm and roughly pulled her over. Her companion started after her, but Salluste made a grimace, and the ogryn lazily raised a hand and prodded the man in the chest with a finger, sending him sprawling on his back. He raised himself in time to see the woman shoot him a resigned glance before lowering her eyes as the two soldiers began to jostle her along. His shoulders slumped, and he remained sitting dejectedly where he was.

“Not you, you wouldn’t make the cut,” Salluste chastised him, wagging a gloved finger, before irately turning back to the staring crowd. “Well, what are you looking at?” he snapped, “Get on with unloading the goods, the way I said! If anyone lays a finger on my share I will have the lot of you flogged!” With a sweep of his cape, he spun about to leave the scene, but abruptly stopped still as his eyes fixated on Eiohsa’s figure at the edge of the clearing.

As she watched the scene unfold in silence, a feeling of utter revulsion crept over her with every passing second. To merely stand and watch mutely, to allow this to happen before her eyes, grated against every instinct she held, every noble aspiration she had held herself to through the years. This man, this [i]thing[/i] in the guise of one, looked upon his own people with the rapacious hunger of a predator among sheep. Disgust at what she felt roiled within her, as did the urge to strike out and wipe him from this plane where he stood.

But she remained still, unmoving and unblinking. Eyes hard with burning hatred, she tried to shunt out the impressions he left upon her mind - it was imperative that she remain focused on her task at hand. 

But as his gaze swept over her she felt it return with full force. Predatory hunger alighted upon her and roamed across her body. Surprise at the unfamiliar sight of her raiments. Germs of anger at this newcomer for not approaching to pay due tribute. [i]Hunger[/i] - it was greater than some carnal craving to use the young people of his world for his own pleasure. It was bestial, feral - a starving beast that prowled among his own people, looking for the choicest cuts of meat to indulge in.

As his eyes met her, she remained still and silent, meeting his eyes that roamed across her hungrily with her own expression of purest revulsion.

“Who’s that over there?” Salluste pointed. The loaders around him shrugged. In a few trotting steps, he was before her, piercing eyes boring into her face from beneath his hat. “Where are you from? You don’t look like one of ours, not with that.” He gestured at her clothing, which looked starkly out of place outside the belly of a voidship.

“I am.” She replied. “Not all from this world are bound to it. I left years ago on a ship - much like this one.” She folded her arms, looking him up and down in turn. “I didn’t want to spend my life working some field. I’m sure you’ll agree, lord, that to turn down opportunity like that? I would have been a fool.” She gestured to herself. “And I was right! I’ve done well enough I came back to bring my family with me! Worry not - I can compensate you for your loss.” She forced a smile as she spoke, the tongue of Carcinus coming easily to her.

“Can you now?” Salluste arched an eyebrow. There was a note of suspicion in his voice, but he did not give it further course. “A bit of it goes by itself, you’ll have to catch up with the settlement tax… Your family is from these islands here, yes?”

She nodded. “Naturally. I left some fifty three years ago, now?” She grinned, “Rejuvenant treatments are a powerful thing! I barely feel a day older than I left. I know that those I left are surely gone - but even so those who live there now are still my family. I’d like to take them.” She gestured to a pouch on her hip, “I can cover whatever cost you need. If you could direct me to… whoever it is I need to speak to, for that? My humble apologies for taking up your time, lord.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” the governor crooned, his eyes lighting up at the sight of the nicely rounded satchel, “I will sort it all personally. We’re simple people around here, you know. Eh! Rejuvenat truly does work wonders. Come along, come along, we’ll see to it right away.”

He began to turn, beckoning for Eiohsa to follow him - and in a blink, with that same preternatural speed, his hand darted and pinched her appraisingly below the belt. In another blink he was already scurrying off with a sly smirk, the guards with their captive and the ogryn already on the path leading away from the pad.

Reflexively, she recoiled away from his touch, grimacing at the man. With a sidelong glance at those who surrounded her, and not wishing to cause a scene, she desisted from striking him in retaliation. And there was that… inexplicable speed again. That hunger with how his eyes prowled across her. It disturbed her - there was an inhuman wrongness that pervaded everything about the man, some alien touch that lingered on his person. 

“Very well, then.” She forced herself to say, walking along in line with the other woman he had chosen.

The bare path through the stunty trees and tropical brush was not a long one, and soon the shining buildings were fully in sight. A small, but tasteful white-plastered mansion dominated from amid a carefully curated garden, lush with bright red and orange trumpet-flowers, with a pristine squat barracks not far away. A handful of figures in green and black uniform were milling about its entrance. On the other side of the road, a cluster of humble wooden houses, evidently belonging to the more well-to-do townsfolk, spread out in the direction of the distant ocean, growing increasingly poorer and barer the further they were from the governor’s demesne.

The group strode past the closest gate in the garden fence, previdently wide enough to accommodate the ogryn, and traversed a pathway paved in a mosaic of small polished stones and mollusk shells to the mansion’s doors. Salluste effortlessly pushed the heavy wooden panels open, ushering the group into an ample, well-illuminated hall with pale yellow walls. The Carcinian woman, who had kept a sullen silence along the way, raised her eyes and gave a scream as she stepped into the building, leaping back and ramming into the gut of the huge abhuman as he was struggling to fit through the portal.

Straight ahead, under the balcony of a converging stairway that ascended to the upper floors, a monstrous mass of spiny carapace loomed, scythelike pincers large enough to snap a person in half held menacingly open.

“Hah-hah! Recognize it?” Salluste chuckled, as the ogryn impatiently forced the woman ahead with a shove that nearly threw her face first to the floor, “Don’t worry, this one is dead. A gift from our illustrious patrons! They told me it was a true veteran who killed many hundreds of humanity’s foes. How’s that for you, eh?”

“A lurker,” the woman whispered to Eiohsa’s ear as she straightened herself, “A real plague around here. This must’ve been a servant of the [i]deep children[/i], Don Salluste made a pact with them.”

Eiohsa nodded, feeling her mind flooded with the terror the woman had felt at first sight of the thing. “I am familiar with them.” She said in turn, her tone hushed, but unable to conceal the distaste for the monstrous thing that loomed over them. “I had hoped that when I came home I would not need to see one. They are… as horrible as I remember.”

Trotting ahead of them, Salluste nonchalantly took his hat off and tossed it onto a chair. His head was mostly bald, but he was much younger than he had seemed from beneath the shadow of the brim, mature yet well within his prime. He opened a white door in the left wall and hurried the women through before shutting it, leaving the soldiers and the ogryn out in the hall.

The chamber the governor and his guests found themselves in was a good deal darker, being illuminated only by a narrow window set high in the wall. There was nothing within, not even a carpet, besides a simple wooden cot standing beside the entrance - and no other doors.

Without wasting time, Salluste began to undress. He snapped the ruffle collar open and laid it on the cot, then the cape, then the gloves, revealing crooked hands with hideously overgrown and filthy nails. Then he unbuttoned his black sleeved waistcoat and cast it off behind his shoulders in a grandiose motion that thrust his chest forward. Although he was manifestly in perfect physical shape for his age, the sight of his torso was a repellent one: a wide dark stain spread over the skin on his ribcage, scabby and rigid in a way that was nauseously reminiscent of insectile chitin. At the very center of this blemish lay a pendant of bone-grey stone, fashioned in the shape of an ornamental scarab and hanging from the governor’s neck by a thin silver chain. Unsettlingly enough, though the chain was plenty long, the jewel did not budge from its spot, as though it was glued to the diseased skin below.

The islander woman stared in mute disgust at the mark on Salluste’s chest, and thus she was caught entirely off-guard when he leapt upon her with tremendous vigour. They tumbled to the floor, the governor on top, the woman barely managing to avoid hitting her head. She tried to bring her hands up over her chest in vain resistance, but her eyes widened in surprise when Salluste ignored her motion entirely and clasped his gnarly fingers around her throat. Surprise turned to horror as he opened his mouth, wide, wider than a human jaw had any right to be. Though no true physical change had come over it, the creature crouched on top of her like an incubus was no longer the sneering, choleric nobleman she had addressed on the landing pad, but a nightmare of ripping nails, burning eyes and that mouth, a mouth that seemed to swallow the whole room into an abyss ringed with monstrously sharp teeth.

The feeling of the consciousness - of the soul of a man, no matter how twisted, being overridden by whatever strange alien works had twisted his body was a deeply repulsive one. It was as though some vile thing older than humanity itself welled up from within him, consuming him, enveloping his being and warping him into the horror that now crouched poised to devour the woman beneath him. Despite herself, a wriggling worm of eldritch horror planted itself in her mind at the sensations that assaulted her mind, and she retched, staining the floor beneath her as she fell to one knee. 

This would not do. She looked up at the thing, Warp lightning crackling in eerie blue streaks between the fingers of the disguised primarch as she stood, appalled at what played out before her. This world… nothing was right about it. Nothing was as it seemed within Carcinus. The thing that wore the skin of a man hunched over its would-be victim, the gaping maw of nightmarish teeth and the rending claws. She had come to the world to stay hidden, to infiltrate it and to uncover the truth of what horrors she had been told of. But she could not stand by and watch - the blue glow grew as she prepared to incinerate the thing before her - but before she could, she sensed the approach of another. One of the Ninth Legion approached within the hall, the odious mindset of one of the Astartes from the depths of Carcinus unmistakable. 

Swiftly, she changed her tact, summoning her strength and rushing forward to body slam the thing off of the islander woman. “Off of her!” She bellowed with as much volume as the lungs of a mortal woman could muster. “Get off of her you monster!” She grabbed the woman, pulling her to her feet and towards the heavy doors of the chamber. The aberration turned to her with a hissing screech and grasped at her shoulder, its nails tearing through her clothes and into her skin beneath.

