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[i]The Second Compliance of Praxia
Aulpollriax[/i]

“I…. See now…. We die for your perfection.”

The man no longer squirmed in her grip, beyond the natural response to the strain her grasp placed upon his mortal form. The golden mask set upon his features hid the majority of his expression from her, but his eyes shone with a mad delight as his focus sat unwaveringly upon her. The rest of them lay slaughtered around her. They could have been his closest friends, spouses, children even, yet he held only adoration for the one who had brought destruction upon them. The thought sickened her as much as the pleasant yet foul stench that arose from the bodies of the gene-enhanced guardians who had sought to stop her in her retribution. As her spear had cut through them the fluids that had spurted from the monstrously large beings could hardly be described as blood, a mixture of fragrance and effluence pumped from where arteries should have been.

Thankfully their overlords had bled as mortal men, and the creeping taint had been washed clear with a deluge of human ichor. He was the last, or at least, the last that mattered. The warriors of the Pact who had accompanied her yet roamed the halls of the estate, pumping bolter rounds into any remaining Praxians they found. They had responded as swiftly and without question to her commands as if their own Primach had ordered them to do so. That was a praise she would sing to their gene sire once the killing was done.

“You die because you shun the Emperor’s Truth, and cower behind false gods.” Sekhmetara snarled, her armoured grip squeezing around the man’s throat. Something popped within the mortal’s throat, but through a gargle of blood and bone he still spoke.

“You are promised, child of the Serpent’s Nest, The galaxy shall walk in your golden light and know only His perfection.” Even as she brought him pain and suffering beyond which his body could come back from, he did not waver.

“Bask in my Light then. My future is my own.” She witnessed the reflection of her own blazing gaze in the shine of the golden mask the man wore a moment before the heat and fury of her eyes struck him. That was too much even for faith to press beyond and the man screamed and shrieked as the mask began to melt to his features. She could have annihilated him in a moment, but she had enough control of her gifts to allow him to live for the first moments as flesh and metal became one. Even through his shrieks, he gibered about prophecy. That earned him a final death, the solar fury of her eyes increasing to blast flesh from bone, leaving only the gold clad skull which she shook free of the charred corpse. Hot sizzling blood still dripped and hissed from her war plate. Most of the enemy had not been armoured, had practically lined up to be torn apart by her in some form of twisted worship.

As she turned to climb the filigree stairs which made up the far end of the chamber, her footsteps left pools of the substance. The heat exuded from her form refused to allow the tangy liquid to clot and slow, running down her armour in trickling waterfalls as she steadily climbed the decorative stairs. At the summit a marble throne dominated the far wall, the pristine white stone decorated with gold leaf and rising up into a huge frieze. The artistic depiction was beautiful and horrific all the same, human figures depicted writhing with serpents, all surrounding a vast semi-human face which glared from above the back of the throne, the exposed tongue of the collosal visage forming the back of the throne itself. She had not witnessed so perfect a depiction since she had last looked upon her father, her plated fingers reaching up to brush the elevated cheekbones of the sculpture. In truth it wasn’t her father that bore the most resemblance. With careful consideration, she decided it could have been herself, if she had stripped some of her own femininity away. The true brother she had never had. 

She knew not what compelled her, but she turned her back to the vast face, looking upon the miasma of slaughter she had left through the room. Her eyes still roared with burning fury, and as she refused to dim the psychic power rushing through her, the deep brown mane of her hair ignited as well turning white then bursting into the fiery locks which denoted the fullest extent of her potential. Then she took the throne, pressing herself into the groove of the tongue with ease. When the High Priest, or whatever ridiculous title he had used, had been sat upon it he had been utterly engulfed, a ridiculous pawn upon a vast throne. She rested within the alcove as if it had been made for her, the width of her hips perfectly held without tightness, the armrests aligned so that the fingers of her hands just draped over the edge. The full length of her height placed her head right at the cusp of the tongue-ridge, so that she appeared framed by the frieze without any of her being obscured. She allowed the image of poised perfection to exist a moment longer before she lent forwards, one elbow resting on her right knee. The image of a conqueror who had seized the throne, rather than the queen it had been crafted for.

