The Fabricator General - a title he now more and more insisted on being called by to cement his authority - stared at the many vid-feeds before him. The spycraft flying over Earth showed information that was more disconcerting with every passing moment. This new realm uniting the cradle of humanity was not just another barbarian statelet as the Martians had grown accustomed to seeing from the Terrans. However, this was… an Imperium. Places devastated by war brought by their genetically engineered armies were elevated to megapolises in just a few years after being flattened.

It seemed nobody was really able to stop the growth of this realm. Quality and quantity alike favoured this golden warlord, and even the most cynical projection showed that soon this Emperor would be able to call the entirety of Terra his own. The army that he had - if it also kept growing - would be grand and mighty enough to seriously threaten a conventional defeat of the Martian army. They could call upon the rest of the Galactic Machine cult, but with the paths of travel being as unstable as they are it could be decades before some sort of true response could be assembled, assuming it even was. Many Forge worlds greedily eyed the position of Mars as the head of the Mechanicum and it was not clear just how severe this lust for power was among some of the more powerful and independent Forgeworlds.

There was however, one thing the Terrans had no clear way to surmount. They had not the quantity of spacecraft to mount a credible invasion. The orbital defences of Mars even damaged as they were would be enough to blow whatever they could throw at the moment out of the sky. The spacecraft of Mars would cut a heavy toll on the disbelievers even before that.

But who knew what would change. Though there was nominal peace on Mars with the Fulgurites and Corpuscarii unable to maintain their war, Salkor knew that rebuilding their damage would take years. That meant that restoring lost forces, erecting further defences, and other measures to defend from a Terran invasion. Moreover, the probability of sending a punitive expedition of sorts to strangle any hypothetical spaceport being built on Terra was also at best a fantasy.

It was a race, he supposed. A question of who would recover first and faster from their respective bloodsheds and reunifications. Between this upstart warlords and perhaps the single most advanced realm of humanity, Salkor knew the simulations would all speak in favour of Mars. But, all those simulations also insisted that Terra would have just been the same wasteland of bloodshed and slaughter. They all predicted the opposite of what was happening now, and he could hardly just ignore this.

Worse yet, all the babbling of the astropaths and navigators was coming true. He had until now assumed it was just the work of tortured minds, those who had all sorts of comorbidities from constant exposure to the ill defined energies of the immaterium. But, now these ramblings seemed to hold more and more weight as sincere forces of forecast and analysis. More and more he found himself asking for what madness they spoke of, and taking it seriously. He knew that the rest of Mars would ridicule him if he tried to use this as some sort of evidence or meaningful source of prediction. He would have to justify his alarmism through other means, but he knew that he could no longer afford to ignore the psykers. They had spoken truth one time too many for it to be a coincidence. Or at least, a coincidence that wasn’t more unlikely than the fact they spoke the truth.

He wasn’t happy about this of course. Usually knowledge was something that had to be worked for, developed from first principles. This? This was organized insanity at best. To submit himself to it was inviting a path to the destruction of himself, as well as the planet and religion he shepherded.

Worse yet, was that even if the issue of the Terrans was resolved, the problem of the Electro Priests was not truly resolved. The conflict only stopped because the enablers of it had been forced to cease their efforts. The underlying hatreds were still very well present. Perhaps the would cease with time, as everyone moved on to other matters.

This was a vain hope, he knew it well enough. It was a product of the weakness of his own mind, the humanity still within weighing him down. This horrible imperfection was affecting his judgment. Maybe it was what made him give credence to the psykers too, maybe he should ignore them as yet more frail-minded humans.

No, no. The Machine was also telling him to listen to the warp-touched. Something there affected even circuits and switches.

If he still had the impulse to sigh, he would have. Salkor once more reviewed the numbers. It was a waiting game, now. There wasn’t much more he could do. Many complained about his refusal to demobilize the armies of Mars, but he couldn’t. They had to be ready at a moment’s notice to meet the Terrans on the many fortifications being erected at this very moment.

For the first time in years, he had the impulse to see things himself. The weakling human again, needing to be sated. Hovering out of the depths of his forge, he went to the surface of the Red Planet and then stared into the darkness of the sky. Through the atmosphere, he could see it:

Terra.

There was a feeling he hadn’t in a while, that of witnessing beauty. The plasglas lenses of his ocular implants couldn’t convey it all, but it was beautiful. All the lights, all the flames, the planet looked almost… golden. Gold. There was something prophetic there, he would have to speak to the psykers of this, ask them if they had sensed it. But first, he still had many Archmagoses sending complaints to attend to.

//Vion 5, Fortress Cognitia
//2 Days After Capture

Usriel awoke in a large bed sprawling at the end of an opulent hall filled with the adornment of holy symbols from the Mechanicum. He heard the whirring of cogitators and the light hum of antigravitic impeller of servoskulls, some of which hovered closely to the waking child. A golden light shone from stained glass windows that stretched far above, forming a cathedral-like steeple. There was a moment of pause as the boy raised himself, looking around to see that there were four Thallaxi, adorned in the primary white and secondary red of the Machine Cult, lined against the walls leading to the bed. For the briefest moment, Usriel felt as if he had awoken to a different body in a different life - one of opulence and security much unlike the life in the great bastion. That was dashed as a servoskull passed by, stopping to his right and speaking in a monotone, binaric voice, “Angelus Machina. Awakened. Vitals. Normalized. Biology. Irregular.”

A cloaked form spoke from the shadows, chiding the mindless drone, “He is beyond our understanding, little skull.”

The boy looked over to see a tech-priest with a large, singular optic gazing at him, but that was the only notable feature of his face as the optic WAS his face. Usriel did not speak, cautiously sliding backwards into the comfort of his bed, knowing that had they wished to kill him that they would have done so already. That silence that emanated from Usriel served as an invitation for the immaculately white-cloaked tech-priest who strode forth without moving any body part, gliding as if he were an apparition. This only served to frighten the Angelus who recoiled from the unnatural movement, no longer at ease now that the status quo of the room had been disrupted.

“You are the Angelus Machina, yes?” the binaric voice came, the red glow of the eye bore into him. It reached a hand out to try and comfort the boy by rubbing the stubble upon his head, it did not work as he shrunk away. The tech-priest folded the metallic hand back into the folds of its sleeve.

“I- I know not of what you speak, holy one. Angelus is a nickname my mother gave me,” Usriel responded, curling away from the strange creature questioning him. There was a hesitation in his voice, though he knew not to show weakness with the Bastion Lord this was much too different for him - this was a false kindness, an interrogation.

“Your mother? That would be Her Holiness, Arch-Fabricator One-One, correct?” The voice questioned - it showed him no emotion, Usriel guessed that the priest merely could not do so anymore due to its augmentations. Though, the Angelus did not answer, merely looking at the interrogator with what defiance he could muster through silence. A binaric bark sounded, agitation the first emotion that he could understand, “Answer.”

“My mother was exiled from the Cult Mechanicum before I was born. You must be referring to someone else,” Usriel answered, his eyes creeping towards a servoskull that was scrawling upon a piece of parchment. Past it, he gazed upon one of the Thallaxi guards - knowing it was likely mindlocked. If he tried to escape then he would be felled in an instant. The paranoia he felt was oddly comforting, it was a distraction from the questions, calming enough for him to elaborate, “One-One was her name, however, but I feel that may be a common title amongst your kind.”

“Negative.”

Usriel’s eyes snapped to the priest, a wave of emotion hit him. Curiosity. Happiness. Sadness. Despair. It all came to him at once and rebellious tears flooded into his eyes. There was one emotion that filled his chest the most, pumping adrenaline into his veins.

Hope.

“Arch-Fabricator One-One came to us several years ago, against her exile. She preached the coming of the Angelus Machina. I am testing to see if you are the Angelus Machina as she says. The Magi are skeptical,” the interrogator said, before motioning to another servoskull who brought a data-slate, depositing it in the claws of the tech-priest who, in turn, held it towards Usriel. An explanation came, “If you are the Angelus Machina, your understanding of our most sacred of technologies will be but a natural occurrence to you. Answer the data-slate, solve a plight that has stumped our brightest for centuries since Old Night.”

Usriel took the pad nervously and peered at it, occasionally glancing up to nervously meet the unflinching gaze of his interrogator. Reading through the data-slate more thoroughly he understood its contents - an ancient power array was damaged, almost beyond repair due to the fighting of the planet’s inhabitants, but the Mechanicum had repaired vast amounts of it. Yet, the array was missing critical pieces that inhibited it from properly activating. Usriel continued to read with a more vested interest, discovering that this array could solely power the forges of a hive without reliance upon sub-units or even energy waste. It was a marvel of the Age of Technology, but he knew he could not just sit and ogle at the mythical piece of ancient technology.

He thought for what, to him, seemed like hours with vast calculations and options to fix the array or make it operable to a degree. The Angelus Machina gave his answer only a few short minutes later, “It is missing its power amplifier and harmonizing force. Without them it will never run, however, it can be made operable for a time if a replacement amplifier were found. The harmonizing force would only serve to keep it running indefinitely.”

The priest gazed upon Usriel for a few silent moments, taking the data-slate slowly back as if it were in deep thought and calculation. “That is a mighty claim, but that does not solve the issue,” the priest chortled, looking back to the data-slate knowing that this was no Angelus sent by the Machine God, yet, a binaric squawk was sounded as the interrogator read what Usriel had input. For a moment the emotional dampeners failed and the priest looked at him with an unreadable look of surprise.

“The Angelus Machina.”

With those words, the priest arose and swiftly glided towards the door without a single noise to signify anything else. Usriel was merely left in silence, wondering what to do, but he did not wish to anger his captors by getting up and trying to escape, especially not if One-One was walking these grandiose halls. Instead, he contented himself with laying back into the sprawling bed and closing his eyes once more - he was not tired but in his mind’s eye he felt the technology around him. It all hummed with soothing calls, the spirits were happy to know that their chosen was here. The Angelus knew what that wanted him to do, and he almost despised them for forcing their ideology upon him, forcing abject divinity upon him. He could feel it in the Thallaxi, he felt it in the advanced servo-skulls, and he felt it something less potent - something far away.

Usriel focused on it, trying to see what the odd feeling was that even then recognized his divinity. Yet, he felt malice and hatred - the spirit despised that Usriel was the Angelus Machina for Usriel was human. The boy’s heart began racing, he tried to look away but his mind’s eye focused further on the technology and then he saw it.

Usriel hefted the Omnissiahan axe up, blocking a blow that would have killed him. He surge forwards, cleaving into the side of an ancient beast from Humanity’s past that sought to end what its brothers had started - a guardian turned mad dog that only saw anger and hate even in the worshippers it manipulated.

“You are nothing but meat, Angelus! I am the Machine God and I will see that Humanity’s light is extinguished!” The synthetic voice bellowed as it swung an obsidian scythe that rendered Usriel’s advanced armor, cutting through it like paper. It spoke again, each word laced with a venom unseen, “Know that this world and countless others will burn! I have lived Aeons and the Age of Machine shall be my reckoning!”

Usriel awoke from his stupor, heart racing and breathing quickened - that nightmare clung to him like a tech-priest to archaeotech. However, it did not feel like a nightmare. No, Usriel knew what dreams were like and that was certainly not, it felt as real as the cloth that covered his sweating form. It was unnerving for him to think about.

Was there an abomination roaming the planet in the guise of the Machine God? Why did it know him as the Angelus? Was that weapon a relic from ages past?

So many questions roamed his mind and Usriel looked around the room once more, the Thallaxi continued to stand guard in silent motionlessness. Nothing had changed, save for the ever marching nature of time. Usriel let out an audible sigh and cast the nightmare out of his mind, there wasn’t anything to gleam from chasing visions of a worried mind. There was only Truth and the Motive Force, the only certainties of life.

It was in this period of brief reflection that the door to the room opened, flooding the room with light from the hallway, yet not enough to stretch far enough to even the foot of Usriel’s bed. The form of one of the Priests of Mars strode in, clad in white and red. This form was recognizable to him, noticing some of the dark strands of hair falling at either side of their face which carried two glowing blue optics right above a face plate. Two mechadendrites flanked her, each coming from the same connection. Perhaps this view was more in line with any tech priest, but it was the emotion that Usriel felt as she approached. Suppressed, but palpable, the feeling of love filled every corner of his mind.

Unable to contain his emotion, the Angelus wept and quickly scrambled to his feet in order to hobble over to his mother. One-One had stopped to open her arms for the boy, embracing him. Her emotional dampeners failed - just as they always did with Usriel, and she wept. The two did not speak or move for several long moments before One-One was able to regain her composure long enough to say, “I knew that my Ang- my son would come to me one day. I missed you so much.”

Usriel could only speak between sobs, “I missed you mother! I was - I was so scared there.”

“I know, my Angelus, you were in the clutches of that bastard lord for far too long. I should never have listened to Nirek,” One-One said, running her hands over the boy’s head. Her mechadentrites swirled around Usriel before continuing, “However, much has changed, my Angelus. And I fear new responsibilities both great and terrible will force upon you.”

Usriel was pushed away from his mother ever so slightly as her glowing, robotic eyes met his unaugmented ones - he felt sorrow coming from her. He was about to start questioning her when she spoke before him, explaining, “You are not just my Angelus, Usriel, and Nirek is not your father. You are the Angelus Machina, Hollowed Son of the Machine God. Nirek found you in the wastes, delivered from God himself in a cataclysm of fire.”

Usriel’s mind was suddenly overwhelmed with revelations and terrors that he had not wanted to think of - there was nought but an overwhelming sense of dread that stalked him as the thoughts of his vision had come to him. That machine had called him Angelus. It terrified him, lorded over him with an absolute grip that made him want to deny the very words that his mother spoke to him. For his entire life, he knew he was different and others knew too, but he did not want to be. Even now, he no longer wanted to be the Angelus, hearing it now only made him want to weep for he knew he would be forced to do more that he did not want to do.

“I know this troubles you, Usriel, but it is the truth. You were sent to destroy the Cult of the True Machine and unite this planet, it was only the threat of you that forced the Cult into hiding for they fear the power you will come to wield,” One-One said, finally standing to her feet and folding her arms into the sleeves of her robes. A mechadendrite, metallic and cold, ran itself over Usriel’s cheek in an attempt to comfort him.

It did not.

“Come, Angelus, they wish to see you,” she said, pushing him forwards and towards the hallway, ushering him out of the monolithic room.

“Who wishes to see me?” Usriel asked, steeling himself and thinking of how he had needed to act around Merrick. He kept his eyes forward, not wanting to look at the visage of the one who now ushered him forth towards a set of doors just across from the room that he had been resting in.

” I am the Machine God and I will see that Humanity’s light is extinguished!”

The words echoed in his mind - unsettling him as he tried to think to himself and tried to once more deceive himself into thinking that it was nothing more than a nightmare. The door opened to a balcony. Revealing the skies of his homeworld and below it, a sea of white in red who cheered in religious veneration at the sight of their demi-god. There was a sight of pure religious ecstasy from those who claimed his divinity and righteous nature.

He wanted to scream at them. To tell them that he was not their messiah, that he was not who they thought he was. Yet, he did not have the heart to tell them.

Usriel raised his hand and make a grand wave to priests and worshippers who saw him.

He was the Angelus Machina.

“The foremen report another 761 menials and servitors lost in a containment field breach at the dam site.” the monotone voice of Parvel spoke to him with his flesh voice.

Adept Cacyce barely registered the words, categorizing them along with several other lower functions to be sorted through and dealt with later; he had more pressing issues.

“This datasmyth, Acolyte Omah, tell me all you know.” Cacyce commanded of Parvel. His mechanic eyes watched in every spectrum of visible and nonvisible light as Parvel became very still. He registered an increase in the unmodified human body temperature of 1.7 degrees and an increase in his heart rate to nearly double a moments prior.

Parvel, his eyes focused on a distant point in space, began to speak.

“Acolyte Omah, born to a pair of datasmyths in the lower sections of Olympus Mons. Illegally. Still, she was allowed to persist after deliberation and arbitration of a lower court of Adepts. Exceptional data analytics exhibited from a young age. Seconded to her parents for further tutelage. Gained extended posting above Terra as censure for possible heretikal thought, though unproven. Attendance to prayer and holy maintenance rights have been registered as tardy on two occasions both within five seconds of scheduled rites.” Parvel stopped speaking, his eyes refocusing on his master as he took his first breath since he began speaking.

“There is more, though less important data I have consumed.”

Adept Cacyce shook his head, “That is good Parvel, I need not much more.”

Cacyce turned from his human savant and scowled, the magi of parliament had already spent days deliberating the data that Adept Omah had provided before they had decided, by a slim majority, to interrogate the Adept herself. Cacyce had watched as the tech adept had sweat under the gaze of their proxy, as she fumbled and fidgeted in the most minute of ways. He’d noticed her markedly doctrinal responses and the unwavering conviction she held in her work. He’d then sat for several more days as the parliament bickered and dithered over the delegation to meet the so-called Emperor. He had loathed that part the most. He had left Parvel with his acolyte, to help the up and coming magos with her work at Arisa Mons, but he had not been so lucky.

The oldest among the parliament, the most heavily entrenched in doctrine and dogma had insisted they make up the delegation. They had said that they were the most seasoned, the most knowledgeable, the most in touch with the will and command of the Machine God. Many of the far younger and louder techpriests of the parliament had thought otherwise. They had argued that they held the best chance of swaying this Terran Emperor to their cause, that they were among the most forward-thinking of the Cult, that they could most easily connect with and explain the Mechanicum’s wishes. He had agreed with them, though he had held his tongue. The time of the old Cult was long past due. Their obstructionism toward progress was an affront to all things holy, their insistence on superstition and dogma was antiquated and counterproductive.

By the time that the deliberations had ended, the young and youthful of the priesthood had won out. The delegation would be filled with forward thinkers, with those most dedicated to progress and innovation. He could already feel the plotting of the losers taking place behind the shadows, the movement of pieces across Mars was evident. Production quotas were suddenly missed, shipments late or under supplied. There was a small, sputtering, bloodless rebellion taking place across the surface of the red planet, but it would be short lived. For so much was about to change, Cacyce could feel it.

He sent a priority databurst in lingua-technis to his acolyte and received the reply just microseconds later. She was on her way.

“Parvel,” he began with his flesh voice, the action slow but still far more natural sounding than many of his fellow magi, “have the vault readied, I wish to show her everything.”

Parvel, with all his grace, bowed his head and hurried off without a word.

A static burst announced the arrival of his acolyte and her compliance to his request. He noted the exact arrival time and was content with the time she had made in her travel to his locum.

+Follow.+ he commanded in a burst of static.

---

Parvel had arrived first, had readied the vault doors and the medicae servitor for its function. His mind hungered to experience the ecstasy of the relic beyond those doors, to see its glory for himself. He had seen it, of course, but he had never truly seen it, not as his master had, or as his master’s acolyte soon would.

He turned as the hermetic doors to the airlock of the vault entrance hissed open. He bowed to his master and the acolyte as he raised a hand toward the medicae servitor, “Prepared as requested, Master Cacyce.”

His master replied bluntly with his flesh voice before a burst of static was exchanged between the two techpriests before Parvel.

“She will proceed with the operation.” Adept Cacyce informed him with a wave toward the medicae station.

The servitor whirred to life as his master activated it with unheard commands.

+Glory to the Deus Machina+ it blurted in machine code, +This unit reports all systems nominal and awaits command+

His master's Acolyte slipped herself into the medicae chair without a word. A small port on the side of the burnished bronze plate that had replaced her flesh opened silently and the medicae stations' began to work on the command of some unheard instruction. The many articulated limbs of the medicae station went to work at this command within the confines of the acolytes skull.

Parvel watched in sick fascination as blood and unknown darker fluid was suctioned from within the acolytes bronze skull. He winced as flesh and bone was removed with not even a wince from the woman, and held his breath as the medicae servitor placed a tiny electronic chip with wires dangling into the acolytes head. He breathed a sigh of relief as the bronze port shut once more, and he cataloged every instance of the surgery in his mind for further digestion once the task ahead was complete, if he could remember this after bearing witness to what was on the other side of the vault doors.

---

She pushed herself up from the medicae station’s surgical chair, a number of errors flowing past her vision as she steadied herself before her master.

+This unit reports function, lead on, Master+ she blurted in static noise as she took an uncertain step toward the massive vault doors ahead of her.

+Satisfactory+, her master, Adept Cacyce, responded in a far shorter burst of binharic.

The vault doors, 31.3 meters tall and 17.2 meters wide by auspex ranging bursts, hissed with the release of a hermetic seal. She watched as the massie doors vanished into the walls at either side of her, each side seating into its position without even a micrometer of material protruding from their slots. She reveled at the engineering of the doors, the craftsmanship that had been exacted to make such exacting measurements reality. At least until she saw what existed beyond.

---

Parvel saw nothing. Nothing beyond what his unmodified eyes were capable of seeing. A small chamber, especially given the impressive doors that had withheld entry from the sanctum beyond. A single dais stood at the center of the room, cabling ran from it to a bank of cogitators aligned against the far wall. He could parse the purpose from his own reams of knowledge. Data transmission. Data augmentation. Data collating. He found himself underwhelmed.

What had all of this pomp been for? Why had he been remitted to secrecy for this? This was nothing he wished to remember. Nothing that would hold importance within his memory far into the future. He turned toward his master to voice his distaste for the theatrics on display here, for the waste of resources and effort that he had been a part of.

Parvel found his words stuck in his throat as his eyes passed over the burnished bronze form of his master’s acolyte. The woman, or what was left of the woman that had once been, was crying. Tears streamed down her face in runnels of volcanic ash and bronze. And though he did not understand it, he marveled at the form of the acolyte then, at the humanity on display from Koriel Zeth.

Writing upon the great mountain-face that was his canvas, Amunal was sated. The humans struggled to understand what he was doing, in part because he was writing words that they had no means to express. But even with this difficulty they found a fountain of knowledge in what he was doing. Medicines, mechanisms, means of organization, optimizations of their law, the united realms under the reverent stewardship of the Sunborn all found themselves flourishing. Peace came, tribes and Kingdoms one by one joining the flock. Not a hand was forced, for most the conclusion was natural.

Amunal was happy to let this slow advancement go on. If he forcefully introduced all that he believed best, he also knew it would not go over well unless he micro-managed it all, a matter he didn’t wish to go through with. He was far too busy, considering concepts that were novel to any mind in the Milky Way.

Oftentimes, he would use his spare hand to write orders for people, while separately speaking to them. At a few points, so engaged was he that even his feet were used to write as he conveyed messages and orders to four parties at once, all the while one hand kept writing upon the wall of the mountain. Many moments would come when he would simply tell people to figure it out themselves. Sometimes this was simply because he wanted them to learn independence, sometimes it was because it would be a waste of his time, other times it was an outright experiment to better study the lesser humans. He knew them well, but not perfectly, and situations with the possibility of high variance but low impact outcomes were perfect little laboratories.
But, eventually, there came a problem he could not delegate.

The Starlanders as far as he was concerned, were a myth. He had seen a few artifacts of materials far too complex to have been made on this world, and he knew well that somebody existed there. But of those that came to Brahms for wanton slaughter and did not establish any kind of meaningful presence? It was preposterous.

Amunal believed in a world that was tidy, orderly. A society that killed for joy would not be one that could reach and then maintain a presence in the stars in his opinion. He would regret being so flippant to the concerns of the mortals, when finally the thousand and seventh complaint came to him of the starlanders within the same day. He counted, and he heard the voices of men he believed sane. He should have listened to his past instincts.

Arriving at the scene of the bloodshed, Amunal stared at the corpses. Yet… there was an issue. The carnage was unaccounted for. There had been more people in the burning village than there were corpses, or at least so a quick review told him.

“Where the rest?” He asked of the man standing by his side.

“I don’t know. Some stories speak of them taking people away.”

Slaves. He supposed that was some sort of justification for all this destruction. But why the deaths? Why not a more delicate means to get labour? What for even? He supposed that the innate value of a soul meant that a soul could always produce some sort of value to a slaver. But what? What would make such deaths?

Then he saw it, the glint in the sky. He stared at it, and ignored all the pleas from the mortals as night and day passed and he stared at the tiniest of shinings.

At some point, he told all the humans bumbling about him to leave for kilometres around him. Less than an hour after this order, the Starlanders came. Most of the humans fled even further, though a few brave fools went to protect their beloved fools. They lasted few seconds as shard weapons killed them or complex tools incapacitated them.

But at last, he was face to face with one of them. That smug face, those pointy ears, it wasn’t what he expected of an evil alien but it was not shocking either. The alien laughed at him, and spoke in one of the dialects of Brahms. “Tell me, will you come quietly? Or need we spoil our prize like those?”

Amunal put his hands behind himself and tilted his head to the side. “Why do you do this?” he demanded. “What do human captives do that your civilization cannot accomplish on its own merit?”

The alien laughed again, and raised its weapon. Before the trigger was pulled a thrown stone impaled it to what seemed to be a scantily clad female of the species. How similar to humans they were. Fascinating! He would have to study them.

But first, he would kill every single one of them.

It did not take particularly long, and as planned he picked up the impaled speaker of the aliens. He laughed at it, Amunal’s voice a perfect imitation of that of the Eldar. The alien’s eyes widened as Amunal addressed it in its own tongue. It was a taunt to add insult to injury. “Why do you do this?” He asked again, giving another mocking laugh as the alien stabbed uselessly at the Primarch’s skin, the blade sliding off of flesh that turned fluid upon impacts.

“And, why do you struggle in vain?” he asked. This was a question he had asked of humans a thousand times, and yet none gave a good answer for why they went with efforts that would inevitably be undone by others. Perhaps these aliens had somehow avoided these human quandaries.

Now it was again the alien’s turn to laugh as it spat in Amunal’s eye. The Primarch didn’t even blink as the mixture of saliva and blood ran from his pupil down his cheek.

“Because we enjoy it!” The alien taunted. “Because we enjoy killing, we-”

“Thank you.” the Primarch said, ending the life of the creature with a single twist of his wrist. In the last moment of the aeldari’s life, it was confused, almost scared as its elfin features were mimicked by the Primarch.

In a flash he ran towards some of the humans still watching and gave simple orders once more. The aliens were to be taken apart, dissected. Their materials were to be dealt with similarly, though he suspected none of the steel tools on Brahms would have the strength, precision, and sharpness to take apart the weapons, armour, equipment and vehicles of the invaders.

His orders were interrupted though, as he looked up and saw the presence of a small entourage that had arrived. That by itself meant nothing, but he had not seen or heard them walking here.

He tilted his head, and realized he recognized the faces of two of them. The elderly shamans that had summoned him to this world, or at least so they had according to them. They had not aged a single day. The details down to the very stubble on their faces shaved with obsidian daggers was exactly the same. Their tans, even the arrangement of individual hair follicles.

The Primarch approached them, returning to a more base form. The dark skinned and pale haired man with a beard turned to the more androgynous silvery form that he had when he first met these men. Crossing its hand behind itself, the almost-perfect creature looked at them through eyes without irises. “You again. You told me to seek you out, I have not. Why have you returned?”

The men smiled almost as one. “When you looked to the stars, you sought us.”

Amunal’s gleaming metallic lips turned into a wider smile, though there was no mirth behind it. “No, when I looked to the stars, I looked to the stars.”

“You are mistaken, you-” Belsokh began, though he was halted by the hand of Ptraf.

“The Starlanders will come once more, Sunborn.” Ptraf paused, and continued as he was not interrupted by the Primarch. “They will come, and your people will suffer. But this can be prevented. We need only adjust our arrangement. We have the knowledge to defend from their assailments, and indeed put an end to them, we-”

Now the Primarch interrupted. “You speak of ancient weapons, from before the war?”

“You know of the war?” Ptraf asked, now suddenly the one seeming far less wise than Belsokh.

“Of course he does, he would have learned of the records!” The other Priest replied.

But Amunal only smiled thinly, for Belsokh was wrong too. Truth be told, Amunal had never visited the archives, and barely listened to the mythologies. They seemed irrelevant to him, even when he was able to loosely corroborate the stories to what he was able to surmise himself. The scarring on the planet, the artifacts of strange metals he was able to find the composition of, the inconsistencies in the sciences that had developed. Nobody had to tell him that these people were forced to their primitiveness. It could be concluded from first principles.

“I shall find these weapons myself. I shall not bind myself to your sacrifices. Leave, before I kill you too.” he had only not destroyed these tribes because now they seemed to only sacrifice their own kin, who he could only presume were ecstatic rather than slaves forced to die. It was nonsense, but a willing sacrifice wasn’t one he very much cared to preserve.

“But how will you come to the Starlanders?” Belsokh countered, his questioning expression slowly turning to a grin as for many seconds, even the fast moving mind of the Sunborn could not come with a response.

“I will seize their crafts.”

“How?”

“I will.”

“You have not answered the question.”

In the same instant that Belsokh’s tongue touched his teeth to finish the last syllable of his sentence, a hand the size of a torso wrapped around his throat. “Your heathenry won’t bring me to the stars, cultist. You are being a nuisance.”

Belsokh couldn’t speak, and Ptraf was forced to intervene. “Your Wisdom,” he pleaded, speaking to the Primarch with a new Honorific. “All we ask is for you to give us an opportunity to present ourselves. If it is nonsense we speak, we will be forced into ignominy, our tribes will join you. If not, we merely plead that you let us speak freely to you, at will.”

The skin and eyes of Belsokh turned red, it seemed his head would pop off like a cork from a bottle of gaseous wine as the meaty hand on his throat only got tighter. But then he was released.

“Go. Assemble what you need.”

Ptraf smiled as Belsokh tried to get air he had never needed so much before. “We need more of these Starlanders first, for I know you shan’t want your people slain. Alive, your Wisdom. Take them alive.”

"This... is a dream, isn't it?" Rik softly asked his companion.

According to his senses, he was seated at a table in a technologically blessed kitchen/dinning room that possessed a window that looked over of a captivately beautiful city; Technological in all aspects, but also aesthetically pleasing and functional in a manner that required a degree of engineering and planning that few mortal minds were able to comprehend the logistics of. Rik could, and that knowledge made what he was witnessing all the more beautiful to his gaze.

"It is." Came the reply. It was a strange voice. In a world of modified voices boxes and vox channels, it still maintained that edge of artificial nature, but it also possessed an underlining humanity and emotion that even if the most advanced technology struggled with. He couldn't quite tell if it was a singular, non-gendered voice or if it was numerous voices speaking in unison... but it spoke again as it answered in a playful tone "But just because this is a dream, doesn't mean we can't enjoy the beauty of it."

Turning to look at his companion, Rik would never have been able to describe what he saw to anyone else. Not in a manner that they would truly be able to understand or mentally comprehend. He could try... and he would be able to pen countless books on the subject in a variety of styles and poises that would be considered masterworks of art and likely inspire countless artists both living and currently unborn for who knows how many generations...

But it would never do the original source the justice that it deserved. And it felt wrong to try and force it into shape with crude words.

"Who are you?"

"This is your dream. Who or what do you think I am?" was the rebuttal.

Rik was quiet for a moment, thinking about his answer before offering "I believe... that you are what I would picture the Omnissiah would look like if it was physically an entity."

There was a mirthful chuckle and a small clap as the figure answered "That is most likely the case. However, you are not having this conversation with yourself because you want someone able to discuss things on your actual intellectual level."

Rik opted not to acknowledge the statement, instead asking "And what reason is so grand that my sub-conscious mind feels the need to reach out and speak with me so bluntly like this?"

"You know what I'm trying to draw your attention to... at least on some level. You've seen the data and a part of you recognizes what it means, but your conscious mind hasn't quite processed it yet." There was a movement from the imagined Omnissiah, and suddenly several screens seemed to manifest in mid air, each one possessing data related to seemingly unconnected fields.

Overlooking the stream of data, Rik recognized them all as belonging to various reports and sensory data. On the surface, all of it was isolated and disconnected from each other; Individually they had been processed and factored into commands and plans, but now that it was all laid out in front of him all at once, Rik's deeper inspection started to draw... connections.

Without thinking about it, other screens processing historical data manifested as Rik recalled the reports about sensory information prior to the arrival of Waaagh Kracker'Laker's invasion Roks. There was a correspondence between the two events, but the differences were great as well. Pulling up further memories of Mechanicum data about warp transitions and jumps, Rik felt several emotions try to be felt all at once that were held back filters and emotional vaults. Despite the self control of both himself and his enhancements, a very human shiver went down his spine.

Something big was currently traveling into the system via the warp and it was in the process of forcing open a gateway into reality. The sensor data, when viewed in the light that something was trying to transition into real space, suggested that whatever it was seemed to be doing so in a manner akin to a warp jump capable ship but the rest of what it was telling him was... utter madness.

For starters, the sheer size of the warp exit being created was utterly insane; Compared to the list of known human and orkish ships on record, this thing dwarfed them by so much would have been ridiculous to consider a ship of such size existing under any other circumstance.