The door slammed open, and the dull face of the ogryn guard peered in. The creature sprang to its feet, and all of a sudden the monster was gone. There was only Don Salluste, who winced in irritation and snapped at the intruder, “What? What now?!”

“Duh, big man’s here,” the ogryn mumbled in a cavernous voice, “Blue one.”

“Ah, [i]peste[/i]! He just had to come right now!” Salluste bounded over to the cot and began to pull on his waistcoat. Without stopping to button it any further than needed to cover the deformity on his chest, he slipped on his gloves and hurried out of the room. “Watch these two!” was the last the women heard from him before he slammed the door shut and his footsteps skittered away into the hall.

Eiohsa waited scarcely a second before she turned to the islander woman - Alethia, her name was, checking her over for injuries. To her relief, what little there was was superficial and would heal quickly. She felt no serious pain from the woman, only pure terror and confusion. She knew she had been seconds from a grisly death, and she stared blankly back at Eiohsa. 

“We need to leave.” Eiohsa whispered to her, pulling her to her feet. “I cannot yet, but you need to leave. Now.” She looked up towards the Ogryn standing out of the room, extending a finger towards him as she plucked the memories from the feeble mind within, twisting them within her grasp before she snuffed them from existence. “He will not see us.” She whispered, more urgently. “I do not know what is wrong with your planet, Alethia. But I intend to find out. Hear me now - whatever has corrupted your world will be brought to light.” She turned towards the hallway, pulling her along with her. “And certainly, I will not be leaving you here for that thing to devour.”

She stole down the hallway, turning around once to re-wipe the ogryn’s memory, before pulling Alethia to the side and into a small room. “Wait here, I will return for you. No harm will come to you, you have my word.”

The woman could only nod, evidently too stunned by what had transpired in the previous few minutes to so much as open her mouth.

Eiohsa nodded, giving her a brief pat on the shoulder before she left the room, ensuring it was locked from within before she crept down the hallway towards the signatures of the governor - the alien presence having retreated within him once more - and the Abyssal Lurker who had interrupted him.

She took a deep breath, before her form shifted around her, shrinking down to a tiny, miniscule creature that scuttled with supernatural speed along the floor towards its destination. She positioned herself in a small corner, out of sight, and listened.

“...in order,” Salluste was saying in a querulous voice, “I told you people that Major Juvier is your contact for the aspirant tithes, why do you keep coming here?”

“The Major is surveying the orbital stations this month,” an inhumanly deep voice, distorted by a heavy metallic helmet, replied, “You said so yourself.”

“Ah, yes, yes,” the governor’s tone grew irritated, anxious to sweep away his misstep, “So he is. Well, remember to ask him next time. That will be all.”

“Another matter,” the inhuman voice flatly interrupted, “The implantation stock.”

“That is not for me either!” Salluste became plaintive again, “Sergeant Moetz is the one you want! He was the one going around, gathering up all those orphans. Fie, but what a waste. Give them a few more years and they would have been paying taxes, good taxes…”

“The administration will be compensated as necessary.”

“Not for me, I tell you that’s not for me, take that to Moetz! He will know what to do with it all.”

“Then it will be done.”

There was the scraping of a chair against the floor, and the closest door opened. Salluste hurried out and up the stairway, still buttoning the ends of his waistcoat as he went. Behind him, twisting sideways to fit through the doorway, trudged a towering figure, encased in deep blue power armour like a crustacean in its shell. An Umbra-pattern bolter was clamped to its hip, alongside a combat knife that could have easily passed for a shortsword in lesser hands. The giant swept the hall with the inexpressive gaze of its helmet’s aquamarine eye-slit, the ogryn standing guard at the opposite end raising a clumsy military salute as it did, and strode out the door in long, perfectly even steps.

Eiohsa did not know the full context of what she had heard, did not understand the specifics of what it was that the Abyssal Lurker and the governor had spoken of - but she had heard enough. Enough to know that she would have to follow him, and descend to the depths of Carcinus herself. 

Silently, still in the disguised form of a small creature, she followed behind him, keeping pace with the giant’s stride as she darted from cover to cover, waiting for the opportune moment to strike, when nobody could see.

She followed him out from the mansion and towards the oceans from which he must have come. Scurrying between rocks and foliage to keep herself concealed, her mind raced over the possible meanings of what she had overheard within the mansion. Implantation stock? Orphans being taken for such? A picture of the atrocities that must surely be taking place beneath the waves of Carcinus began to form within her mind, a picture she prayed desperately would not come to pass. To think that even Sarghaul could order such things, or tolerate them, was difficult to believe. Indeed, had she not stood in the presence of her daughter’s twisted form herself, she would scarcely have believed that such horrors were possible at all.

They were nearing the beach now. The vast, imposing sea lapped gently against the beaches of the island. Shores of fine, gravelly sand, dunes crowned with hardy grass and flowering thorns, stretched on to the horizon just as did the endless oceans of the world. To many it would have been a beautiful sight - but to one who grew to adulthood knowing only the twisting confines of the underhive, it remained ever a perplexing and baffling experience. That the Ninth Legion might choose to base themselves beneath it, deep within the crushing pressures of the depths, was more baffling by far. 

With a glance about her, she was satisfied that they were well and truly alone. None would witness what was to unfold.

The Abyssal Lurker ahead of her suddenly halted in his tracks, frozen in place as if caught in still image. No matter how hard he would strain or fight against it, he was powerless against the sudden, inexplicable force that held him motionless in place. 

Behind him, Eiohsa stood, returning to the form of a mortal woman she had taken on as a guise on this island. She walked around to the front of him, feeling his muscles straining and quivering against her psychic grasp. Try as he might, with the incredible power of Astartes muscle and power armor, strength that could lift small vehicles was powerless against the diminutive woman who stood before him, watching him with an expression of purest loathing. She raised her hand, and the clasps and seals that held his helmet in place on his armor began to release themselves one by one, water gushing out over his body as they did, until at last the bald, bleached head of the man beneath was revealed as his helmet fell from him. His face was that of a statue, blank and stolid, ageless.

A dull thud sounded as she forced him down, kneeling before her. Every fiber of her being was filled with the stale, oppressive sense of [i]emptiness[/i] she felt from the man. Her lip curled in distaste, before she placed her palm upon the clammy, warm skin of her prey. 

Memories flashed through her mind as she ripped them from his. There was nothing before implantation. A blank void that gave nothing and held nothing. Like most of the Legion, the man had been stripped of his identity, reshaped into yet another one of the nightmare spawn of Carcinus. The trials of the Abyssal Lurkers. Wandering through the depths of Carcinus, mapping its forbidden undersea landscapes. Wars with scores of monstrous foes that blended together in an amorphous, bristling cacophony. Flashing teeth and claws. The light of alien weapons gleaming through the dark as the Abyssal spawn tore them asunder with claw and bolter. Hearing of the conflict upon Pyotrskov. The arrival of prisoners of the Sixteenth Legion. Eiohsa’s breath caught in her throat, and she drew back temporarily, steadying herself.

The sight of her Daughters, broken, drugged, treated like mere animals, was a harsh one to bear. Golden tears spilled upon the sandy ground as she turned her eyes away from the stunned Astartes before her. The blood that oozed from wounds that would never heal. Hollow, tortured eyes. Many of them already showed signs of experimentation. Others showed the fresh wounds from geneseed extraction performed en-route...

She suppressed a sob, before turning back to the man before her, forcing her hand back to his forehead as she tore through his mind once more. Imagery flashed before her with lightning speed now as she ripped his being apart inch by inch. Flashing imagery of the warped frames of the daughters of the sixteenth. Foreboding catacombs of despair beneath the waves. Horrors beyond horror. Warped, crablike monstrosities that begged for death from Sisters who could not deliver them. Dissections upon medical tables. The tapering of supply, and the sudden influx of new test material. Orphaned girls from the surface taken in cages and forcibly implanted with the Sixteenth’s geneseed. Forced into the forms of Astartes, and then forced into the same experimentations as those who had become sisters. Her daughters. Cruel vivisections. Experimentation for inexplicable designs. The limits of human sanity and capacity for cruel discovery pushed to the breaking point. The smell of viscera and decay that permeated, mixed with the heady stench of utter, raw despair. The rows and rows of cages holding the men and women who had become Infestus, some of whom still retained a glimmer of cognizance and incoherently begged for death. Begged for the Emperor’s [i]true[/i] Space Marines who would deliver them from this nightmare.

Eiohsa collapsed to her knees, weeping. Before her knelt the catatonic form of what had been an Astartes. She did not know how long she lay upon the sands, but it seemed to her as though the time stretched on ad infinitum. How could she have allowed this to happen? Her daughters - following her orders, fighting for her ideals. Forced into this horror? This fate worse than death? How horribly she had failed them.

At length, however, she rose. Unsteady on her feet, she refocused her eyes, red from tears, on the thing before her. She set to work, stripping him of his armor and stashing it where it could not be found. The husk that remained she killed with a simple movement of her hand, severing the arteries that fed his brain. The body was destroyed, rendered into a fine paste of meat and bone that she cast into the sea to be devoured by the things of Carcinus. 

With a final shudder, she turned from the grisly scene - she would need to infiltrate the headquarters of the Ninth Legion itself. That much was evident. But first, she would need to rescue the islander woman - Alethia - from the governor’s mansion, and ensure she would leave the planet with her. 

She crept silently back into the mansion in the guise of a mouse once more, making her way to the room she had left her in. Within she still felt the terrified presence of Alethia. Not wishing to risk detection before absolutely necessary, she crept beneath it in the same guise of a mouse, before returning to the same form she knew her by, raising a hand pre-emptively to silence any sound she might make. The woman stared at her with painfully wide eyes and made a quick sign with her left hand, but her mouth remained shut.