[I]”All wings reporting, Encarmine Protocol targets eliminated, Sire.”[/I]

The voice crackled in her ear, not as pristine as the audio of her helmet, but she had removed it long before.

“Received, begin retrieval of the Icari.” While she felt a sense of pride for how swiftly her daughters had reacted to the paradigm shift of their deployment, she would wait for true praise. The call of slaughter was upon her, the taste of iron in her mouth and to wax lyrically in his moment would have drip too much of her blood lust into her words.

[I]”Your Eyes Upon Us, Sire.”[/I]

She turned the charred skull in her left hand over, regarding the ashen bone held together by the previously molten metal now hardened across its skeletal features, before setting it upon the left armrest of the throne. She shut her eyes, steadying her breathing as the song of conquest still rang in her ears, the pool of blood seeping from her armoured boots growing as it began to run back down the stairs, channels of the slick substance, still refusing to curdle and clot, interrupting the gold and white perfection of the climb to where she sat.

[I]”Your sister approaches”[/I]

The voice was Isabis, no doubt monitoring the motion of the Primarchs aside from the military operation. Sekhmetara had no doubt which of her gene-siblings she meant. She did not reply to her adopted mortal sibling, instead simply relaying the message to the Pact securing the compound. There was little chance Daena could be mistaken for any other oncoming aerial blip, but it still seemed reasonable to warn them and alert them to her permission for her sister to join her. She was, afterall, in overall command.

Sekhmetara did not move from the throne, but she did open her eyes, regarding the slaughter one further time before resting on the embossed doorway from which her sister would shortly arrive.

Daena had flown with the haste that only rage could proffer. The plan had been simple - Sekhmetara was to relieve and join forces with the loyalists in the spire, and from there fight upwards, splitting the attention of the hive’s defenders yet another time. With threats from above and below, the decapitation strike would catch them outmaneuvered and out of position. Yet that was not what had happened.

Instead she had found her strike force flanked by reinforcements sent from lower in the spire, the very elements that Sekhmetara and the loyalists were to have tied down. Her only support in that chaotic killing field were the misbegotten and murderous daughters of the Tears, women who seemed to have little understanding of who or what they fought for considering the trail of death they left behind them.

The cost for their victory was far greater than it ought to have been due to this [i]deviation[/i] from the plans, and each fallen Doomsayer weighed upon the Angel’s heart as she approached the gutted palace. Her rage, vague and unfocused as it was, already began to cool as she examined the charnel field the Tears had made of the loyalist compound. It had clearly been a slaughter - for the most part, and the sight of the only corpses that had seemed to proffer resistance caused her lips to curl into a sneer of disgust at their warped and inhuman forms.

At last she arrived at her sister’s taken throne, the Angel brushing aside the errant desire to bow before her. Still, she could not but admit that Sekhmetara was sitting where she belonged. Even if that place was surrounded by gore. Calming herself, she remained assured that there must be a reason for such apparent madness. Her sister would not act so otherwise. “What occasioned such foulness, beloved of my heart?”

“The foulness festered here long before our arrival, Sister.” Sekhmetara rested back into the throne as she spoke, straightening back up to perfectly fill the frame of the throne, her hands resting along its edges as she beheld Daena, her eyes focused once more. “This was a cleansing, one that my daughters will complete before we are done here. “ The righteous fury which surged through her had yet to fade, her eyes burning with an intensity which settled on Daena, even if she was not the true focus of the Primach’s ire. 

“I have not spoken to you of such things, but you were not the first of our siblings I met. Our father brought Sarghaul and his Lurkers to Mithra. I have spoken of the overlords of my home, the Empire of the Scale, who I drove from Mithra’s surface.” Her attention drifted from Daena as she recounted the tale, a new truth matched with a familiar tale. Her armoured gauntlet lifted the gold-clad skull of the priest up to her own features, the charred icon of her handiwork staring back at her.