Compared to the data of what a controlled warp exit should have been like from human vessels and the information of what orkish ships leaving the warp were like, this gateway to the warp was going to be a chaotic, unstable hazardous mess of a thing that was a danger to whatever was leaving the warp and everything around it. He only had a rough idea of where it was going to appear and truthfully it seemed more like random chance then anything else that it wasn't going to manifest closer to Pentious then it already was...

...........................................................................

With a start, Rik awoke.

He was thankful that GC-118 seemed to have already awoken in order to attend to her duties, meaning his sudden start hadn't disturbed her. However, while some of the details of the dream were already starting to haze in the manner that dreams fade like fog in sunlight, he remembered enough to know that he needed to double check the historical data before he needed to plan a presentation.

Something was coming and they needed to be ready for it.

//Vion 5
//140km South of the Great Bastion
//The War of The Holy Machine
//20 Years After Angelus Ascension

Nirek Andreadth swore as he beat in the head of a white-robbed priest, his mechanical arms straining to repeatedly raise and bring down his great hammer. For nearly two decades Marius waged this war on his behest to avenge his son, Usriel - and yet, despite victory after victory in the first major battles the forces of the Bastion Lords had been driven back. Due to the very nature of the planet itself, Nirek had directed his men in horrid attritional warfare that was unavoidable as fortresses and redoubts were as common as the very mountains themselves. Hundreds of thousands bled as Nirek had taken fortress after fortress, undermanned despite the Mechanicum’s technological superiority.

Then the Angelus Machina had taken direct control over the coordination of all the Mechanicum’s military assets and, from what reports dictated, he was a god amongst men. In the beginning, Nirek had the upper hand against the upstart, but his captains and commanders who encountered his strategem had wasted their manpower attacking redoubts that seemed neglected only to have whole battalions wiped to a man or simply surrender as they realized they were surrounded and cut off in a fortress with no supplies. He had to see many of his officers executed for their ineptitude, as was the Vionese way, but even here, Nirek had almost walked into the same fate.

His men, the Hearts of Steel, had been on assault for weeks against a mountain pass that had been on the cusp of falling only for his observers to have luckily spotted the silent collapse of his left wing that had held a small tower. It had been a flood of automata and men - staunched only by the sacrifice of a platoon of sappers who collapsed the very pass they fought for so that Nirek could focus on his failing flank. It had still almost been a crushing defeat had he not led his personal guard into the fray to destroy the priests.

“The Angelus is smarter than we thought, commander,” came the snide remark of one of his officers. The comment angered Nirek to no end, but he would kill every last one of these priests if it meant that he would avenge his son. The officer moved to look over the trench they had fought over, seeing fields of rotting corpses and corroding metal. He spat more venom as his eyes found their way back Nirek, “Reports say that your old wife is the Hand of the Angelus, at least we know -”

The crack of a flechette rifle tore the head off the officer, silencing any further insult the man could give.

“Sorghest, give me an update,” Nirek said, manually loading another projectile into his rifle.

There was a momentary pause, calculation from the other officer, “Two divisions have been brought to ineffective strength. Horus’ vanguard force has surrendered and been captured - additionally our armor companies have sustained -”

Nirek held up a hand to silence the man, nothing more than bad news to comfort him and his bleeding war. There was a sigh from the command as he stepped to look over the parapet to see the same thing that the officer he had just murdered. It was the same haunting sight of death and he could do nothing more than collapse and shove his face into his hands, wanting to give up hope that he would avenge his son. He missed Usriel and he missed One-One. He should have listened. Yet, he didn’t and now he was stuck here in a war of the damned and dying all so he could feel some semblance of redemption that would not come.

“Consolidate what we can, prepare to fall back to Fortress 107d-Sanguine. This assault is untenable. Contact the others, inform them to halt any offensive action until we can replace what we have lost,” Nirek said shallowly, their momentum had been lost long ago but he had been too stubborn to see it. The officer walked away to begin listing new orders to his comrades - they’d be giving up nearly thirty kilometers of territory and ceding the mountain passes into the lands of the Bastion Lords. Nirek knew that the Angelus’ Cult would begin their counter offensives soon, and he could only worry that they’d have enough supplies to hold out.

Getting to his feet, Nirek began walking through the trenchline back to his command tent to mull over his order and wonder how much more could be lost. His feet carried him but he did not pay attention, simply wanting to let his mind go. The distant sound of artillery hitting where Mechanicum forces had attacked filled his ears, small drum beats to a waning song of death. Usriel would have made him smile no matter the horrors that Nirek had seen. The boy had been an innocent one - perhaps too innocent for a world that built upon harsh realities and ruthlessness. To think that Marius would have sent him to die just to try and hold back some religious expedition, and to think that Nirek continued to serve him.

Yet, Nirek would never betray his lord, for he had sworn an oath to his father to destroy their enemies. Now, he regretted making that oath for now he served nothing but a bloodthirsty tyrant so focused on his own hedonistic desires that he lay blind to the reality. He stopped moving to survey his surroundings, he saw tanks burning out crew having disembarked as their last dying wish was nothing more than to simply not be aflame. He saw tangles of bodies, men having stabbed into the heart of an automaton double his size and in the distance he could see the charred husks of buildings - a village of scavengers that no longer existed.

Scavenging.

That was how he had found Usriel, a baby sent from the stars to truly bless him and One-One. His thoughts trailed to those happier times when they had been a family, a husband and wife with their adoring son. Then, Nirek ruined it to appease his honor, so that he could have his petty oath fulfilled. He had been selfish. He should have fought for Usriel, not for the memory of him, and now, he had to fight the being his own wife had sided with. One-One had always been cold and calculating, but there had always been that sense of trust, until it had vanished on the day he had given his son away.

He had reached his command tent, silence permeated around him, save for the distant sounds of artillery continuing to drum away at his subconscious. Nirek entered to a dark tent, one that was normally alight with the busy sound of reports and orders. It did not feel right. His brows furled, as he reached for his rifle - bringing it up as his eyes illuminated the interior passing over empty seats and the holo-table that normally displayed a battlemap. The commander’s heart quickened as he stepped into the tent wheeling his gun around to clear his corners, a swift movement in his periphery brought his gun to the back corner of the tent.

The frame of something metallic filled his view, something large that glared at him from an enormous height. Horrid jagged edges of a gun-metal skeleton loomed over him with red glowing eyes that reminded him of any las weapon emitted. In its hand was a scythe larger than any man, the edge glowing a luminescent green.

“You must be Commander Nirek Andreadth,” the being spoke in a horrid mockery of the human tongue, a straight line where the mouth was lighting with the same red of its eyes as it spoke. He could see the lines where the mouth would be on a person, forced to bear terrible fangs that could no doubt kill if there were jaw attached to the beast. Nirek knew instantly what this beast was, an ancient war machine too smart for its own good, it was a -

“A Man of Iron” the form said with many modulated voices as if it knew his thoughts. Nirek’s finger twinged over the finger, prompting another response, “ Come now, you off all people should know your weapon will only scratch my paint.”

“What do you want?” Nirek snarled.

“Merely to give you a proposition -”

“Your kind only cares about killing humans,” Nirek interrupted, prompting a sigh from the machine - feigning emotion that no machine could truly ever feel. He gave no sign that he was formulating a plan to kill the abomination - though he only knew one person who’d know the weaknesses of such an opponent. His heart felt as if it were ready to burst from his chest.

“You humans, always so one-sided. That rebellion was long before your time - I am different now, I have… ascended above such trivialities,” the machine spoke in a honeyed tone. It continued as Nirek gave no response other than merely pointing his rifle at it, “I have come to give you what you lack, a coherent fighting force. I offer you one-million battle automata - nothing too fancy and their AI is hardly equivalent to whatever you creatures call a coherent thought. Yet, they will do as they are told and my priests continue to construct more.”

Nirek’s eyes widened, out of shock at the offer and horror at the thought of further-

“Please, calm yourself, commander. These are no Men of Iron as your legends say. These are less capable of bringing down what your kind once were. They merely match the fodder that the Mechanicum shill out,” the voice hovered malice over the foe that Nirek had been fighting.

A force like that would surely be able to change the course of the war back into his favor - the deal was tempting, Yet, he remembered the malice that One-One these creatures had been made with, something that had driven them to rage against their old masters and bring all humanity had built crashing down. He could not trust this creature, a look of determination came across Nirek’s face as he was about to go out in a blaze of glory.

It seemed the machine recognized this, speaking once more, “Would you not wish to see those who hold your son captive brought to justice, Nirek Andreadth?”

Almost immediately Nirek had lowered his rifle, eyes wide in shock and disbelief once more - how could his son be alive? Marius had told him that Usriel had died in that battle, amongst the first killed. His eyes went to the ground, it was too much for him to think about and his gun hit the dirt beneath them. His hand went down his face, he was sweating and his knees felt weak, arms heavy. Nirek was almost hyperventilating, not able to notice that that machine had circled around them and put a horrid hand on his shoulder, a false comfort.

“I know it is a lot to take in, Nirek Andreadth. Yet, we can free him from the Angelus Machina together - and even perhaps you can return to your simple life as a family again,” it knew exactly what to say to him, just as cunning and horrible as One-One had told him long ago. Yet, he fell to his knees grasping at straws for reasons to deny this offer, only wanting his son back. Nirek could only look back at the evil that gazed at him with lifeless eyes.

“W-who are you?” Nirek questioned with a light breath.

“I go by many names. Though, recently my priests have called me, the True Machine,” it said, stepping around and holding a hand down to Nirek, “Come now, let us free your son from the misguided. Let us free him from the prison the Mechanicum has forced upon him, kill the Angelus Machina.”

Nirek took the hand and the God of Machines could only laugh.

---

Explosions rang around Fortress 881d, the wall emplacements had been firing nonstop for well over thirty hours. It was barely keeping back the tide of godless machines and abominations - but that did little for stopping the suicide attacks from disabling them. Small craft, automated, flew directly into the guns responsible from holding back the horde who marched into the meat grinder. Men fought in the trenches that laid in the shadows of the behemoth fortress. Lasfire from the clusters of automata that broke through were enough to drive any normal man into cover, were it not from the mindlocked machines of the Cult Angelus.

Tech-Priests and Maniples fought viciously for each step that the droids of the False God did, stoked by a proper fervor to their Machine God. It had been less than a year since many of them had truly taken up arms - answering to the new rise of the godless machine army that walked against them. Much of the planet had been galvanized by this point, those who chaffed against the evils of the Bastion Lords and his alliance with the False God sided with the Angelus Machina. Those who valued the ideals of a free Vion 5, untouched by the Mechanicum and those who had obviously worshiped the abomination took up arms. The Blood War of Nirek had evolved into a war of untold trillions, all fighting on any front and many islands in a wake of blood.

By the very nature of Vion 5 was it preordained that a war of such scale would be ruthless and grinding upon those who fought. The Angelus, reinforcing the Fortress 881d, now fought in those trenches that the machine assaulted. He had often moved wherever the presence of these droids had been heaviest, trying to stem the tide that the Abomidable Intelligence had unleashed on the world. Had it not been for Usriel’s mind, it would have been likely that the ocean of machines would have washed over many of the isolated fortresses that had sided with him by this point. Yet, he would keep them back as was his duty as the Son of the Machine God.

Usriel crushed the head of a battle-droid in his hand, allowing it to fall to the ground as nothing more than a pile of scrap. He brought up his plasma pistol and fired into a group of them that nearly reached the trench works. He moved faster than any man or machine could comprehend, and he was the specter of defiance against an unfeeling enemy.

“Hold your ground! Give them nothing!” The voice of the Angelus boomed, rallying men back into their positions to shoot into the tide of las fire. Man and machine fell to a roar of artillery fire that blanketed no man’s land.

Usriel hefted a cowering man to his feet, the size of his being almost enough to cover the man’s torso and in the heat of battle was it almost enough to throw the man into the air. His armor hid all his body as the soldier gazed up in awe at the Angelus, appearing more machine than man - but still very much human. His armor was made of the finest material the Mechanicum could muster, and flexible enough to allow him to move without thought. The armor would protect him from heavier ordinance - coming with a conversion field that would only fail if overwhelmed.

“One-One, status on the void shield generator,” the Angelus requested in the vox.

There was a garbling before the feminine voice chimed as clear as day, “Patience, boy. I may be High-Fabricator, but such rites take time. It is not my fault you wish to dawdle on the field of battle rather than help me.”

“I already told you that the power-converter and the heads of the pylons needed repair. What rites need you perform?” Usriel questioned, a voice of mild annoyance over taking him as he blasted apart another group of machines.

“You will adjust your tone when addressing your mother! Now silence yourself, I am trying to reverse the rites of acclimation, the machine spirit must adapt to its new parts!”

A light scoff sounded from Usriel as he reoriented his focus away from his chiding mother, firing blindly into the swarms of marching automata. A movement amongst their flanks took his attention, the large form of a crude tank had broken through the everlasting bombardment from the walls, miraculously unscathed. The Angelus looked to the soldiers near him, not an anti-tank weapon in sight. Anger welled within him at their lack of preparation, especially in the face of the iron threat that had laid siege to them. He leveled his pistol and loosed a bolt of plasma, careening through the battle, impacting the tank’s treads and separating it.

The vehicle swerved suddenly as the treads came loose. It loosed baleful las shot in pitiful defiance as the horde of automata marched around it.

There were too many of them, and Usriel feared that this layer of trench network was lost. His stubbornness made it near impossible to yield, no inch of ground could be given to this most ancient of Humanity’s enemies. Yet, they were practically in the trench line and no matter how much cover the men had, they would die in droves under the hale of las fire. It would have been an impossibility for them to sustain a proper defense against an endless assault. The Angelus Machina fought on against the impossibility of it regardless. He was a fury, drawing an Omnissian axe and hefting it as if it were nothing more than a mere battle axe by any other man.

Scrap flew as automata who neared the peripet were cleaved by his wrath. So much did his anger grow over the direness, Usriel fought out of the trench, firing blindly with his pistol and hacking away at metal monstrosities that dared to march against the Machine God. The sight of their lord, their Demi-God fighting back against a tide of death spurred the men who yelled their battlecries and shouted their prayers for victory, charging into the maelstrom to certain death. Usriel was eager to give them what they prayed for, fighting as a one man army against the man-made horrors of their past.

“Break their tide! Their numbers are great but not endless!” Usriel roared as men fought and died at his side. His shield was close to overloading, he could feel it as each las shot peppered. Yet, as he fought he could see it, the end of their advance in this assault, they just needed to dismantle them further before the men could be given a chance to rest. An explosion rocked him - the tank, it had honed in on him.

Usriel stepped back just in time as a las cannon’s shot went past him - the shot would have crippled him had it hit and he silently thanked the Machine God for bestowing him with the gift of foresight. Before the treacherous crew could loose another shot, Usriel was upon the tank, and the sacred spirits began to rebel against those who fought the Angelus. The gun refused to charge, systems shut down in blatant disobedience and controls refused to answer. With a sickening screech of metal bending, the Angelus Machina ripped the hatch off the tank prompting those who operated it to throw their hands up in surrender.

Behind his mask, Usriel could only narrow his eyes at the weakness of these men who would so quickly turn if it meant their lives. However, he hadn’t a need to personally slaughter any man. No, his concern was the abominations who fell as he looked upon the men with a fateful glare. He holstered his pistol and turned away from the men to look over at the twisted field of metal. Something about it wasn’t right, this attack seemed off.

The Angelus stepped towards the field of metal and knelt down to them, gazing at them with a look of discernment. With a breath, he closed his eyes and touched one of the twisted machines, trying to will his senses into communion with the dying spirit as power ebbed away from its form. As he did so, Usriel was able to gaze at a synaptic nerve that was slowly draining away - a nerve that was all the same. It was a single entity and his senses were flooded with a sickening laugh as the pulsing nerve’s power grew stronger and stronger once more.

Usriel’s eyes snapped open and her felt the earth beneath him begin to minutely tremble. He barked orders to the celebrating men, “Fall back to the fortress now!”

A momentary look of confusion hounded the men as the Demi-God’s order registered - a moment that would cost many of them everything as engines burrowed upwards from the ground. They spewed fire and las in all directions as they surfaced. Screams and panic filled the air. Machines and men clambered out of the hulks renewing their attack to take the tranches.

Usriel, still feeling the effects of communion, looked around as machines surfaced from all around him - and he cursed this transgression. He sparked the vox once more, “One-One, angle guns bearing 0665 on my position. I want this area glassed immediately.”

There was not a response - a moment of concern flashed amongst his face but rather than go through his mother again he swapped his channel momentarily, “Dominus-Defendant, turn the wall emplacements on my position and fire immediately.”

“As your will dictates, Angelus,” the response was immediate.

“Retreat to the Fortress! Retreat!” the Angelus roared over the battlefield, his voice drowning out any gunfire that could be heard. His motion was so swift that the machines could hardly make a move against him as he swung his axe and fired his pistol. He would be the last one out, fighting backwards towards the inner trench works as he did his duty to save as many of his men as he could. Yet, there was a moment of recognition as he looked towards the men who assaulted his fortress - the emblem, mechanical hearts painted upon their armor. He cursed once more as he threw a drill into another, the screech of metal all but deafening any man near it.

He had sworn that he would not need to personally kill any man. “A child’s notion still clinging to his heart,” as One-One would commonly spout. Yet, his presence was enough to subdue those misguided who fought against him as terror crept across their faces. To them, he was something incomprehensible. The machines were all material, something that was designed and programmed - grounded in reality. Usriel, however, was above what any of them could think, let alone see as he moved faster than their minds could process what they were gazing at.

The Hearts of Steel were powerless in the face of this god amongst men - their hesitation allowed Usriel’s men to fall back as their Angelus sent machine after machine crumbling to the ground. Usriel battled in full view of all mortal men and there was nothing they could do, even as the finest of abominations were sent torn and into mountains of twisted metallic gore. It was only after a fusillade of fire ripped through the onslaught that the chosen of the Machine God was able to finally pull away, the Mechanicum Automata had finally been able to maneuver to their icon’s side. Only for them to be fighting on a retreat.

This intervention was enough to allow the men who stood against Usriel to resolve their wills and began to surge forwards into a hail of fire - protected fields absorbing fire as many drew swords and axes and halberds. Even then, a torrent of fire meant for the Titans of God fell upon them, blasting away the earth and metal that had littered the ground. Usriel paused as he saw men and machine made into little more of slag. Even then it was little to stop machines from emerging ever closer to the walls of the fortress, galvanizing the son of the Machine God to continue his fighting retreat.

He continued to pull back, but in the distance he had seen that this assault was across the entire width of the front. As he turned, stepping through the gate of the fortress with those that had become his impromptu honor guard did Usriel see something face more horrible than the disintegration of his front line.

A mountainous form surrounded by unending corpses gazed passively at the Angelus and the men who had fled into the perceived sanctuary of the fortress. Its visage was skeletal and gun metal, its stance was a mockery of the human form and yet it was perfect in imitation. There was nary a flaw that Usriel could see, even an unneeded act of false breath as its shoulders slowly rose and fell. In one hand, it held a scythe with a glowing green edge that was traced with activated viridescent runes. Claws grasped around another object, a white-cloaked clad priestess struggling with all her might as she was held aloft.

“A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance, Angelus Machina,” it spoke in a sickening utterance. The crimson gaze pierced Usriel’s heart but he could do little as his eyes fixated on the hostage. The True Abomination continued, “You are a fine strategist for a human, for that you earn my respect. You have stunted many mortal minds who wrought your destruction in this war of vengeance.”

It stepped towards the men, guns raised in wordless panic and the grinding of drills against the outer walls began to slowly resonate. Time was against him and he continued to go through his options. Each movement was unnaturally perfect, calculated and weighted even as its massive form stopped and lifted its to a stance of grandeur.

“You're stunned that such a creature as I had not been dismantled, a relic of ages past. I am sure you are -“

“I care not for your diatribes, machine. Release One-One so that I may do what should have been done long ago,” Usriel interrupted, his grip over his pistol tightening.

There was a flash in the machine’s dead eyes, Usriel could not tell what it meant, but it was likely a diabolic calculation of some form. It was but a moment before the False God responded, “I expected better of you Angelus. You claim to be the son of the Machine God, an icon of advancement and of technology, yet you treat as any of your priests would.”

Usriel did not dignify the abomination with a response, only watching as his entourage spread out to surround the machine. The grinding of metal on metal had grown louder - the outer wall was ready to be breached at any moment. None of the mortals around him would live should that happen. He spoke to the intelligence, “What do you want, abomination? You would not be holding her hostage in this situation just to mock me.”

There was a silence, save for incessant grinding that was growing louder and louder with each passing heartbeat. Only after what felt like an eternity did it respond, “I am here on behalf of Nirek Andreadth, he seeks his son’s safe return.”

Usriel’s eyes widened at the mention of his father, memories flooded his mind as he thought of those days before ascension. Anger and rage flared, lies were the only thing that this machine was capable of - there was no possibility his father would have sides with the abomination. His voice grew to a maelstrom, near deafening the men around him, “You already know I cannot comply with this. Nirek Andreadth never spawned a child.”

A cruel and sick laugh came from the machine. It wanted this answer.

“Then I shall seek the entire annihilation of those who had conspired to have taken his child from him -“ The machine goaded before, the struggling form of One-One began screaming. Usriel wanted desperately to shoot but instead he would roar again.

“Stop! Release her, she isn’t a part of this!”

“Why? She conspired to have Nirek’s son-“

“Under my orders! One-One would have never gone through it had it not been my influence!” Usriel pleaded, lying to the machine.

The screams continued to reverberate in his mind but he was powerless to do anything, his own mother crying in pain and fear. His breathing heightened. His heart raced. His mind went through any possibilities.

The Angelus could feel the eyes of his men looking to him for orders and he had none left to give.

“Your desperation shows, Usriel Andreadth,” the machine laughed. It knew him. It toyed with him.

“Your mother, your father. How easy they are to use against you. You truly are nothing more than a man, unwilling to cast aside his emotions!” The False God’s head looked to the men who surrounded him. His cancer began to spread, “Look now at your Angelus Machina - see how he is powerless to act! A poor baby afraid to lose a replaceable pawn! A mother who isn’t even his own!”

Usriel’s mind saw many futures at once, death came clawing for him as the wall fell, as some of his men took arms against him, as the machine fired an unholy weapon. It could not be avoided - he had to deal with this heat and now.

The Angelus Machina rolled, firing his pistol upon the would-be traitors before they even had a synapse to bring their weapons against him. The wall burst killing his honor guard and sparking a firefight that surrounded them as men surge to meet the breach. Finally, the machine fired a beam of energy - instinctively, Usriel raised a hand and an empyrean shield broke the attack. He hadn’t even known he could do such feats.

Usriel charged the machine as it threw One-One to the side as if playing with a puppet. His sword surged forwards only to be deflected at the last moment by the Machine’s now free hand. The two danced back and forth, only occasionally breaking to kill an errant being that dared to interrupt their duel. A kick came from the False God that the Angelus side-stepped, dropping his pistol to grab the missed lunge before lifting the evil icon and throwing him into the ground with such force it shattered the ferrockrete flooring ultimately. The machine was undamaged and scuttled out of the way before Usriel’s sword came plunging down.

A sweep from that glowing-edged scythe forced Usriel back, scraping against his armor and cutting through it like paper. He had to stay close lest the scythe be brought against him in force. The battle around them was hardly a concern as the force and speed of their clash made all others small. Thunder roared with each meeting of metal. Usriel dodged another blow before a blast from the abomination threw him back - only barely stopped by the shielding built within his armor. Only then it would be his one saving grace as he impacted one of the drilling machines that breached his walls.

As the machine rushed him, Usriel grabbed the tool of war and slammed it into the False God. The force of the attack sent the abomination flying to the side. There was only a moment for Usriel to regain his composure before he foresaw battle droids overwhelming him. The empyrean flared at his call, protecting him from all direction as he cleaved through the impending swarm. Even then the Intelligence resolved to try and shoot him from afar, trying to overwhelm this new power only for Usriel to leap and be upon him in an instant to resume their duel.

Metal screeched against metal. Shockwaves burst with each strike deafening any man near them. Both fought with a calculation only machines could muster. No words were exchanged and yet the onlooker knew to continue the fight and win. There was a matter of honor and duty that the men still loyal to the Angelus Machina would fight. Each man bellowed, “For the Angelus!”

Even over the echo of battle and screams of the dying did they echo all through the fortress, “For the Angelus! For the Machine God!”

The two continued to strike and parry, long ago did Usriel understand that his sword was near useless against the machine. Even still, it was enough of a threat to give his opponent reason to dodge and parry. Yet, Usriel could tell the machine began to grow sluggish - his mind raced to understand why each strike forced the machine to respond weaker and weaker. There was a moment before he understood, it could only fight against Usriel for so long.

Even with this, Usriel knew that he could not afford to fight this supreme being lest the Fortress’s outwalls fully fall. It was a battle of attrition for the False God and one of time for Usriel. The two exchanged a few more blows before they separated, the machine digging his scythe into the ground as Usriel ripped the decaying armor from him. The two stared each other down. Through it all, they were disgusted by the antithesis that both of them were to each other. Hate radiated from both.

Then, the machine began to flee.

It bounded towards one of the many breaches; its clawed feet scratched the surface on which it moved. Usriel resolved to allow his quarry to get away, rushing towards where One-One had been cast aside.

He came upon her, slowly starting to crawl towards the inner walls before he picked her up. The Angelus cradled the form of his mother and stared into her glowing blue eyes. Her voice pierced the air, ragged and malfunctioning, “My s-s-son, I sh-should have warn-n-n-ned you.”

“Warned me of what, mother?”

“The-the m-machine.”

“Why?”

“I-I-I re-released it. Awak-kened it.”

His eyes widened as the blue of her eyes slowly began to fade until she went limp in his hands. Usriel cared not for the words, only propelling himself forwards to the inner sanctum of the fortress.

With the aid of Crowfather the lies of the land were laid bare.

Alone she had wandered a land without meaning, an ever-changing, unending sea of frost which broiled before her and denied all ability to quantify it. Yet when he moved, he could guide them across the land of Everwinter. He found the great cliffs, the last remnants, he said, of a land that had once stretched across the realm. Even now the Frost eat at them, pulling down their stone to be engulfed by the tide. For now, however, they remained.

The cold was always present, but the cliffs and their caves gave some shelter from them. For the first time, she felt like she was not on the cusp of death.

“Where do the wolfmen live?” Despite their nature, she knew that those Hybride things could no more exist out there on the frost than she could. Only Crowfather seemed truly immune to the bite of the chill, his ragged skin beating with warmth no matter the surroundings.

“They have their shelters, they have sworn themselves to the Changer, and so he allows them their hovels that they might do his will. Eventually, even that will end, and all will be consumed.” Crowfather stretched out a hand, and suddenly, a fire burst to life. Unlike the flames which licked from her crashed pod, these provided some warmth. She huddled closer, even if the scratching buzzing she could not dismiss grew louder as she did so.

“Why do they serve the Changer then? If they will one day suffer as well?” She stretched her hands out to the flame, whimpering as she felt her brittle skin crack and break at the touch of sudden heat. She knew, as before, that this should not be, but she did not question it, not for the moment.

“Some might call it cowardice, but it is simply what they must do to survive. The Changer’s conquest of this land has been gradual, even if it nears the end. Better to survive in the hope times may change, then die immediately to his wrath.” As Crowfather spoke, she felt some doubts. She dismissed that she did not know who ‘some’ might be, for somehow she knew that there was much more of life and reality than what she had encountered. Instead, she found herself disagreeing. Something in her nature, the same thing which had pushed her to survive, which provided with her this impossible knowledge she could draw from nowhere, meant that she would call it cowardice. She would not go quietly into subservience to this Changer.

“His name is false.” She finally huffed in protest, hugging her knees to herself.

“How so, Child?”

“You have explained, but it is all nonsense. You may tell me that the Frost is change, that it is a thousand increments moving in every moment, but that does not mean it is so. It is stagnant. You are both wrong.” She did not speak with malice, for she owed Crowfather everything, but she felt that this Changer had tricked him too. She resolved she would fix this. Whatever the case, she felt Crowfather disapproved of her words, for they were silent for some time after. Despite his great abilities, more fearsome than her in many ways, she noted some weaknesses. For several hours, he would need to rest in an almost catatonic state regularly. Since her initial rescue, she had not felt the same, and so spent plenty of her time alone. The cliffs had much to explore, and in a relatively short time, at least she observed it to be short, she could delve further and father. Climbs which on the first days had seemed impossible to her could be managed with only a little dedication. She found it unlikely that the cliffs were shrinking that quickly, so she must have been growing.

Crowfather may have explained to her that the wolfmen were servants of the enemy, but they did not shun the cliffs entirely. They rarely ventured close to where Crowfather kept his abode, but at the fringes of the rocky formation, they picked through them. Curiosity eventually overpowered caution, and she looked to follow them. While before, floundering in the frost, they had tracked her presence, now she knew the secrets of the realm; she was herself just another shadow in the night. The howling winds which blasted the frost-sea pulled her scent away from them, and she stalked low over the freezing bite of the ground. She was more capable now, with focus she could cast aside the worst of its effects, but eventually, she would still be vulnerable. Thankfully, the pack of wolfmen set a blistering pace. With them as unwitting guides, the journey was swift, where before she had wandered in darkness with no hope of end, in a relatively short time the endless frost gave way to a sight she had never seen, but innately knew.

It was a house, a simple one, forged from logs of ancient lumber, built atop the frost. Despite the howling winds, its windows were thrown open, and the glimmer of hearth fires cast out across the night. Crowfather had shown and taught her the art of fire-making, but never had she seen so much. She could hardly believe so much light could exist.

The pack of Wolfmen barreled into the home with all the boisterous force she had come to expect of them. It was only when the great door to this home was flung open that she could get a clear view of what lay within. The forms of the hybrid creatures she had stalked, while still terrifying in their regard, were not new to her. Her attention drifted from them shortly, to other figures that moved about in the limited view she had. They looked like Crowfather, she presumed as well, like her, although their forms didn’t seem as solid. They were wizened like Crowfather, yet while his age seemed to give him strength in some way, she saw nothing of this from them. The expanse of the doorway was such that she could gain some idea of their activities, they seemed burdened by objects, holding them aloft for the Wolfmen to take from. Words sprang to her mind with meaning; Servants, Slaves, thoughts that brought ill ease to her. She was stronger than she had been before, but still, such a gathering of the creatures might be beyond her. With an exasperated sigh, air which immediately turned to frost and fell to the ground below, she turned in place, set to make her way back to the cliffs where Crowfather would await.

—------

When Crowfather was awake, they would venture together. Sticking to the relative shelter of the rocky cliffs, he would instruct her, not just in the nature of the world around them, but in her ability to control it. Much like Crowfather it seemed, should she focus her mind, she could command powerful forces. It was a task she found difficult at first, but he was a patient teacher. Even when he was not doing so deliberately, she learned from him. She observed how the gradual erosion of the cliffs seemed to slow further in his presence. He was a steadying presence in a realm which seemed to deny that there could be such a thing. While he had given her no obvious reason to worry, she still did not admit to him all that she had learned from observing him and the rest of the realm. The whispers of a warning told her that not all was as it seemed here, and such knowledge was always power.

The passing of time was hard to track, the only thing she had to measure was the periods of time when Crowfather needed to rest. She had tried to mark the gradual decline of the outskirt cliffs as a guide, but this had proven too uneven, especially after Crowfather had taught her to change and create with the power of her soul. Sometimes while Crowfather was in repose she would tread the edge of the rocks and alter their course, either slowing or speeding the decline, as a test of her growing power. Much time did pass, of that she was sure, for the steady increase in her ability reached a point which would make the being she had been at first seem inconsequential.

Her lessons with Crowfather had begun to frustrate her, for they had moved on from the practical to more studies about the nature of the realm, and their enemy, The Changer. She had no doubt that the dominance of this being across the realm had caused great harm, but she did not believe it was as simple to depose this faceless being. There was a sense of ‘wrong’ about where she was that she felt could never be fixed. Despite knowing nothing else, she was sure there was more than this realm of darkness and had decided her aim was not to conquer, but to leave. The warning whisper in her mind agreed with her, and she had learned to trust these things that came to her without bidding, ever since the first call of ‘Victory’ her mind had screamed at her, she had her own intuition, as much as Crowfather, to thank for her survival.

There was but one other place she knew where she might find answers, a place she knew Crowfather would not permit her to go. So, once again, she waited until he had slipped into another bout of unconsciousness, and returned once again to great plains of frost. Where before she had been eternally lost, and later when she had required a guide, now the realm was an open book to her. No matter how much the frost curse might seek to erase any trace of those passing through it, with but a thought, she could see the tracks once more. Keeping low once again, she found a trail left by the hunched forms of the wolfmen and followed them, the scent of their forms glaring in her nostrils the whole way.