Eiohsa nodded gratefully. “I can explain fully. Every single question you have, and more, I will answer to the best of my abilities and more as soon as I can.” She cast her senses around her, feeling for anyone nearby - and sensing none. “But that must wait. I have a mission ahead of me, deep beneath the ocean. You will gather your family and whoever you wish to take with you from this world. Follow me.”

She stood, unlocking the door and pulling the terrified woman along behind her as she once more crept from the mansion and into the warm air of Carcinus. They slipped past a few soldiers idling about, whose heads would turn at the perfect moment to miss their approach, stole through the sparse groups of locals who ventured out in the afternoon sun, until arriving near the landing pads of what passed for the capital’s starport. 

Eiohsa pressed a purse filled with currency into the hands of Alethia. “Like I said. Everyone you want off this world. Meet me here tonight. I cannot risk being found. Tell nobody of what you have seen. Only that great fortune has befallen you and you can leave for a better life, understand?”

“It’ll have to do,” the woman finally managed in a husk of her voice, before quickly nodding in gratitude and disappearing along the path that led to the clearing. 

As she watched her go, Eiohsa silently whispered a traditional prayer for safe passage beneath her breath, before turning to face the oceans of Carcinus once more.

[hr]

The island chain did not lie upon a single bank, but emerged from the waves of the boundless global ocean in sparse order, as the highest peaks of some immense antediluvian mountain chain whose slopes had never once seen the light of day in the world’s history. While few could have seen this from the surface, it became increasingly apparent as one stepped into the waters and waded away from the shore with the heavy feet of a bottom-dweller. The seafloor dropped sharply down in a series of narrow terraces, each longer than the last. Clumps of meaty algae clung to the sunken mountainside like alpine shrubs, sinking into a myriad cracks in the stony surface, and tall thickets of swaying reedy seaweed rose from the sand that had accumulated on the more even stretches.

All around, the ocean teemed with life. Every gently undulating stalk crawled with small carapaced shapes, almost invisible until stirred by a sudden current, or else almost provocatorily colourful in venomous tones. Every unsettled grain of sand seemed to reveal a segmented worm creeping along on dozens of hooked legs, or a cheerfully bright sea-slug, or a burrowing dome-shaped rock tick. Imposing spires of coral growth swarmed with a myriad self-contained miniature ecosystems. Clouds of shimmering plankton drifted overhead, festooned with garlands of needle-like silvery creatures frozen at an odd intersection between fish and mollusk. Huge, placid nautiloids sailed by like small moons crossing a starless sky. Indistinct shadows that could have been many times larger yet flitted by far in the distance now and again, and the jagged silhouettes of charybdes clambered up sheer inclines without regard for the blind drop below.

The form of an Astartes was always a strange one to take on, especially one not of her own blood. Somewhere between human and Primarch, a peculiar middle ground belonging to neither and existing as its own, distinct, unnatural aberration. The body of a man or woman changed for the purest pursuit of war. Shaped into a living weapon, an instrument of conquest. The body of a Primarch was a warrior, surely - but just as with humanity itself it was so much more. The Astartes were weapons, many like the Ninth wiped of all thought or memory that did not serve such a task. The unfamiliar skin of the Abyssal Lurker was as alien as the living fossils that surrounded her in the forbidden, shadowed depths of Carcinus. In this foreign body, filled fresh with the memories of a foreign mind, she was but one more supervenient insect crawling through the depths ignorant of what timeless horrors might lurk out of sight.

Wading ever deeper along the ocean floor, every step a struggle against the watery immensity, she could faintly sense, guiding her way, a growing signature of… souls. Deep within these frigid, stygian waters, she had held some subconscious notion that there could not truly be a fortress for the entire Legion. That these ancient, hostile waters would crush any impudent enough to think themselves fit to challenge its mastery. That the simple resource cost to produce such an edifice would dissuade them, and result in its construction occurring on land. 

But, then, perhaps practicality was not the approach to take in regards to the Abyssal Lurkers.

Her mind swam with the horrific images she had ripped from the mind of the Lurker on land. Some part of her denied that it could be true. That not only could Astartes inflict such horrors on another, but that a human could do such to another living being at all. She knew, objectively, this to be fool’s thoughts. But she had lived her life in accordance with the values of mercy, understanding, peace, and prosperity. Those inclinations towards cruelty she had felt through life - her own and those of others - filled her soul with a green mire of disgust. 

Upon Kayaamat, as she had studied, she had felt the completion of her soul in her hours of quiet contemplation. It was her duty to safeguard and to defend. To enlighten. To build up. Upon Terra, as she had studied, she had felt the Emperor’s impositions grating against her. It was to be her duty to subjugate and conquer. To destroy. To annihilate. She had warred within herself at this conflict, and had concluded the Emperor was both right and wrong. She would subjugate and conquer that she might safeguard and defend. She would destroy those who threatened enlightenment. She would annihilate those who sought to tear down what she had built up and what she would build up. In service to humanity and to all Good souls whose fate lay within the golden Empyrean, would she live her life. 

And then she had met her Brothers. Fools, brutes, living weapons, or some combination of the three. Only a spare few among them had seen her for what she was. She had dreamed of knowing her Sisters - and known none of them until the trauma of the Rangdan had stolen the light from life. She had dreamed of knowing her siblings, the 19 other children of the Emperor - only to be met with barbarism. But none could surpass the Tartarean, the dreaded behemoth. Was he truly a Primarch, she had wondered, or some cruel facsimile clad in the skin of one, dredged up from the eldritch, menacing depths of long lost nightmare Carcinus. To be near him filled her with disgust and dread. To know of his word moreso. What ancient secrets lost to all but the most dreadful and dark of fevered dreams spoken of in elegiac Remembrances filled these waters? What further cruelties awaited the lost members of her Legion, beyond the horrors of human evil, could this infinite vastness steeped in long forgotten demoniac energies bring? 

Her path, half-glimpsed along the rim of the descending sandy banks, half-reconstructed from the Lurker’s reflexive memory, far vaguer than true recollection, wound down along the side of the mountain and across what must have been a wide plateau stretching out away from the island and towards the open sea. Though covered in a shroud of creaking sand and millenary pulverized shells, the elevated rocky plain was far from even. Small hills and gulches cast fragments of oily shadow like black stains in the otherwise clear water. Lesser peaks broke past its surface here and there, stillborn islands that had failed to break free of the ocean’s crushing grasp.

Time flowed strangely in this silent world. It could have been little more than an hour, or perhaps several, when the visible path came to a clear divergence. One branch seemed to wind up the side of the closest colossal natural pillar, disappearing somewhere behind its bend, while the other plunged into a shallow crevice, surmounted by an irregular roof of jutting rock spurs. Most disorientingly, the already indistinct memory trail grew badly blurred here, and the spiritual beacon of the sunken fortress was yet too distant to clearly indicate a choice. Only a suggestion of deepening stripes of shadow seemed to hint that the second pathway may have been the right one.

Eiohsa spared but a moment to analyze the paths, the sudden divergence from the norm jarring her from the fugue that had been slowly building within her mind over time. She did not know how long she had been wandering within the catacombs of epochs past. The miasma of the deep permeated everything, and even to a Primarch these alien waters were horrible and forbidding. 

She looked around through the murky waters of the deep, before setting off down the second path, picking her way gingerly through the crevice ahead. The yawning maw of jagged stone and eons old fossils enveloped her, and she continued on towards the fortress.

The crevice steadily deepened and widened into a gulch, then eventually into a small valley. The path was left clinging to one of its sharply sloping sides, veering sideways as it grew to a sizable circular depression that had been invisible from the mouth of the crack. It sank down to the right, almost perfect in its shape, perhaps a crater from the planet’s youth. Clusters of seaweed and coral dotted it as in a simulacrum of a true mountain vale. As if to complete the picture, a large metallic structure, clearly manmade, rested amid a wide thicket near the very center. Only the large black-striped fish, long and thin like animate flags, stridently broke through the similarity.

Near the facade of the building, a wide, squat complex of connected square structures topped with domes, a few dim shapes were rooting about in the penumbral murk. Despite the distance, Eiohsa’s transformed eyes, acclimated to the darkness, were able to distinguish some features. A grasping limb. A turning head. A chillingly human-like silhouette loping among the corals.

Eiohsa stopped dead in her tracks, watching the lurching form ahead in dead silence. A million hypotheses raced through her mind at the sight of it. Could it be one of the accursed infestus of the Legion? Some long forgotten [i]thing[/i] that crawled and scuttled through these shifting undersea wastes in search of food? 

She reached out with her mind, only to be surprised by its… unremarkability. The humanoid things that lurched around the building seemed to be, in what little they had for a mind, to be indistinct from the fish and sea life that surrounded them. In the warp their signature was faint, barely there - just one more facet of the terrible mosaic of Carcinus’ oceans. Nearby, she felt something [i]different[/i] - more distinct, more intense. She turned towards it - before the jerky, sudden movements of the thing she had studied caught her eye once more and she cast her attention back over to it for a moment. 

A wave of the hand, and the figure was grasped in psychic energy that pulled it inexorably towards the disguised form of the Primarch. She resumed her movement towards it as it neared, and near her head, a bright, glowing orb appeared. It cast a harsh, glaring light that cut through the gloom of the abyss, and revealed the thing in full detail.

A squamous greenish-blue shape flashed before her, a rush of long finned arms, stumpy bent legs ending in webbed feet, an elongated gibbous head, like that of a frog or a fish, with lidlessly staring glassy eyes.

Then it disappeared into a cloud of silt. Startled by the sudden glare, the creature twisted about, despite the invisible force still pushing it forward, and clawed at the seafloor under its feet. A rush of sand erupted around it, cloaking it from the unmerciful light.