“It was not I who threw down the halls of my childhood, who burned the estates of the Empire upon Thotha and vented its environment to the void, only then choking the flames of its destruction..” With a dismissive flick of her fingers, the skull clattered from her grasp, trailing down the stairs to rest beside where Daena stood. “I was present, I knew the necessity, but it was the Lurkers who fought those battles with me, not the people of my home. They wept and raged against the purging, for many we were fighting to free Thotha of the Empire, but our Father had shown me the necessity of it.” Finally, Sekhmetara stood. The fury boiling within her faded, but did not cease, as she descended the steps, the stone, softened by the heat of her, cracking beneath her golden tread.

“Father spoke to me of the beings in the Warp, Xenos creatures more dangerous than any we fight within realspace. They covert humanity, seek the worship of our masses so they might dominate our reality as well. The Imperial Truth is both our cause and our weapon against them. On a thousand worlds you may find cults and hidden enclaves like these.” With a wave of her hand, Sekhmetara motioned to the reliefs along the walls, the works of foul perfection that detailed the entire estate. “That is why Father needs weapons such as the Lurkers. His own monsters, to hunt the tyrants of Old Night.” Finally, her features settled once more on Daena in full, at last with the warmth of expression usually reserved for her, a sad, knowing smile on Sekhmetara’s full lips.

“I am sorry for the loss of your daughters, Stars of my sky, but this cult of Serpents must be put to the pyre, lest they spread among those who claim to be our subjects, not one may escape, and to that task my daughters can be his monsters as well as our brother’s get.”

Were it anyone else who said such things, Daena would have scoffed. The pagan rites of mystery cults and Warp whisperers were dangerous, it was true, she had had lifetimes dealing with them - but this was beyond the pale. If Sekhmetara insisted upon it however, and if she went so far as to claim that the Lurkers were part of Father’s design…

“Very well, Sun of my days, I shall take you upon your word,” the Angel said after a few moments, her wings wilting at the statement. “A full accounting can wait, there are more pressing issues to deal with,” she continued on, attempting to retain the thread of conversation lest she be swept away by her sister’s zeal. It was more difficult than she would like to admit. “But.”

Pulling herself up to her full height, she locked eyes with her enthroned sister. Things might have been simple to Sekhmetara, but these revelations - if she did accept them as truth - only made things far more complicated. “Sekhmetara. If these,” she said with a wave at the carnage around them, “were our loyal functionaries, worthy of death by your hand, then what does that make the rebels?”

“A traitor is a traitor.” As the Mithran primach spoke, her hand came to rest on her sister’s shoulder, the contact felt through the second skin of their ceramite plate. She remembered well, the time before, when she had not known these lessons herself. When she had walked the shattered halls of her home and questioned the justice of her father’s will. Dissent was still dissent, heresy was still heresy. Only the Imperial Truth could strike the centre, the narrow understanding of reality upon which the Imperium could survive.

“What we do here will seed this world for a thousand generations of humanity that might live in peace and prosperity. I am the Unconquered Sun of Mithra, and I will burn away the cancer buried in our father’s realm.” Sekhmetara’s voice was quiet despite her fervor, whispered words of intimate belief to her sister, even as heat and power radiated from her, only dipping as she came upon the one topic she knew would be painful. “My daughters report to me that you encountered my first company, I sense rage and indignity in you sister, speak your piece that I might quell your concerns.”

Daena turned her face away from her sun as it tried to embrace her, wings shrouding her form. Such breezy statements, so certain and filled with conviction, were easy things for Sekhmetara. They had never come easily to her. “Their treason is our failure. If there was any left upon [i]our[/i] worlds who followed such foolishness, then it speaks to our inability to root them. To think that such were placed so high says even worse. What use is a conquest without ensuring the Truth is firmly placed in power? What benefit is so hollow a victory?”

Now she overcame her fretfulness, facing her sister full on, eyes gleaming with the light of her genegift. “You are a hunter, o greatest of stars. And you unleashed your hounds. Tell me. Are these wayward souls to be cowed, or prey to be run down?”

“As we do with any failure sister, in our father’s work. We bring Truth to falsehoods, we correct them. Words have failed. It is time for fire and fury.”