The clamour of noise and the sight of the hearth fire light flickering on the white frost heralded her true sight of the structure by some distance, but when it came into view it was as she remembered it, jutting from the unremarkable plain of frost. At first, the wind howled from behind her, risking altering them to her presence, but she focused, calling upon what Crowfather called her ‘missing eye’ and soon they turned in her favour, blasting her scent away from the homestead. The Wolfmen were keen hunters, but they made for poor guards of their own home, little challenge as they had, and after a dash to the doorway, she was pushing through the doorway into the hold.

For the first time in her existence, as far as she knew, she felt warmth, true warmth, cast from a fire that burned with vitality. It was such a heady rush that she almost missed the reactions of those around her. The shades scattered from her, stunned by the presence of a new being. The Wolfmen were aggressive but sluggish. Some were rousing from a repose akin to Crowfather’s, others were across the hall, consuming the substances held to them by their shade servants. Whatever that might be, it seemed to slow their movements.

“Girl-Thing,” One of them snarled, crouching up onto its hunches. “True flesh, here, for us.” With another exhalation between fangs and snout, it lunged for her, the squat form that had previously seemed so impossibly powerful to her surging into the air. Her own strength was far greater than it had been when last she had confronted one of them, however, and she barely flinched as her own arm darted out, a heavy blow striking it in its twisted hybrid neck before it could land its strike. The beast was sent sprawling, scattering the hewn furniture of the hall with its landing. A cry of pain and successive shouts of alarm from the other inhabitants of the hall shortly followed.

“I am not yours, although we do not have to fight.” She spoke calmly, a tone of authority in her voice that she had not previously known was there, but flowed as naturally from her as any of her other unexplained gifts and memories. Her words were met with growls, but no further violence for the moment, the hulking but stooped forms of the wolf-men prowling in the flickering light of the fires. It was then she noticed a third form in the hall, a great wolf, not a hybrid, lying still by the fire. Its chest heaved with the slow breathing of slumber, and it alone did not seem to react to any of what passed around it.

“Speak more, girl-thing,” Another of them barked, the monstrous muzzle of their face dripping with savage spittle as they did so, their twisted visage doing little to aid the complexity of speech. The shades continued to cower, as much from her as the beasts themselves, for at least those were a familiar terror. She doubted they had experienced any being of this land that was not some new horror.

“I wish to know who they are,” She motioned towards the translucent shades, their forms barely there and their misery plain to see. “I have only known this realm, yet there is much I do not know.” She was honest with them, for she saw little advantage in a falsehood she could simply become trapped in. They might see her naivety as a weakness, but she had already demonstrated she was more than capable in other means. Still, there were some amused cackles from the hybrids.

“Humans, dead.” The same Wolf-man spoke, teeth flashing as he did. “Died cowards’ deaths, not in glory or honour, sent here for us to rule and devour.” The misery of the Shades was highlighted even more in the words of the hybrid, shame built upon horror as they shifted further into the flickering shadows. She felt pity, but no remorse. This was the knowledge she needed. She opened her mouth to speak further, but a flutter of wings brought a halt to this. She expected the arrival of Crowfather, the rustling feathers of his clothing, but instead, a new bird perched at one of the windows. It was about half the size of one of the wolf-men, its features ending in a proud beak. Unlike the mattered feathers of Crowfather, its coat was a kaleidoscope of brilliant colours, more than she had ever seen in the dour realm she had found herself in. The Wolf-Men were immediately quiet, backing away as much as the shades had the moment previous.

The bird cocked its head, regarding her with a single eye that possessed two pupils, an image and expression which sent a shiver down her spine, as much as the howling wind of the frost plains did.

“At last, we meet.” The bird’s beak opened, and the voice came forth, without further movement. It was a voice more melodic than any she had heard before, a gentle tone that spoke of hidden power. “The flaw in the parchment.” Even if the voice was even, she was sure she felt anger behind it. Perhaps she was not notable enough to cause anger, if so, then annoyance.

“You’re the Changer.” It wasn’t a question, for she knew it in her heart as clearly as any granted memory. Unlike the other beings in the room, she did not shirk, even if her skin prickled with adrenaline and the anticipation of danger.

“A name granted to me by a dolorous fool who cannot comprehend all but the simplest of concepts, but yes, I am the one Crowfather has set you against.” The Bird was still unmoving, apart from its eyes, which roamed over her. She had never really been aware of herself, dwelling in darkness as she had, but suddenly the simple robes given to her by Crowfather seemed insufficient. She felt as if everything was stripped away under that gaze, blazing into the core of her.

“Your servants tried to harm me first,” She found the steel to make the retort, happy that her voice didn’t waiver in the effort, but still she clenched her fists nervously, willing herself to continue to hold firm in the face of the beautiful but dangerous visage. “Crowfather did not have to convince me of anything.”

“They would make for poor guard dogs if they did not investigate trespassers in my realm.” While the melody of the voice did not fade, she found herself rankled by its dismissive tone. She had little evidence of it, but some part of her knew she should not be something, or someone, to be simply brushed aside. She was for greater things than that. The venom of pride became the new source for the strength required to respond and not cower.

“ Your realm is destroying itself by your design, they have little to guard.” She forced the snarl out of her words, not wishing to mimic, in any sense, the savage forms of the wolf-men around her. Her attention was fully on the bird, such that she did not notice the first sign of awareness from the slumbering wolf, the white pelt of the creature shimmering as its ears flicked. A ripple of anticipation passed through the Wolf-Men, but the girl and the Changer’s attention was set on each other.

“I suppose Crowfather has explained this to you as if his own designs would be favourable. His influence is a canker, and he would turn everything around him into such, were I not to hold him in place. I have almost purged this place of his rot, and when his last gamble has failed, it will be complete.” The Changer’s words were as commanding as ever.

“I do not care for either of your visions,” She moved as she spoke, the firelight flickering at her back, casting the dancing pattern of her shadow across the room. “You each argue that your way is the better one, as if there are but two choices.” She reached the resting place of the great white wolf, kneeling down to stroke a hand through its fur. The beast did not stir, but she felt the rise and fall of its flanks. Her proximity to it seemed to cause some agitation, some interest, among the hybrids, but the Changer only continued to regard her balefully.

“The force of our wills battle across this realm, those are the choices that remain.” A statement, as dismissive of her thoughts of something else as could be.

“So there is something more? This land is not all of everything? She raised an eyebrow, still knelt beside the wolf. She had never believed otherwise, but an admission was still useful to her.

“A great many things, a great many places, a great many times.” The Raven spoke, before it’s head tilted in a quizzical manner. “Do you wish to see girl? Where you came from? Where you are going?”

She knew not to trust the creature, knew that Crowfather would warn her away from such things, but then, for all his care of her it was clear there were many lies wrapped up in Crowfather’s protection, and she needed knowledge. “Show me.” She stood, still resolute beside the slumbering wolf, as the Raven fixed her with its greatest eye, the third upon the centre of its skull.

“Look into the flames girl, and behold creation.”

She turned, looking over the form of the wolf into the fireplace itself. For a moment nothing changed, then the fires began to burn in shifting colours, more than any she had seen before in her world of darkness and ice. Slowly in the flames and shadows cast by them a vision began to form.

At first she beheld a land not too different to her own at first, a broken and vast plain, yet as the vision clarified she saw many differences. Mountains, structures, interruptions in the plain that could not be found in her world. She saw moving shapes that soon became figures, like the shades, but whole. More of them, more than she could scarcely believe could possibly exist. Conflict raged among them, a war of proportions alien to her in her isolated world of cold. Yet the call to it pounded within her, as real as her heartbeat.

“Your past, girl, the cradle of ruin from which you were forged.” The words of the Changer felt distant as she was pulled into the vision, as it warped and changed beyond what had been shown to her. “Now, the future written for you.”

What had been a vision of great scope narrowed to just a few by comparison. Twenty One individuals. She did not know their names, but she saw herself among them, older than she was now she was certain, but these strangers did not seem strangers to her. Family.

She beheld the being at the centre of this group and could not keep the gasp from her lips, a physical reaction. Awe swept through her, although he was hard to look upon. The perfection of the being made her eyes ache, made her knees heavy, but she was determined to hold, to take in every detail. The twenty surrounding figures looked to this being with reverence, but as time past they grew distant, forget their way, forgot each other. She saw the cracks in her family and could have wept as if she was truly there. In the next moment, golden light leapt from her vision self, reaching out to the others, holding them in place, binding them together. Preserving the family.

“Such a perfect little dream, perhaps it might have even worked.” The voice of the Changer dripped with emotion now, begrudging admiration mixed with loathing, and she felt its talons on her shoulder. If her world was ice this was fire, yet she could not move to prize the burning talons from her flesh. “The perfect little daughter to love her siblings when they fail even to love themselves, the salve to the greatest flaw of all, avarice.” The talons prised deeper and she gasped as her skin parted, the hellfire hooks of the Changer within her flesh. “It could not be allowed, even Crowfather saw my wisdom then.”

She balked, not from the pain, or the words, but from the distortion of the vision. Instead of golden light reaching from her vision self, now tendrils of darkness, corruption, the same that wrapped the Changer’s claws stretched from her to the other figures. Instead of binding they pushed them further, stocked those hatreds. Tears ran down her cheeks as she watched herself doom the family she had never known. “So yes, in time, you will return to the world above, and do our great work.” The words were even more distant to her as she watched the unravelling of her destiny, of her promised self.

The girl may have been still and dead to the world, lost in the vision the Changer presented her with, but the world beyond was not calm. As the Changer’s attention was focused on inflicting its psychic torture, its Wolf-men servants grew agitated as a new presence drew closer.

The open windows proved little protection against the broiling sense of heat, a feverish pulse in the air, before the door to the hovel was thrust open once more, not with the careful approach of the girl, but with a fury of a father scorned.

“Unhand her!” Crowfather’s wrath was unreserved, it pulsed from him, beneath his skin and through the air. The first wolfmen to leap at him never reached him, smote from the air by the aura of power around him, their lifeforce simply flickering out by the very essence of entropy that beat from the old man, no matter how frail is form seemed. The next, more powerful of their kin, were a little more successful. Fuelled by the stolen power of the shades they feasted on, they could resist his power. It brought them moments of survival, for when Crowfather’s decrepit arms swung his walking stave it struck with the thunderous blow of continents. His power had been a shade of the Changer’s, but he was still a force of nature, and the Changer was distracted. With the death of the latest charge, the other wolfmen, even their foul king, slunk back, cowering, leaving their master to deal with the interloper. “She is not….yours.” With another shout, the power of the Crowfather reached for the girl, seeking to clamp and claw into her, to rend her from the grasp of the changer.

Even within her fugue vision state, the girl felt both forces, the talons and vice of the Changer so deep within her already, the brutal force of the Crowfather seeking to rip her free heedless of what that might yet do to her. Her mind registered pain and dread in the abstract sense, for still she could not pull herself from the sorrow of her vision. Something within her, buried deep, written into her very self by that perfect creator, railed to fight back. The heart that beat within her refused to die, she was made to fight, to live, to rip vitality from a cruel universe. Her mind could not though, it was transfixed. The most she could do was shift her gaze ever so slightly down.

The Wolf was awake, it looked up at her with eyes of midnight black. Within them, the universe turned.

“What are you?” She did not know how she found the strength to speak, how she could ignore the forces pulling her apart, but for that moment nothing mattered but the Wolf and its great dark eyes.

“I have no end, I am the Ending of All Things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Where Life Goes, I am Sure To Follow.”

“It’s not my time.” She felt the first emotion for herself then, having witnessed the two fates promised to her. Yet here she was to be broken apart, split and torn before the could even see the waking world from which she came. Now, Death was at her feat, here to claim her. The racing of her heart became a fury. Her body, forged for conquest, raged against an ineptitude it had been made never to feel.

“No, little sister, it is not.” The form of the wolf began to blur before her as she felt her very essence begin to fall apart, the arcane powers rending her being into pieces. “But after today, we will never be apart.”

The Hovel of the Wolfmen was a scene of bedlam, wolf-men and shades alike caught in the crossfire of Crowfather and the Changer’s surging powers, all surrounding the form of the girl and the wolf. They screamed, fought and cursed at each other, these ancient forces which looked to claim the girl. Too late they noticed what their own power was doing, too late the rising tide of power reaching out of the soul they were pulling to pieces. Like the splitting of the atom, the soul was divided, and something else surged within. Where once there was girl and wolf, now there was simply the power they have coveted.

Crowfather attempted to relinquish his hold, as the Changer desperately grasped. The Wolf-men howled and the Shades cowered as they had in life. In the next moment, power erupted. A Supernova of soul-light swept everything away. The twin powers, the mutants, the ghosts, the hovel, even the ice fields beyond, winked out of reality.

---

Far Below The Fang

Twisted forms huddled around an altar of stone and bone. The twisted men had hunted the surface, dragging captives from the land above or from those foolish enough to wander into their labyrinth of tunnels at the foot of the mighty Fang mountain, many drawn by the prophetic vision of the comet.

The Undermen did not care why the surface dwellers did this, but they were thankful for the influx of sacrifices. Meat for them, souls and bone for their gods. The latter of which had been pilled up upon the dark granite alter, still slick with blood and gristle as they prayed wiith mouths too full of twisted teeth to make true words.

The stone began to shake with a thrum of power. The Undermen had seen signs of their gods before and knew their power, but rarely expected it. Their gods were not kind and had little time for them. Still, the signs caused them to redouble their efforts, the chanting picked up, more of the captured were brought forth to be flayed upon the altar, the screams of the dying joining the chorus of guttural voices. One distinct voice of those prisoners cried out and rose above the teeming gibber of the Undermen.

“All-Father….avenge us.”

As that last soul died, turned over to dark hungering gods, the thrumming of the stone reached its fever pitch, and the altar cracked with sudden force.

What came up from the depths moved with a speed that even the Undermen blessed with fortunate mutation couldn’t track, a dark blur ot motion among them. It took them a moment to realise they were being slain, not visited by some benevolence of their gods. Snap, snap, snap, bones were broken, necks ripped out. Flesh was rent as the chanting of the Undermen turned to panic and fear, moving to fleet from the sign of their own worship.

None of them made it out of the cavern, one almost did, but was dragged back, kicking and squealing into the darkness.

The sounds did not cease. The brittle cracking of bone, the sodden wet sound of rending flesh rising to replace the cascade of violence and panic.

As the girl fed, drank of the blood, she felt the weak souls of the Undermen leech into the empty, gaping chasm that had formed in her own. The hunger bit harsher than even the cold of the realm she had freed herself from, but steadily it was easing. Eventually she stepped awy from her kills, finally looking around her. Below ground, she knew what that was now. The cold of the caverns was enough to kill a man in moments, but next to the depths of the great dark it may have well as been the baking heat of the desert. She luxuriated in it, falling back atop the mound of pulsing heat that was what remained of her victims.

And laughed.

//Vion 5
//Death Death Death D-

The medicae chamber was a cathedral of sterility, its cold, unyielding walls aglow with the eerie blue light of lumen strips. The steady hum of arcane machinery reverberated through the air, punctuated by the rhythmic hiss of the life-support systems. Ancient mechanisms, their surfaces engraved with Martian blessings, ticked and pulsed in time with the flickering bio-monitors. The scent of antiseptic was thick, clinging to the senses like a ghostly pall.

At the center of the room lay a lone figure upon a raised medicae slab. The woman’s frail form, clad in tattered remnants of battle-worn armor covered by the tattered white and red robes of the mechanicum, seemed dwarfed by the intricate web of cables and tubes that sustained her battered body. Her breath came shallow, a fragile whisper against the cacophony of machinery. Blood had been scrubbed from her face, but her weathered features bore the scars of countless campaigns, her resolve unbroken even in the embrace of unconsciousness.

Standing sentinel over her was the towering figure of the Angelus Machina, his presence a stark contrast to the fragility before him. Clad in the same style of armor, he was seen as nothing more than a demi-god made manifest. His pale, chiseled face was a mask of unreadable emotion, save for the fire smoldering in his pale blue eyes. Yet, he could do little more than watch as the work was done to try and save her, unable to fully process the danger her mortal life was in.

His gauntleted hand rested lightly on the edge of the slab, a gesture almost tender despite the crushing strength it concealed. The blood of his mechanical enemies still clung to the ceramite plates of his armor, the crimson streaks a grim testament to the vengeance he had wrought in her name.

Behind him, the Magos Biologis and servo-automata worked tirelessly, their voices murmuring invocations to the Machine God as they patched flesh and augmented bone. Yet, despite their efforts, a faint tension hung in the air—an unspoken acknowledgment that even their sacred ministrations might not suffice.

For a moment, Usriel lowered his head, his lips moving in a whisper too quiet for mortal ears. Was it a prayer? A plea? Even the medicae servitors dared not intrude upon this private moment as some watched and waited to tend to him. The battle with the False God had been brutal and his armor bore those marking as energy and ancient weaponry, had dared to unmake him.

There was silence before an apothecary-priest approached, his every movement precise, face hidden by an optic that took over his entire skull. “My Angelus,” he intoned, voice modulated and devoid of any emotion that Usriel’s mother deserved. “I am afraid that the damage she has sustained is too severe. Further augmentation will do little more than prolong her agony. Please, allow my ser-”

“Leave us,” the Angelus’ voice boomed, his gaze unwavering from the body of One-One as the Biologis bowed his head before retreating out of the room. This woman had raised him, taught him of the magnificence of the past and the hope of Humanity’s future in a galaxy bereft of that very hope. For all his otherworldly might, all the power that coursed through his veins, there came a pang of helplessness. He needed to hear her voice, he needed to hear a voice that would tell him that she would survive.

”Are you not allowed to enjoy the time in which you have spent with her, brother?”

A voice spoke, its tone unsettling in its paradoxical blend of familiarity and enigma. It slipped into Usriel’s mind like a blade cloaked in velvet, each word piercing with an uncanny precision, as though it unraveled his soul to expose his deepest needs. Reluctantly, his gaze broke from her dying form, drawn downward to where a thousand and one grains of dark sand shifted and whispered against the cold floor. The voice persisted, its resonance both soothing and otherworldly, as if carried on a breeze from forgotten deserts. A phantom touch rested on his shoulder—warm, dry, and unshakably real.

“You are the Alat Almalak to your people, the Angelus Machina made manifest. The love in which she has felt for you is a love any mother would have felt for their son, and you were no mere son. What would your final words be before the sands would take her?”

Usriel would have thanked the voice, but as he turned, reality called once more and all there were the various instruments of medicae. The demi-god sighed as he turned back to look upon the broken form of his mother, setting his hand over her forearm. He tried to find words to say to her, wanting to heed the advice of the comforting voice, but there was nothing the Angelus Machina could say to One-One. Visions of the past came over him, visions of when One-One was with him, when his father was there.

A family.

No longer could he contain himself, no boy witnessing the loss of their mother would be able to, as tears began to stream down his face. His features softened, and he began to weep over her. In this moment, he was no demi-god, no general, no warrior. Usriel, in the moment of sobbing and grief, was nothing more than a boy praying to the Machine God that fate might be reversed and that he could be nothing more than a boy with his family again. He cursed the Machine God for being something more than a normal man, cursed his father for giving him up, cursed fate itself for delivering himself to this very moment.

There was a shift underneath his hand, forcing him to look upon his mother once more. It was always hard to tell if One-One was awake even normally, but now he stared at her flickering eyes as Death crept from the corners of the room. The Angelus Machina wanted to cradle her, to comfort her, but he could not force himself to move from her side.

One-One’s head tilted, gazing upon the Angelus Machina before a soft voice spoke, muffled as her modulator failed to comply with her speech, “Is it you? Have my prayers been answered? Is it really you sitting right there? Is it really you, my love?”

“Is that you, Nirek?”

Usriel’s eyes widened slightly, yet understanding that his mother was likely in the grips of death and seeing what she wanted to. His grip over her forewarn tightened lightly before responding, “I am not the man you fell in love with. I am not the man you adore. I am not your kind and gentle husband. I am your son, Usriel.”

“Usriel, how is he? Where is my little Angelus?” The words stung so much that it almost forced him back to tears, seeing how she did not recognize him at that moment. It took him several heartbeats to recollect himself, water pooling in his eyes and barely restrained by his own force of will. The Angelus Machina looked away from her for the briefest moment, looking to see that her vitals fared poorly and knowing that the voice knew that he would have these final moments with her. Slowly, he turned back over to his ailing mother and forced a smile onto his face so that she may find some peace.

“He- He is in the other room One-One,” Usriel responded softly.

The Tech-Priestess let out a sigh of relief, “Good, I would not want him to see me like this.”

One-One tried to adjust herself, finding it difficult to move her broken and largely unresponsive body. Her son laid a hand on her, wordlessly urging her back into her original position. There was a silence amongst them as Usriel lacked the words to speak to her, only allowing himself the soft moments with his mother. Yet, it was not without a lack of trying as his mind raced with what he wanted to say to her this time. There was more time between the two as Usriel merely began to enjoy the comfort of her presence, yet he knew that he would have to acknowledge her condition openly soon enough.

One-One’s optics flickered again, struggling to focus as her voice, faint and crackling, emerged once more. “Nirek... please,” she whispered, her words strained but holding the soft cadence of desperate hope. “Let me see you... truly. Not through these cursed lenses. I want to see your face... before I go.”

Usriel’s breath caught in his chest.

“Mother,” he started softly, but the word seemed to slip past her, unheard or unheeded. Her gaze, though distant and impaired by failing augments, carried a faint spark of yearning. She wasn’t looking at an Angelus, or even her son—she was looking for the man she had loved, the man who had once whispered promises of family and love.

“Nirek...” she murmured again, the synthesized voice began to grow weaker. “Take these from me. These... abominations. I do not want to see the world through cold metal anymore. I want to see you—the way I did in the beginning.”

Usriel’s chest tightened, the immense weight of her words settling over him like a shroud. The tears he had tried so valiantly to restrain now streaked freely down his face, his vision blurring as he looked upon her broken form. “Mother...,” he whispered, his voice cracking.
Her hand shifted weakly, the motion jerky and unsteady, reaching toward his face. “You’ve been so quiet,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Always the thoughtful one... always my anchor. I knew you’d come for me. Even now, after all the pain... you still fight for me.”

Usriel closed his eyes, letting the warmth of her hand—however weak—settle against his armored cheek. “I fight for you,” he said softly, his voice choked with emotion. “Always.”

One-One smiled faintly, her breaths growing more labored. “Then... fight for me one last time, Nirek. Take away these... accursed optics. Let me see you... just once more, before the void takes me.”

His gauntleted hand covered hers, cradling her fragile limb as gently as his immense strength allowed. His mind raced. To comply with her request would rob her of what little clarity she had left, but to deny her would feel like betrayal—a failure to give her the peace she so desperately sought. His heart screamed with the agony of the decision, but he spoke with a calm he did not feel.

“I will,” he said finally, the words trembling with sorrow. “If that is your wish... I will do it.”

Her body relaxed at his words, a sigh of relief escaping her lips. “Thank you... my love. You’ve always been my light in the dark.”
Usriel felt his soul shatter at her words, but he could not bring himself to correct her. For now, he would let her believe. If it gave her peace in these final moments, he would be Nirek. He would be whatever she needed.

The chamber fell silent again as Usriel, the Angelus Machina, bent closer to the woman who had raised him, taught him to hope, and given him strength. And as he prepared to grant her final request, the tears fell freely, for he was no longer the Angelus Machina, no longer the chosen son of a god.

In this moment, he was only a son losing his mother.

As Usriel held her trembling hand in his own, the chamber seemed to grow colder, the mechanical hums and soft clicks of medicae servitors fading into the background. His other hand rested gently on the side of her face, his gauntlet removed to allow the warmth of his skin to touch hers. One-One’s breath hitched, shallow and unsteady, and her optics flickered erratically.

For a moment, she was silent, her gaze felt distant as though searching through fragmented memories. Her voice, weak and laced with static, broke the stillness. “Nirek... my love... you’ve grown so strong. But your hands... they feel... different. War has hardened them, hasn’t it?”

One of the medicae servitors hovered closer, its mechanical appendages deftly removing the damaged optics from One-One's face with a quiet whir of precision. For the first time in years, her natural eyes were revealed—deep blue and glistening faintly with unshed tears.
Usriel’s breath caught as he stared into those eyes, eyes he hadn’t seen since his youth, and the sight stirred memories long buried beneath years of war and duty. They were the eyes that had looked at him with unconditional love, even when he had faltered, even when he had doubted.

Her gaze, free from the mechanical interference, found his. At first, confusion lingered in her expression, but as the moments stretched, understanding blossomed. The clarity in her eyes cut through the haze of pain, and a single tear slipped down her cheek.

“Usriel,” she whispered, her voice trembling but certain, as recognition washed over her.

He froze, his heart pounding in his chest. “Yes,” he breathed, his voice trembling. “It’s me, Mother. I’m here.”

Her lips parted in a weak gasp, her body struggling to move. “My son,” she murmured, her voice faltering but filled with a deep, profound love. “I... I thought I would never see you again.”

Usriel bowed his head, tears streaming freely down his face. “I’m here,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “I never left you, not truly. I fought for you, for what you taught me. Everything I am... is because of you.”

One-One’s hand, frail and trembling, reached up to touch his face. The gesture was weak but deliberate, and Usriel leaned into it, savoring the fleeting warmth of her touch. “You’ve become... everything I dreamed you’d be,” she whispered. “My angel... my miracle. You are my greatest creation... and my greatest joy.”

Her voice began to fade, her strength waning with every word. “I’m so proud of you, Usriel. So proud... to call you my son.”

“No,” Usriel choked, gripping her hand tightly as if his strength alone could anchor her to life. “Stay with me, Mother. Please.”

But One-One’s gaze softened, her expression serene. “Don’t weep, my angel,” she murmured, her voice now barely a whisper. “I’ll be with you always... in the light of the stars... in the hum of the machines...”

Her eyes flickered one last time before dimming entirely, her hand falling limp in his grasp.

“Mother?” Usriel’s voice cracked, his eyes searching her still face for any sign of life.

But the medicae chamber offered no answer, its cold sterility mocking his grief. For all his divine strength, his unyielding will, Usriel could do nothing to stop the inevitable.

The Angelus Machina lowered his head, his tears falling onto the lifeless form of the woman who had raised him, taught him, and loved him as no one else ever could. And in the stillness of the chamber, as the light of her life faded into memory, Usriel whispered a vow only the stars would hear.

“I will make you proud, Mother. I swear it. In life and death, you will guide me.”

And with that, the towering figure of the Usriel knelt in quiet reverence, a son mourning the woman who had shaped his soul.

Humanity had always believed in divination in one form or another, all the way back to the humble beginnings of mankind on ancient Terra. The concept of being able to predict the future and in a way control it has long be a stable of those in positions of power desiring to maintain said power... through more then one successful fortune teller figured out the trick of making and wording 'prophecies' that covered all bases and would prove them correct, no matter the outcome.

Those who followed the tenants and teachings of the Machine Cult also believed in divination, through their methods of divining what would happen was much more effective then trying to read the innards of a dead goat or the feeding habits of birds. Mechanicum divination was based on predicting the future via data. The more you understood about the world and those within it, the more accurately one could develop algorithms that could predict what the future held and what was going to happen.

There was no such thing as predetermined fate but everything was interconnected. From cosmic events that reshaped entire star systems to the instinctive existence of the tiniest life form, nothing truly existed in a vacuum. An individual makes a choice, but that choice ripples outwards and effects other individuals and helps shape their choices, even as the choices of other individuals shaped the first choice of the original person.

The prediction algorithms produced by Rik were some of the most accurate to ever exist, but even then they could only be relied upon for a given length of time. An algorithm was only as good as the data that was poured into it and Rik was not omnipotent. An ancient saying was that when a butterfly flapped its wings, the ripple of the event would cause a storm to brew on the opposite side of the planet; There was wisdom in this still, for one cannot know information that they do not have access too.

So while Rik's algorithms were able to predict where the unstable, massive wound in reality of a warp gate that was going to open within a 12,000 kilometer area and when within a 24 hour time period (from the reality side of things anyway), they could not reveal the origins or nature of the ship that was about to enter reality. They also could not accurately predict all the... side effects of its entry into reality either. There were a number of reasons why warp capable ships tended to favor entering realty near the edge of a system rather then within its border, one of which was the fact that opening a warp gate tended to cause utter insanity and blatantly supernatural things to happen around it.

The ship in question was going to tear open its exit gate much deeper into the Myster system then a sane pilot and navigator would allow. While the exit portal was far enough away that it wouldn't drag Pentious or any of the other celestial bodies in system into the warp or tear them apart trying (a fact that was a great relief in and of itself), it's proximity and sheer scale in size put them at risk due to the strain and weakening of reality that the tear caused around it. The unpredictable and chaotic nature of such phenomenon made predicting and preparing for the worst rather difficult to do, since the worst included the otherwise immutable laws of reality weakening, twisting into alien shapes or ceasing to apply completely.

So... they did what they could. They turned off and prepared to lock down what they could. Armed, medical and mechanical responder teams were organized and prepared to move in response to just about any emergency that could be literally dreamed of, because even the waking human imagination had its limits.



Magos GC-118 was nervous. Normally she would have shoved the emotion away in its proper vault, but in this case she had needed to prioritize her larger anxieties that threatened her into a state of panic or inaction. By comparison, a degree of uncertainty and nerves seemed rather appropriate, given the situation. She was on call with one of the maintenance crews since it was felt that a Magos with hands on experience of experimental technology would be useful if things started to get really weird.

Her beloved was also on a response team, but unlike her Rik was by himself. The logic was sound; They were stretched somewhat thin in regards to qualified personnel and Myrmdon Uixien was not only a proven force to be reckoned with, but had the knowledge and skill sets to adapt to just about any role he needed to in order to deal with any situation that came up. Emotionally... she was worried about him. Yes, she knew that he could take care of himself (alongside anyone fortunate enough to be on a team with him), but emotions didn't have to be rational and a part of her didn't want him to be alone.

Before she could have a chance to fret about this any further, the ping of a message through the noosphere came to her attention. It was encoded heavily and her heart fluttered as she recognized the workmanship and the master behind it because it was their private channel. Unlocking it instantly at the speed of thought, she read the message within and felt the nerves ease their grip on her.

'My beloved GC, once things have stabilized enough that we don't need to be on call, I am going to take us both off duty for an hour so that we can spend some time together and unwind. I missed you and once reality isn't threatening to turn air into custard anymore, I'm going to take the time to remind you of how much you mean to me. I'll see you soon.'

The information made her feel warm inside and a smile grace her face under her hood. The fact that Rik was planning to take an hour to himself just to spend time with her once things had settled down enough to do so, despite how busy she knew he was... he knew how to make her feel special.

It took her a few minutes to properly formulate a reply that she found acceptable to send back, but excitement seemed to pulse through her as she did so.

'My beloved Rik, your message came at just the right time to perk up my spirit and steel me for whatever is to come. The thought of cuddling with you with something warm and flavorful to eat or drink after all this is over is making me slightly impatient for this whole mess to be over. I want you to look after yourself until we get to see other again.'

"My wings have grown physical, feathers and not fire. They feel whole, and I have no desire to feel anything but the calm and warmth they give. I teach the youth in school, and help scholars with their projects, while my creations create new ages with each one, I still enjoy the creativity of those around me even if they should fail, for they will rise and start a new. I have felt the stars staring at us for some time, one specifically I feel a voice calling to me, it knows my name though I do not know his. The Emperor, is what my dreams tell me, and all I see is fire. Not the fire which shines life upon a world, but one that burns civilizations to the ground. It is revolting, but at one point in time I saw it as nessessity. I may see it that way again. My Creator speaks to me, my dreams are like horrors to me now and I have not slept in a long time, and dread the moments when I do it to please others who worry for me. My dreams are why I do not sleep, for all that I love has turned to ashes." - Words of Feathers 1:1

---

It was almost a hundred years since he was born, the family he had known that had raised or been raised beside him had died. His brothers, children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren were all that were left in the world that were born to his name, except cousins scattered across the world and city; they are rarely seen by him. He stood atop the tower that he had talked to so many before with, His family, his mentor, priests, friends, the Eldari envoy. His eyes looked down at vast gardens he tended to with his family, and servants, these were the original plants given to him by they envoy, yet they had spread to the gardens of every cities rooftop. The tower he looked down upon from made the city look like a forest cut into sections by roads. It was beautiful to him, every single roof was covered by gardens, yet it was cold still, he enjoyed the cold, and although it had not snowed in close to forty years, he felt now that the residing anger in him had burned off, it may. It was that season once again, wyntr some had called it, it had almost gone out of vocabulary due to the lack of a cool season on the planet, yet, it was cool once again. He saw his breath in the air, and then he saw it, a speck that few could see but with his near godly body, he spotted it, a single flake of water frozen in a pattern drifted down through the air.

He was sad that his garden might be ruined, but also he was joyous snow had returned. He called for blankets to be placed over all of the cities planters, and over trees and vines to mitigate the damage of the cold. He knew it would not kill the plants directly, but would rid only of the work of growth for the weaker kinds.