Behind it, two other shapes were approaching in long, running bounds. The detritus they kicked up as they leapt concealed most of their bodies, but from the brief glimpses that shone through they greatly resembled the first being, though one of them was a far lighter shade of green. They brandished long, slender objects in their flabby hands - spears made from bamboo-like seaweed stalks, with sharpened stones or sea-beast teeth tied to their tips.

Eiohsa’s lips turned in revulsion at the thing, rubbery and loathsome in whatever evolutionary path had lead it to be like this. She cast it aside, pushing it through the water to where it had once been, and uttering a silent expression of her disgust.

Her eyes turned towards the new threat, and she raised her hand, halting them in their tracks and suspending them motionless in the water. Their spears were pried from their grasp as she trudged through sand and silt formed over millions of years to the strange entities before her. She racked her brain, searching through the blurred, almost inhuman memory of the Lurker for an answer - what were these?

The figments of the foreign mind did not yield much. Evidently, this particular son of the Ninth only had a superficial awareness of those inhabitants of the ocean. Mere half-remembered traces swam before her inner eye, sparse mentions of a supposed abhuman race, or even several breeds, native to the planet. Doubts on whether it was too debased to even be considered human to any degree. On its relation to pelagers and other similar strains. On its origins, calculated or accidental. Hypotheses of a rudimentary civilization in deeper abyssal caverns. Nothing definite, except an oddly salient thought that their natural lifespan was difficult to determine even with thorough dissection.

Eiohsa looked away from the repulsive things, crushing them to a paste with an offhand motion. She resumed her march towards the buildings looming ahead, making mental note to ensure a full investigation of this species. The thought that humanity might fall along such an evolutionary path demanded further study. But her mind was focused solely upon the task at hand. 

She trudged along, eyes fixated upon her target. Soon she would discover the truth of what lay buried within these oceans.

The closer she came to the building, the more signs of age she saw over it. Though untouched by rust, its metal was stained and darkened, overgrown with tenacious algae around the corners. The domes on its roof were scratched, bent inwards by stones fallen from the underwater mountains centuries before. Large breaches ran through the wall that faced her, revealing nothing but darkness beyond.

Then something moved inside. The presence she had felt nearby had stirred upon the death of the ichthyoid creatures, and now it was rapidly growing larger, brighter. There could be no mistake - it was a great psychic force, perhaps one to eclipse even the disciples of a Legion's Librarium.

A hulking shape burst out from the cracks in the metal. Far larger than the form Eiohsa had assumed, it was akin to the marine beings, but swollen to grotesque size. Covered in glistening cerulean scales, it moved in a blur, its stooped legs propelling it through the water with impossible force. Its long ape-like arms ended in webbed claws, and as it leapt it soundlessly snarled with the enormous, toothy maw of an anglerfish below dish-sized inexpressive eyes.

The force of the current of water generated by the creature’s charge knocked the disguised Primarch to the ocean floor. She impacted with a thud, cushioned by the water as her fall was, and whirled to face the creature that had emerged. “Se spen a khutil!” She hissed, reflexively, pulling the large knife she had looted from the corpse of the Lurker, and charging.

The monster made no motion to turn aside her lunge, and as they collided in mid-bound the point of her knife found the underside of its ribcage. But it went no further. Under her blade, the being's scaly hide seemed to have hardened beyond tempered metal, so that even the knife's monomolecular edge could not penetrate it. The shock of the interrupted motion only had a moment to register, however, for the creature's hands came slamming against her head like clubs, preternaturally heavy and so fast they were a mere flash at the edge of her vision.

Even for the unnaturally swift mind of the Sixteenth Primarch, the thing moved with a speed and precision that seemed nearly impossible. The world swam before her from the force of the impact. She snarled, launching herself backwards from the thing as she summoned her psychic might, gathering it behind the cyclopean stones that had spelled ruin for the structure and pulling them towards herself - and the creature - at enormous speed. The boulders, eroded by age and shattered by the bygone collapse as they were, remained massive, and veritable storms of silt and startled fish whipped around as they were lifted from their resting places.

Their imposing mass did not go unnoticed by the squamous being itself. A spark of awareness lit up in its hideously large eyes, and in a moment it was hurtling away from Eiohsa and straight towards one of the rocks. The water began to churn around the great mass as an inexplicable reddish glow began to radiate from it, followed by a wave of boiling heat. Unflinching, the creature plunged straight through the center of the boulder, parting its softened bulk like a pickaxe, and in a leap disappeared among the swaying thickets of seaweed.

Heavy breathing followed its disappearance, Eiohsa’s eyes wide in absolute, total bewilderment at what had just taken place. It was not a feeling she enjoyed, nor the eerie, aberrant stillness that ensued hung over the scene in an oppressive cloud. 

She pushed on warily, scanning the area surrounding her with every second that passed. There was no more time that could be spent trudging through this mire in blind pursuit of her goal. Psychic energy manifested around her, and she propelled herself through the water towards her target.

The metallic structure's wide front door was closed, the mechanism keeping it under lock still functional despite its long abandonment, but the numerous cracks and breaches in the walls - some bearing the signs of heavy labour ordnance - offered easy access to its interior. The fish-creatures had likely been there with the intent to ransack it, but whatever there might ever have been of interest within was long gone. All that remained was a bare, dreary maze of chromed rooms and corridors, with what furnishings had survived due to their steely composition being waterlogged and covered in barnacles. Amid the gloom and ruin, dead machinery had become indistinguishable from desks and lockers. Small crustaceans scurrying from one corner to another were the abandoned building's only masters.

Eiohsa examined the ruin with the dispassionate eye of the otherwise occupied. Ancient machinery, so corroded and lost to the ravages of time and decay that even she could not understand its purpose or make, blended with the remains of a long dead civilization. Perhaps, in a better world, this site would have attracted archaeologists and scholars, curious to unearth the remnants of the past. Now - it served only as the rotting, skeletal husk of better days. 

She pushed herself out of the empty shell of the building, and set course through the water towards her main objective in the distance, hurtling through the water propelled by psychic energy. The other, true branch of the diverging path - for the dimmed memory had been misleading - climbed a high pass between two rising peaks and wound down, over a broad ledge and beyond its lip, further into the darkness below. It would have taken hours more of travel on foot, perhaps a day, perhaps even longer. At length the path became a curving protrusion along the sheer flank of an almost cylindrical massive. She followed its turn in a vertiginous loop, and at last, upon reaching the end of the forbidding wall of rock, she saw it.

In the archives of Terra there were records of an ancient city, since long vanished, by the name of Mediolanum. At its heart there had once stood a great temple of one of the old faiths, with a facade emblazoned with thirteen archways and crowned with well over one hundred sharp spires. The sight that now opened before Eiohsa’s eyes was in some ways reminiscent of the depictions she had seen of that venerable relic, but while the mass that rose towards her along the side of the mountain was less ornate than the great temple had been, it so dwarfed it in magnitude that the mind struggled to find a scale of comparison.

The basalt fortress of Dis sprouted from the peak like a black, spiny parasitic growth, resting its foundation on the edge of a wide shelf far below. The high-ridged enormity of its central nave, like the backbone of some impossible leviathan, scraped the lower slopes, and all about it, interspersed with the ungainly metallic tumours of surfaceward defense batteries and emergency void-shield generators, rose a forest of spearlike pointed towers. From her vantage point, Eiohsa could see that they were arranged along a symmetrical concentric design of rough nested circles.

Instantly, her mind filled with various plans of attack, analysis of the construction and layout of the fortress below, the design patterns and technical readouts of the weapons and shields arrayed below flashed through her mind, arrayed against a catalogue of known Imperial models. Despite her hatred for the Ninth Legion, she could not help but be impressed by the formidable fortress that sprawled before her.

The path now sharply turned down, along the cliff that ran parallel to the stronghold's elevation, and became similar to an alpine stairway, folding time and again upon itself. The walls of the closest outer towers became visible as she wound down along it, and she could see that they as well were encircled by a carved spiralling walkway. There was no railing along its exterior side - a misstep would have been a hopeless plunge from the vertiginous height. Facing onto it from the wall were innumerable doors, rings upon rings of them, featureless reinforced slabs with large gaps above and below for water to pass freely. Some of them were open, revealing spacious but bare windowless cells. Superhumanly large armoured figures sat in cross-legged poses inside, either asleep or absorbed in meditation. A few were directly on the walkway before the doors of their receptacles.

Further down, the grounds beyond the fortress began to slowly grow visible. The shelf was an even plain stretching away into impenetrable darkness, writhing with curious growths, algal trees and monstrous sea anemones. Fearsome shapes stalked across it on spindly legs. Even the wildlife swimming above it seemed hardened, vicious. Predatory seawurms with silky sails undulating along their tubular sides chased pale, barrel-like fish with atrophied eyes, and sinister bioluminescent lures flitted around like will-o'-the-wisps over a graveyard.

At last the cliffside ended, and the path disappeared into the soil. Close, to the right, there awned the gateway into the fortress. A cyclopic archway gaped like the mouth of a primordial cavern, great enough to swallow a Warhound Titan whole. Its tremendous doors, worthy of a spot on a warship's hull, were swung wide open. At its sides there towered two gargantuan charybdes, monstrosities mighty enough to tear a Knight Dominus limb from limb, with nests of autocannons, torpedo tubes and siege guns bristling on their backs. A score of legionnaires, themselves immobile as sculpted rocks, stood watch near them.

On foot now, she approached the mighty fortress. In spite of everything, she felt her jaw slacken slightly in awe within the now water filled helmet. The cyclopean citadel towered over her, an aberrant shard jammed into the carcass of an antediluvian past. She walked briskly towards the soaring megalith that loomed ahead, her feet treading heavily in the path worn over centuries by countless armored boots. 

The dreaded Charybdes sent a ripple of disgust down her spine at the sight of their repugnant, warped forms. Changed, just as the Ninth had done to humanity itself, into twisted mockeries of what they once were. In service to the Great Crusade they fought alongside the most foul of the Emperor’s creations. She grimaced, and turned her attention to the Astartes manning the gate as she neared, stopping short of them as she awaited their response. 

One of the sentries slowly turned his head by a fraction of an angle to look at her. His invisible eyes ran the length of her armour, a motion intuited rather than perceived. Then, his hands left the grip of his bolter, which drifted down to its magnetic clamp on his belt.

[i]Your weapon is not adapted.[/i] His gestures formed into the laboriously recognized forms of the Ninth Legion's wordless code signatum. Not only was the rote, mechanical knowledge of that alphabet hazier than conscious memories, but the Lurker ahead of her was not deliberately stretching his movements out as for an outsider, but spoke to her as to an equal - briskly, glossing over some less vital curves. Some nuances were lost to her, such as the nonetheless easily guessed implicit question [i]why?[/i]

That was, in truth, a further exacerbation of the same flaw. For any blooded Lurker, switching between combustible and gas-propelled round magazines when entering the water was more than an instinct - it was a reflex, never truly voluntary, but taken at face value the rare times it was noticed, like the act of breathing or putting one foot before the other to walk. In the barrage of sights that had assailed Eiohsa when she had first probed the mind of the body she now inhabited, such a minutia had been altogether invisible, and she had not inherited it along with the Lurker's thoughts and genes. However, it seemed that it was after all no less important than those two.

She watched the hand-signs and fluid motion of the Lurker ahead of her with a detached, analytical interest. Piecing together missing fragments of information drifting within the disparate threads of thought she had pulled from the Lurker on the surface.

A fool. She was a fool. Of course they would have had munitions for underwater combat. She became aware of them now, and of the conversion to the rifle he asked about. Silently, she cursed herself for such oversight. There was no easy route out of this - few explanations could suffice for an oversight that a full blooded Lurker would have never made. She would have to, once more, rely upon the powers of the Empyrean. 

[i]I encountered difficulties on my return to the fortress.[/i] She signed back, emulating what subtleties of the language she could. [i]I expended a significant complement of my ammunition.[/i] She focused in on the one who had addressed her, summoning her psychic might once more. [i]You see nothing wrong with this[/i], she ordered. [i]This is a perfectly unremarkable occurrence.[/i] Silently, she prayed that even with her inexperience in such, the empty minds of the Lurkers would prove susceptible to such interference.

The sentry remained staring for a moment, his expression, if indeed he was capable of one, unreadable behind his helmet. At last, he moved to sign in response.

[i]Go to the armory for resupply.[/i] With that, he turned his head back to its original position and resumed his immobile vigil.

Eiohsa nodded to him, and marched through the looming gates above. She wanted nothing more than to leave this place, to flee from this asylum of madness and return to the surface with the evidence she needed. She searched the memories she had extracted, prying out every shred of detail about the layout of the fortress that she could - and the route to the laboratories of Carcinus. 

Inside, the already stifling darkness became absolute. Only the eyes of an Astartes of the Ninth lineage, better suited to penumbra than to the light of day, could have navigated that maze of lightless corridors, blind stairways and sepulchral chambers. Often, however, even their unnatural sight proved insufficient, for there is no living eye that can pierce that which is darker than terrene night, and even nature itself concedes the struggle, leaving the inhabitants of the deepest crevices to be born into perpetual blindness. Then the sense of the shifting water became the only way to find the path ahead, and the rudiments of this skill honed over years left her stumbling.

The bowels of Dis were, however, not entirely abandoned to shadow. At the crossings of corridors, where they converged in wide circular spaces, and in the larger rooms, the walls were mottled with faintly luminescent excrescences, a sort of subaqueous moss, evidently cultivated for that purpose. Their pale green glow illuminated empty refectories with high vaulted ceilings and coarse stone tables, meditation and instruction halls where a few hulking shadows crouched in contemplative postures, and sometimes strange enclosed vivariums where charybdes scuttled among tubular growths swaying stronger than the light currents would have given them cause to.

At length, after a long time frightening in its implications for the fortress’ size, a broad stairway led her into a long, imposing hall with only another opening, a wide door at the further end. Large clumps of the luminous moss cast their ghostly radiance over it, revealing rows of crystalline vats and stasis cells arranged on shelves lining its vertiginous walls. Each held within it a hideous shape, frozen in time or fluid, with a tablet at its feet giving a name to the terror within. Here was a revolting, verminous mass, almost without shape, marked SLAUGHT; near it a three-legged, tubular biomechanical amalgam, SLAUGHT PUGNATOR, and in a huge tank an amorphous, sluglike mass, SLAUGHT MESSOR. Others clustered around, each more repugnant than the last. A towering, yet almost skeletal beast of an inhuman warrior, RANGDA; a tusked green colossus encased in rough, but barbarously ornate armour, ORCUS NOBILIS; a worm-like fiend with six bladed arms and a snarling chitin-crested head, KYNAZAR VORAX; suspended in a stasis cell, a wraith of iridescent vapour half-contained in a baroque carapace suit, PSYBRIS OSIRIANE; in another, this one surrounded by psychic sigils, a tentacled gelatinous hulk with spider-like eyes, KRELL; and dozens, perhaps hundreds more. This gallery of nightmares, she realized, was something between a trophy hall and a specimen room, a repository of the Lurkers’ most fearsome and bizarre foes contained for memory, study or other unknowable purposes. A chilling suspicion crept up to her that some of these horrors - how many? - might still have been alive in their eternal prisons.

The acrid taste of bile rose in her throat at the sight of these familiar monstrosities. Long since committed to memory she had hoped and prayed - and yet she was now confronted with them, face to face separated by the repugnant vaulted displays of the Ninth legion. She bit her tongue, forcing herself not to retch at the memories that floated to her conscience. 

She wanted to smash this room. To turn it to rubble and let the foul abominations within decay into the empty wastes of the Carcinian underbelly. She could do it - she had the power within her, crackling at her fingertips. This entire nightmare assemblage of the Imperium’s most vile of inhuman foes could be erased from existence at her mere thought. 

Slowly, the energy that arced in her hand subsided. With gritted teeth, she marked this grim nightmare down for later. This blight upon the galaxy would be erased, she was resolved of that much. When the Ninth Legion had been brought to justice for their crimes, when they stood before the Emperor himself and faced his wrath, she would right the wrongs she had seen upon this world. 

With a final shudder of disgust, she pushed on from the grim display and deeper into the bowels of the fortress.

Beyond the door was another stairway, as ample as the last one. It was bathed in faint light from above, yet what was remarkable was that this glow did not issue from another of the moss-algae growths, but descended from above in refracted beams. Indeed, overhead the stairs ended not in another shadowy corridor, but a large square opening framing a rippling span of mirror-like water. A surface, here in the deeps.

Up the worn stone steps, and she was breathing air again. Her armoured boots barely made a clink when stepping onto the stone floor; the polished metal walls must have been inlaid with sound-dampening materials. Cold blue light weakly streamed from narrow, regular gaps in the ceiling and their burnished faces. However feeble, it was a relief after the umbral realm below. In the corners, grilled sarcophagus-like devices that must have been air recyclers stood silently.

Ahead was a chamber slightly smaller than the gallery and with a far lower ceiling, multiple doorways gaping in the metal at various of its ends. A few Lurkers busied themselves around its center, most of them boasting narthecia, servo-arms tipped with various menacing surgical implements and collections of vials and eye-lenses. The memories had guided her correctly: this was the lair of the infamous Fleshweavers. Three of them were circling a stack of massive crates, comparing the encoded writing on their sides with something in their data-slates. Another was inaudibly addressing a blue-armoured Astartes, with the markings of a simple legionnaire, who was strikingly missing his right arm: the pauldron had been removed, and the opening in his armour showed a sanguine membrane at his shoulder. The Fleshweaver motioned to one of the doors, and the mutilated warrior evenly marched towards it; there, another apothecary emerged to lead him further beyond the threshold.

“Brother.” After what seemed to have been centuries of silence, the deep, hoarse voice, deadened by the walls and distorted by metal, was startling, otherworldly. One of the Fleshweavers who had been examining the crates was approaching. The lack of additional limbs suggested that he held a lesser rank. “How is the implantation stock?”

She regarded the Astartes before her with an expression of purest loathing upon her face. The Fleshweavers, they who her Daughter had told her of. The vile changers of skin and flesh against their nature. After a moment, she forced herself to remain composed.

“I was redirected by the Planetary Governor to Sergeant Moetz, of the Planetary Defense Force.” She responded, nodding to him. “He informed me that the sourcing of implantation stock is proceeding well, and to expect the next shipment shortly.”

"Good. We will see to it in time." The Lurker turned and marched back to the crates without another word. Eiohsa was left standing by the descending well, with but a faint recollection suggesting that her way lay beyond the same door the wounded marine and his companion had gone through.

Casting a glance about the room, Eiohsa searched for any prying eyes that might bear witness to her actions henceforth. Seeing none, after some minutes of searching, she summoned her psychic might once more - casting a glamour over the armor she wore. To the eyes of any observer, devoid of powerful psychic abilities or the nullification of such, there now stood a young inductee of the Ninth Legion’s Fleshweavers. 

With a deep breath, she pressed on through the door ahead, into the laboratories of Carcinus.

Warm, humid air wafted at her visor as she entered the first room. It was almost as large as the previous one, though lower still. The doorway opened onto a strip of rock spanning about a fourth of its surface. The rest was covered in a tide of red-pink sludge, quietly churning like mud over a geyser as air bubbled to its surface and mounds melted and shifted on their own accord. Scattered in that inchoate mass were macabre agglomerations of flesh, half-formed bodies with features obfuscated as if in a dreamlike haze. Legless, faceless torsos with slowly pulsating ribcages. Tangles of displaced limbs that seemed to grow directly from the sludge itself, or from misshapen mounds that bore nothing but an odd collection of extremities. Translucent domes of bone and unformed skin, filled with mismatched viscera like greenhouses with exotic blossoms. All of this was made yet more grotesque by its size, being large to Astartes proportions. The one-armed legionnaire stood waiting at the edge of the floor, while the Fleshweaver who had accompanied him waded through the charnel mire, careful not to step on any quivering amalgams, with a long one-edged knife in hand.