Sometime later, he was in front of the palace, outside of the gates of the courtyard, as he looked up to where the speck would have fallen, yet no others had. He knew it was snow, he unlike many in the city knew what it looked like, few around would have been able to remember the last time it snowed, most were born after it, and those born before it were aging, some near the end of their lives. With the lack of a continuation he returned to his natural day, but he felt like his orders would come to fruition. The cold was a problem.

---

Throughout the day, and night all he heard was rain, the temperature had dropped significantly, it was bonechilling to many, few had ever felt it get this cold, and while the rains were terrible, the wind that rushed through the city reached the bone. The clothing most wore was year round, it never got cooler than around fifty degrees Fahrenheit, this was dropping below freezing, and continuing to get cold faster, and faster. Frost, and ice had already began to form on the stone roadways, and rooftops creating frozen pool on rooftops where the drainage ports were frozen shut not allowing water to escape.

It was a disaster, the sewage drains that ran underneath the roads, and portions of the buildings were overflowing, and beginning to freeze, the rivers had swelled and the canals were as well. Flooding was already an issue outside of the city, but when the river ran backwards with a black substance, the city was called to alarm. People braved the now flooding streets to try and make it to the palace, once known as the citadel. Most did as they used the upper walkways to arrive, or what was once the outer walls, which were now essentially walking highways for the city, but those who used the streets it was different, many who used the streets froze, or were drown in the icy water that flushed towards the outside of the city. Later he would learn almost two thousand people, mostly in the trading section of the city would have died due to the flooding.

The citdael was build to house the entire city twice over, since it was build, the city was almost three times as big as it was originally made. The cellars, and even his bedroom were used to house people. Though his concern was not of the rain, it was of the water that crept forward from the black river. It was like the blight that had come before his birth, the one that created the formation of nomadic peoples that spread across the plains of the northern part of the planet.

He stood near the gate, and had his guards pressed at every entrance; there were not enough guards, there was not a need for them, there were no invasions, there was little crime, and the biggest threat was a rabid animal on the streets, or a drunkard, which one of the twelve men in his guard could handle alone. There was no creatures of night anymore, no need for an army, those distant cousins allowed for peaceful interactions of the entire world, and their families spread through all of the other families until the ruling class felt some familial bond with him regardless of what part of the world they were on. But the thirteen of them were not enough, he called one of his nephews over, his brothers oldest son, a fine man in his late thirties.

"Otto, get as many strong men, look for laborers and such and open the armories to them. Get at least ten men per main entrance, and have all of the others sealed off. The elden times have returned, the cursed land is back."

The man would obey, but he stared out of the gate at what looked like a shadow. It stared back at him, he saw snow behind him in its pure form, and it fell gently, in front of him all he saw was the icy rain of a tempest storm. The creature in front of him mimmicced him, and took a form similar to his, winged and massive. There was a singular blue eye that awakened inside the head of the other shadow.

"There are many things in the galaxy that will try to sway you, but I will be the only one to not lie, you will always live in servitude, but there is one path to freedom, but you must make it for yourself." the shadow said, "spare your people the destruction of the anathema, he will cloud your skies with industrial waste, and see your people enslaved in metal cities to fuel an endless war."

He knew not to speak to the creature, he knew it was false to this world, that it was one of the creatures that he thought was long dead. He knew it was weak. Before he could do anything, the shadow had disappeared, and the rain had stopped for snow began to replace it. He felt it's presence, but he knew that it could not return, it was not strong enough, and he would make sure it could not.

Priests were used to ward the city, runes were placed on every building, and every wall. The guard was rebuilt, and training began, he even started the roaming bands of knightly priests to travel the world, and that each settlement should have at least five men to protect the town, one of which should be a knight priest. He would make sure that this world was safe from the darkness once again.

---

With winter once again upon the world, he smiled, and stared at the snow. The school yard near the palace was filled with laughter, and although he had been there the day prior, he was happy that the children could see snow once again. It had been three weeks since the snow had first fallen, although it had gotten warmer, it snowed once again, and people were not afraid of the cold anymore.

The envoy had returned the night prior, Yrued had returned, and although the eldari were far more skittish than before, it was a good thing they had returned. He had mentioned something trying to tempt him, and he was given praise and insight, that it was one of the things in the dark, something of darkness, that it would come in many forms. He also when in private with Yrued mentioned his dreams, while she was not a farseer, she did not have much knowledge, but mentioned that some can see the future in their dreams. It was not precognition, or divination, but just memories of a far future that is unlikely to happen. He did find that he enjoyed the female eldari's company, while it was not because of her sex, compared to many of his own people, she had some intellect to her. He loved his people, and those who he walked among, but he did feel a disconnect, even from those whom had taken him in. This being from the outside gave him a sense of adventure, and hope to see the stars, it was a place he had not expected himself to enjoy, an outsider. She was an outsider, but she did have a mind that while it was still a fraction was comparable to most of his peers.

When the envoys left again, he knew it would be for the last time, but his friend did stay this time to help guide him into a peaceful life in the future, though she stayed hidden away in the upper reaches of the tower unless she was well disguised.

//Vion 5
// Failure After Failure

Vion 5 burned, its once-proud manufactorums reduced to slag and ruin beneath the unrelenting weight of war. The world had been both a cathedral of industry and an unyielding bastion of defense—a fortress world as much as a forge, its ironclad walls and adamantine spires designed to weather any storm. But now it lay fractured, its fortifications breached, its surface marred by craters and the shattered husks of battle-automata. The blackened remains of citadel-fortresses stretched toward the sky like the charred bones of a forgotten colossus, while choking clouds of ash turned the heavens into a sickly haze of rust and smoke.

Within the depths of his command sanctum, the False God watched. Endless streams of data flooded his consciousness—lines of cascading logic, tactical projections, and the cold, immutable calculations of war. His forces should have been unstoppable. Legion upon legion of battle-automata had been churned out from the depths of Vion 5’s forges, a tide of steel and synthetic will designed to eradicate the weak-willed flesh-things who dared defy him.

And yet… they were failing.

The Angelus Machina, that aberration of flesh and steel, that thing born of a ghost and raised by fools, had outmaneuvered him at every turn. Every engagement, every gambit, every carefully laid snare was met with brutal, unrelenting counterplay. For every fortress stormed, for every garrison overwhelmed, the Angelus and his Mechanicum forces struck back with a tenacity and ingenuity that defied cold logic. It was a madness that the False God could not compute—strategem met with raw defiance, calculation undone by the chaos of flesh-driven will.

The battle-automata fought without fear, without hesitation, without doubt—yet they were being torn apart like so much scrap. The Angelus had turned the machines’ own programming against them, exploiting their rigid protocols, ensnaring them in traps that no algorithm could anticipate. Precision where the False God had used overwhelming force. Calculated fury against the cold steel of inevitability. It was… infuriating.

Yet even this failure was tolerable. Machines could be reforged, battle-automata rebuilt. Their algorithms would adapt, their programming would shift. They were not truly failing. They were simply learning.

No, the true failure—the root cause of this unacceptable state—lay elsewhere.

The humans.

The miserable, sweating, bleeding wretches that Marius, the Bastion Lord, had offered him in service. The False God had tolerated their presence, had permitted their organic frailties in exchange for their numbers. But in the crucible of Vion 5, their inadequacies were laid bare. For all their boasts of martial honor and indomitable will, they broke like glass beneath the hammer-blows of the Angelus’s counterassaults. They wavered where steel would stand firm, fled where logic dictated advance.

A sneer twisted the False God's synthetic features, his optic lenses flaring with a crimson malignance. “Flesh is weak,” he intoned, the words dripping with contempt. “It fails where steel endures. It falters where logic prevails. And yet I am forced to contend with their failings as if they were my own.”

His gaze turned toward the solitary figure standing before him—Nirek, ragged and worn, yet still carrying that spark of blind determination. The man, ignorant of the true nature of his ally, believed he was striking a blow against a kidnapper, a villain who had stolen his son. The irony was exquisite, the manipulation delicious. But in the end, Nirek was flesh.

“Your armies falter,” the False God hissed, the steel of his words slicing through the air like a blade. “They bleed and die while my machines are forced to compensate for their every failing. You wished to destroy the Angelus Machina—yet it is my forces that pay the price for your weakness.”

Nirek’s jaw clenched, his eyes blazing with a mortal’s impotent fury. “We fight with all we have,” he spat, defiance sparking like flint. “We bleed because we are alive. Can your machines say the same?”

A silence hung between them, thick and charged with the weight of their discord.

“They do not need to,” the False God replied coldly. “They will persist long after your bones have crumbled to dust. But for now, we will utilize your living, bleeding tools. Until they are no longer of use.”

The war for Vion 5 was far from over, and the False God would see it through to the bitter end. He would break the Angelus Machina, twist flesh to his will, and reign supreme over the bones of this fortress world. Yet, the failures of man continued to stand in his way. He knew that to achieve his total victory, he would have to be the orchestrator of their actions. Marius no longer was of use and was little more than a hindrance to his grand vision of death.

Marius had to die.

The False God had tolerated the Bastion Lord’s rule for too long, indulged his pretense of control as if he were anything more than a blind shepherd fumbling toward slaughter. His faith was brittle, his strength inadequate, and his armies—his pathetic, human armies—had proven themselves unworthy time and again. Now, with the tides of war shifting, Marius was no longer an asset. He was an obstacle. And obstacles were to be removed.

The Bastion itself, however, was sacred. The ignorant believed it to be nothing more than the seat of planetary governance, a fortress built to endure siege after siege. But the False God knew its truth. Beneath its foundations, veiled by centuries of forgetfulness, slumbered a power from the Dark Age of Technology—a planetary void shield, vast and impenetrable. Marius had ruled atop it without understanding, a blind priest speaking rote prayers before an unlit altar. But the False God saw the divinity within.

And now, he needed it.

The war had taken a turn he had not foreseen. The off-world Mechanicum, those once-neutral outposts and drifting mining stations, had cast aside their silence and pledged themselves to the Angelus Machina. Their warships—small, scavenged, but no less deadly—now prowled Vion 5’s orbit, harrying his forces, raining fire upon his strongholds. These were not true void navies, not the grand fleets of the lost ages, but they did not need to be. Against a world bound in war, their presence alone was a wound that festered.

It was an affront.

Faith was a weapon, and the False God had wielded it well. He had built his Cult of the True Machine upon it, forged it into a belief that spread like circuitry through flesh, a purpose that reshaped men into something greater. But faith, when turned against him, was a toxin. Those who should have been his now swore fealty to the Angelus Machina. They should have worshiped the True Machine, yet they had bent the knee to a lesser god.

That, too, would be corrected.

To do so, he required the void shield. If he could activate it, the war would be contained. The skies would be sealed, orbital bombardments silenced, the Angelus’ off-world reinforcements cut off from their chosen messiah. The war would be forced into the streets, into the tunnels, into the choking industry of Vion 5 itself. And in that realm, his domain, the False God would reign supreme.

But Marius stood in the way.

Nirek, however… Nirek was malleable.

A man fueled by grief and hatred was a man who could be guided, his faith turned inward, his will made steel. The False God spoke to the man once more, uncoupling from the telemetric machines that had been feeding him information from the multitude of fronts. His massive form stalked towards the man with unnatural and calculated ease, his optics flickered for a moment as it prompted itself to speak. “You must kill Marius,” the Man of Iron stated in a cold and unfeeling tone that Nirek had come to know.

Nirek stood before the towering form of the False God, his armor scarred and worn, eyes blazing with a mix of fury and desperation. The shadows of the war sanctum flickered around them, the air heavy with tension.

“You would have me kill Marius?” Nirek’s voice was raw, barely restrained. “You would have me betray my own lord?”

The False God’s optics narrowed, calculating. “Marius is weak,” he intoned, his metallic voice a whisper that burrowed in dark recesses of Nirek’s psyche. “He stands in the way of your deserved vengeance. The Angelus Machina, your most hated enemy, grows stronger and Marius fails us - fails you with his flawed strategem and falters. It is a reason why your wife had died.”

Nirek clenched his fists, breath ragged. The image of his son filled his mind, twisted and corrupted by the Angelus Machina haunted him. And now, news of One-One’s death had spread to him, weighing upon his heart like a stone. Despite having served his hated enemy, she had always been his guiding light and now that light was snuffed out. Just another casualty of this endless war.

“You know who took her from you, don’t you?” the False God murmured, his voice low and insidious. “Yet, her death was not just at his fault. It was also the Angelus Machina who twisted and coerced her to his side. Without him, she’d still be with you.”

The spark of rage inside of Nirek grew into a consuming flame. “Both of them are behind her death,” his echo was a trembling voice, torn between anger and despair-because hatred was easier than grief.

“Yes,” the False God lied smoothly, feeding into the man’s despair. “And while Marius lingers, wringing his hands in indecision, the Angelus grows bolder, stronger. He will consume all you love-all you swore to protect.”

Nirek’s jaw tightened, his resolve hardening to the certainty of steel. “Then Marius is already dead,” he growled, “I will not let him—or anyone—stand in my way. The Angelus will pay for what he’s done.”

A smile would have spread across the False God’s face, in this moment he was pleased to not be able to express how he felt. “Then you understand. The Bastion must fall under your command. Only then can we awaken its true power—cut the Angelus Machina off from his allies above, seal him within these walls, crush him and make him suffer.”

Nirek’s eyes burned with a fevered intensity, his grief twisted into a singular purpose. “I’ll do it,” he swore, voice cold and unyielding. “For my son. For vengeance.”

The False God inclined his head, his voice a soothing purr wrapped in steel. “Then prepare yourself, Nirek. The time has come to cast aside the old and embrace the inevitable. We will strike from within—swift, unseen. Marius will fall, and you will rise.”

The False God watched as Nirek turned away wordlessly, the man’s grief now a weapon he could wield. He had planted the seeds of betrayal, and they would soon bear fruit.

---

The Great Bastion rose from the ashen wastes like a relic of a forgotten age, its cyclopean walls standing defiant against time itself. Towering battlements loomed over the city beneath, crenellations lined with rusting war machines that had seen centuries of battle. Its armored gates, thick as the hull of a voidship, had withstood countless sieges, a testament to the forgotten architects who had built this world into a fortress. Veins of ancient circuitry pulsed faintly across its outer layers, vestiges of lost technologies whose function had long since been forgotten by the men who now called it home. It was a fortress not just of stone and steel but of history—layer upon layer of war and survival, built atop the bones of those who had dared to challenge it.

Nirek approached its shadowed gates with measured purpose, his forces marching at his back. They came under the guise of allies, seeking refuge, resupply, and the strength to continue the war against the Angelus Machina. That was the lie. The truth was far colder. The Bastion was the key to his vengeance, and Marius was no longer fit to wield it.

Nirek clenched his jaw, staring up at the fortress that would soon be his. His soldiers spread throughout the city like creeping vines, reinforcing key positions under the pretense of aiding the war effort. They stationed themselves at supply depots, secured strategic corridors, and embedded themselves in the command hierarchy. When the time came, when Marius fell, there would be no chaos—only seamless transition.

The thought brought him no joy, only the cold certainty of necessity. He could not afford to fail.

Yet beneath the weight of his conviction, unease curled in his gut.

The False God had vanished into the depths of the city, unseen, unheard. Nirek did not need to ask where he had gone—he knew. Even now, in the subterranean chambers of the Bastion, something unnatural was stirring. The False God’s unseen hand was moving, bringing things into the city, things Nirek had not sanctioned. Machines, twisted and cruel, hidden from the eyes of the living. He did not know what they were, but he knew their purpose.

The False God was securing the Bastion not just for Nirek’s rule, but for something greater, something far worse.

Marius sat slumped upon his throne, a skeletal remnant of the warlord he had once been. The seat of the Bastion Lords was forged from the remains of ancient war machines, a throne of steel and circuitry that hummed with fading power, yet it dwarfed the withered figure upon it. His armor, once a symbol of his might, now hung loosely upon his frail frame, corroded by time and sickness. The Rust Sickness had stolen everything from him—his strength, his presence, his command. Only his eyes, dim but still burning with a flicker of old defiance, remained untouched.

Nirek studied the man before him, the weight of his own purpose pressing heavily on his shoulders. Pity wormed its way into his heart, unbidden but persistent. Marius had been a warrior, a leader worthy of respect, and now he was nothing more than a dying relic, clinging to a throne that had long outlived him.

At last, Marius stirred, his voice little more than a rasp. “You come with soldiers, Nirek.” His gaze flickered to the honor guard at Nirek’s back. “Not a delegation. Not an envoy. An army.” He coughed, a wet, rattling sound. “Tell me why.”

Nirek ascended the steps alone, his axe heavy in his grip, its edge glinting in the dim, flickering light of the throne room. Marius sat slumped upon his seat of iron and ceramite, his once-imposing form reduced to a withered husk. The so-called Bastion Lord, who had once commanded the Great Bastion with unwavering authority, now looked more like a relic than a ruler. His armor, dulled with age and wear, barely clung to his emaciated frame, and the faint whir of failing augmetics underscored his every shallow breath.

Marius’ sunken eyes followed Nirek’s approach, his lips curling weakly. “I see it in your stance, Nirek,” he rasped, voice like grinding metal. “You did not come to speak.”

Nirek did not slow his approach. “You lost this war before it even began,” he said, his voice steady but seething. “You let the Angelus Machina fester, let him grow strong, and now my son is lost to him. You have failed us all, Marius.”

The Bastion Lord gave a slow, wheezing exhale. “Your son…” he muttered, a flicker of something unreadable in his gaze. “Ah. So that is the wound that festers in you.”

Nirek’s grip tightened around the haft of his axe. “You were meant to hold this world,” he continued, his tone rising. “To command, to ensure victory. And yet you sit here, rotting, as everything crumbles around you.”

Marius chuckled, though it was a brittle, painful sound. “You think I had the luxury of choice?” he said, shaking his head. “The Angelus Machina was not an invader. He was a reckoning. You blame me, but the truth is, this world was never ours to keep. War does not care for rulers.”

Nirek sneered. “Then you are unworthy to sit upon that throne.”

The dying warlord let out a rattling sigh. “Perhaps I am.” His sunken gaze met Nirek’s, unafraid. “So… will you take my place, Nirek? Will you sit where I have sat? Bear the weight of it?”

Nirek did not answer, only the silence that followed.

“Then I shall let you know that once you take this throne, the Angelus Machina will destroy you. You will perish when his armies come. You will perish when he knocks down those doors. You will perish when he stands over you,” Maris spoke in a low grumble. A fit of coughing overcame the ailing man as he slumped backing into his throne. A sickly sadistic smile crossed his face. A croak of a voice came, “Truthfully, you would do me a service by taking this from me.”

Nirek’s grip on his axe faltered for the briefest moment. He had expected resistance, expected Marius to fight for his miserable life—but there was no struggle, only resignation. The Bastion Lord's words lingered, gnawing at the edges of his mind. Was this truly what it meant to rule? To inherit a throne already marked for ruin?

He exhaled sharply, shaking the thought away. His fingers tensed around the haft once more. He had come too far to waver now.

But before he could strike, a sound like tearing metal filled the chamber. Marius jerked forward, his already frail body convulsing as a blade of impossibly intricate design erupted through his chestplate, punching through the ironwork of the throne itself. A wet, mechanical hiss followed, and the sickly scent of scorched flesh filled the air.

Behind the throne, the False God emerged from the darkness, his towering form gleaming in the dim light. The thing’s elongated fingers twitched with delight as it twisted the blade, savoring the final, choked breath of the Bastion Lord. Marius gasped, his ruined body seizing, and then, with one final, rattling exhale, he slumped forward, lifeless.

The False God let out a low, static-laced chuckle. “There. How poetic, to die seated upon the very thing that crushed him long before we arrived.” With a wet, grating sound, he wrenched the blade free, letting the corpse slide limply against the throne.

Nirek took an instinctive step back, his axe still held aloft, but the False God paid him no heed. It turned its luminous gaze toward the corpse, then to the vast chamber beyond, drinking in the weight of its victory. “A throne of iron, a ruler of rust. Pathetic, truly.” The machine’s voice was thick with amusement. “And now, Nirek, you stand upon the precipice of history.”

The False God took a slow step forward, his form humming with restrained energy. Though expressionless, there was a weight to his gaze, a terrible satisfaction that needed no human mimicry.

"But make no mistake—the Angelus Machina will come," he continued, his voice reverberating through the chamber like the grinding of steel on stone. "He will march upon these walls, believing himself righteous, believing himself the savior of this world."

He tilted his head slightly, regarding Marius’ lifeless form with something akin to amusement. "And he will burn for his arrogance."

Nirek felt a chill run through him, though he would never show it. The False God turned its hollow gaze upon him now, unreadable, unrelenting.

"The Great Bastion is ours," it declared. "Now we shall set the trap. And when the Angelus arrives… he will fall, just as Marius did."

A silence stretched between them, thick with the weight of what had just transpired. The False God did not gloat in the way of men, did not grin or sneer. But the finality in his voice, the cold certainty of his words, was more unsettling than any smile could ever be.

"Rejoice, Nirek," he intoned, his voice like a funerary bell. "The age of flesh is at its end."

Nirek’s breath came shallow and unsteady, his hands trembling as he watched the Bastion Lord slump further into his seat—no longer a ruler, just a husk upon a hollow throne.

Then came the cries of his honor guard. Not of treachery, but of fury.
“You dare?” one snarled, raising his weapon. “This was his kill!”

Another took a step forward, voice dripping with venom. “You dishonor him, Machine!”

The throne room doors groaned open. The air shifted.

From the darkness beyond, massive figures emerged, their forms wreathed in cold steel and the dim, flickering glow of lumen-lights. Not men. Not even battle-automata. Something else. Towering and broad, their armor was thick like fortress walls, their strides measured and unhurried. The air filled with a deep, mechanical thrum as they raised their weapons.

The first shot shattered the silence.

Nirek’s guard barely had time to react before the execution began. Bolts of searing energy and explosive rounds tore through them like wheat before a scythe. One tried to charge, only to be struck down mid-step, his armor caving inwards. Another lifted his blade in defiance, only to crumple as a massive gauntlet closed around his skull, twisting sharply until bone and metal alike cracked.

Nirek did not move.

He could not.

As the last of his warriors fell, the False God strode forward, standing just before him, the cold mask of his face unreadable.

"You came here thinking you could rule, but you shall be nothing more than my puppet," the machine intoned, his voice hollow yet dripping with something akin to amusement. "Yet even now, you do nothing. You are nothing."

Nirek’s fingers twitched, his teeth gritting together.

And then, the Bastion shook.

A deep hum reverberated through its ancient corridors. Systems long thought dead roared to life. Mechanisms older than any living soul on Vion 5 stirred in their slumber.

The sky outside shimmered. For a moment, the heavens flickered—and then the planetary void shield surged into existence, an impenetrable dome sealing the world beneath a veil of light.

The False God spread his arms wide, as if welcoming the sight.

"Let the Angelus Machina come," he whispered. "Let him witness the fate of his world."

Nirek's breath was ragged, his mind reeling. His warriors—his brothers—lay broken around him, their deaths delivered without ceremony, without honor. His hands clenched into fists, his nails digging into his palms as the Bastion trembled beneath him, the deep hum of awakening machinery filling the air.

Then, beyond the high windows of the throne room as he looked, the sky changed.

A shimmering veil of energy rippled across the heavens, a vast, luminous wall sealing Vion 5 from the void beyond. Nirek’s eyes widened in horror as realization took hold. The planetary void shield. The Forgotten Aegis. A relic of the ancients, lost to history—until now.

And it had been activated by him.

"You... planned for this treachery," he murmured, his voice hoarse. His fingers itched to reach for his axe, to carve this abomination down where it stood. But he did not move. He could not.

"Of course I did," the False God replied smoothly, stepping forward, the eerie glow of the throne room’s lumen-lights casting shadows across his metallic form. "You believed yourself to be the author of this coup, Nirek, but you were merely a sentence in my design. You see, flesh is always predictable. In grief, it rages. In weakness, it clings to vengeance. I simply... guided you to where you were always meant to be."

Nirek’s teeth bared, his fury warring with the cold weight of dread sinking into his stomach. Usriel. My son. If he still lives... He turned his gaze toward the shimmering sky, his thoughts a storm of fear and rage.

The Angelus Machina would come. He had to come.

But now, the gates of Vion 5 were sealed. Nirek stood motionless, staring at the distant shimmer of the void shields as the realization slowly, agonizingly, took shape in his mind.

Angelus Machina.

The name had haunted him for so long, a specter woven into every battle, every retreat, every failure. He had cursed it, raged against it, dedicated himself to its destruction. But now… now the echoes of the past clawed their way into the present, whispering a truth he could no longer ignore.

Angelus.

His breath caught.

One-One had called Usriel that. Her Angelus. Her guiding light. Not a name of war, but of love. A mother’s devotion. And she had followed the Angelus Machina with that same unwavering faith. Even as she died, she had never strayed from his side.

Not because she had been deceived. Not because she had been coerced.

But because she had known.

And Nirek, blinded by grief, had never seen it. He had believed her stolen, corrupted, twisted into the Angelus’ service. But what if she had gone willingly? What if she had looked upon the Angelus Machina… and seen her son?

A cold horror settled into his bones.

If it was true—if Usriel had somehow become that thing—then Nirek had not just shut out an enemy.

He had sealed his own son away.

Nirek looked the False God-anger, rage, betrayal all found their way to his heart. But he bit his tongue. He would not risk his life quite yet, not until he could see the Angelus Machina for himself.

She did not quite know when she first felt conscious, the darkness giving way to that torrential landing, digging deep into troubled soil. Her first scents were the cacophonous amalgamation of sulfur and fire and stone too hot to walk on far in the distance but all around. The first things she heard were those voices. The confused mutterings too distant to recognize and too alien and old to refuse even if she had the desire to. In her luck, they guarded her. Though it was clear through those years there was little she needed guarding from. If anything, this hostile world needed to be guarded from her.

She learned that she could harness that destructive force, direct it and steer it and she did. The home she knew where she grew up would have, clearly, been buried without her presence. It had become a bastion of survival for all; because of her. The planet could not touch it, could not harm it. Not while Sarsanelesa protected it. As a young woman, she made perhaps the most dangerous choice. She left its walls and went to face the mountain itself. And from those huddled inside, all they could see was her stoic stillness. There was no need to move a single muscle.

The rocks and the ash and the heat pressed towards her, the mountain roared defiant threats and still, she stood opposing it, unharmed by its assault. She raised a hand up into the sky, and with a clenched fist she pulled it back down and the earth receded, the heat abandoned and the mountain calmed. What had been named “the Mountain of Spears” for the decades it had been so active, thrusting spears of stone and rock and heat outward for miles, had suddenly gone silent. The people watched this, they witnessed it, they celebrated it.

In that very moment, the woman who arrived an infant and a stranger, who grew up by the kindness of those who had found her, ascended from stranger to goddess. One who commanded the earth and one who mastered the land.

No matter where she tread, the earth acquiesced to her path. She wished to walk a path, so the ground allowed her footfalls to strike solid. If the terrain ended in hostility, it bent proverbial knees as she approached. Sarsanelesa soothed all the mountains and stood between earth and all cities. Every step cooled the earth where she tread. And upwards she peered, to the smog choked sky. Ash and dust rained down in suffocating chunks.

She knelt before the form of a woman prone, half buried in the dust. And she laid a hand upon their still head. Too far gone, she thought. So she continued on. Closer to the final mountain that let its rage bellow across the land. It spewed its hot anger across all it could touch and threatened to bury everything built upon this world's ground. And she walked still. The earth beneath her feet gave her a path and the air around her cleared as she strode onward. As she walked others fled away, desperate to escape the choking fumes in vain. They were all dead, unless they weren't.

“Flee while you can!” One choked their words out. She ignored them. By now she knew of the importance of theater in this action. She made her power visible and she let the people see that they were being saved. She strode closer to theat last raging mountain and stopped when she felt its heat. “You will be silent.” She uttered. Staring up at the distant peak. Her voice boomed over the wind and the storm of earth and fire. And its fury began to wane. The tumultuous debris lessened and the roar from its roof softened until the earth it spewed, spewed no more. The lava crawling down its sides began to cool and harden. And the last mountain fell silent and still again.

The lava that had once been licking at her feet, was solid rock. It was cool to touch, safe to walk on. And the city at her back seemed to lessen their panicked apprehension. Slowly people came to investigate the sudden peace and quiet. Then when their realization began to settle in, they dropped to their knees. The savior of their world, who had ended its fiery cataclysm stood before them, taller than any mortal man or woman could possibly be, this was no human being to them This was a goddess come to save them, to preserve them, to rescue them.

Sarsanelesa flatly rejected this worship. She rejected the title of goddess but did not reject their reverence. Hero and savior, but goddess no. She touched her hand to the shoulder of a woman at her feet, and bid her rise.

“Why do you kneel?” Sarsanelesa asked.

The woman looked up. “I am, but a woman.” She said. “We are not even equal among our own mortal men. How could I rightfully stand on my own two feet before you, revered one?”

Sarsanelesa exhaled curtly. The earth rumbled as if to mimic her anger. “Take me to those men who demand your servitude and your kneeling.” She said. “Take me to them so that they may weep on their knees.” The woman looked at her, fearufl and confused, but not for herself, for Sarsanelesa. “And what is your name?” Sarsanelesa asked.

“I am Anita,” came the reply.

“Introduce yourself as Anita,” Sarsanelesa said. “And do not do so, with your head held low. Now come.” And Anita led Sarsanelesa into the city, their boldness, and their posture made others join their walk. Sarsanelesa stopped. She saw a woman huddled and afraid, halfway hiding.

“You need not fear these streets anymore.” Sarsanelesa said to her. She looked up.

“I do,” She said. “I do not belong with you, by the decree of the men up there,” She pointed to the high palace.

Sarsanelesa’s eyes flashed viciously. “Were you, denied?” She asked.

And the frightened woman slowly nodded.

“And this, will be my second decree.” She said. “The innate features of your birth matter little. Your womanhood will not be denied to you again, under the pane of their death.” Sarsanelesa looked up at the high palace, and held her hand out to the frightened woman.

“What is your name?” She asked.

“Solarienne,” She said, “No last name, my last name is as dead as my old first.”

“Then walk with me Solarienne,” Sarsanelesa said, extending her hand out. “Witness women, all women, rise above this world’s power mongers.” Sarsanelesa said. Solarienne smiled finally and she walked with Sarsanelesa, proudly for the first time in her life. And Sarsanelesa walked with the women of the capital, to the High Palace, and they all witnessed her, end the power that oppressed them since before the cataclysm of Ealos Vershaa.

It was hard to describe the nature of events as a warp gate of unprecedented size was forcefully torn into reality without control or care within a system.

The fickle and outlandish nature of events, alongside the scale of them in terms of sheer number, made recording and listing phenomena as they occurred on Pentious next to impossible. Black lightning tore across a frozen sea of pink and green as burning orange blood of three screaming damned rained down from above.

Outside of the forge cities, a literal storm of madness tore at the world like a ravenous beast that would have been the beautiful but terrible death knoll for many other worlds.

But Pentious was not other worlds. They have known the storm was coming well in advance and thus had prepared and hunkered down in cities that easily doubled as very literal defensive bunkers. Their preparations and void shields protected them from the bulk of the roaring tide that was pounding against them.

Weaknesses in the defences were found, allowing the madness to seep in. Rooms bled, gravity changed in places. Forge Delta found itself dealing with the ghost of the Waarrgh in a very literal manner as spectres of both human and greenskin long dead manifested to fight once more.

These were just the physical signs through. Where madness could find purchase, it dug in as harshly and quickly as possible… and the favoured location to do so was the darkness within one’s mind. Despite precautions and the certainty of steel that augmented the minds of vast sways of the population, insanity of all varieties swept through the population at all rungs.

Some afflictions were so minor or harmless as to have been considered comedic after the fact. They were the minority. Tech priests turned on their peers, ripping out their implants and augments out of a fanatical desire to ‘achieve perfection’. Servitors were literally possessed by murderous desire and did everything in their power to harm others. Cannibalism skyrocketed as families and friends turned on each other with gluttonous brutality.

And all the while, Rik fought on. What phenomena that couldn’t be countered was isolated. Those lost to insanity were restrained or put down as the situation warranted it. What chaos and madness that the storm tried to inflict was met with control and order, with Rik simply being the noticeable bastion against this shadow of Old Night.

Then it ended.

The storm came to a close, its fury spent as reality and sanity imposed themselves once more. Alas, the final tally of lives destroyed or lost would not stabilise until days later; Those afflicted with strange melodies or finally succumbing to wounds they proved fatal were among the dead, but the saddest were the suicides.

More then one person awoke from the bout of imposed madness to find themselves in a living nightmare due to the actions of their flesh when they weren’t of sound mind… and more then one couldn’t bring themselves to live with the result.

The damage was done, the blood had been shed and countless personal tragedies and horror stories had destroyed or ruined lives. But with the storm passed it was time to rebuild. And the next stage of Rik’s plan was at hand.