The next room was so immense it could have been an Aeronautica hangar. The lighting grew duskier as the luminescent gaps disappeared high above and away at great intervals. Nonetheless, the chamber was bathed in a sickly pale-green glow that radiated from its contents. Rows and rows of evenly spaced genetor vats, their elaborate tubes disappearing into the floor like roots, filled the entirety of it. It was impossible to say how many there were at a glance, though certainly no fewer than a thousand. Their ranks were lost in the depth of the hall. Inside each of the arabesqued containers floated a curled shape, suspended inside the nutrient fluid. Although they seemed superficially human, their segmented, hard-shelled bodies, clawed limbs and faces that were little more than a pair of gnashing jaws belied their mutant nature. A new horde of nascent Infestus slept its dreamless sleep in there.

Eiohsa walked through this nightmarish procession as if in dream. Dreams of long forgotten, immemorial catacombs of blackest night. Murky images flashed through her mind, dimly illuminated in the wan glow of a mind that does not wish to see. The sound of armored feet upon the hard stone provided the metronome at whose beckoning time passed in this disconnected, surreal reality torn from the fabric of the sane, outside world.

The sound of feet echoed on endlessly.

In the following room, the stone floor became a metallic walkway. Below Eiohsa’s feet, a square pit far smaller than the gene-vat cavern descended into a pool of clear water slightly tinged with green. A few young charybdes crawled around its bare floor, and at the center sat a Lurker with the shattered skull of the Heralds of Silence on his shoulder. He did not move, and the surface above him barely stirred with his breath. A psychic emanation lay heavy upon the chamber, the presence of the empyreal strangely tempered, almost mutilated. The shells of the crustacean beasts had a metallic sheen to them as they moved under the blue light.

It was beyond the next door that she found the trail of what she had been seeking. Here the walls widened into yet another hangar-like immensity, but the space was far better lit due to more frequent light-fissures and a lower ceiling. Columns of black stone propped it up at even distances. Along the walls ran lines of approximative surgical tables which somewhat resembled sacrificial altars, were it not for the racks of instruments and vials crowding around them. Most were empty, but around others work was boiling. 

[i]Tap… Tap… Tap…[/i]

Fleshweavers of all ranks, from apprentices in mostly unadorned armour to elders with a plethora of mechanical arms and gauntlet tools, busied themselves over the drug-paralyzed bodies of human and Infestus alike in various permutations of age and constitution, from children barely out of infancy to massive, ogryn-like abhumans. There, skin was folded open like a scroll, tendons and blood vessels were severed and sewn back together, neural fibres were welded in curious webs, bones were replaced and rearranged, intestinal tracts were stimulated to test the strength of their bile, carapace plates were fished out of murky tanks to be grafted into muscle in a vortex of surgical zeal that, dissatisfied with merely healthy bodies, could not restrain itself from improving upon them in some way. The dosages of the sedative concoctions were clearly not always uniform, and several of the subjects impotently stared with wide open eyes as their tormentors deftly set to work with their scalpels and injector needles. The Lurkers themselves were a far more diverse group than any Eiohsa had seen before. While some cut and pried with the cold, remorseless precision of machines, others gleefully twirled and flourished their implements like virtuosos celebrating a difficult passage, or gently daubed suture points like artists afraid to ruin their masterwork.

Eiohsa did not know what to think, understand how she felt. What [i]did[/i] she feel? She swam amongst a sea of thoughts and emotions, alien and human, Astartes and mortal, the stray threads of the Daughters trapped within this swirling maelstrom. What was there to think? To feel? It was not the raw, unresistable assault of Exterminatus, nor the constant barrage of war. It was altogether worse, more personal, the horror at oneself she had felt little of before. The emotions that assaulted her mind were impossible to understand, to process, to comprehend and to rationalize. Raw, unfiltered horror and disgust. The semi-human cries of a [i]thing[/i] that had been stripped of everything - humanity, identity, hopes, dreams, love, family. The sole vestige of what was a human that remained within was a hatred, a burning hatred of everything that surrounded it - and a hatred of itself. Longing for death, for an end to this impossible dream-world. 

[i]Tap… Tap… Tap…[/i]

About the central section the floor was pierced by a number of wide circular pits, about as deep as two Astartes-heights. They were arranged in a disposition that somewhat resembled that of Dis’ towers, though they were nowhere as numerous. While some were entirely empty, most of them formed each a microcosm of dread inside the maddening labyrinth of the fortress and its Apothecarion halls. Four Infestus snarled and tore at each other like gladiators in an arena, their growls and screeches deadened to spectral echoes by the dampening walls. A misbegotten simulacrum of a human body, like an approximation wrought from clay by a blind sculptor, lay half-submerged in the same bubbling organic slime she had seen in the first room. A charybdes slowly consumed a still twitching disfigured victim, methodically tearing off strips of their flesh with its maxillipeds and grinding them between its many nested mandibles. A nameless thing with irregular scraps of carapace over a body half-covered by white bony growths paced hungrily in circles. One of the pits was filled with water, and in it a swarm of large pale shrimps was picking clean a pile of bones and refuse. In another, full of a thick acrid-smelling yellow fluid, floated an indistinct shape, suspended from a score of thin tubes plunging into various parts of its body and running across the chamber to a set of vats and devices. A Lurker with strange red-rimmed armour and a mechanical right hand, three-digited, with fingers like long slender knives, watched over that nest of machinery. [i]Dronemaw,[/i] flashed a shard of memory.

What was there to do? What could she do? Destroy this entire labyrinth of twisted mockeries of science and progress? Burn down this submarine hell, boiled up from the deepest bowels of some apophryca of the abyss? This waking nightmare that scarcely seemed reality as much a cruel parody of what ought have been.

Eiohsa cried.

Golden tears welled within her eyes. She was powerless, powerless if she wanted to end this abomination, once and for all. She bit her tongue, for she wished to lash out and destroy this grotesque carnival that surrounded her. She could do it, she knew this. She could turn the technology that ensured the survival of this place against its masters. Lead, under her hand, an armada of the Abyssal Lurker’s own weapons against them. Tear this cursed fortress down brick by brick and grind it to dust beneath her heel.

But to do so would solve nothing. Invite the wrath of the Emperor. Doom her Legion, and who knew how many more to the ravages of the Ninth. If she wanted this put to an end, it would be by the Emperor’s hand, and on her testimony.

And so she silently wept.

[i]Tap… Tap… Tap…[/i]

In a shadowed corner at the far end of the chamber, beyond the last rows of unoccupied tables, a square opening awned in the floor. From above, it appeared similar to the one that led to the laboratories from the fortress below, but it was not as wide, and the dark, rippling surface of the water visible through it was lower, as in a shallow well. The sequence of recollections Eiohsa had been following surged up again - the path lay there below.

Like the dim light of a lantern as a guide from the depths of a swamp, Eiohsa followed the recollections of this strange, aquatic underworld. With only a moment’s hesitation, she stepped into the yawning hole before her, plunging deeper still.


Borne downward by the weight of her armour, she fell through the murky water for a time that seemed interminable. Around her, sheer stone walls, growing coarser and, strangely, [i]older[/i] as she sank deeper into the stygian abyss. At a moment not even her superhumanly observant mind could place, such was the crushing monotony of the sightless descent, the levigated surfaces of construction blocks had given way to a tunnel carved into live rock. She was [i]below[/i] the fortress, she realized, and still she fell, deeper and deeper.


At last, the walls disappeared, and for a minute or an eternity there was only darkness to every side. Then she landed onto something brittle and yielding. Some fragments of light must have found their way into that abyss, for soon her eyes could almost see again, her mind filling the shadowy gaps with flashes of recollection.

Bones. She sat amid a sea of bones of all forms and sizes, many of them human. Some coalesced into loose animal skeletons that seemed lost in this strange mortuary. The bones lay chaotically in heaps and mounds arranged by invisible currents, broken and corroded by age. How many were they? How old? Did they predate the foundation of Dis itself? Not even the laboratories above could have accounted for such a multitude, for those innumerable pale sparks in her strained sight. Swarms of shrimp and schools of ugly, toothy fish with shovel-like heads scattered around her, scavengers of the deep troubled by an apparition from the world of the living.

There was a path winding among the macabre dunes, remembered more than visible. It led, between some treacherous cracks, to the wide mouth of the ample cavern she had fallen into, the seafloor beyond rocky and uneven.

There were no words she could use to describe the sensations that filled her as she half walked, half stumbled through this catacomb. She could [i]try[/i], most certainly. Disgust. Sadness. Horror. Morbid curiosity. But what she felt most of all was… contempt. And hatred.

She hated everything about this planet.

Everything, from its rulers, to its fauna, to the strange phenomena that pervaded it at every level, to the Ninth Legion that had implanted itself as a fresh tumor onto this already cancer-ridden mass. She hated them with a fury she had not fully realized she could muster. A deep, personal loathing of them and everything they stood for. Sarghaul, the Tartarean, lording over this mire of death and despair in that cruel, inhuman manner of his. Every step through this Devan-forsaken labyrinth brought only fresh atrocity. 

It was not the Rangdan, not the Ork, not any number of foes that threatened humanity and brought untold horrors. For none of them had been built to serve humanity. To aid humanity.
To protect and guide humanity. None of them had been created by the Emperor to be exemplars of humanity and of all intelligent life, and turned so willingly to such depravity. She swore to herself, as bones crunched underfoot, that when the time came she herself would swing the executioner’s sword.

Outside the cavern lay a rocky ledge, wide enough to tread without fear of being sent drifting into the deeps by an incautious step. The dark bulk of the basalt fortress hung straight overhead - the cavern burrowed into the stone cliff beneath its outer wall. The path now led along the span of the protruding ridge, flanking the side of the shelf above. A number of openings gaped in the craggy surface, many shallow, some stretching out into tunnels that wormed their way towards the heart of the peak. One such fissure, outwardly not distinguished in any way from the others to both its sides, was the next beacon to flare up in the murky trail of the Lurker’s memories. This was not a way he had followed in a routine that became reflex, but one visited far more infrequently, on irregular, almost furtive occasions.

The cunicle was wide enough for Eiohsa’s Astartes frame to step freely through. It twisted and wormed for a span, before abruptly ending in a sealed metallic door, invisible from outside. The obstacle had been firmly built into the passage’s structure, a portal fixed into the stone to prevent the leaking of water beyond it. Despite its sturdy appearance, it smoothly slid open after being pressed in a well-remembered concealed point near its rim. Water rushed forward as it swung inward, filling the space of a long plated airlock chamber beyond, closed off by a second identical door at the opposite end. As soon as the first door shut behind her, the water was drained once more with a gurgle, and the inner door was audibly unlocked with a click.

Behind it, the plated floor became rock again. Several tunnels, whose rough walls eventually gave way to artificially levigated surfaces, spread from an almost spherical chamber. A Fleshweaver with a long-drilled narthecium on his left gauntlet was conferring with two legionnaires by the far wall. Noticing the newcomer, he gestured to signal that he would address what he presumed to be his subordinate.

“Some waste has collected in Chamber Eta. Dispose of it in the chasm when you go through there.”

Eiohsa nodded to him, speaking with the unfamiliar voice of one of the Ninth. “It will be done.” She said, nodding to him. Her mind was focused elsewhere. She could sense them now. Close at hand. Her Daughters. Her breath came quickly now, as she pushed onwards. Soon she would know the full scale of the horrors beneath Carcinus.

The revelation did not let itself be awaited for long. In the first hewn pocket on the way towards Eta, a low, but wide roughly cylindrical space, a rough simulacrum of the stone tables in the laboratories above held upon it, chained and ostensibly sedated, a strange and hideous figure. In size and proportion it was broadly similar to an Astartes, if somewhat larger than was the norm for most lineages, but no Astartes ought to have had the signs of chitinous growths beginning to emerge from her skin all across her body. Peculiarly sickening was the fact that these aberrations showed no signs of being implanted, but sprouted in jagged, brown ridges from beneath the parting skin in a wholly organic way. The body’s face was covered by a metallic breather mask, connected by a thick tube to an opaque blue vat near the base of the table.

The stench of death, decay, and hopelessness roiled up around her amidst the nightmare scene. To exist before this dread cacophony of evil decay and degradation was purest torture. Eiohsa did not know, could not understand, how human hands could bring such to light. She stumbled through the chamber, half in daze, insensate to all but the wailing cacophany that resounded within her mind. Despite everything, she pushed on. 

[i]Tap… Tap… Tap…[/i]

The following chamber was smaller, but two opposite alcoves in the left and right walls gave it an impression of depth beyond its true extension. The air, already heavy due to the enclosed and poorly ventilated nature of the tunnels, became even thicker and damper here. Inside each alcove, behind a translucent pane, the lowered floor was covered in that nauseating pinkish sludge the Fleshweavers seemed so fond of, but what sprouted from it was even more bizarre than inchoate bodies. Something like a sanguine stalk, a small pillar resembling a monstrous blood vessel covered in a mesh of nerve links and capillaries rose halfway to the ceiling in the right alcove, and suspended from it like surreal fruit were fleshy sphericles, studded with golden membranous domes around their surface and clinging to the stalk with skinless tendrils. Progenoid glands. Whatever the blood-coloured pillar might have been, its blasphemous intent was clear - to do away with the intended cycles of Astartes life and prepare new genetic seeds with impossible speed and abundance. Fortunately, the sacrilegious experiment did not seem to have achieved its goal: the glands growing from the blood-stalk seemed pale, stunted and malformed in their unnatural gestation. A tablet on the glassy pane read “XVI”; in the opposite alcove stood a similar formation, only about as tall as a quarter of the first, hung with similarly feeble nascent glands and marked “IX”.

But it was beyond this receptacle of unclean designs that the reality of what was transpiring in those concealed passages fully unfolded before her. The tunnel widened into an ample circular lair, its squat ceiling supported by a broad stone pillar in the center. All around it and by the walls were parallel rows of surgical tables, in an approximate imitation of the great laboratory hall. While the surroundings were far more coarse, however, the bounty of those altars to the profane quest for mastery over life was decidedly more exotic. The muscular bodies of space marines lay over a number of them - or, at least, their remains, for the score of Fleshweavers roving among them were far from idle. Under slicing claws and severing blades, from salves forcing flesh to regrow into shapes it had never known, what had been devised on Terra centuries ago took on visages undreamed of by the Master of Mankind himself. Bestial carapace and segmented limbs were thrust upon the delicate balance of the human organism, the resilience of Astartes constitution tested to its limits as unfeeling eyes of aquamarine crystal watched it fight to integrate these intrusions, duped into mutating the very system it struggled to preserve. In many places, it failed - a great number of the horrid amalgams of skin and chitin were steadily approaching their death throes, bloody ichor seeping from the mouths of those that still had them. But the aquamarine eyes did not relent in their perverse curiosity, and again and again the blades fell.

Whence such a profusion of transhuman blood to spill, that precious fluid so rare that battlefields across the galaxy contended for the crowning honour of being watered with it? The answer lay mercilessly bared to the left side of the cavern. A young girl with the sun-touched skin of the planet’s surface-dwellers, barely entering adolescence by her appearances, was strapped to a table. A Fleshweaver loomed over her, monstrously large in comparison, and reached into her opened ribcage with a fine bionic talon, his own clawed hands too gigantically unwieldy to operate on such a small and frail body. One of them pinned her waist to the stone slab to stop her from wriggling, while the other was clamped around her crudely shaved head, holding her jaw closed in a deathly vice. This, then, was the implantation stock the agents of the Ninth had been so eager to secure.

Defilement of all things good and sacrosanct to humanity surrounded her, her mind under constant assault from the wave of that barraged her entire being. Utter horror, wordless screams that echoed and reverberated through her mind rose up, burrowing into her psyche as parasitic larvae that ate away at her mind. She tried to shut it out, to focus upon the task at hand. But it was hopeless, the miasma of oozing, toxic rot, the atrophy of the very souls of those around her, was too much. Only against the dreaded Rangdan had she felt such atrocity before. 

She pushed on, struggling against that which assailed her. Her duty was to bring these crimes to justice. Nothing would stop that. Nothing would hinder this righteous cause. Marinated in the charnel morass of the chambers she forced herself onwards. Every step, every breath, was fought against millions of grasping hands that clung to her and dragged her back. 

Even the mind of a Primarch struggled to retain a sense of self amidst this crushing wave of nightmare spawned human misery. What was she, one woman, against this? No other could feel it as she could. Each and every soul ensnared in the beating, fleshy threads of this ichorous web clung to her, slowly adhering to her. She screamed in futile resistance as oily black tendrils enveloped her mind and she was dragged into the sucking mire of black despair that surrounded her.

One of the elder Lurkers in the room, distinguished by his two servo-arms, beckoned Eiohsa over when he saw her disguised figure enter. He was standing by one of the expiring victims, a swollen chimeric mound with a multitude of arthropodal legs affixed to its sides that seemed to be breathing its last.

“Acolyte!” he spoke in a voice like the echoes of a subterranean gong, his array of five eye-lenses fixed on the newcomer, “Show me how well Khirex is teaching you lot. Can you tell why this one is a failure?”

Eiohsa barely registered the words even as they were spoken to her, her mind reeling from the barrage of emotion and sensation it was now subjected to. She stood in a daze, peering through kaleidoscopic imagery of deepest horror and despair at the man who swam before her eyes in a million fractal distortions.

From the depths of her mind she dredged up a vague simulacrum of an answer, silently grateful for the armor that concealed her distraught features from view. “I am too early in training to properly answer.” She forced herself to say, “I would welcome the opportunity to learn whatever you can teach of this work.” The words burned like acid on her tongue, and she forced back a sob as they passed her lips. This was wrong. This was worse than she could have possibly imagined. Every second within this miasma of despair and suffering was soaked through in the emanations of hundreds of souls, both her Daughters and natives of Carcinus forced into implantation, seeking an end to this suffering. Silently, she prayed her answer would be enough.

“Too early in your training.” The rumbling words rolled out from the Fleshweaver like boulders pushed, steadily and deliberately, down a mountain incline. Among the nauseous psychic cacophony that surrounded them, Eiohsa could make out the thread of his dismayed, even irritated surprise - and, strangely, a note of concern alongside it. “Even one of our mere battle-brothers should have been able to guess that it is a flaw in the subject’s keratoid transmuter.”

It was true, on reflection. The keratoid transmuter was a glandular organ in the anatomy of the Infestus strain, whose purpose was to rebalance and modify the endocrine directives of the keratinization natural in human bodies to redirect them into supporting the abhumans’ pseudo-exoskeleton. It was a detail that any member of the Ninth Legion was passingly familiar with, but at the same time the sort of trivial recollection that only occurred to most when they deliberately thought about it.