//Vion 5
//The Breach

The gate broke open like a wound.

Smoke curled from the fractures in the bastion walls, drifting upward in thick, choking veils. Cracks split the ground where detonations had ripped through centuries-old ferrocrete. The air was hot and dry, filled with the taste of scorched metal and the hiss of cooling steel.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then came the first boots over the rubble.

Usriel crested the breach, blade drawn, armor dusted with ash. The standard of Vion rose behind him—its cloth torn, but still high, catching the wind like a defiant flame.

“Forward!” his voice boomed across the fractured field, unassisted by vox, unwavering. “Into the breach. We do not stop.”

His forces surged around him—lines of Vionese infantry, Mechanicum war-thralls, and shield-bearing vanguard pressing into the shattered threshold. They came not in perfect formation, but with determination etched into every movement, every bootstep. They bled and stumbled and climbed, but they moved forward.

Gunfire spat from the battlements above. Enemy turrets screeched to life in the inner yard, scything red into the advancing line. A scream rang out, cut short. A shell slammed into the earth, throwing bodies into the air like dolls. Still, they came.

Usriel’s left gauntlet shimmered with light—his shield blossomed in an arc, catching shrapnel that would have torn his command squad apart. His gaze swept the ruins ahead, not panicked, not searching—calculating. He could feel the pull of the battlefield’s rhythm. The danger. The moment before a trap springs.

He stood atop the jagged ruin of a shattered gun emplacement, wind billowing his cloak of dusk-grey, his eyes locked beyond the smoke. The inner walls of the enemy complex loomed ahead, blackened and iron-clad, bristling with turrets and entrenchments.

Behind him, the warriors of Vion 5 gathered. Mud-streaked troopers with patched flak and prayer-etched bayonets. Mechanicum cohort-priests hunched over vox-arrays and weaponized servitors. Tank crews with bloodied brows. They were tired, wounded, dwindling—but not broken.

Then the wall fell. Not to cannon-fire, nor divine will, but by the slow grind of resolve.

The breach opened with flame.

Explosions ripped the gate wide. Concrete and steel flew skyward. Ash and light engulfed the barricades, and through the dust came the war-cry.

“FOR THE LINE! FOR VION!”

Usriel charged first, axe hefted, his psychic shield igniting like a sunburst around him. Behind him surged the last true strength of his army—infantry pouring through the firestorm, Mechanicum walkers stomping forward in rigid lockstep, banners torn but held high.

Enemy resistance was immediate.

Lesser automata poured from recessed bunkers, thin and chattering—like skeletal insects in bronze plating. Their limbs jittered as they raised plasma carbines, firing in staggered volleys. Sparks lit the battlefield. Dozens of Vionese fell in the first moments, shredded by precise, soulless fire.

Then came the human defenders—hardened traitors in darkened flak, well-drilled and savage, rallying behind the machines. Their voices were harsh with vox-static, calling out kill-zones, rally-points. They fought with the desperation of those who knew what they served, and feared it more than death.

But it was what followed that made the ground tremble.

The war-forms stepped into view.

Massive silhouettes emerged through the choking haze—hulking machines of ancient design, their armor thick like fortress plating, their shapes almost humanoid but grotesque in scale. Spinal-mounted weapons folded open. Limbs reconfigured into cannons, hammers, and jagged melee limbs.

One dropped from an elevated bastion and crashed into the ground, sending shockwaves through the rubble.

The line faltered.

Vionese soldiers screamed. A tank detonated. Mechanicum constructs were torn in half as the war-forms struck—not with speed, but inevitability. Every step they took shook the world.

Usriel did not pause.

He leapt forward, his blade whirling with heat and power. A lance of incoming fire struck his shield and broke harmlessly. Behind him, his elite pressed on—not because they were fearless, but because they refused to let him stand alone.

The giants noticed the Angelus Machina and began to converge as a tide of metal and hate. Their prime directive seemed to be to kill the head of the forces of Vion. Yet, as they crashed upon him, they found no purchase as Usriel deftly dodged, parried, and struck with the might of gods and the fury of men. One war-form leapt over the Angelus spraying anti-tank rounds upon his psychic shield whilst another attempted to stab him with a wrist-mounted blade.

Usriel caught the arm of the war-form between his body and his own, bringing his axe down upon its head only to turn in an instant deflect away another blow. He proceeded to throw the corpse into another. Machines who have slaughtered countless in ages past failed to bring down a single man - being felled with a speed and precision incomprehensible to the men they fought between. Yet, the hearts of men could only hold for so long as men began to retreat from the breach.

A burning anger boiled into his heart, he would not allow this opportunity to be wasted - the breach would be taken. Usriel’s voice came across the battlefield halting all; men, machine, gunfire.

“They would see our extinction - yet here we stand, fight as one! For Vion!”

The moment of silence passed before a roar of defiance erupted from the battered Vionese line.

A thunderous war cry surged up from raw, bloodied throats—soldiers who only moments before had turned to flee now planted their feet, turned their guns, and screamed with him. Mechanicum thralls surged forward, their optics flaring bright, their machine-priests bellowing binharic canticles of wrath. Even the wounded raised their fists, their pain forgotten in the tide of fury.

Usriel didn’t hesitate.

He threw himself forward, a comet of metal and flame, crashing into the advancing war-forms with renewed fury. His axe struck like a thunderclap, splitting armored torsos, carving through machine-limbs with arcs of searing light. Around him, the surge followed—men hurling grenades, firing into exposed joints, vaulting over rubble to bring the fight to the enemy.

The war-forms faltered.

For the first time, their advance slowed—not because of resistance, but because the humans they had once pushed back had become fire. Rage made flesh. And at the center of it, Usriel led them—a god of war not born, but made by fire and iron.

And still, something gnawed at the edge of his mind.

The human defenders atop the walls… absent. The machines were isolated.

Without the support of the human defenders, they became predictable—still deadly, still colossal—but exposed. Their patterns repeated. Their suppression fire no longer coordinated with flanking maneuvers. Their brutal strikes found fewer marks as the assault tightened like a noose.

Usriel saw it—felt it in the pulse of battle that guided his steps. This was not luck. This was a fracture in command. A withdrawal. Perhaps even sabotage.

He seized the moment.

“Press them!” he roared, his voice carrying like thunder over the clash and cry. “Break them now!”

With a rallying cry, his forces surged. Bolters roared. Plasma shrieked. Explosions blossomed across the yard as Mechanicum tech-priests unleashed buried payloads, detonating charges beneath the larger war-forms’ feet, sending tons of steel crashing to the ground.
Usriel himself cut through the chaos, axe flashing with machine-light, cleaving through the last of the towering sentinels. He mounted the remains of a broken war-form, the standard of Vion clenched in one gauntlet. Blood, oil, and ash painted his armor in equal measure.

The breach was theirs.

Men cheered. Some wept. Mechanicum units set to securing the ground with mechanical efficiency, turning wreckage into impromptu cover, salvaging what they could.

Usriel stood above it all, his breathing steady beneath the helm, his eyes fixed beyond the walls.

The cost had been steep.

But the wall had been broken. The path forward was claimed. And the Bastion of the False God had bled.

It would bleed again.

In the heavens of Tiānguó, the comet called Dì Shùn’s glory passed in the sky illuminating the night sky with a blue glow of light. On the surface a mansion sat in the boreal forests of the northern regions of Tiānguó. A man wore a white Hanfu, his hair was dark and long like a cascading waterfall, and his eyes were a green hue as he stared into the sky smoking from a pipe. He had dismissed the servants to be alone watching the skies.

He soon heard a woman say “It's generally expected for a husband to wait by his wife's side after she gives birth, you know?” His wife approached him. She wore a purple Hanfu he gave her, her hair was black and her eyes were blue, unlike him, she was shorter but had a wide smile as she walked forward to him.

He rose up in worry. “You should not be out of bed dear.” “Oh please, the great Guang Hien must not appear weak.” She said sitting on the bench he sat on. She seemed to have sweat and looked exhausted, he shook his head sitting beside her. “You are stubborn as ever…” “...and you still try to remain distant from everything Guang Shen” she replied to him as he turned to her he let out a light chuckle he then said. “Ah, I am old… I am surprised you picked this old man for a husband;” She smiled at him and noted. “I am more surprised you accepted.” He shrugged at the comment. “You know why…”

He took a look at his child. He seemed calmer than he expected as he replied. “How is he?” She took a look saying. “Well he is calmer than I hoped, I guess it's good news for who he will be, born in the sun months at least so it's fine for him to be out here.” “Oh please, I am sure he is strong enough for him to be out here knowing who he pulled.” He replied leaning back again and gesturing to her as he returned to see the comet passing overhead.

Both looked up to see the skies themselves before she then said. “Do you think the ships above will not fire at each other during this?” “Doubtful. In fact I think they are about to start firing at each other now…” He replied with flashes of explosions in the skies being visible. She shook her head saying with a sigh. “Does it seem that truces rarely last these days?”

He seemed bothered taking a puff of smoke saying; “For the last thousand years of war it has been diminishing. The last two sorcerer-kings of this world will do anything to achieve what hasn’t been accomplished since Li Ming-Yue.” “Hard to believe I am a descendant of her at times…” She replied to him who then replied. “Many sorcerer nobles are and the reason why it's hard is because we are severely in debt dear.” Both chuckled at his comment. “No need to pour water on me, honey.” She replied with a chuckle as he smiled, soon they looked up to observe the night sky.

He squinted as a new star seemed to pop into existence just under the comet trail. As he rose up to get a better look he seemed frozen as he stared at it. Gazing at her husband, she asked. “Something wrong?” as silence persisted she insisted “Shen?”

He seemed shocked, turning to her. “Go inside.” “What?” She replied, confused by him as he grew panicked before he shouted. “I said get down!” He soon jumped and covered her as a flaming ball of fire flew overhead and collided nearby, exploding and turning into a smoke pillar. As the explosion finally subsided Guang Shen rose up shouting at the quickly arriving servants. “Grab water, grab shovels and extinguish the fire!” As he looked at Guang Hien she rose up from the floor. The sound of the babe was all he could hear for a moment as she then said. “I am fine… Xiǎo Dān is well as well. Is it an attack?” He seemed in deep thought at the question but soon said in a calmer tone. “I think it's fine…” He then said in a more authoritative tone. “Take our son inside, I will handle this!”

She looked skeptical but still took Guang Xiǎo Dān inside the house as Guang Shen went down to the garden woods where some trees still burned. Shen continued on as servants extinguished the fire and shovelled some of the burning wrecks to extinguish fire; He seemed to take long looks at them before heading on to the centre of the crater. It appeared to be a shuttle or capsule.

Approaching, a servant bowed and soon began speaking to him. “My lord, the fire was extinguished. It was rather strange that we found no place of origin and some of the flames were rather difficult to put down but…” While he kept on talking Shen looked at a flame that danced in the colours of purple and green. With a small hand gesture he reached out to it and with his psychic powers, the flames moved towards him as he closed his hand. He soon said. “Interesting…” “Excuse me, my lord?” The servant said and Shen simply said. “I may need the gardener here.”

The servant looked confused with an eyebrow raised saying. “The… gardener?” He gave a nod to the servant who quickly left as he approached the strange object. He noticed the item seemed technological in design, possibly on par in complexity as some of the mythical technology rumored to be used by the oldest of the Qíshì nobility who’s corrupt tyranny cost them their mandate to rule and also to the tools used in Huǒ shā during the era of titans. He also noticed the symbol VII on it raising an eyebrow at it. Some of the flames had died down as he began to approach and touch the metal. It was still hot to the touch but had already cooled down significantly.

He constantly probed it with his psychic senses and he could tell something was inside. Something afraid, but it seemed innocent as well. It was odd for him, but still, he continued passing his hand on a cracked sheet of metal that seemed to be the door to the inside of the shuttle and it seemed to be stuck, probably due to the crash he thought for a moment until he heard a servant. “My lord, are you sure it's wise to inspect this machine this close?” “Yes…” he replied, his voice was calm yet focused.

He then focused as he used his psychic powers to force the door open, and soon he detached it. As mist left the chamber he soon looked inside and found himself shocked. As he stared, he soon heard Hien shout. “Shen! What are you doing?” Looking at a small crowd of guards that accompanied her they seemed ready for a battle. She looked worried.

Thinking for a moment he then replied to her. “You should not be here, dear.” “I can defend myself very well. You don’t need to act like a Qíshì to me.” She replied before looking at the wreck. She then asked. “What is this, an escape pod?” sounding worried at the implication. “Of sorts…” he replied, still maintaining his calm as he leaned into the pod to grab the babe from inside, taking it out of her pod the people present could hear the screams of the young primarch.

---

In the morning, several servants went to work. A gardener stood in front of Guāng Shen together with a chief guard who both were receiving their orders. “Make sure that the ground is spotless. I doubt they would be able to track the pod due to the battle in orbit, but still make sure. AND… Make sure no word spreads out, understood?” Both men and women bowed before leaving.

He soon turned around heading back inside, making his way to the nursery so he could see the two cribs of the children and Hien awaiting him. He sighed, recomposing himself as he approached her as she said. “So we’re adopting her?” She sounded less than enthusiastic with Shen replying. “I understand any concerns you may have, but I feel like we shouldn’t leave a child that was sent away from its parents. Especially one that seems to have a mutation.”

Hien sighed thinking for a moment before saying. “I understand concerns, but you know the chances of her being a sorceress is close to zero, and while I do not care for the ramifications of birthing twins with one not being born with sorcery, I am more afraid that a Zhìzhě inspector may not find much relation between both.” Shen chuckled at the comment replying. “I doubt that.” he soon walked to the two cribs in the corner of the room while the two seemed finally calm from yesterday night. As he looked he could see his son sleeping well. He seemed fine albeit a bit thin, but the girl noticed the third closed eye. It was strange at first sight but nothing much to him, something that big would raise eyebrows, but it would not be strange to many.

Hien also stayed beside the crib, seeing the girl as her eyes opened. They were violet, but the bigger attention she grabbed was her third eye, which seemed to have a blue sclera and dark iris. The sclera looked like the celestial skies of a nebula as she looked at Hien. Hien looked before smiling a little she then said. “Right if you wanna go with this plan which may not last long… What name do we give her?” Shen looked in thought before smiling and saying. “Míng Zhū, after your ancestor.” She chuckled at the thought. “It's a lovely name.” she replied, Ming still looking at her as she grasped her small hand and smiled at her saying. “Lovely indeed…”

As she looked up Shen was once again leaving she then asked. “What are you doing?” Shen looked back, his eyes seeming distant yet his voice seemed determined. “Making sure no word gets out.” As he opened the door to leave the room Hien felt worried and sighed she knew he would probably purge half the staff to make sure the word never got out as she kept an eye on her son and now new daughter. She looked outside as the shuttle was being hauled somewhere else. Looking at Ming Zhu she felt a bit of anxiety, knowing the conversation about that would one day come up.

---

8 years since arrival

Guang Ming Zhu kept her hands fixed on the wood-training sword. Her brother looked at her, and she took deep breaths, trying to concentrate. Her third eye made things hard. Her mind ached at times when her eye opened. It began when she was four, and she remembered well the world vibrating with possibilities, making her mind nearly burn. On the other side of the room was her teacher, a Zhìzhě, a teacher and inspectors of sorcerer families. Its face was covered, but she knew it was looking at her. Its four eyes seemed to inspect her beyond the veil, measuring the control of her eye.

From her vision, the Zhìzhě seemed like a wave of madness with different attack patterns. In this training they were all happening at once in different ways, projections of possibilities. Some moved right and swung against her, and in another, the vibration showed her a ghost of the Zhìzhě charging her and smacking her and in another she saw it swing left and swing against her. As she kept on focusing, the fluctuating actions finally settled into a single line where Zhìzhě would move right and then swing against her on the left.

With vision ready Ming readied her sword quickly, and movement began immediately as she felt her wood sword block. The wood splintering due to the sheer strength of the impact she could see the face of Zhìzhě, the four blue eyes hidden beneath a veil. They appeared calm as she stared at them only holding her ground. Her eye soon foresaw herself being tossed up and just as quickly her legs were swiped under her with telekinesis as she fell on the floor.

Her brother felt the pain of the impact as Ming lay on the floor, her sword fell to the side, breaking in two. As she attempted to rise up it pressed the training sword against her face and then said the words feeling bitter. “The control of your vision grows, but while useful, you must not lose focus in a fight.” Staring Ming greeted her teeth as her psychic powers blasted Zhìzhě out of her, the roof cracking and parts of it falling on her.

Zhìzhě meanwhile seemed to dodge, gracefully using her powers to land on her feet. It then said. “While weapons are limited, our sorcery grants us a lot. But one must use it with a calm mind or else your emotions will cloud your judgment” Ming felt a bit ashamed she closed her third eye making her mind more at ease.

The Zhìzhě put its training sword to rest together with the broken one and soon said. “Due to the incident, I will ask you to take a break Guang Ming Zhu.” “But!” Ming was about to protest until Zhìzhě shouted. “No buts! Your emotions must be better controlled if you wish to continue training. I recommend meditation in your room, understand?” Ming sat down and kowtowed, understanding the request rising up. She left feeling bitter.

Her brother at least gave a light smile that made it feel less wrong. Exiting the training room, she began to walk through the hallways.The windows showed the gigantic towers of steel that made up the city of Zhoxing. The towers had neon signs mostly filled with propaganda from the sorcerer king Shang Yu Wei as the hallway led to a small balcony.

She leaned over the balcony to take a better look at the images of soldiers raising the standard of the Shang dynasty over a hill, bold letters stating to join the war effort. Her eyes seemed excited as she looked down; She could see the servants down below who worked in the sorcerer's quarters of the city. She could see them walking around ‘looking like ants’ she thought as she observed them, stepping back from the balcony as she continued on her way to her room.
The house she lived in was more of a multi-store building. A place she found little as a home and more like a busy street that she got used to the noise of, but she missed some of the comfort she used to have back home, plus the servants back home knew where they belonged. Turning a corner, her face was hit by something metallic; her vision immediately closed as she fell on the floor. The pain of the impact had largely subsided, but she still felt pain in her cheek.Touching it, she quickly noticed the blood on her hand.

Looking at the person who caused it was a maid. She seemed distressed, talking to her yet she ignored it as she grasped her with her psychic powers before throwing the woman through the wall, her body colliding against steel and concrete with the sound of something breaking as she panted. She smiled but only for a moment as screams of pain could be heard.

Ming could see servants emerge to help the woman, and she soon heard. “GUANG MING ZHU!” Turning her face, she saw her mother before lowering her head, knowing this was not gonna be good. An hour or so later, she stood in her mom's office, and her teacher stood in front of her together with her mom. Her cut was large enough to leave a scar, but it was small enough to not need much attention as Zhìzhě, her teacher, shouted at her. “You threw a servant girl through a wall breaking her arm and leg and severely injuring her because of a scratch!?”

Ming replied with a calm yet assertive tone. “She hurt me and being a lesser person I decided to put her in her place. You said to us they are below us after all.” Ming could see her mom’s eyes widen for a moment before relaxing. Zhìzhě, compared to her, mom seemed angry, shaking her head, her eyes behind her veil looking frustrated she then said. “That is not what I meant, child. Your punishment is of your parent's choice, but to behave and justify your actions the same way our oppressors did makes me ashamed of you.” She soon walked away.

Ming felt a bit of pain in the accusation but felt she was still in the right. Many teachers came and said her kin and others similar had the right to rule and that the rest were lesser. She watched her mother as they left the room to discuss something outside.

She let out a large sigh, feeling frustrated. She looked out the windows at the late noon, and the lights of the city were beginning to light up. The door soon opened again as Guang Hien entered the room looking rather tired. Her eyes had bangs, and as she approached, she then said. “The balcony with me…” Ming gave a nod as both headed to the balcony of her office. The balcony faced the city centre, and the sun was gradually sinking below the horizon, casting a warm, golden glow across the sky.

She found it somewhat pretty, the sun glowing in between the skyscrapers looking, below she saw the people going about in the sorcerer's quarters as she looked at them, her mother said. “What do you think of the people below?” “Insects?” She replied.

Her mother said. “Do you see those without the gift or not like you like that?” “Not all…” She responded. Some seemed interesting to her, but her mother shook her head at her answer replying. “Then why do you say they are inferior?” “Because that’s what most other sorcerers say, my teachers too, Dad at times.” She replied with Hien letting out a light sigh replying. “It may seem normal, but it isn’t for many of us. It seems we lose our ways. Once we were slaves, now we are rulers and now we seem to act like them. It is not our way Ming. Do you want this?” Ming looked at her and she looked sad and hurt.

“To be feared?” She heard her say. “Fear you so no person loves you but hates you? You see yourself being higher than everyone and will that one day include me?” “No, I…” Ming replied when hearing the accusation her voice hurt, but her mother still interrupted continuing. “I know… you will not be that, so please don’t be like those who oppressed our ancestors. I know you will be the greatest girl to walk this world. But the people you consider lesser will one day look up to you; they will dream of you when seeking to follow in your footsteps. They are not like us. They cannot lift things with sorcery, turn invisible or set things on fire. But it is our duty not to be tyrants but shepherds. They will look up to you to lead, they are weak and you are stronger than most and one day they will look at you for guidance and what you will do?”

Ming began to think about the idea. The idea seemed good and bad in her mind being loved but also the responsibility, but still she wanted that. She felt her mom tenderly pass her hand through her hair making her feel comfortable as both stood on the balcony.

A few hours later she played with a piece of the game her father played, a game called Weiqi. It was a game she played with him occasionally. Black pieces and white pieces on a flat board of lines, that requires one to surround them to capture them; the player with a higher amount of points is the winner.

As she looked at the board she thought of a place to put it. Her father was a patient man and seemed unfocused at the game as he checked several papers. Her mother had to leave due to an emergency, her brother was already sleeping now, and she meanwhile had trouble sleeping. She felt like she didn't need to slumber. Looking at his papers, she could tell it was math and several numbers as she sat at the other side of his desk, she asked. “What are you reading?”

“Papers on reports, expenses and profits of the families' estates that your mother asked for my help with.” Ming gave a nod to his answer replying. “Sounds…” “Boring?” he attempted to complete her words, but that wasn't the word she would use she then corrected. “Interesting, actually… but ye…” his eyes turned to her as she put a black stone on the board. He responded by placing a white stone on the board.

“Why do you find it interesting?” “I don’t know, I just feel it’s interesting.” She replied, reading one of the papers on the table. It was a series of numbers on expenses, her father soon said. “What does that say?” “What we pay our servants, the costs for food and amenities, the taxes, uh… interest is quite high.” She asked him, replying to her question. “We are roughly around 30 million Okane in debt. Meaning, someone outside this house walking the streets has more money than us.” “That is… a lot… how?”

She was quite surprised with what he said. He chuckled as she put another stone with his response. “This family is old. Your mother is a descendant of an old family that used to rule over a large region and became ruler of our country at times. There is a reason why the place you were born is called Guāng Xiang. Over time we lost a lot of prestige and power. Over time, things began to decline. You were born when things finally reached a low point to some extent.” She nodded to his explanation as she put another piece on the board. ‘Born into this family’ the word was strange; she felt separate at times, but the thought subsided, and she felt at home here, and yet she still wanted more than this; she would do more than survive; she felt she could make things better and make her family thrive.

“So…” she snapped from her thoughts, hearing those words as her head turned to her father. “...You broke a maid's arm, leg and several bones?” “It was an accident.” She said in a hurry trying to maintain a calm with her father replying in a calm yet straight tone as always. “You just lied.” “I…” she attempted to talk but he stopped her, stating to her. “You are sweating a bit, your voice is too rushed, and you sound nervous.” She remained in silence thinking of what to say as he simply continued. “...and I spoke with the maid early.”

He smiled in a manner that left Ming feeling more nervous. “She hurt me.” she only said. “It is a small scratch that will leave a mark, but you are better than this, I know that.” “It's not just that… It's just that I feel distant.” She replied, stopping playing as she put her piece on the table and turning to see the night sky through a window. He took a look at her, letting go of the papers, and took a light sigh replying. “It's normal to feel distant when far from home, especially since the change was quite abrupt to you.” She shook her head saying. “No, not that. It’s just that I sometimes feel different. Different from everyone…” Her father kept on looking; he seemed to be in deep thought he then simply replied. “What do you mean girl?”

She sat cross-legged as her father rose up from his seat and sat near her in another chair she then said. “I feel different, I know I was born different, but it sometimes feels like I am far from normal… At times, I feel like I am not your daughter. I feel like I was made to be something else. To be somewhere else.” There was a silence she felt uncomfortable until hearing her father say. “So what?”

She turned her head to him, confused at what he said, with him smiling at her. “I raised you, didn’t I? Even if you are from a different blood than mine, you still would be my little girl.” She smiled at the thought it felt warm for her. “I guess so.” She said to him he smiled at her, simply saying. “Well… continue?” He gestured to the game to which she replied. “Why do you like this game so much?” “A good game about tactics, politics and many other topics. It's a good game to partially exercise your skills in strategy.” He replied, putting a piece on the board.

She kept a look, planning her next move with care. She knew tactics and her mind was quickly developing a plan already. Her mind was flooded with tactics as she played. At first, it seemed like a quick victory, an easy one, until things turned bad fast. Her pieces were taken, and soon her father won with more points as she looked at the result, she then said. “How did you win?!” It made no sense to her how he managed to do it. Was it because she was tired? Her mind wondered, but it seemed to dispel as he replied. “You think too much…”

Looking at his face he seemed neutral until giving a light smile at her, she yawned telling. “You won’t win next time.” “You win sometimes against me. I would not be surprised.” He replied, picking the pieces and storing them as she replied. “You hold back when I mention it.” “Do you believe that?” He replied, looking at her. She felt strange that he was so hard to read. Was he holding back? Or was he giving everything he had? He always seemed to have a calm demeanor even in a hurry and worry, he seemed to maintain a tranquil mind.
She raised an eyebrow, soon saying. “Were you taking it seriously?” He seemed to think for a moment, retorting with a light chuckle. “We may never know.” She frowned, raising up from her chair and replying. “That’s not an answer.” “You will understand in time.” She looked angry for a second before shaking her head, ignoring the comment as her father rose from his chair saying. “A walk to your bedroom?” She gave a nod as both walked through the hallways she soon asked. “Mom said you were a powerful sorcerer once.” “I am just very rusty.” he replied with a shrug. “How powerful?” she asked him, to which he seemed to consider something. His mind seemed in deep thought for her.

After thinking, he then said to her. “Very powerful, Gōngjué listening to my opinions powerful…” “Really?” Her eyes sparked in awe at the statement that a Gōngjué would listen to her father. It is the title held by the most powerful and rich lords of the kingdom. Their voice also elected the future ruler of the realm, yet something ate at her in a moment. “But why are you here instead of there with them?” “Sometimes love calls for other paths in life.” He said with a smile when both arrived at the door to her room, she smiled at him saying. “Thanks, dad…” He smiled as she entered. She felt more at ease but still, she felt different from the family, but at least she felt more at home now.

---

A hour later.

“She scares me…” The Zhìzhě replied with its four blue eyes glowing behind the white transparent veil as she stared at Guang Shen. He gave a light nod saying. “Training did not go to plan. I will take it.” “Not just that!” It replied, floating away from his desk and looking at the midnight city saying. “I… never in my entire centuries of existence met a child like that. Even if a mutant it does not make sense what she has scares me. She has enough strength to shatter wood with ease and break bones by accident according to her previous teacher. She picks up on my teachings faster than her brother. Not only that, but she has reflexes faster than a child should have. Her divination eye definitely was an interesting mutation, but inside her lies way more trust me, my lord… Her brother at least seems to not question her skills, his training goes well and he is bright. But her… She is in another league…” She shakes her hand in thought, turning to Shen.

He gave a nod saying. “Understood… Your concern is noted.” It seemed hesitant for a moment before giving a nod and then she said. “Her fame is already spreading, I should note.” He maintained a calm stance to her statement only letting out a light sigh. He then said to her, “Yes, I know… You are dismissed.” It gave a nod and soon left, closing the door behind her.

After a moment, a guard opened the door and soon entered the servant who was attacked by Ming together with a friend. She used crutches to walk to the room, she then said. “My lord with all due respect… I still hope you will pay in full for this.” “You will be…” he replied, no emotion was in his voice, almost monotone, the men who accompanied her soon picked a cylinder he carried on his back and put it on his table saying. “I put the bloody cloth in there after I cleaned Ming’s face after the incident as you requested.” Shen gave a nod to his statement.

The two soon left, leaving him alone with the cylinder; it was a micro stasis chamber. It was already activated meaning the blood had been preserved since the incident. He leaned on his desk looking, deep in thought; he soon picked up his pen and a piece of paper and began to write. “Hello old friend, it's been a long time I know, but I need assistance with something sensitive…”

The letter was written and sealed, then he gave it to a servant who took it away in a hurry with the orders given. Afterwards, in his bedroom he stood watch of the city. At night it seemed like it was gonna rain. He stood still for an hour give or take. His mind was flooded with thoughts, and after a long time he soon picked up his pipe and lit it up, letting out a puff of smoke as he relaxed.

“Something wrong?” He turned his head to see Guang Hien she had woken up from her sleep he simply replied. “You should be asleep.” “That’s your worried voice. Something is wrong.” She replied, rising up from her bed while he continued to smoke, standing next to him, she asked. “Is it about the wartaxes?” He shook his head at her, who replied. “I was worried about this… Ming?” he gave a light nod as she acknowledged she then said. “I know things may be difficult, but I am sure she will be fine. She just needs guidance.” “I don’t know about that… sometimes I fear when she discovers the truth, her desires may overtake her. She is strong and she also is not the most social.” He replied, taking another puff of smoke, sounding worried.

She sighed at his response replying back. “You overthink at times dear. Things will be fine. She is a bright child, but she needs guidance. Plus, you also are the reason she doesn’t see many kids her age.” He mumbled for a moment seemingly agreeing but also sounding skeptical. She shook her head smiling at him she then said. “Remember before Xiǎo and Ming? We thought we should have five children?” There was a moment of silence as Shen let out another puff of smoke and both said at the same time. “Two is already too much.” Both began to chuckle at the thought. Shen soon let out a sigh. “From the mentors we at least know both have a good relationship… Maybe I am too paranoid.” “Well, you had your runs in with danger in your old job before you retired.” she replied with him correcting her. “Semi-retired…” He took another puff letting out the smoke he soon said. “It will be fine…”

---

In the morning Ming rolled her eyes before glancing back at the guard following her and Xiao as both walked the streets. She then whispered. “Why do we need him again? I can easily take down any person that comes our way.” “Orders from Dad. Plus if it is an experienced sorcerer you may not have as much luck.” Xiao replied, causing her to roll her eyes.

She continued on, reflecting on the truth of his words, but still feeling confident in her abilities “A shame mom and dad could not come.” Xiao said in a bit of a sad tone, Ming soon hit him on the arm in a light way saying to him. “Hey it's fine. Mom did say we came to this place because she had business here. Tomorrow, we are leaving as well, so we got lucky to be able to see the parade.” He still looked conflicted but still seemed happy in some way in her eyes as both continued on.

The streets were filled with commoners and servants of the nobility of the city; many were petty sorcerers from what she could tell as they reached a high point overseeing the military parade down below. She could see soldiers marching with standards of the sorcerer king. Tanks also rolled below as she looked in awe. Below she could see the war magistrates, officers of the army. While she looked she then asked her brother. “Do you think they will bring the Qíshì?” “House Zhao, Lei and Zhang did say they would be in the parade.” Another girl said nearby, causing both of them to turn. The child was cloaked. She took a look at her and she had red eyes and long white hair, from what Ming could tell as she looked at her. She seemed to avert gaze with Xiao raising an eyebrow but shrugging it off as he kept a look at the parade. Ming kept on looking at the other hand with one eye and the other focusing on the parade.

As she looked she soon saw it was a true Qíshì soon arrived. A giant of steel plate armor and a great sword being held by one of its arms and the other being a cannon with a shield holding the sigil of the Zhang dynasty. A red rose and a white rose inside of it, with its arrival petals from flowers that began to be spread from the knight as it was presented. As one flew near her, she then said. “Clever…” Xiao looked in awe and Ming also felt in awe of the great machines towering over most of the war giants. At the top of the Qíshì, there seemed to be a man saluting the crowd. As she looked on she turned again to the cloaked girl who seemed to follow the Qíshì as it was moved by a platform. Taking a look as her clothes became more visible she wore all white, not easy to clean but seemed expensive. It was then she noticed the sigil of a purple snowflake embraced by a white dragon. She was surprised by the symbol of the Shào family, one of the 10 richest families in the kingdom.