“But for one initiated into the mysteria of the flesh,” the Lurker continued, “It ought to be obvious that the strain on the transmuter due to the insertion of complex appendages,” he prodded at one of the segmented limbs, highlighting the area around its base - the shell plates there were brittle, broken and uneven, wholly embedded into the live flesh in some places, “Caused a wider disruption of hormonal balance, and from there a progressive failure of vital parts of the organism. Your lack of perceptiveness is troubling, acolyte. What is your name?”

Eiohsa stared at him, dismayed, for what seemed to her eons and eons as she scrounged for a name, any name, that would not arouse suspicion. “Ishmael Sarantakos.” She said at last, praying silently that the Fleshweaver who loomed over her now would accept her answer without suspicion. She said nothing else.

“You must be very new indeed,” the Lurker mused, “Elder Ormis must have his reasons for allowing you in here. Regardless, I think your spirit is still unsteady in the new regimen. Redouble your meditations for this week, then decrease them again evenly, day by day. Your focus should return.”

He turned towards the center of the room, gesturing at the expiring bulk on the table next to them as he stalked away. “This one is useless now. As your penance, bring it to the chasm and dispose of it.”

For a time, no response came from the disguised woman as she stared at the Fleshweaver before her, her eyes flitting between him and the prone, slowly dying form of her daughter. She was bathed in misery. Marinated in despair. She was surrounded by the imprint of suffering upon this accursed pit of hell, etched permanently into the very air she breathed for all eternity. Around her, perhaps hundreds of her daughters - those who had taken oaths in service of humanity, and young girls taken from their homes and subjected to this atrocity - had died alone, without ever knowing a chance of salvation.

Silently, she wept within the helmet once more, nodding tersely to the man before her and forcing a quick bow, before she walked to her Daughter.

Breath came in ragged gasps as the cruel mockery of an Astartes fought for life before her eyes. Eiohsa took her in hand, reciting the traditional prayer for the dying in a voice audible only to herself, and to the dying form of her daughter. Devoid of energy even to react, she felt a flicker of life within her, the familiar language rousing some long dead part of her soul as she was carried to the awaiting chasm, where she would be disposed of as so many had before. Words that she herself had never before uttered, for though she had followed her gene-mother into battle, she had never shared her convictions. And yet she knew the tongue, and knew the words by heart.

Eiohsa carried her Daughter with the weight of a trillion bodies upon her tread. With each step she took, the words came, and she felt the confusion of the dying marine slowly fade away, replaced with comfort - she no longer feared her death, she would not die alone, robbed of everything. She simply wondered.

Satisfied that nobody could see them, Eiohsa knelt in a bend of the tunnel, removing the helmet, and cried. Her features shifted to those her Legion knew her by, the kind face that had known every one of them by name, that had led them against some of the darkest foes humanity had ever faced. Golden tears spilled down her cheeks as she wept, holding the warped form of her Daughter close. “I am sorry.” She whispered, over and over. “I am sorry, Divya, that I could not prevent this.”

The husk of her daughter said nothing - for there was nothing she could have said. Rendered mute from the experimentation of the Abyssal Lurkers, Eiohsa felt only stunned silence from her daughter, and disbelief. 

“Anastasia found me.” She whispered,  her voice cracking as she struggled to contain herself. “She found me, I do not know how, and… I will end it. By the hand of the Emperor himself, I will end it. But… that will wait.” She told her of the events she had witnessed, since the conflict upon Pyotrskov. Of the triumphs and troubles of the Sixteenth Legion. Her Daughter, who had never once shared the faith of her Primarch, merely listened, listened to whatever poured forth from the mouth of her Primarch. Eiohsa held her daughter, what remained of her, for what seemed to be hours. In the deepest halls of her enemy, she held her daughter as she died.

She would not be consigned to the pit. Of that, she was certain.

After securing the body, she rose, shakily, to her feet - taking on the form of the Astartes she had impersonated once more. She returned to the chamber, shaky on her feet, and began to scan it for what she might loot from it, for her word alone would not suffice for the condemnation of Sarghaul and his Fleshweavers. Only evidence. 

The Fleshweaver at the entrance, she recalled, had mentioned an accumulation of rejects in Chamber Eta. That waste, no doubt bearing sufficient signs of the unclean work conducted in the caverns, would not be missed by anyone present if it disappeared.

The way to Chamber Eta lay through one of the other corridors branching away from the central lair, and past another large grotto. A wide basin along its further end was filled with water, acrawl with spiny crustacean bodies. Young charybdes crowded over each other, as their kind were wont to do in constrained spaces, trying to clamber up to the sheer rim of the depression. A few stone tables stood along the lateral walls, surgical instruments and scraps of organic material scattered over them, as well as a number of the vessels used by Apothecaries to store extracted gene-seed. Some of them, Eiohsa noticed, were full.

In the middle of the chamber, a strange scene was taking place. A Herald of Silence stood with one hand raised, the cloying presence of his order's distinctive psychic field emanating from his figure. Circling around him was an outlandish creature. It appeared to be a grown charybdes, large enough to loom over the marine, but where the carapaces of those beasts were usually brown and jagged, it was black and smooth, like a corporeal shadow. Eight eyes stared from its approximation of a head, and instead of a single pair of clawed forearms it had two, emerging in parallel and snapping with agile ease despite their unnatural number. On its back, an autocannon was fixed to a set of cybernetic sockets, and it swivelled and clicked in blank fire - without any trace of a targeting servitor.

Slowly, a conjecture began to form in Eiohsa's mind. It was absurd, improbable, surreal, even; but no less bizarre was the sight of the mutated beast that was performing a [i]drill[/i] before her eyes. Its coordination, enhanced senses, natural interfacing with machinery, even its clearly overdeveloped awareness, together with the progenoid surgery supplies, all pointed to an impossible conclusion. Through some obscure marvel of fleshcrafting, the Lurkers had found a way to transpose the foundation of Astartes conversion in a way that served to augment a body that was not human. Even an analogue of the black carapace could not exist in isolation. A complex that defied the laws of life both natural and not pulsed within the shell of that being, and as its foundation - the gene-seed of the Sixteenth, noted for its exceptional adaptability.

Fortunately, there were no more horrors between that grotto and her destination. Strewn about the ground of a small cavern was a bouquet of gruesome remains: another body that had been Astartes, plagued with continuous grafts, a small charybdes with some odd features, though nowhere as alien as the live specimen she had seen, and a trio of partially dissected Infestus carcasses. It was perhaps for the best that she had not had occasion to see why those were in this crypt of unholy innovation.

Time passed in a blur for her as she faded through chambers and rooms lost to any sane mind. She did not remember how she concealed the treasure trove of abominable waste from the depths of the Carcinian laboratories, by what unconscious psychic glamour she made it invisible to the Fleshweavers that haunted them like ghouls a crypt. Nor did she truly recall her feet carrying her out from the web of hidden tunnels, through the mazes and corridors of exquisite horror and mockeries of science. Once out on the sunken mountainside she pushed herself and her grotesque salvage through the water at speed, desperate to return to land, to return to some semblance of normality and sanity. Above the water lurked horrors of their own, but beneath those seas of long lost antiquity there was naught but madness from which she fled in desperation.

Her first breath on the surface in hours was one of the sweetest sensations in her memory. The clean, crisp ocean air filled her lungs, absent the stench of death, fish, and blood. 

She dragged herself onto the beach, pulling herself free, piece by piece, from the armor of the Ninth Legion, casting the pieces into the sea as her form returned to that she had disguised herself in when first landing. Half stumbling, she pulled herself and her cargo towards the spaceport. Through the jingling of a heavy purse of coins, she secured for herself storage for the grisly items, securely locked and away from prying eyes. She would wait for Alethia until the departure of the cargo vessel she had stowed away on. 

Dusk was beginning to descend over the landing zone, daylight giving way to moonless night, when the tall bushes at the edge of the beaten dirt pad parted with a rustle. Alethia was there, along with the man who had accompanied her that morning. Both looked drawn and if possible more haggard than before, as if after the exertions of a day.

"That's her, yes," the woman half-whispered as the two staggered out from the brush. They reeked of saltwater and various odorous grasses crumpled together.

"Is it true? That you're an [i]ifrel[/i]?" the man quietly asked Eiohsa, making an inadvertently conspicuous effort not to look into her eyes.

“I am nothing of the sort.” She responded, shaking her head at the man. “I am, however, the woman who will save your lives. It pains me to do so, but the alternative is to abandon you here to death. I will answer all questions - any questions you have - later, when we are aboard my own vessel. We must stow away on this one first, however.”

The young Carcinians shot each other a perplexed look, but they seemed to understand the essence, if not the entirety, of the situation well enough. Stepping with exaggerated caution, they made their way to the transport - something they had seen before, but never so much as laid a hand on - and vanished in a corner of its bay. The pilot, who stood nearby smoking, did not spare them a glance.

Numbness. 

That was what she felt.

A dull buzzing sensation that filled her body to the brim. Not unlike that which followed in the wake of Exterminatus. But different. More personal. It was not the trauma of battle, something she knew and reckoned with well. It was altogether different. A rotting, sucking despair that pulled at the fabric of the soul, stretched the mind like putty. Even now, she felt its cloying threads resting sickeningly against her being, remnants of a tapestry woven of the darkest nightmares. It scarcely seemed real. Some distant memory already.

But the containers that now surrounded her told her a different story. Within those innocuous sealed containers were the horrific things she had borne witness to. Within those containers were [i]her daughters[/i] - or what had remained of them by the time she found them. Within those containers was the most grave transgression yet committed by Imperial hands, and, she prayed, the most grave to ever be. 

Surrounded by a catacomb of lost souls, she sank to her knees, the memories joining in the ever-present choir of torment within her mind. She slumped against a container, energy spent, and cried.
[hr]
[b][...End Log.][/b]
[b][...Terminating.][/b]
[b][Imperial Thought for the Day: The Malevolent grows like a cancer from the smallest corruption. Take up thy sword and cut it out, root and stem.][/b]