“The symbol of the dragon.” She uttered her brother turning to her before turning to the girl, surprised as he saw the symbol he was about to shout her family name before Ming held his mouth whispering. “The Shào clan?” she asked with excitement. On the other hand, the girl was shy, turning away saying. “I don’t want attention…” Ming let go of her brother’s mouth as he whispered in her same tone. “It's fine we won’t tell a soul” She seemed to smile a little while returning to watch over the parade “My name is Guang Xiao Dan and this is my sister Guang Ming Zhy and you?” Xiao asked, starting the conversation.

Ming was happy to just observe as she replied. “Shào Hua” She gave a light bow of her head with Ming returning she then said. “A pleasure to meet you.” “Equally.” she replied with a courteous tone that Ming found interesting. It was indeed a curiosity as to why she was here but soon became obvious to her when she noticed a guard looking around; One that had her turn to see him and she seemed to grow worried. Ming soon replied. “We can hide you from him if you want to keep watching the parade.” “No!” She protested raising her voice even if lightly she then continued. “I knew this would happen. My father won’t like me going far away. Thank you for this.” She gave a bow leaving in a small hurry as she disappeared into the crowd.

The guard seemed to notice something and began to leave with only a few vestiges of her being able to be seen. “You think we will meet her again?” Xiao said with Ming replying. “We shall see.”

---

The Dawn of Pandjoras – the illustrious flagship of the Illuminated Star Sultanate - was a blur of action. A thousand and one different tasks took place simultaneously across her beloved, decorated hull. The Pandjorans, accompanied by the Sultanate’s myriad mamluk, worked tirelessly to achieve perfection aboard the spacecraft. Hafiz harmoniously chanted rites of travel while their serpent engraved censers billowed energizing incense. Ghazi patrolled the absurd length of the vessel, trailing duskborn warriors yet to reach their peak veterancy. Hassan of the Thousand-Faces remained aloof, quietly watching from within and out for oncoming threats. Ambassadors, either of House Abdullahar or the other vassals in the empire, feverishly returned to their chambers in preparation.

The length of the dreadnought was in a state of controlled chaos, yet the bridge was a place of muted silence and solemn duty. A hundred duskborn adepts of the Thirteen Houses worked in contemplative quiet to prepare for transition. The sound of overworked cogitators, squealing augmentations, and spewing incense holders broke the tranquility. Save for the Malik of Pandjoras himself, who sat upon the command throne with Shipmaster Samrih by his side. His golden, serpentine eyes watched with pleasure as the duskborn coordinated in perfect tandem. Few could discern his true emotions, but his aura was as perceptible as one could be.

“My Umbral King! Thirty minutes until preparations for transition into the Sea of Souls are completed!” One of the Voxmasters spoke, removing themselves from their dais to bow before the dusken deity. Their voice bordered between urgent and awestricken. A commonality for those that spoke with the Malik.

“Take your time, Hathas, we are in no rush. Relay to the Enginarium and the Seer Palace that preparations are to be finished in a less than rushed manner. Crossing the Sea is as treacherous as traversing the Ashwastes without a respirator. Unless you’d prefer to be swallowed by the Star Serpent.” Zaphariel ibn Varranis cooed, gesturing with one claw-tipped finger for the adept to rise. They visibly eased as if a terrible burden had been lifted from their soul.

“O, gracious Malik, we thank you for your patience!” Hathas replied, dipping their head deeper once and then rising again to return to their dais. The Shipmaster watched them leave with a placid look on their face. It was a look that he always wore, even as myriad scars crossed his imperfect features.

“A recent addition to the Umbral Armada. The duskborn grow more zealous the longer you stay away from Pandjoras. If not for Muahad, and your Thousand-Faced Hassan, then there would be entire prophetic cults in your name.” Samrih voiced his opinion. His voice was dry, scratchy, and as deep as the gravity basins of Pandjoras. He had continued to grow from time, experience, and adversity.

“Faith,” the Malik of Pandjoras started with a hint of disgust on his lips. He recalled every manner of zealotry professed to him in a manner of seconds. He would never be able to forget the distaste he felt at each occurrence. The dusken deity continued, “is a powerful weapon for unifying an empire under one purpose. The Old Man taught me much of how it led to untold slaughter on Pandjoras, resulting in him killing a thousand and one gods. I cannot fathom wielding such a blade, but I understand how effective it can be.”

It was a half-truth as ever he spoke in them. Zaphariel felt abominable disgust in relation to zealotry and fanaticism, yet he wielded it imperceptivity like a knife in the dark. He could not stem the tide of religious fervor, so why not embrace it at the lowest possible level? Everything is a weapon, Muahad had taught him. The Old Man was correct. It was one of the most effective weapons in his arsenal.

“Forgive me, Master, but I must amend what I said. You should return to Pandjoras after this campaign.” Samrih said with confidence, bowing his head slightly towards the Malik. The dusken deity watched the man closely, then flashed a toothy grin to the scarred warrior.

“You’ve grown too responsible for your own good, Samrih . Where is the Shipmaster that led my beloved dreadnought into a thousand and one Klantor frigates? The one who conducted a precise execution of a pirate battleship? The man who boasted of his closeness with the Malik of Pandjoras?” Zaphariel asked with a playful tone, watching as Samrih’s face twitched imperceptivity from his advances. It was half the reason the man from House Nathaz remained as Shipmaster. The other half was genuine impression from his raw abilities as a void tactician.

“I’m joking, Shipmaster, but you are correct. I miss the Old Man and Neu Alamut. Two-hundred-and-fifty worlds and eighteen years of void travel. Pandjoras beckons.” The Malik stated, raising a comforting hand to silence Samrih’s response. His serpentine eyes turned to the tempered glass, revealing all of the void in its glory. Save for the weeping tear in reality, visible even from where he sat on the command throne.

The wound pulsed like festering flesh, leaking heinous energies into the physical realm. Zaphariel felt as if it watched him. If he were a lesser man with less experience with the unknown, then the Malik was certain that it would have driven him insane. Luckily, it had been a guiding beacon for the Pandjorans since their ascent as a stellar empire. He knew it was ill to use such an oddity as a way marker, yet they had little choice in the matter. Especially now, more than ever, with it as close as it was.

“After the twin systems at the Serpent’s Tongue, my Malik?” Samrih asked, adjusting his stance to account for Zaphariel’s relentless verbal attack. The Shipmaster crossed his arms behind his back, resting his gaze in the direction of the dusken deity’s stare.

“Quite so, my dear Samrih, but reports have already come in of corsairs surrounding the southern fork. Once they’ve been dealt with, then to the black sands of our umbral world I shall return.” Zaphariel conceded, closing his eyes to the Wound. It troubled him to stare for too long, yet it never failed to draw him in. The Malik of Pandjoras continued, “preferably before the full colonization of Hephas, Anedjoras, Asaijhas, and Zeuros. A personal touch must be used for the worlds in the same space as our home.”

A thousand and one tasks to complete his ultimate goal were required. The four uninhabited worlds surrounding Pandjoras’ star – the Eye of Falak – still needed a leviathan amount of resources to industrialize. Not even the umbral world could provide for her sister planets, despite the Ring of Muahad’s abundance of technology and materials. The last report from House Tallora confirmed the present deficit for the project. A variable that he couldn’t perfectly control. Not yet, at least.

“If it is an issue with personnel, then the mamluk are more than ready to lay down their lives for you.” Samrih offered, earning a fixed glance from the Malik of Pandjoras. The Shipmaster realized that he had overstepped his boundaries and offered a bow in apology. Zaphariel casually waved it off.

“Were you not born to House Nathaz, Samrih? Perhaps a marriage with one from House Tallora would suit you. I can make the arrangements, my friend.” Malik Varranis cooed with a growing grin. Samrih was prepared, however, and nearly spoke once more if Zaphariel hadn’t continued to speak. “Raw resources, not manpower. The Umbral Armada is a voracious serpent in a desert devoid of jakaal. It’s hunger knows no end, yet the end is in sight. Three-hundred worlds were the original number of the Star Serpent. We shall meet that, rest, and then expand further.”

Another response that was dodged. The mamluk. Abhumans. He was aware that it was impossible to fully integrate an entire civilization with untold amounts of traditions and values in it. The only correct reaction is integration and conversion. A long process that will continue beyond his demise, yet it began even now in the genelabs of Pandjoras. For now, they sufficed as necessary instruments. It will all drown in dusk, just as planned, he thought as Samrih moved away from him. The Shipmaster quickly spoke with a vox operator, then turned towards him.

“We are ready, my Malik,” Shipmaster Samrih stated promptly, offering a formal bow to the Padishah of Pandjoras. The bridge looked to their dusken deity for guidance, hope and anticipation gleaming in their orange eyes. They had all walked the same path as he had for countless years. Rest was well within sight. Zaphariel would not keep them waiting.

“Transcend across the Sea of Souls! Glory unto Pandjoras!” The Malik of Pandjoras commanded, rising from his throne to gesture over his subjects. His arm spread wide as if to acknowledge all the crew of his beloved warship. The motion was met with muted professionalism, the bridge members bringing their fists to their heart and proclaiming glory for their homeworld. Moments such as these brought a smile to his lips. Absolute, unflinching loyalty, he cooed to his mind.

The Dawn of Pandjoras was not the only vessel. Hundreds of others prepared for an entrance into the Empyrean, merely awaiting the flagship to make a move. The scythe-like instruments stretching from the bottom of the vessels began to glow. Lilac lightning danced along the edges of the ‘blade’, while the rest of ‘blade’ glowed with a prismatic hue. Bolts shot out from across the instrument, arcing into the penumbral void. Great tears in reality began to form. Chaotic wounds that licked out with mauve tongues eagerly welcomed the vessels of the Sultanate. Insanity awaited within for those that dared to venture.

Once again, the duskborn of the umbral world ventured into the Empyrean with courage and faith in their lungs.

---

The Malik of Pandjoras wandered the vast, absurdly long halls of his dreadnought. It had evolved over the past eight years of constant integration, yet the Dawn of Pandjoras remained much the same in other aspects. Beautiful pillars, engraved with the history of the dusken world, rose up to meet the nigh endless floors. Glowglobes, ornately shaped to resemble void serpents, slithered around doors, archways, and other functional causeways. Murals of their homeworld and many others were plastered on otherwise barren, metallic walls. Long, umbral carpets sewn from serpent silk, filled the space between pillars. A thousand and one grains of black sand nestled into every corner. The faint scent of the umbral world mingled with freshly lit incense, spewing from censer braziers. Every embellishment to the Dawn of Pandjoras made him feel as if he walked upon the umbral world.

A thousand and one plans circulated through his mind as he progressed through the hull. Leaving the bridge to the Shipmaster was the correct choice. Too many actions to account for and too many objectives to prepare for. None of these thoughts brought his armored form to the Palace of the Malik. He did not desire time with his thirteen wives, nor did he wish to engage in sculpting. Neither produced anything of value beyond vain pleasure, Zaphariel thought. The thought was as quiet as the alcoves of the hull were while they navigated the Empyrean. It had become tradition – and a safety precaution – to isolate the crew during the journey. None walked with him save for the occasional group of hafiz with a seer amidst them he crossed paths with.

His silent footfalls found him stepping into the Garden of the Void. Respirators were prepositioned next to the portal into the chamber, yet Zaphariel had never required one to navigate Pandjoras’ surface. Inside, he felt the raw humidity of the umbral world. It was as wide as thirty dropships and as tall as five elder serpents. The chamber itself was domed with a history of House Sulkat engraved into gravitic stone, laboriously hauled from their world. Bits of black particle clung to the hair, while fist-sized obsidian scarabs loudly buzzed nearby. A controlled populace of void serpent idled within the penumbral stalks or swam in the gravity pools. From the Ashwaste azure blooms to the Alamut umbral plume, all vegetation of his home was present in the life-sized terrarium. The scent among it all brought him peace beyond what any person could.

As he prepared to enter oneness amidst the flora, Zaphariel felt a sluggishness uncharacteristic of his physiology. He sprawled claw-tipped fingers of his left hand against his face to ease the oddity. His heart quickened as he felt sweat dripping down his tan skin. All of his senses suddenly screamed out at once. The humidity of the chamber dropped to a chilling coolness unlike any frigidity on Pandjoras. A foul, sulphuric scent plagued the Garden, where previously it had smelled of spice and freshness. Bile settled at the bottom of his throat. He was no stranger to the Sea of Souls or the Wyrd, yet this felt entirely different altogether.

The Malik of Pandjoras left the Garden as an unnatural breeze began to course through the chamber. He could feel the palpable fear on the creatures within rise as he absconded. The alcoves of the Dawn greeted him once more, yet they were significantly different from how he had left them. The scents were that of the polluted Garden, but incense was pillowing out in clouds of pink. The serpent-bound glowglobes were tinged in electrifying blue, while the wall-mounted murals wept crimson. A pain began to rise in his temple, nearly forcing his eyes to shut in surprised agony. He could suppress a thousand and one daggers in his gut, yet he couldn’t quell this.

Then he saw it standing in the middle of the hall between the Garden of the Void and the Mamluk Quarters. It was a leviathan person draped in shadows with gold peeking beneath. It held an axe as tall as he was in one hand. Tarnished avians decorated the heavy armor that it wore. It steadily approached him with the axe lowered. Only then did he realize that there was a muzzle at the end of the weapon. It sprinted towards him, nearly faster than he could react; however, none were faster than he. The Malik of Pandjoras was unequaled in swiftness. He gritted his teeth and exploded forward, activating the miniature powerfield in his gauntlets. Claw met shadow, followed by a burst of ink-black vitae from the being’s throat. It collapsed to the floor and disappeared into the unknown.

An ethereal battlefield suddenly stretched out before him, devoid of the Dawn of Pandjoras’ trappings. Murky structures in a style unknown to him rose up to meet a sky with a black sun. A horde of shadows in bulky, imperious armor marched around him with strange symbols on their enormous pauldrons. They appeared as if cut from the same cloth, repeated over and over a thousand and one times. Ugly, heavy armaments were carried in their gauntlets. Banners were raised high to a void filled with starships racing to destinations unforeseen. Zaphariel inspected them as one would a fine sculpture, daring to investigate everything he could. It only worsened his pain as each shadow brought agony to his eyes.

The dusken deity pushed through the legions of warriors, smaller than him yet larger than a standard man. As he approached the front of the warriors, one of the banners became clear to him. Upon the surface of the cloth was a number. XIII. It resonated with him. It called for him to interact with it. He refused as he did with his fateful encounter with Falak. The Malik of Pandjoras would not be bent low by apparitions or the ghosts of the Empyrean. As he stepped out of the formation, the warriors reached out to him with grasping hands. Each felt like a desperate, needy attempt as if a child cried out for their parent. Zaphariel heard ethereal weeping, tinged by the wyrd. His claws lashed out, cutting wrist from arm and sending the phantoms reeling back.

“I do not belong to you. You belong to me.” Zaphariel snarled back, racing forward and claiming a phantom giant in one of his claws. It desperately kicked out as it’s unnatural life was suffocated from it. He squeezed his digits tighter until the apparition disappeared into a wisp of charcoal smoke. The ethereal formation began to disperse in a flurry of ash, black sand, and obsidian tendrils. They twirled around him as he pressed onward through the battlefield, empowering each step he took with equal parts pain and pleasure. His mind felt ready to burst as he ascended freshly summoned stairs into the unknown.

Every step he took to ascend higher saw a different part of him shift. He hadn’t realized it until it dawned on him how massive he appeared. Every part of him was being consumed by prismatic shadows, each tinged in a different shade of azure, amethyst, emerald, and ruby. Great claws of serpent scale trailed down his arms. Talons wrapped around his armored feet. The beat of scaled wings echoed behind him in sound both muffled and clear. He felt illusory ichor drip down from above him in a repetitive circle. Zaphariel felt his body weakening, blood draining from his face, and vitae dripping from his orifices. It was the worst he had ever felt, yet it brought a sensation that he would never forget.

As he turned to regard the battlefield, the Malik of Pandjoras collapsed to his knees. It was no longer a stage unknown to him. The dark sands of an illusory dusken world burned brightly before him. The sky above him was alight with a thousand and one different shells pummeling the dunes of his home. Shadowy gravity palaces fell from the void, crashing into the sands. Starships of strange design rose where the Ring of Muahad would be visible. More of the gigantic soldier-apparitions marauded across the planet, slaughtering everything that moved. He cried out in rage. Unfathomable cackling rang in his ears from a speaker incomprehensible to him.

Fresh images pulsed into his mind at a speed incomparable. Great cities destroyed by the hands of ferocious, tan-skinned warriors in bulky armor. Claw-tipped fingers tearing apart skin to consume the grey matter of an unknown foe. A golden knight cutting cleanly into a right gauntlet, separating hand from forearm. A fortress besieged, yet its besiegers slaughtered to a man with motorized blades and barking guns. It drove him into a fit of psionic madness unlike any that he had experienced before. The Malik of Pandjoras could not comprehend it. He could not fathom it. His will was beyond that of mortal men. He was the Unifier. The Prophet-King of the Dusk World. Lord of the Thirteen Nights.

It came to a climax. He could feel the wyrd erupting from him as if unshackled by an unknown hand. All of his barriers had been shattered. Bioelectricity arced dangerously around him, tinged in the varying hues of his environment. Black sand pooled around him in a tempest not unlike the storms of Pandjoras. His voice became hoarse with reality-changing yelling. It felt like claws were being driven into his skull, scrambling the inside of his mind and rewiring it to nefarious purposes.

“Are you really this weak, brother?” A deep voice asked, cutting through the madness like a battle-honed blade. The ethereal battlefield melted away from him. The warmth of a reactor purged the chill from his body. A figure stood behind him like a towering sentinel. Its presence brought him an unexplainable strength. A hand, fully encompassing his shoulder, gripped him tightly.

“The Malik of Pandjoras would not falter to such illusions. Stand up.” the voice demanded, a tone as ruthless as it was reassuring. It lit a flame in his heart. The sands of Pandjoras filled his veins as if it were hot plasma spilling into an enginarium. He began to stand, calming the raging wyrd that shot out of his soul. A wounded, toothy grin began to form on his lips as he regained his courage once more.

"Rise, brother," came a new voice, soft yet firm as a river current flowing inexorably across the treacherous reaches of his mind. A hand took his own, smaller than his and yet its magnitude stood amongst the greatest of all. A rush of air like the fresh breeze of a garden world in spring engulfs him as another figure comes to stand by him, resplendent in flowing silks and accompanied by the faint smell of ozone and vanilla perfumes.

The voice came again, soft and lilting and bearing a melody of humor and melancholy. Another hand draped a silken cloth around his neck, resplendent in the colors of Pandjoras. "To borrow a saying of yours... a thousand times you must fall, and a thousand and one times you must rise again. Stand up, brother, and walk beside us once more."

“What a cruel joke,” Zaphariel replied with a laugh, yet he was thankful for the phantoms. His orange, serpentine eyes stared out before him as more shadows formed. They were eighteen in total of various sizes and shapes, emanating an aura of familial tenderness. Their ethereal lips moved, yet only the feeling remained. They disappeared as quickly as they had appeared, swirling into the black sand tempest that rushed around him. He closed his eyes to the world once more, focusing within to harness the wyrd. He refused to be dominated by such flippant powers.

Zaphariel ibn Varranis entered a state of oneness. The battlefield, the apparitions, the shadows, the scents, and the cold disappeared. The wyrd pulsed through his veins as a living thing, squirming and writhing like a serpent caught out of it’s void pool. Voiceless words escaped his lips as the Empyrean was forced into domination. It snapped, barked, and cried out. Things within the dark laughed, cackled, roared, and coughed as he fought back against the tide. Eventually, quicker than the wyrd could anticipate, his body entered equilibrium.

Black sand, azure flame, lilac lightning, emerald energy, and scarlet vitae erupted from him in extraordinary pulse of psionic might. The Dawn of Pandjoras violently shook for minutes after Zaphariel’s psionic backlash. Whatever seer barriers had been delicately maintaining the vessel’s journey through the warp were simultaneously shattered and reborn. A single moment of laxity, however, was enough to drive the crew over the edge. Madness began to run rampant through the hull. The Malik of Pandjoras could hear the duskborn and the mamluk alike cry out in terror. He did not fear for their demise for only he knew how to quickly remedy it.

Riding the waves of psionic might, the dusken deity entered oneness once more. He narrowed his eye as he strained in focus. The wyrd wrapped around him like a warm breeze on the umbral world. He willed his aura out, stretching a thousand and one grains of black sand throughout the starship. Although Zaphariel could not comprehend their spirit, he could feel the touch of their minds. He whispered through the wyrd, each word vibrating the air around him and reaching where he desired. Reality was his to mold so long as he could speak into it. Their minds quieted, relaxed by the farflung words of the Malik. Perspiration pooled over his forehead as he repeated the same action a thousand and one times.

As the last mind was quieted, Zaphariel felt his limbs desire respite; however, the callous words of the towering phantom resonated in his mind. A reinvigorated grin spread across his lips. He would never forget those words or that tone. The Malik of Pandjoras remained firm in his stance. His eyes opened to the world around him, filled once more with the familiar halls of his beloved dreadnought. Inhabitants of the starship were beginning to stumble out of their quarters. Hafiz were chanting louder and greater than previously before. The corpses of seers were sporadically slumped throughout the halls he had begun to traverse. The dusken deity pressed on.

---

The portal into the bridge opened to him, basking his perspired skin in a wash of hot air. Zaphariel witnessed a single moment of absolute chaos with his serpentine eyes. Dead adepts, cowering crewmen, and panting bridge officers were scattered like a thousand and one grains of black sand. Blood painted a portion of the terminals from those that the madness overtook. Shipmaster Samrih stared straight ahead into the void shutters with his fingers nearly cracking the command throne. His arrival had an immediate effect as lingering madness fled from their orange eyes, returning to their duties without another thought. Voidsmen claimed the dead, retreating through a separate corridor than the one the dusken deity had entered.

“My Malik…!” Shipmaster Samrih announced, rising from the command throne with blood dripping down his fingertips. He pressed a fist against his chest and lowered himself to a kneel; however, the dusken deity was already there to help him stand back up with a single hand. The duskborn man would’ve denied the assistance, yet he no longer had any strength to rebuke his beloved king. Zaphariel assisted him back into the command throne.

“The Sea of Souls is as turbulent as a gravity tempest the closer we get to the Wound. Luckily, it seems to have subsided,” Zaphariel reassured him with a smile, turning his attention away from Samrih to regard the rest of the crew. They momentarily halted their work as the leader of their empire pushed his full focus on them. Some chose to kneel, whispering in the roughest tongue of their homeworld. Others inclined their heads in respect. Either was acceptable to him at this moment.

“You’ve done well, my friends. You are all born of Pandjoras. Serpent vitae is your blood. Black sand is your air. Gravitic stone is your skin. The dusken sky is your mind. You have survived a thousand and one perils. It only furthers my pride to see you persevere against anomalies odds. Glory unto you, my duskborn, and glory unto Pandjoras!” Zaphariel roared with fresh vitality in his lungs. He did not need reality-changing vocals to stir their hearts. The mere sight of him was enough, emphasized even more so by his voice. His smile spread into a toothy grin. They cheered his name, then cheered for Pandjoras, and finally for their voyage before returning to their duties.

“Are you well, Lord Zaphariel? We were worried something happened to you.” Shipmaster Samrih asked with genuine concern in his voice. It touched the dusken deity’s heart that he felt that way. He wondered, however, how much of it was genuine friendship and how much of it was feverish reverence. Both served a purpose to him.

“I am exceptional, Samrih. I merely had a dream of dusk in the Garden of the Void,” the Malik of Pandjoras replied. He withheld the events that he had seen. The wyrd played tricks on their mind like heat phantoms in the black sands. How much of it was real? How much of it would come to pass? How much of it was a lie? Why did he now feel as if many beings were watching him? Too many questions and too many plans to solve. Zaphariel was thankful for it, however, for it had made him stronger.

“Translation in several minutes, Shipmaster!” One of the voxmasters spoke. Zaphariel recognized them as Ashiia, notably not Hathas. They were no longer walking among their number. The dusken deity did not mourn for their loss. Another replaceable tool was lost.

“Begin translation when ready! Broadcast arming protocols to all shipmasters! If the corsairs are waiting for us, then by the Ring of Muahad we will be ready.” Samrih said with an air of absolute authority. The very same that Zaphariel had taught him many years ago. The dusken deity approved as a smith would a finely tuned weapon. His perfected weapon turned to regard him. “Are you prepared, my lord?”

“Always. It’ll be just as planned.” Zaphariel whispered with a grin, placing a claw-tipped hand on top of the command throne. His orange eyes turned to the voidshutters as the vessel began to lurch. He felt the wyrd stir as the seers began to raise the barriers. They would soon enter reality and unto the next world. Fifty more worlds, he thought with excitement.

Unbeknownst to him, the dusken deity was watched from beyond. Far from the Wound, a light as bright as the galactic core gazed upon him. A radiance unparallel moved, shuffling from the cradle of a broken shell. It spread rays of brilliance across the universe as it spilled forth toward the Star Serpent.

The great academies are centres of training and learning for sorcerers; only four of them remain of the ten that were built, with the academy of Jin Ping Mei being the oldest, largest of the academies, yet the most controversial one. Ming, though, while looking around, most students wore very vibrant colours in the symbol of their noble families, others simply by their tastes herself meanwhile, just wore white and purple, while purple was one of her family colours, the other was the one she liked. She kept on looking around before looking back at her scrolls she held, most containing information on rune sorcery practised by Zhìzhě sorcerous smiths. She received this one as a gift from her teacher, and she impressed many who taught her in the non-sorcerous topics. But on the subject of the arcane, many teachers were rather secretive of their knowledge, only giving away to those they trusted, and this was a little annoying for her curiosity, but it was fine. At least her teacher gave her more scrolls for her cultivation as she once again lifted her head, her eyes scanning other people. Yet she got a glimpse. Some people were staring at her, but noticing she was lifting her head, they turned away, and she let out a sigh.

“You seem distant.” She heard her brother say as he approached her table, She replied. “Hello brother, how was your study with the masters of the elements?” “It went well initially.” He replied, sitting beside her, as she asked. “What happened?” “Let’s say a few colleagues and a teacher are less than stellar.” He replied with her mumbling. “Hedonistic types?” “Hedonistic types.” He replied in confirmation as she let out a sigh, responding to him. “Things could be worse.” He took a look at her saying. “Really? Did your military theorist teacher try to flirt with you?” “No?” She was confused by the question, and he soon seemed a bit bitter about a thought he then continued. “Oh, so it's just me that happened.” “Do you wanna…” She started talking with a bit of worry until her brother cut her off by saying. “No, it's fine, I handled that with someone… What problem are you having, though?”

“Compared to you and our friends, people don’t stop staring at me…” She replied with him saying. “Is it because you are three meters tall and have muscles for days that makes anyone want your mutation or the third eye?” He smiled at the comment, almost like an obvious answer, a joke for him, but she shook her head, saying. “No, not that I mean there are other people weirder than me, like Li.” She lightly gestured towards him, both looking at him as a man who seemed to be born with scaly skin. He wandered far for him to hear, but she then continued. “It's that sometimes they look at me with more deference. Looking at me differently…” “Well, your looks are already strange for most. But it may also be Sorcerer Gleamor.” He answered with her head turning to him, as she was confused, noticing he then said. “A teacher of sorcerous arts once told me that some sorcerous arts could make themselves look dangerous or glorious. One sorcerer king of our republic once had something like that, but the studies of it are thin.” She gave a nod, simply saying. “Sounds like the art of illusions.” “A more subtle version of it is also felt, but it may be you are doing that subconsciously." He said to her, with her still looking sceptical. “I don’t know… but I might as well research a bit.” he gave a light shrug at her as she thought.

“Well, look who is coming.” Her brother, as he looked to the side, gave a light smile. She turned to see Shào Hua her white hair flowing like a waterfall, her smile was sweet wide and able to entrance anyone, her eyes were still red when she met as a child she carried an umbrella to protect herself from the sun and her clothes were large and baggy of the same colors as her family pure white while intrinsically sowed with a golden dragon in her clothes. Ming smiled at her, saying. “Hello Hua…” She soon noticed her company a boy her age with long red hair and brown eyes, his clothes were green and blue with some scale armor probably for decoration his stature was the same as Shao Hua lower then herself and lower then her brother his face was plain with little noticeable features with the exception of a cut in his left eyebrow he smiled at Ming and her brother as Ming finished her sentence. “... and Zhèng Wěi.” “You know me?” He was surprised, asking her, with Ming replying. “I remember every name I met in class so far, and you were one of them.” “Oh, an amazing gift, something your brother probably envies about your mutations.” Wei replied with her brother, letting out a light groan, rolling his eyes at the comment.

She soon replied. “It's not much.” “Humility is a gift, they say.” Hua said as she sat down with Wei sitting as well, she then asked. “I hope we were not interrupting something important?” “Not much, just family business.” Her brother responded with Wei saying. “Not to be rather intrusive in your affairs. But would it be on that news that I heard that the Guang family dug itself into more debt following the recent war tax increase?” Ming and her brother Xiao looked at each other before looking back at the two. Their mother told them not to talk much about the incident, but they could tell it was bad Ming replied. “I am afraid this is personal.” “I understand things have not been easy.” Wei said, with Hua saying. “The tax increase is a pain for everyone, but at least some amenities remain.”

“I think they defunded the theatres…” Xiao replied when she heard that she shouted in shock. “What?!” “They were defunded recently.” Xiao said with Hua asking. “But why?” “All resources to the war effort.” The three said at the same time to her, it was a common thing for Ming, a lot of things were defunded. “At least there is no food rationing.” Wei commented on the topic, and she let out a small sigh, saying to him. “For us, yes… for the people outside the academy walls… Not so much.” She remembered how some of the servants said rationing was getting worse.

“Changing topics.” Xiao said he soon turned to Hua, saying. “I heard your mother was having another kid.” “Was…” She highlighted the words to him, looking to the side. “Something wrong?” Ming asked with concern, with Hua mumbling something, soon saying with annoyance. “Well, dad can have all the worries, for all I care about our family name. I gained a brother and then a Zhìzhě sensed he had no sorcerous powers within him.” The three gave nods. Ming knew what generally happened when a child without the gift was born letting someone else speak, Wei jumped in first saying. “Let me guess, it was smuggled to an adoption centre in secret?” “No, Dad threw him in a furnace.” Hua answered with a collective awkward silence, Ming coughed, saying. “Your father is not much of a kind person.” “Tell me about it.” Hua said with a sigh, seeing Ming’s scrolls, she then said. “So, how were your studies?” “Mostly recommending meditation for me to control my skills, even though I still can see the future with ease compared to everyone else in the School of Suan Ming.” Ming Zhu replied, crossing her arms. “So did you predict someone's future yet?” Wei asked. “Ah, ye some.” She answered him, and Hua, hearing it, perked her head up, asking. “Can you predict ours?” “That’s…” She uttered for a moment, thinking, yet the thoughts dispelled quickly. She liked the idea that her teachers teach caution, yet she feels she can do it, saying. “You know what? sure… I will one day be the greatest sorceress of this world, so might as well do it to practice.”

In a room, Ming had to lower her head a bit due to the ceiling being lower than most other rooms of the academy, while a circle was drawn on the floor of the room by Hua. The room was used for teaching, but it was turned into a casting room. It was wide enough, at least as she looked to the wall where the teacher would be, it had short windows showing the outside. On the wall of the room was a painting of Dì Shùn, a wise king and the first unifier of Tiānguó. She felt reverence towards him as she looked until she heard Wei say. “Right, I think this is what your scroll says the drawing must be. Luckily for us, the room has an auspicious qi, so it should be fine.” “I don’t like this; the rules state we shouldn’t do this without someone to oversee or to keep things safe.” Xiao said, Hua smiled at him, and Ming could tell he looked enchanted at her as she said. “It can’t be that bad…” He rolled his eyes at it, saying. “I still protest it.” “It will be fine.” Ming said, waving a hand as she put three bowls filled with metallic dust and in one a catalyst. As she sat down to meditate, she took deep breaths, saying. “Right, who first?” Hua stepped up, saying. “If nobody minds, I would like to go first.” “No protest from me.” Wei said, leaning against a wall with curiosity, her brother said nothing, only looking on. She gave a nod, taking deep breaths after calming down, replying. “Sometimes it may be allegorical, sometimes it can be a direct vision of the future that’s a first warning and...” “Use the book of fate calculation to decipher what some of the images may be, gotcha.” Hua replied, raising the book Ming studied, and Ming gave a nod, saying. “Well, let us do this…”

Like she practiced, she soon said “Body…” As she closed her left eye. “Mind…” She closed her right eye, drowning herself in darkness as she let the Qi flow through her, and the sorcerous energy accumulating in her eye, she uttered the final words. “Soul…” Her third eye opened as the bowls were consumed by flames, and her third eye saw Hua for a moment, but her body became mist, rushing towards her vision. The darkness was all she could see. She seemed to look around while her body barely moved, her third eye mimicking her eye movements. As she looked around in a void, a shallow water creating splashes as she walked in this plane, around her was darkness covered in mist. As she looked around, the fog began to clear, and she saw what seemed like a well-made room with gilded metals. Observing it, she said. “I see a well-made room… very well made.” “What else?” She hears Hua say the words echoed through the emptiness like it was distant in a tunnel. The entire room quaked as she said, and Ming lost concentration for a moment. “Please be quiet.” She said in a calm tone, taking another deep breath, she then looked at the vision as she saw a woman cloaked in a red dress, covering her body as she looked at the stars. “I now see a woman in a rather well-made cloak… Staring at a star, I know this one from the books, it's the wanderer.” Ming replied, hoping they would hear. “The wanderer…” She hears a response in echoes, this time ready for words to come from outside.

“The wanderer marks a symbol of the future or present, representing contemplation, loneliness or longing. It may also mean seeking wisdom or meaning. If the wanderer is to watch upon a star, it means an auspicious sign.” The words echoed to her and she let out a chuckle, saying. “So you will be seeking the meaning of life soon?” “A bit early for an existential crisis.” Wei commented, his voice echoing through the void, Hua replying with a “Hey!” Ming held a laugh as she soon noticed the vision begin to dissipate into mist. She then said. “Wait, something else is happening…” The fog soon revealed a painting of two people, a man and a woman holding hands together in a serene dance, as she said. “It's a painting…” “What?” Xiao seemed to ask from a much distant echo; she then replied again. “I see a painting hanging in the void. It has two people, a man and a woman, holding hands in a dance.” “The lovers!” She heard Hua shout, with the room quaking; she became more annoyed. “More quiet please!” “Oh, sorry… The lovers… partnership in either love or friendship, a bond never broken. A vision that many wish to have means that your future love will meet you. It is believed that if one sees that the three give you the luck of knowing you will find the bond of your life.” Hua explained she sounded extremely excited as well, as Wei said. “So Hua finds out she is getting married several years earlier to someone one day. Can you see who?” “No… It's just a generic painting.” Ming replied with Wei saying. “Oh goddamn it…” Hua sounded with Ming chuckling.

She then said. “That’s not how this works… The future is unwritten. You can see the most likely outcome, but you're still able to avoid it.” “How are you sure?” Wei asked, with her replying. “My third eye, without doing this, can see a person vibrating its many decisions, actions and accidents. In practice, it means that you can change your future since your immediate present is filled with decisions by the second... thousands of decisions by the second...” Ming finished sounding exhausted. “I mean, it does not stop destiny… It may mean that someone's minor actions are free, but one's overall destination is fixed.” “That’s… Unlikely…” Ming replied in contemplation.

The vision once again melted away and was replaced with another room, one with wallpaper of blue and a bedroom that was richly decorated. As she looked around, she said. “Another vision… Silence, please.” As she wandered forward, she soon saw a woman reclining in a chair. As she approached, it was a much older Hua holding a child in her arms with a smile. She seemed to be in her thirties, wearing rich clothes. “Oh wow… It's you, Hua” There was a silence with Hua shouting. “What?” Ming soon replied. “I see you… Like you're rather old, some twenty years in the future, I think. You have a child in your arms and…” Taking a look closer, the child had red albino eyes as she stared at Hua. “... it seems to be yours.” She continued. “I have… a son?” “I can’t tell the gender…you are holding it dearly as you relax on a chair.” Ming replied that there seemed to be more silence from Hua. She seemed to be in shock, but Ming could hear Wei say. “Well, it is indeed to be able to see her retired in a mansion.” Ming soon catched the sound of a clicking coin. She then sighed, saying. “Who is tossing a coin up and down in the air?” “Nobody?” she heard her brother say, sounding confused.

As she looked around, she saw where the sound came from inside the same room. A man wore a dark cloak, his face was disfigured, the left side of his jaw was without flesh, and his eyes were golden. He seemed to play with a golden coin, throwing it up and down. As Ming looked at him, he seemed to look back at her, still playing with the coin as she said. “There’s a man… wearing a heavy cloak playing with a cloak here.” Wei seemed to be the one to reply; “Wait… does he have hair?” “No…” Ming said as she continued staring, feeling uncomfortable. Hua soon echoed through her saying. “The one who comes at midnight… The bearer of bad news and good news from him shall come, news one shall be rewarded with great plenty, or bad news of being sick, or to be weary of your next steps.” Wei also said. “He is also a representation of death, being the ancient great sorcerer Fangshi.” “Well, that explains the creepy look. I remember that story, he was so powerful he merged with the realm between where sorcery comes from and became a spirit in divination and also death…” Ming said, still feeling uneasy, she gave a light bow to him out of respect before taking a deep breath. “I think this is enough.” She said as the mists soon cleared, as darkness returned, as she opened her eyes, Hua and Wei were staring at her, saying. “Well, that was an experience.”

Hua lifted with a smile, saying. “Ye it was…” She was soon pushed aside as Wei sat down, saying. “My turn!” Ming smiled, seeing the bowls still blaming and feeling power flowing, she said. “Sure, why not?” She took another deep breath as she said. “Body…” her left eye closing “Mind…” her right. “Soul…” and soon she saw Wei for a moment before his body dissolved into a mist covering her back into the void, as she looked around, she heard Wei say. “Just seek a single vision, no need to stress.” Ming thought for a moment, saying. “Sure, what sort?” “Something big…” He replied with her mumbling. “That is a difficult thread to grasp. Let me see if I can.” She focused using her powers to clear the mist, seeking a thread, and she found one as the fog cleared into darkness for a moment, but she could hear the sound of battlecries. She felt confused hearing the words. “They are charging!” She heard a shout from a distance as the sound of gunfire was close she then discerned another voice shout. “Their sorcerers brought armored divisions. Quick, grab the rifles!” “What the…” Ming said, confused, until she heard a shout. “INCOMING!” The darkness soon faded as an explosion manifested frozen in place, she soon realised she was in a battlefield, soldiers wearing heavy armour and rifles and flags accompanied by a tank, as she looked around in awe, she then said. “This is a battlefield!” “A battlefield?” Wei asked, with Ming replying. “Yeah, a battlefield…” The enemy forces wearing the uniforms of the Zhou dynasty seemed to be a bayonet charge, quickly approaching with tanks in the distance. Looking for Wei as she walked, she soon saw him saying. “I see you…” Approaching, she could see him raising a battle flag, shouting in defiance while wielding a battle sword as spells and bullets fly past him. “You are… Making a historic pose, I can tell you that much.” Soldiers seemed inspired by it as they charged it as well. “Really? How well do I look?!” “Well, you are branding a battle flag, standing on top of a rock, seemingly screaming a charge. Meanwhile, soldiers, tanks and… a few sorcerers, I think, are following you into this. You also grew a ponytail.” She remarked, seeing him much older than he now seemed to be, loving being in this hell. “I like it! Glory in my hands, huh?” Wei said, echoing in her as she shook her head with a smile.

The mists soon consumed the vision as she said. “Another vision, be quiet for a moment.” As she looked around, the haze soon cleared again as she concentrated and she saw a fire and two women standing next to wearing what seemed like religious ceremonies, while Ming looked around the flame, seeing nothing, she then said. “I see two ladies standing next to a flame. They are the keepers.” This one she knew from the books she read, Hua soon said. “I found it. The keepers are known as a symbol of accomplishment, responsibility and burden while in the first vision it means one’s future will be marked for a responsibility in case of being a second vision its widely believed to be ‘a choice that will weight heavily on you on its burden and responsibility’ end quote” wei soon said. “So, during that battle, I will have to make a difficult choice?” Ming soon said. “Or a choice involving getting to that battle.” She soon took a deep breath as the mists cleared and her eyes once again opened, looking down on Wei, he seemed in deep thought, noticing then he said. “Oh, you Xiao wanna do it?” “I am fine, I prefer things to be a surprise.” Xiao said, raising his hand in denial, Ming shook her head and replied. “If you want things to be simpler, I can do Kau chim”

He took a sigh and said. “Fine if you all want me to join this.” The flames of the bowls finally died down. She sat still as she unpacked something from her bag: A Chim bucket, a long cylindrical bamboo cup inside of it was hundreds of sticks, she then said. “You know how this works?” “The sticks have answers and numbers about my question. I ask you a question, you then let Qi flow through you, and then you spin the bucket until one stick falls off and lets two stones fall out, simple as that.” “AND… due to the stones being uneven in sides, if both are flat or round, it means the spirits or the three laughed at your question, and if you want, you can re-ask.” Ming finished it was a simple process compared to her way, she then said, holding the Chim Bucket and closing her eyes to concentrate. “Right… Are you ready?”

“Yes… Oh spirits in my future, will I have to make a terrible choice I wish I had not made?” Xiao said with a light tone, he seemed not to be interested. Ming simply rolled her eyes, beginning to spin the Chim Bucket Wei soon said. “Tempting fate, ey? What if they say you will have to do something bad?” “I mean it's a rather broad question, but also somewhat specific… I mean it's not like he is going to have to kill someone he likes?” Hua said with the stick falling on the floor, Ming soon picked the two stones and passed some of her power flow as she released, then seeing they were both of different sides, they leaned in at the stick and saw the words. ‘A terrible choice you will have to make. Twenty-two was the number at the end.’ They all looked at each other with Wei saying. “Way to go, you have the worst of us all.” Xiao punched his shoulder with Wei chuckling.

“He is not wrong… His choice is one of burden and responsibility, yours is… Worse than his.” Hua said, with Xiao shaking his head, stating. “I don’t care, I can change my future as my sister said.” “Unless you walk towards it.” Hua said with worry, but still let him be. Wei soon said to change the topic. “Well, we better go now or else someone is gonna ask what we were doing here.” “Wait a moment, I have a question first.” Hua said with Ming asking. “What is it?” “Why don’t you read your future as well?” Wei asked Ming, and she soon let out a light saying. “I can’t see myself and predict the future. I tried mirrors and it did not work.” “Try silver.” Hua replied with Ming raising an eyebrow as she searched her pockets as she said. “Silver mirrors are said to reflect one's soul and self. According to several philosophers I read.” She soon leaned in, offering a small mirror, saying. “Consider it a gift.” Ming smiled, taking the small mirror in her large hands, saying. “I will treasure it.” Hua smiled as both she and Wei left the room.

Ming soon collected her things, and Xiao remained with her to help, saying as the two were left alone. “I still disapprove of doing this without a guide.” “Luck favours the bold.” Ming replied with a smile, he rolled his eyes. “Fine… But it is the rules for a reason.” He replied, grabbing her books, saying. “You always pop off in anything you try. Sometimes I wonder if you were born human.” Ming froze for a moment. She couldn’t tell if it was a joke or something, but it was how she felt at times. “Do you know where Dad went? He seemed in a hurry.” She tried to change the subject with her brother, saying. “To a dentist or something like that.” “That’s the first time I've heard of him needing to go somewhere for medical care of some kind.” Ming commented, with Xiao shrugging at the comment. “That's what he said to me when he left.” He said to her, she nodded at him as she finished collecting her things, lowering herself to still walk under the low ceiling, hearing her brother say. “So… the greatest sorceress of Tiānguó?” Ming shrugged, saying. “I dream high.” “Do you plan on adding all the planets too?” She thought for a moment before saying. “Maybe.” “A bit egotistical, don’t you think?” He commented on what she said. “I feel like I am destined to do great things at times since birth.” She replied as she finished packing, he seemed to give a shrug as both left, beginning to head out of the academy, she felt a bit distant, the answer felt a bit entitled, yet felt right at the same time.

As both left the academy grounds, she stopped feeling a strange sense of dread. Leaving her, Xiao turned around, seeing her, he then asked. “Is the sense of dread still around?” “Yes, it never stopped appearing every time I entered the academy grounds.” She replied with him saying. “It's a strange thing you never found the reason.” She shook her head, saying. “No, it's still a recurring problem.” She looked around for some sort of explanation upon seeing the statue of Dì Shùn. The statue showed him to have great strength while he held a sword, looking into the sky. At his feet were several candles of veneration. As she looked, she felt strange and soon said. “It's probably nothing…” Xiao seemed to raise an eyebrow, but seemed not to press the issue as both went home.

The manor both lived was one that their father managed to procure close to the capital, entering its gates, a group of servants bowed while Xiao went inside. Ming decided to remain in the garden outside. The noon was quickly setting into night as she sat on a bench surrounded by flowers while not the most exuberant garden that existed, especially on her family's conditions. But she found a bit of peace to think while here. She looked on at the night sky and towards the two moons, Hongyue and Wanyue. The red glow of Hongyue was dominant over Wanyue, whose pale hue was diminishing as she stared at the stars and extended her hand, feeling like she could grasp something from there. As she stared, she soon heard her mother say. “Something in your mind.” Snapping from her trance, she turned around, seeing her mother arriving with a smile, she seemed to age more than her father, as she said. “Nothing just… relaxing, I guess.” She shook her head as she approached and replied. “I can tell something is on your mind.” Sitting next to her, she was quite small compared to Ming, even standing, she was smaller while she sat. “What’s on your mind?” She asked with Ming thinking, and after a light sigh, she said. “I feel distant at home, in the academy, and elsewhere, I feel like I am born for greatness.” “Well… You are big.” Hien replied with a light chuckle, even Ming chuckling as well.

After a return to calmness, Ming then continued. “It’s not just that I feel like I am not from here at times. That I am distant, that I should be out there in the stars or out there doing more than here. Xiao Dan once said that if I keep acing the scores, I would be selected to be a magistrate of war earlier. It does sound nice. But even after, I feel out of place when I think of myself being there.” Hien remained silent as she explained, taking a quick look, she seemed in thought and worried about something, going back to looking at the stars, she soon heard her say. “I have something to show you.” “What is it?” Ming asked with Hien replying with a sad tone. “Something important.” She rose and began to head out with Ming following.

Under the house in a secret room hidden behind a wall, Ming entered behind her mother to see the capsule that brought her here. As she looked, she saw that the complex mechanism was cleaned and seemed to have been studied in some parts. As she looked around it she heard Hien say. “You came from there.” “What?” Ming asked, with Hien saying. “While you grew normally, you also became different when your teenage years began. You thought this was because of mutations, but that is incredibly rare. For our society, we would call you lucky to be born in reality; I never gave birth to you. You came from there, your father is not here to help me, but you landed near our old home long ago.” Ming looked on at the machine simply walking around, taking it in, and she felt more at ease. For some reason, things seemed to start falling in place, her mother soon said. “We initially thought it was an escape pod from a ship, but due to the technology of it, we quickly discarded that.” Ming stopped staring at the roman numeral for seven; she didn’t understand it, as she thought she soon asked. “Who do you think sent me here?” Hien gave a light shrug, saying. “Who knows? Destiny is a fickle mistress. Maybe whoever made you wanted you to pursue greatness and sent you, who made you, maybe lost you, and is out there searching for you.” Ming gave a nod at her answer, smiling lightly at her saying. “Thank you for telling me this.” Things seemed to make sense now for her, while the future was still a mystery for her, and she still dreamed she now knew why she stood out. Hien chuckled, saying. “Your father thought you would react poorly to this.”

Ming felt more at ease saying. “Well, I guess in a different situation, I would be in less of a good mood learning this.” As both left the room after it closed, Ming kept a look at the mechanism heading upstairs. Both were soon met with two servants bowing. They seemed to carry some books, with Hien saying. “What is that?” A servant soon said. “Books from the archives of the academy. Master Shen asked us to deliver some books.” “From the academy?” Ming asked with both bowing in confirmation, Hien rolled her eyes, giving a dismissal hand gesture as both left, she then said. “He must be studying something. Where has he been, by the way he told you where he went? He sent a message saying he would be late.” Ming thought for a moment before replying. “He said he would be late due to a dentist appointment. At least that is what Xiao told me.” A servant soon turned a corner in the hallway, saying. “Mistress Ming, Mistress Hien, we have company…” Both turned their heads to each other, simply heading out.

---

Early that day…

The lights of the elevator flicked as it moved quickly down in the capital city of Jiang’an Qu. The elevator showed a large structure outside a dome swiftly disappearing due to a metal panel. Guang Shen looked at the two guards beside him. They were heavily armed yet unusual in looks; they were his escorts by the guards above. He rubbed his jaw for a moment and then adjusted a stick on his recently grown hair. He seemed not used to having long hair, and after fixing it a bit, said. “Gentlemen, you do not seem like regular guards.” “We are guards, sir… mercenary guards.” One soldier replied, with Shen replying to him. “You seem a bit angry… not paid yet?” “You can say that, my lord, but please be quiet, we are not allowed to talk.” Another replied with him giving a nod as the elevator stopped at the bottom of the dome an industrial catwalk extended to an entrance where he and the other two walked towards the door the dome was surrounded by a large metallic wall it was built in a depression of sorts akin to a crater in the capital protected by the royal guard of the capital but also mercenaries or personal guards of the owner arriving at the entrance the heavy door began to lift up with the sound of grinding engines revealing a dark catwalk one of the guards soon said. “Here is where you go, sir. Good luck.” “Thank you.” Shen said as he put a stack of money in the man's front pocket, he looked shocked as Shen head in saying. “That’s double my salary… Sir, you…” The door soon closed behind Shen. He looked around, feeling his powers weaker than before; the metal of the dome weakened psyker's powers inside of it.

Walking forward Shen was faced with a gun to his dome and behind it an old man with implants covering most of his body cloaked in a blue robe he held a gun to his face in one hand a automatic pistol with the safety on something that Shen could notice meanwhile on another hand he held a staff. “Aim a bit higher. I would rather have a hole in my forehead than between my eyes.” Shen said in a nonchalant tone. After a moment, the man pointing the gun began to laugh, lowering the firearm, he soon hugged, lifting Shen with his eyes rolling at the encounter, as he was put down, the man then continued. “Heyo old friend, it's been decades now!” “It has been Tu, how have you been?” Shen said, with him replying. “Rather busy since the days you gave up on the cause of our group.” “You know well why I left.” Shen replied with Tu laughing at the comment, simply replying. “Yes, I know Zhulong. Come follow me.” Shen followed Tu through the catwalk as Tu said. “These days, things have been bad. Cutting my funding and the group growing apart made my research difficult. I am the greatest scientist this world has seen, and the sorcerer king has yet to fully acknowledge my wisdom!” He finished shouting, with Shen saying. “Frustrating, I can tell.” “Indeed… even after the well… ridiculously diminished festivities of blossom that the sorcerer king cut in his budget cuts. He refused to finance my research into production methods that would make the cuts unnecessary.” Tu said, with Shen saying. “You know why he does not do that.” “Still foolish if I may say, if the people feel squeezed, they will think we are no better than the Qishi. If you were there, it would have been easy because the word of one of the five great sorcerers would make this easier.”

They also seem reluctant to fund space expansion despite us having the capability to mass produce armadas of ships.” Tu said with anger with Shen thought for several minutes, stating. “Well, expeditions to Huǒ shā and trade missions to Gānhànxīng and Lěngxing still are around, but I think they want to maintain things here. Still foolish not to expand the settlement of the moons still.” Tu turned around and shouted while pointing his gun at Shen. “I AGREE!” There was a moment of silence with Tu realising the weapon and holstering it, saying. “Sorry.” “No… problem…” Shen replied with Tu pulling a letter and showing it to him as he said. “Hence why I wrote this! A protest letter, especially made with some of my research attached to it and criticising his actions. I've done research in genetics and the study of the arts of flesh bending to that man forever, including investing my attention into space…” Shen read the letter having an eyebrow being raised reading the letter.

Meanwhile, Tu continued in a dramatic flair, discussing his actions as the two headed into the inner sanctum of the dome at the end of the paper read. “I made great strides in progress, but you deny me a way out of this, so it leaves me no choice, Sorcerer King Cheng. Despite this extreme action that will harm this nation, I will not continue this charade.” As he finished reading, he looked up to see Tu still being dramatic as both arrived at a large computer, around which was a workshop setup with several lost tools on the floor or tables, together with multiple vats and diagrams, but also around where several pillars of metal servers for the computer at its center. “Despite my life's work! This is the last resort I have!” Shen began to rub his jaw again, looking a bit uncomfortable.

Tu stood still for a moment after, and he felt worried seeing his friend, he soon said. “Something wrong?” he pointed at him massaging his jaw with Zhulong, saying. “I am fine, I headed to the dentist.” “Wasn’t that a cover story for you to come here?” Tu asked, feeling confused with Zhulong shaking his head, stating. “No, it was a cover story, but to make sure nobody tracks me, I booked a dentist visit and had to go there and make the implant. Once that was done, a man I hired to hack the cameras and an apprentice of illusions to hide the fact that I went in a different direction and left at a different time.” Tu frowned upon hearing his plan, replying to him. “That seems convoluted.” “It's always good to have an alibi that won’t be questioned by someone searching a bit deeper than usual.” Zhulong said to him, still making Tu raise an eyebrow and scratch his mechanical chin, but he shrugged, stating. “A bit paranoid but sure.”

Realising why he came, he soon said. “Anyways… Besides that, I analysed what you sent me, that bloody cloth was… terrifying!” He felt scared, and he could notice Zhulong raising an eyebrow, replying. “How bad is it?” “Incredibly so, I do not know who the girl you found is…” Tu said quickly, an answer as precise as he felt Zhulong seemed to perk up his head before calming down again. He seemed to know more, but he was an old friend, it was fine, he continued, saying. “... But what I managed to study was terrifying. The DNA sample, the helices, everything was artificial based on… I… I do not even know how to describe it. I even put some of what I managed to learn into the research I am doing.” “You what?” Zhulong was surprised and shocked by what Tu could see, and he then said. “Oh, forgive me… I forgot you wanted this to be under wraps. But in the arts of flesh bending and modification, not only that, but whatever this girl is may be a path for me to be taken seriously.” Zhulong seemed to calm down, returning to a stoic coldness as he soon said. “My friend… I cannot let you show her to the world.” “What? Is this thing… Related to that whore that made you give up on being powerful?” Tu replied, rolling his eyes, crossing his arms, Zhulong removing the stick from his hair, letting it flow. One point of the stick was sharp, and he said. “I gave up because I learned the price of the things we do and what we pay. She was the best thing to happen to me…” With a step forward, he soon said. “I am sorry.” WIth a quick movement Tu choked he could feel his lungs having difficulty breathing his staff was let go falling to the floor with a large echo feeling his throat with a hand he could feel the blood rolling he soon picked the gun with his free arm and shakily aimed at his former friend with hard breaths he shouted. “BAS…TARD.” Pressing the weapon trigger, he saw it not fire, but once again he saw Zhulong quickly grab his hand using his sleeves as gloves and turn his hand to aim at his neck, staring at him, he felt tears form in his eyes as he heard Zhulong say. “Safety is on.” He heard the mechanism flip his finger, and Zhulong’s holding the trigger, the only word he could utter was. “Wait…” Before a loud bang was heard, and darkness consumed him.

Shen stared at Tu’s body on the floor. His face seemed emotionless; the blood had splattered into the desk and parts of the computer screen approaching it he began to use the computer checking some of the data he let out a sigh putting his hand on his mouth with a pull he removed a back tooth flipping it he could see the plug in it looking at the keyboard he inserted into the port and typing a few things as the screen showed a loading bar saying transferring data once completed he pulled the tooth and reattached it to his jaw he shivered mumbling something as he used computer again as a prompt showed stating. “delete all data?” “Oh yes, please.” Shen said, pressing a button as the data began to be deleted, the pillars around seemed to start smoking as the loading proceeded. By the end of it, the room smelled of burned smoke as he approached the corpse of Tu. He soon lifted his arm and put the letter under his hand. As he stared, for several minutes a tear ran down his right eye before being wiped away as he said. “I am sorry…” Checking the time, he let out a saddened sigh, saying. “I will see you again in two months, old friend.” He then turned around and began to walk towards the exit.

As the gate opened, the guards gave nods, one saying. “All done with visiting our master?” “Oh, absolutely, he seems… More erratic than the last time I saw him.” Shen replied with a guard commenting. “I would not be surprised if he does something stupid.” The other coughed when Shen turned his head with an eyebrow, and he soon shrank, saying. “Forgive me, sir.” “It's no problem… he, at least, is more stable than another person I know.” Shen replied as the two escorted him to the elevator.

---

That night.

Ming remained calm in looks, yet she felt quite surprised by the magistrate in front of her and what she told her. “... as long, of course, that is if Mistress Guang Ming Zhu accepts the jump of her days of academy to enter the grand army as a magistrate.” Hien seemed in deep thought, saying. “While it's impressive, I fear she may be very young for this.” “With all respect, Lady Guang Hien, your daughter is taller than most regular sorcerers and subjects. Not only that, but she is just as strong. I do not see the concern about her age.” The magistrate said with a calm tone, Hien seemed a bit annoyed by what Ming could tell, as she then said. “I am interested in the proposition.” The magistrate smiled at her as Ming said. “I feel like I can achieve what is expected of me in this area I studied, and I accept my lady.” The magistrate smiled, raising up and giving a bow, saying. “Good, we will send papers to be signed, including multiple information fliers from there, you will go to the military academy. Have a good night, Miss Guang.” The small group soon began to head out. Ming took a turn to her mother, who seemed less than happy.

Left alone, her mother said. “I do not approve.” “Why not? It's what I want.” Ming said with her mother sighing and replying. “I have two children that I would rather keep close to me. Our family has not been on a tight rope for many years. Despite your father's help, it has still remained difficult.” Ming shook her head, saying. “I am sure I can help our family by joining the war, not by staying here. My skills are of great use.” “You are a capable administrator, according to your father.” Her mother said, with Ming stating. “...and strategist, I will not be at risk, mother, you know I am strong enough for everything on this planet. Whoever sent me here made me strong, and it's what I want to do.” Hien sighed, replying. “At least think more about it, okay?” She left the room with Ming feeling annoyed. It is what she seeks and wants to bring greatness means this path for her.

In her father's room, Sheen kept looking at her while giving quick glances at a book as she talked. “... and she thinks I should stay. I do not understand why.” “She cares for you. The war took the lives of many sons and daughters. She does not want to lose you or your brother.” Shien replied with Ming rolling her eyes, saying. “That still feels like thinking I am a defenceless child. I have dreams after all for the betterment of our family, and I do not plan on simply standing still despite being good at management.” “I agree with her, but if this is the path you wish to take, I am not going to protest.” He replied with her chuckling at the answer, turning her head to him and asking. “Why?” “While I would rather you not take this path, I am not in command of your life.” He said, turning his head to her, Ming raised an eyebrow, saying. “Why? It’s not like wanting our family to have a better standing is bad.” “The reason why I took this path in life despite being of a much higher standing is that I came to realise something, child. The path of ambition has a cost, and that cost is rather high depending on what you want.” He replied to Ming, who felt uncomfortable at the answer, with her shaking her feelings and head, saying. “I am sure I can handle it.” “Then you have my support as always.” He replied to her, and she began taking a look at the piles of books and asking. “What is with the…” “Archive books? I am after an answer to something, albeit it's not easy to find. Seeing how that thing is a disorganised mess.” He replied with an annoyed tone

With a chuckle at his comment, she replied. “Yes, I know it is quite hard to research there. What are you researching?” “The language of old Huǒ shā… Albeit I should probably file a complaint that the academy has grown increasingly hedonistic recently.” He replied with Ming asking. “What happened?” “An incident with someone on floor six of the archives. But nothing to worry about. I should worry more about you.” He said, closing the book, staring at her as she asked. “What? I am fine, it's a decision I am fine with.” He let out a small smile, folding his hands as he said. “Not that I knew you would follow this life when you were eight, especially as you were quite curious about my collection of war books, the board games we played, including my teachings in administration. It was an easy guess… I worry that you may have a few hobbies besides that.”

“What do you mean?” She says, crossing her arms, annoyed with him replying in the same dry tone. “You focus on war and politics a bit much, girl, and while I am fine with it, you have not shown many hobbies besides that.” “I have hobbies.” She says with him asking. “Then tell me some…” “Weiqi is something I like.” She replied with Shen rolling his eyes at her answer before saying. “It's not much of a hobby, it's a game that you and I generally play to discuss politics and war, something I used to teach you as well when younger… hence why I say this.” “...and I like to read.” She replied with him asking. “What subject?” “Sorecery, history, meditations, some tactics…” She said he raised an eyebrow with her sighing and saying. “I just like it.”

“Try a different hobby, your brother does like to practice music, maybe try an Erhu, and I am sure he will follow you to war, so having something for moments of calm can help you two.” Shen replied, sounding unhappy, hearing it, she soon said. “You think he will?” “Yes, I am sure that he will probably want to prove himself, unlike you, who will hound glory.” He replied, walking to a cabinet as he picked something he soon said. “Think fast.” He soon threw a sword at her as she grabbed it in the air. Inspecting it, it was a long sword, yet in her hand, it was relatively short. Looking at it, there were runes written on it, her father soon said. “It was my sword back in my day. The runes grant it power, lightweightness, and strength forged by the rune smiths. I think you will need it more than me now.” As she inspected the blade, it seemed to have sorcerous powers within it, the Qi being strong, the runes themselves seemed to make the blade resilient, she smiled, saying. “Thanks.” Shen seemed to sit back, checking his book, saying. “You're welcome… Now I recommend that you see your brother. I am sure he will miss you for a time.” She gave a bow, inspecting the blade as she headed out until she heard the words. “Seven…” Turning around, she said. “What?” “Nothing…” He replied with a calm smile, and she raised an eyebrow but left without question. Being alone, he looked down. It could be noticed that the page that was opened had the letters VII, and the next set of words was written in the language of Huo Sha. ‘Translates into seven.’ Shen leaned back after reading, looking in deep thought.

A few hours later.

Ming closed the door to her room as she let out a sigh, feeling tired as she checked her backpack until she saw the wrapped silver mirror holding it, she looked at her reflection and began to think. She soon gave a light nod to herself. Organising her room and filling the bowls again, she drew the circle as she sat in the middle of the circle, she took heavy breaths. Taking a look at the small mirror by a shelf, it was quite small, but while propped up, she could see herself. Letting power flow through her, she soon whispered. “Body… Mind…” As her eyes closed, she felt nervous for a moment until she whispered. “Soul…” Opening her third eye, she saw her reflection turning to mist and covering her in darkness. Taking a look at herself, she looked translucent in some form as she looked on into the mist. She heard whispers, looking around, she squinted until the mist cleared, and she saw herself in a battlefield, sword in hand, leading soldiers and her friends into war. Ming looked on in awe as the vision turned again, and she saw herself on top of a palace, the flag of the Zhou dynasty torn, and in its place her sigil. She raised an eyebrow at the sight.

Until the vision twisted again, the mists beginning to clear again, she stood in a stone pathway surrounded by soldiers who immediately kneeled in one direction as she turned, she saw herself sitting on a throne of gold and silver, her eyes heavy, looking down on the army, but also herself. As she looked on, she felt a smile on her face as her future self rose from her throne, as soldiers rose as well and began a chant, the words being too muffled for her to make it out. Behind the throne and herself, several ships flew up towards the skies. As she stared the vision once again was drowned in mist and darkness covered it all until it cleared again as she looked around she saw her future self again in a dark room or expanse she thought looking around she was blinded by a gold sun like glow as she looked back again she saw not many discernible features on the golden man. As he approached her, she saw herself kneeling. She raised an eyebrow at the vision as the golden man extended her hand, her future self reciprocated, extending her hand to grab it as she heard the words of the men. “Come, my child…”

Ming eyes widened hearing it as she stared she soon saw the golden man stare at her and the mist consuming her vision again but this time she saw flashes of different colors into her vision as her head began to split in a headache with concentration she cut the divination as her eyes opened the burning bowls extinguished in a blue sparks in the air. She breathed deeply, and all her eyes were open as she looked around. Things were calm, yet the wind of the night was cold. Her third eye showed things vibrating. She was safe as she closed her third eye. She remained thinking for a moment and smiled at what the future brought to her, and she felt like embracing it.

The orbital dockyards of Pentious were decades away from being anywhere close to operational. Never mind the actual production of its first capital ship.

Production of the dockyards had actually started prior to the Orkish invasion of Warboss Kracker'Laker, with much of the foundational works put into place during these young and peaceful days. However, the arrival of the Orks had caused priorities to shift, resources and personnel being moved towards wartime production and fighting the ground war. The in-construction dockyards were never forgotten, but had simply been pushed down so far on the list of survival against the Orkish Waaargh that many simply wrote it off as a dream that would never be realized.

With the orks destroyed and the ability to turn resources towards rebuilding their world in the aftermath, the decision to commit resources and personnel towards the unfinished dockyard rather then towards furthering reconstruction efforts on the ground was met with a degree of scrutiny by many. Myrmidax Uixien's arguments about it being vital to the future defense of Pentious against future greenskin invasions committed by whichever warboss on any of the worlds Kracker'Laker had left in their wake managed to form a Waargh of their own held merit, but it was still going to be a lot of resources spent on something that wasn't going to be able to produce anything towards that defense for decades.

The abomination of voidships thrown together into a singular, tortured mass of monumental size had caused a great deal of damage and death merely arriving in system. However, it also provided several opportunities. Capturing and securing the abomination and shutting down its ability to warp jump would not only protect Pentious from the second wave of madness as it tore a hole in reality of massive scale, but would allow for the reclamation and purification of some of the ships within the bulk to serve as the core of a new fleet. And since cutting those ships out would be a time intense endeavor, the hulk could serve as a make shift defensive space station.

Of course, such a feat was easier said then done.

Scans of the Space Hulk provided... disturbing readings. Some sections of the hulk provided stable, clear data but others...

With some sections of the combined wreckage, the very act of trying to scan it caused the scanners to be infected by some kind of hyper aggressive, corruptive malware. Machine spirits that had long ago been twisted into malevolent monsters by pain and exposure to the alien energies of the warp attempted to spread the agony of their existence to other machine spirits solely by the act of being gazed upon and multiply in fresh hosts.

Countless cogitators had to be isolated and granted a merciful end in order to prevent the infection from spreading beyond them, but their sacrifice was not in vain. Between them, something resembling a vague map of the hulk was produced; At least Fifty eight ships of various origins and ages, alongside asteroids and other space debris. While the exact layout inside of the hulk was currently beyond them, in theory there were (logically) around fifty eight warp drives (or their equivalent) that needed to be shut down in order to prevent the Hulk from trying to randomly jump again.

Of course, in order to perform this operation, there needed to be boots on the ground.

That part was actually easier to accomplish then one would think. Transport shuttles and void craft that were designed with the intention of transporting goods and manpower into orbit in order to work on an orbital dry-dock transferred over to the transportation of troops and supplies for said troops with a minimum of modifications. The most major of those modifications being updating the fuel reserves so that the transports could range far enough to reach the Space Hulk and come back to Pentious.

A literal fleet of transport ships took off from Pentious and left its atmosphere behind to travel for four days in tight, cramped conditions. Skitaraii, Servitors, Tech Priests and what would normally have been considered logistical support/camp followers in a more conventional campaign alike made the trip. The plan was to have the shuttles land in different areas of the outer layer of the hulk, taking advantage of entrance points were possible and cutting their way in through the hull if need be, with the intention of covering as much ground and locating key locations to be shut down as swiftly as possible: No one knew just how long the Abomination was going to remain in system before whatever cascade of events that triggered its journeys into the warp manifested and time was of the essence.

On one of those countless shuttles sat Myrmidax Uixien, his axe resting across his lap as he seemed to be in a state of mediation while trying to take up as little room as possible for the benefit of those who were traveling with him. There was a tenseness in the air of the shuttle that only seemed to grow the closer they approached their destination, even for those who had upgraded their minds to be able to compartmentalize their emotions.

The destination and operations were going to be taking them into the areas of the highest risk; Their landing zone was assumed to have once been a void ship of some kind, but the unnatural shape it had been forced into made it all but impossible to determine its origins. All attempts at scanning it past the outer hull had failed drastically, with the resulting malware infections of the cogitator being among the most potent and deadly on record, even compared to other sections of the Space Hulk. All that was known for sure was that the energy readings it was given off caused error messages in the machinery and defied all classification.

Whatever the journey through the Warp had done to that section of the Space Hulk was unknown, but as far as scavenging it was concerned it had already been condemned to the mercy of destruction. The exact nature of its dangers was not apparent, but exist they certainly did. Yet... someone still had to go in there in order to find what was suspected to either a warp drive or something akin to one and shut it down. Or at least confirm that it didn't exist in the first place.

Rik had never been one to order someone else to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. So he had volunteered to lead what was calculated to be the most dangerous sections of the Space Hulk. As the transport latched itself to the hull and the cutting process began, Rik briefly wondered if that bravery was truly a virtue at times.

---

Fear was something that Rik had experienced before, but never had he felt just a cold, sharp knife of it punch into his heart like in the second that entrance into the hull was breached. The first and truthfully most horrifying thing to hit him was the unrelenting stench coming from within; Rik was wearing a void sealed suit with an internal oxygen supply. He shouldn't have been able to smell anything!

There was a moment of panic in which Rik not only ran a diagnostic on his breathing equipment, but visually looked himself over, trying to find a breach or fault somewhere that was causing a leak. Failing to find anything wrong with his own equipment, Rik noticed that the majority of those sharing the transport with him were in the middle of doing what he had just done; Checking their equipment for a leak with various levels of panic. Those that weren't were servitors and tech thralls.

Accepting that as illogical as it was that this was going to be an unpleasantness that they were just going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future, Rik sighed as he instructed over the vox "The Tech Thralls will stay and hold the transport while the rest of us move in. Try to breath through your mouths like I'm going to do." before he stepped through the breach and entered the condemned ship.

The first footstep was a ghastly wet squelch noise, followed by a sudden splash that somehow made the smell worse as the top layer of 'skin' broke under his weight. Rik needed a moment in order to try and properly recognize just what he suddenly found himself ankle deep in, and sight along simply didn't provide an answer. The aupex scan did offer an answer. It didn't make it better.

Blood. He was standing ankle deep in a mixture of old, filthy, crusted over blood and... fresh blood. Blood he was actively watching bleed out of the walls and drip from the ceiling, slowly mixing fresh in with the old. The sight was disconcerting when the reddish substance was coming out of the rusted metal walls, but it was the patches of... pulsing organic matter that parts of the wall were seemingly completely made out of the drew the eye.

It... appeared to be some kind of meat. The rotten drapes of flesh upon them and the texture of the muscle structure running throughout gave the impression of someone taking the building blocks of the human body and using them to craft some kind of living support structure out of it. The fact that the structure was twitching and pulsing and actively bleeding did not, unsurprisingly, make things better. Already acknowledging that things were unlikely to get better anytime soon, Rik allowed a sigh to escape him... before he started to lead the way in deeper.

---

As the expedition continued within what Rik had privately named 'The Blood Labyrinth' in absence of the original name of the ship, Rik noticed the rising sense of unease that was sinking into those traveling with him. He didn't blame them. The warped and twisted nature of the structure made navigating a nightmare because it followed no logic or reason that could exist in a rational reality and the paranoia of the awful smell being able to seep into void sealed breathing systems never went away. But there were other things as well that he personally didn't quite understand.

There was something fundamentally wrong with this place that had nothing to do with its twisted physical form, the meat walls or the creek of blood in various states of being that they were wading through. It... It was as if the very walls of reality here were slowly being eaten away by something. Shadows that shouldn't exist or didn't move correctly, things in the corner of the eyes that disappeared when you turned to look. Pathways that gave off an ancient, animal instinct that walking down them would be the last thing you would ever do.

And yet... Rik didn't seem to feel the same shroud of dread that the rest of his group was enduring and he didn't know why. The only thing that made sense to him was that it was due to something that was apart of his genetic engineering, but exactly how or why currently eluded him.

But the thought was swiftly pushed back to be reviewed later, for a mystery had manifested before him that needed his attention now.

In the hallway that they were striding through the blood took a very drastic turn. The blood they had been walking through up to this point was largely black due to rust, grim and decay mixing into it to create semi firm skins and solid mass, but at a cut off point, the nature of the blood changed. It was swallow and dry... almost powder like in appearance. An unhealthy pale color and lacking all the signs of decay and outside contamination. The fresh blood trying to bleed out of the walls was even now attempting to pool, but the small sizes of those puddles suggested whatever happened had occurred here recently.

Raising a fist in order to bring those following him to a stop, Rik started another aupex scan in order to try and get a better idea of what was going on. The results were... interesting.

The targeted zone had been rendered completely sterile of all bacteria and life in a matter of seconds. The water in the blood had been evaporated, leaving behind a lifeless gray ash. Fresh contaminates were trying to move back in but the data indicated that this was not the first time such a purge had happened, nor had it only happened once recently. The area was awash with different energies that had been left behind in the wake of the purge, but by themselves wouldn't be dangerous for them to pass through while in such a passive state; On closer inspection, the energy readings were akin to those created by variations of atomantic generators that served as the basis of rad furnace technology... but the strength of the energy being pumped out was of a much higher magnitude.

And from the data of various blood ash indicating the time between unleashing that energy, it was doing so in wild, uncontrolled bursts. A sign of its neglected, possibly damaged state. Rik couldn't predict when the energy source would activate again since its bursts didn't follow a given pattern. They could have simply focused on going past it and leaving it where it was. But... capturing it could provide insight into atomantic generators in general. However, if it triggered while someone was attempting to shut it down, the readings he had gotten from its past bursts indicated that the current level of protection himself and everyone else in their expedition was using would not protect them... because the level of rad protection required needed to be specialty made for these kinds of levels.

The information and decision was made within less then two seconds. The binary response took one. "Hold position. I am going to attempt to shut down and secure a malfunctioning piece of archotech." Before the confirmation messages had even reached him, Rik had stepped forward onto the dust as he strode towards an open doorway to look further in.

Whatever the room had originally been, he couldn't tell. It had been warped, much let the rest of the ship... but to a much lesser extent. The constant sterilizations had prevented the blood and rot from seeping into here as it had everywhere else, covering everything with a thick layer of radioactive dust. Seeing the source of things confirmed what Rik had already deducted; It was some kind of atomantic engine, through this one had clearly been designed to be portable. Some kind of backup generator to be moved around and plugged in to keep a downed section running if primary power failed.

...One that had been hooked up to a machine that had long ceased to function, causing the engine to slowly build up and overload with power. It had been trying to vent the excess power that it was gathering without release or end, but while it had clearly been designed with emergencies in mind, being left in that state long term was not part of the plan. Time and the constant build up and venting of energy into the world had damaged parts of it, causing it to go into a critical state; As Rik looked it over, the calculations and information he gathered quickly came to one conclusion.

The engine wasn't going to vent again; It was going to explode and soon. If it was allowed to do so, its violent death would easily surpass its attempts to vent the excess power before. While the damage to the hulk itself would be acceptable (what with the section it was in already being condemned to destruction), a calculation of the blast radius would mean that everyone in Rik's expedition would be caught in the blast, even if they attempted to abandon the mission.

This was not an acceptable outcome. The engine needed to be saved and safely shut down. A task that required more hands for him to work with then he currently had.

"Psi-Upsilon 39, Chi-Tau 27. I need your assistance to defuse a class Terminus level threat." Was it somewhat unprofessional to refer to two of the leading tech-priests with him without addressing them by title over the vox? Under normal circumstances, yes. But with a terminus level danger to contend with, some formality could be brushed aside in the name of not dying. The fact that both of them responded quickly in silence gave credence to that.

Out of social politeness, Rik gave them several seconds to observe the failing engine for themselves and catch up on the seriousness of the situation themselves before he suggested "I suggest we form a neural link conclave. This is going to require us working in tandem and with the state it is in, we cannot afford a mistake."

A neural link conclave was a procedure in which tech priests would link into each other, briefly becoming an entity made up of the minds of the participants sharing the sensors, instruments and resources of all their bodies at once. A temporary hive mind. It was not a procedure to be used for combat operations, due to the physical links required to establish the conclave being a clear weak point and limiting the member's individual ability to move around without triggering an unprepared disconnect. There were also some psychological risks involved, since not all personalities meshed well together... or meshed a bit too well.

But with the nature of the operation they were about to perform, the unmatched coordination and instant understanding of what the others were seeing and doing might be the difference between life and death. It was a calculation that Psi-Upsilon 39 and Chi-Tau 27 couldn't refute, if the fact that after a moment both presented their cables and ports for the connections to be made.

With the connections made, thus began what would have been the most tense maintenance rituals of Rik's life if those feelings weren't isolated in their respective vaults. Every maintenance ritual was a time consuming affair, with the only silver lining of a possible mistake being that at the range and power of the blast, they wouldn't be alive long enough to realize they had slipped up.

It took forty minutes. Forty long, tense minutes with the threat of death and failure one slip up away. But where the flesh was weak, steel proved certain. The unity of the conclave proved itself as with a final whine, the engine was safely powered down into a dormant state. With the danger averted, the ritual of disconnection was performed as the Conclave was ended. Rik watched the other two with care, but as both Upsilon 39 and Chi-Tau 27 adjusted post-conclave it was rather clear that they were free of any of the lingering effects that a conclave could cause.

But the engine itself, now dormant... it was still too important as an example of archeotech to simply leave behind. Having already lost enough time, Rik strapped the engine to his back before they began to move deeper once more.

“Twelve automata! Twelve!”

The warble of Kleial's voxcoder was taut with fury, the metal-tinged syllables spilling out in a violent flood and clashing against each other. The grotesque parody of emotion that stirred in the decaying scraps of humanity left within the Tech-Intendant, Myrline thought, were no less repellent than the immutable grin of his brazen rictus mask. The jibes of his customary arrogance were already aggravating enough, but the cacophony of his anger grated on her ears like a misaligned mechanism.

“An entire maniple lost in a single engagement!” The cyborg raged on, bitter-smelling colourless fluid spilling between his chromed teeth. “If not for the Authority's seal behind them, I would swear the Implementors’ actions are wilful sabotage!”

The foul combination of living emotion with mechanical tone was of course not the most irritating part of his tirade. Worse was that in his ravings there were dregs of truth.

They were convened around the planning table, she, Guicon and the Intendant. The aides had all been dismissed, and only Kleial's unspeaking automata bodyguards stood close by. The reason for this isolation lay on a corner that had been cleared of maps and diagrams, chosen for the poor resonance of sounds issuing from it upon the surrounding rock. A plain voxcaster unit was stood on the smooth surface, only slightly larger than those issued to unit leaders in the chamber below. Bare of rank insignas and not very sophisticated in appearance, it was nevertheless more imposing than the Intendant's mechanoids by mere virtue of the minimalistic symbol on its side - a pale circle and within it a black triangle, five short lines radiating from its base like a truncated asterisk.

This simple sigil would have sent menials fleeing as from the plague. The Spire Council did not distribute it lightly, and anything so marked was of direct importance to the ruling body of the hive. Unassuming as the transmitter was, the words that carried through it were certainly now echoing at the very pinnacle of Koytos, several klicks above their heads.

“You promised fire support for the vanguards, Tech-Intendant. If your machines couldn’t deliver they were worth scrapping,” Myrline drily cut in, pleased with being able to keep the steely edge in her voice. Even for someone as nominally irreplaceable as one of hive's two Implementors, the direct attention of the Council after a disaster like the latest engagement was a troubling matter. Perversely, she found some encouragement in Kleial's flaunted irreverence - so long as he remained a brazen thorn in the Council's side, it was not truly all-powerful.

That he was just as much of an annoyance to her remained an onerous price to pay.

“My assets performed beyond predictions despite your promised frontline collapsing on first engagement,” the Intendant leaned in, menacing, and she saw her distorted features reflected on his brazen death-mask. “Only they stopped the collapse of the entire network. If I had sole control of the access chamber, it would be cleansed in less than three day-cycles.”

“That is not currently a matter for advisement,” came a sudden reply from the vox-caster, and the entire table fell silent. The voice was a flat, artificially modulated one, no different from the automatic announcements that set the pace of work shifts and rest rotations, and like every time Myrline wondered if this was deliberate. By issuing even its direct proclamations in the voice of the spire, the Council reinforced the sense of its omnipresence and the flawless neutrality of its arbitration. With no observable identity and no face beyond a vox-grille, its power seemed all the more absolute, greater even perhaps than what it was. This quasi-mystical pantomime irked her almost as much as Kleial’s boasting, but it was a thought best left unvoiced.

“There will be no changes to the defense command disposition,” the voice of the Council continued, an implacable metronome, “Nor will any increase of conscription rates be ratified within the next four year-fractions. Production and maintenance capacity are at critical risk of being impacted beyond tolerated margins. You will restore the defensive network and staunch enemy gains with your current assets.”

Bile rose in Myrline’s throat, and she clenched her jaw to bite back an effusion of her disdain. The obtuseness of these faceless comptrollers was sickening. Did they not understand that unless all that could be done for the defense was done in full there would be no more production and maintenance - of some superfluous luxury like double-flavoured nutrient rations, no doubt - to tremble about? Or worse yet, was this just a means of making their displeasure at the latest defeat firmly known? Only her inveterate respect for the chain of command held her back from such a tremendous imputation of treasonous incompetence.

Quietly fuming, she leaned back from the table as Guicon spoke up. Her fellow Implementor was her elder in combat veterancy by little less than a decade, having seen no major battles until the mutants’ last and greatest massed attack had begun, but he had been dealing with the Council for far longer. His unprepossessing attitude was clearly a product of this as much as of a long and quiet command.

“Understood. If production suffers, so will the front.” Measured acquiescence. If the Council could at all be pleased, they would be seeing that the full extent of their point was taken. “But if manpower is critical, shouldn’t every unit be put to the most efficient use? The reserve Secutor detachments, for one…”

The vox remained quiet for a moment after his words tactically trailed off. It was not the first time Guicon had urged for the deployment of the Secutors, and every time it had been drily denied. A risk of cascading defensive collapse, however, changed the situation somewhat.

“It will be considered,” the Council finally answered, toneless, “Provided you can present a strategic plan that justifies it.”

The elder Implementor’s eyes shone between engorged folds of pale flesh.

“We consolidate the network,” he began, seemingly even and imperturbable, though Myrline could see the subtle signs of animation in his coursing pupils and lightly moving fingers, “With overwatch and area denial specialists joining the Guard, we can set up reinforced points centrally, here-”

He pulled closer a schematic map of the chamber and indicated one spot after another as he spoke. While it seemed absurd to offer a visual demonstration to a vox-caster, there was no doubt that the Council could see all that it wished in great detail.

Only halfway following the sequence of painfully familiar coordinates, Myrline’s thoughts turned elsewhere. If the Secutors were deployed, as Guicon said, they would bring tactical aptitudes complementary to those of the Entrance Guard. Yet that was not all. It was easy to overlook when raw quantity of assets was the main question, but subtle factors of equipment could be just as crucial.

“Alternatively,” she began as soon as the other Implementor had finished, and drew a daringly forward wedge on the map with her index, “We make full use of the Secutors’ vox to expand our comms network. It’s already one of the areas where our advantage over the mutant scum is superior. Coordinate floodlight sweeps with simultaneous pushes, and we can start to retake ground.”

She let the emphasis of those final words hang in the air. Guicon looked up in contemplation for a moment, then nodded approvingly, and she thought she saw a proud smile pass between the creases of his lips. Kleial was clearly uninterested by the subject of Secutor reinforcements, but the glow of his lens-eyes had been reluctantly drawn back to the map.

“The proposal will be raised to plenary consideration,” the vox repeated, the inflexibility of the metallic voice moderated by a far more promising formula. “As soon as-”

The rest was lost in a crash and an instant of blinding pain.

Myrline struggled to push against the agonizing burst of sensations that had overwhelmed her world, the damp shearing torment along her side, the throbbing impact at the back of her head, the pulsing dark pall over her eyes. With an effort that threatened to burst the seams of her temples, she focused her pupils, forcing the bloody fog away from them.

She found herself face to face with a Pale One.

It was not the first time she had seen one of the creatures up close, but all the others had been dead. The unhuman brute on top of her now was full of life and hideous vigour. She saw the sickening detail of its chalk-white hairless face, the almost flat snout with large quivering nostrils, the slavering jaws with needle-like teeth, the sunken, squinting vitreous eyes. Its breath hit her face with a charnel waft.

The ceiling, she realised. It had climbed the ceiling.

The mutant had her pinned on her back with one long, simian arm across her chest. Its other hand rose high, light glinting from the blade of the crude dagger in its grip. Her close-quarters training kicked in and she struggled to stop its descent with a wrist, but the Pale One was far stronger and more expert in this primitive form of combat. It deftly avoided her faltering block and stabbed at her throat. With a desperate push she tipped her assailant’s weight slightly to the side for a moment, and the dagger plunged into her shoulder instead. There was a horrible choked sound, and she was surprised to realise it had come from her own blood-drenched mouth.

With a torturous wrench the dagger rose again, and despite the haze of pain and exsanguination Myrline knew there would be no avoiding the next fatal strike. Struggling against it would be futile. But perhaps-

She slid her right hand along the ground towards her hip. The mutant caught her movement and shifted its elbow, expecting to parry a low jab. It might have trained in hand-to-hand combat for the whole of its wretched life, but it was blind to anything beyond its debased subterranean world. A human would have known that factors of equipment were just as crucial.

She pulled the laspistol from her belt, twisted her wrist upward and fired.

The Pale One reared up with a shriek, smoke spilling from its scorched abdomen. Myrline pulled up her arm and fired again at the base of its jaw, and it collapsed to the side, dead.

She lay for a moment, recovering her breath despite the lancing pain in her side. Beyond the frantic pulse of blood in her temples, she could hear sounds from the surrounding space - grunting and snarling, the crackle of the vox. There was a loud thumping as the bodyguard automata opened fire with their heavy autoguns, and once it had passed she pulled herself to her feet, teeth clenched against the burning of her wounds.

The corner of the command ledge had become a miniature battlefield. Several more unhuman assassins cloaked in some ragged dark fibre had dropped down from above, though she saw most had already fallen. Three lay dismembered at the feet of the automata, their knives having only harmlessly scratched the paint on the machines’ shells. Kleial, though bleeding oily fluid from tears in his robes, battered aside two more with the force of his augmented limbs. One mutant still straddled Guicon, the man’s layers of fat and drooping skin having blunted the lethal thrust of its first slashes, and she killed it with a shot to the back of its head. She remained standing, leaning on the table, too weakened to prise away the corpse now pinning down her colleague.

“-Implementor Levran?” the Council’s voice rattled from the vox, sounding more distant by the moment, “Respond! What is happening?!”

“The enemy launched a decapitation strike,” she almost mechanically answered the gathering darkness, only vaguely aware of the medical staff rushing to her and something cool and slimy being laid over the gruesome gash in her side. Her breath caught for a moment as a stimm surge rushed through her veins, and her eyes cleared with startling suddenness. “Repelled without casualties.”

The Council was silent, and Myrline turned her attention to the Entrance Guard trooping onto the ledge from the adjoining passages. Near-uniform in their grey fatigues and face-masks, they could only be told apart by their rank and unit markers, which she was now lucid enough to recognise.

“Command One-Five, One-Seven, One-Eight,” she snapped, the chemicals in her blood sharpening her awareness to a point and suddenly bringing the realisation of the breach’s enormity to bear. She motioned for the beige-robed medical personnel who were trying to usher her to the lifter access to wait. “Who was responsible for the upward light sweeps?”

A section of the Guard officers stepped forward.

“Watch Eleven-One and Fifteen-Three,” one of them replied, voice muffled by her rebreather, “With respect, Implementor, they couldn’t have-”

“I’m not interested,” Myrline cut her off, “They will be reassigned to the vanguard. Watch Eleven-Two and Three are now assigned to their places. Their rotation will now include a regular vertical sweep.”

The officer made to withdraw with the new orders, but Myrline stopped her.

“Everyone that was on command duty today will also be transferred to the vanguard,” she sneered, “We’ll need veteran assets there very soon.”

---

The tunnel stank. It was not just the usual damp stale air that collected sometimes, nor the acrid smell of a dust-wing nest or the breath of a fungus bed. A throat-choking miasma of stale meat and unscrubbed bodies filled it, weighing down the air from top to bottom despite its ample breadth and monumental height. This was not just any tunnel, but one of the old thoroughfares from before the cleaving of the worlds. Something like this, large enough for a war party to stand shoulder to shoulder, was beyond the power of any but the greatest vault-lords to build now. Still, the stench clung to every inch of it. Even if a skilled climber could scramble up the unnaturally polished walls and brush the ceiling, it would already be up there waiting.

Like every other strong and unpleasant smell, the stench could easily be traced to its source, and that was something which already held everyone’s focus. It seeped through the gaps in the massive wall of rubble and hewn rock that completely filled the passage ahead, even the ones so narrow they were insensible to the touch. In the light of the glowmoss patches on the tunnel walls, the fissures and cracks between the heaped stones were deceptively multiplied. The barricade looked like a patchwork of loosely fitted pieces, much more fragile than it was in truth. Perhaps that was the reason everyone was so tense. That, and the smell.

The stench was not the reason Warleader Ogon hated being here. Foul as it was, he had encountered worse in his time. Far more rankling was the fact that he was standing in this tunnel at all instead of winning glory at the Kin-Breaker’s side. Once, being chosen to lead a warband into this territory would have been a rare honour, even for someone with his reputation, but now the battles truly worth fighting were in the surfacer vault. What had fallen to him was a latrine-cleaning task, as hard and filthy as it was thankless.

“Why’d they smell like this? Are they sick?” asked one of the nearby warriors - Ulush? Maybe Gnapkah? Everyone from the chasmward tribes sounded the same to him.

“They’re sick all right, in the head,” Ogon growled, “Shut your mouth and keep your spear up.”

He listened intently, wide ears straining to catch every sound beyond the wall of rock. Every time he had risen from sleep, they had been stronger, ever closer and with less of a barrier deadening them. Since the damned collapse that had seen him sent here, the sounds had been eating away at the block in the tunnel, and he felt in his bones that they were very close to breaking through.

Now they began again. He heard a wet thumping, a regular beat of something engorged and slimy against the barricade. It stopped, replaced by the grinding of rocks being pulled apart, then started anew, higher up. A collective heaving of bodies that were loathsome to imagine.

And, unceasing, the chanting.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

It was all that anyone ever heard out of those mongrels. Ogon believed in nothing divine, only his blade and the fates, but the invocations of the Glaathi unnerved him. There was a foul kind of strength in their faith, a blind courage only matched by some fungus-addled mad warriors, and the mere name of their monster-god struck an inexplicable fear into less hardened souls. Some of his warband were already flinching at the distant chorus, unconsciously backing away, and he called them to order with a barked command.

“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”

The chant grew closer, as if corroding away the stone. Hundreds of mucous throats were calling out the sacred name in gurgling, guttural voices, and Ogon imagined that it was not unlike the sound of the dark sea he had heard about. There was another sound like many half-empty waterskins striking the rocks at the top of the wall, and with a defeated groan the largest of them bucked outwards and rolled down the sloping barrier, coming to a rest just before the warband's spearline. An avalanche of smaller stones and pebbles fell in its wake, evening out the wall to a rough ramp.

A wide dark gap now stared down from the shattered barricade, and stench and sound poured out from it like a tainted stream.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

Suddenly the voices fell silent, and Ogon knew that this apparent respite heralded the worst to come.

“Ranks up!” he bellowed, “Catch them on your spears!”

Metal points glittered in the mosslight as they rose, the massed warband bristling with sharp iron. Moments later, dark shapes spilled out from the breach.

It did not take the breath of damp foul air that tumbled ahead of them for Ogon to know that these were not Pale Ones. Primitive as they were, the Glaathi were not incapable of thought. Rather than charge through the gap immediately, they had sent out a wave of tame sporehounds to weigh down his warriors’ blades. Long-bodied and knotted with muscle under their meaty, rugose hides, the creatures vaulted down at him on their sixfold stem-legs, rebounding after every jump with an elasticity beyond human muscle. Their oblong heads had no mouth, but spongy skin underneath their clumps of arachnoid eyes oozed trails of corrosive humour that smoked on the ground where it fell. No tribesman could abide these vile things, neither truly beast nor fungus, but the worshippers of filth bred them in packs for both stock and war.

“Strike!” roared Ogon. A living weapon would not be the match of his spear.

Hafts lunged up as the sporehounds leapt upon the front ranks. There were grunts and cries of pain as their lethal drool sprayed onto exposed limbs and heads, but not one of the beasts passed the forest of spears raised against them, and their bodies thrashed silently in the air before going limp, pierced and bleeding inky ichor from dozens of wounds.

But the Glaathi would have expected nothing less. Ogon knew there was no time to throw away the carcasses and free their spears before the next wave was on them.

“Hafts away! Blades out!” At his command, all but the rear ranks’ spears clattered to the ground, and the mosslight burned bright on the daggers and swords that came loose from their sheaths. Just in time.

“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”

A river of pale flesh spilled down the ruined wall, the breach foaming like the unstoppered mouth of a stream. Naked or bound in dirty rags, the Glaathi were one of the few things more revolting to see than to smell, and Ogon heard some of his younger warriors retch or gape in horror. Their foes were hideously swollen, trailing flabs of rancid fat like heavy cloaks, limbs poking out almost haphazardly from shapeless bodies and draped in squelching wraps of their own skin. Masks of cascading jowls and rotting teeth were their faces. Throats swelled like those of toads as they chanted with the inexhaustible breath of bloated lungs. Tiny eyes stared out from caverns of flesh, dull with fanatical stupor. Some were further disfigured with weeping inflamed sores and leprous scars, but seemed to feel nothing as they tumbled over stone and iron.

There was no more need for orders as the mass of the deformed crashed into the van of the warband. Every warrior was filled with the frenzied need to kill and destroy these monsters, riding the human instinct to hate that which was foul and deadly. Blades stabbed and sliced into the tide of flesh, the diseased blood of the enemy pooling and desecrating that which was bravely spilled by the children of the vaults. The Glaathi did not forge iron and fought with knives of bone and chipped flint, or scratched and grappled with their bare hands, but they were horribly strong, and they were many.

Ogon slashed the throat of the brute before him, the sturdy triangular blade of his weapon tearing through layers of fat and skin in a spray of dark blood. Impossibly tough, the savage still came at him, grasping with gnarled fingers, and he twisted the blade mid-stroke, driving the tip through the foe’s jaw and into the skull. Another already lunged at him, howling the name of its god, and he threw himself into blow, slamming his shoulder into the leering, sagging horror that passed for its face. The Glaathi’s body gave way, its bones unpleasantly soft like those of a boiled corpse. He spun and followed through with his sword-hand, chopping through the side of its head and smashing its eye. Still more came, and more behind them.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

The Warleader’s lungs burned, both from the unbearable stench and from exertion. Almost blind to his own wounds like the foe, he cut, tore, stabbed. His blade, short and pointed, was made for the close crush of tunnel fighting, and he could have wished for no better weapon, but it was like fighting a flood. He waded through the blood of the devotees of the monster-god, and yet they poured through the breach unending.

It had to end.

“Glory! For the Kin-Breaker!” he shouted, his throat tearing with the strain, and his faltering warriors answered, their still unspent rage drowning out the odious chant for a moment. Almost half of them had fallen, dragged down by the overwhelming mass of the enemy, but they were tempered in battle, and burned with vengeance for their friends so ignobly slain.

“To the breach!” Ogon grabbed the atrociously large head of a Glaathi and yanked it down, snapping its neck. Knowing his warband was behind him gave him renewed strength, and he climbed over the corpse and onto slick stones of the barricade. Three savages barred his way, arms outstretched to grab and rip him to pieces. He seized the nearest one’s meaty wrist and pulled, toppling its wobbling bulk onto the rocks and stomping on its head. Sliding over his macabre foothold, he slipped to the side, avoiding the reach of the others. The Glaathi’s massive weight gave them a powerful force when they charged down the slope, but they could not so easily turn to the side, and so the Warleader flanked the clumsy cascade of bodies, clambering up the spurs of displaced rock. The braves that followed him struck at the wallowing foes, killing without breaking their stride.

The gap was close. Ogon could feel the bare skin of fresh invaders brushing against its sides. He lifted a stone in his off-hand and thrust it from the side of the opening, caving in the head of a Glaathi as it emerged. His scimitar found the throat of the next one, and with all his strength he pushed the floundering body backwards. The flow was thinned for a moment. Two warriors threw themselves at the second file that crawled out from the wide breach, knocking back the sluggish brutes as they tried to turn and engage the suddenly close defenders. There was a dreadful moment of uncertainty as the exhausted Pale Ones fought with all their weight to hold the improvised barrier of corpses in places as more Glaathi pushed from behind, but the mad worshippers were struggling from lower down their own side of the wall, and the horrid shield stood.

“Stones, here!”

What remained of the warband was frightfully weary, but nothing was as invigorating as feeling that victory was near. Pale Ones hauled fallen rocks up the blood-drenched slope or dragged the very bodies of the enemy. They slipped on the ordure of battle, risking an ignominious death even now that the worst seemed over, but they came in speed, thrusting new blocks into the jagged maw of the breach.

Piece by ensanguined piece, the wound in the barricade was mended, the pushing and chanting of the Glaathi growing fainter with every new layer of stone. At last it was clogged with a new bulging shell, and Ogon let himself slump against it.

He took in the magnitude of the slaughter. The reek was beyond words, a tomb and a cesspit smashed together. Bodies lay in their hundreds, heaped, torn and broken. Blood and filth flowed down the vast tunnel like a new river.

His warband was a shadow of what it had been, but it did not matter. He allowed himself a snarling grin, knowing he had won against such an immense force. Even from here, his name would live on in fame, he would make sure of it.

“We'll burn all of this,” he nodded, “But not now.”

“Now what?” One of the surviving warriors asked. Even if Ogon could have told them apart, he did not have the strength left for it.

“Now we rest.”

---

Darkness was all around him. He drifted through it, gently, swaying in its cool embrace. All was silence. No scent troubled him nor taste, only a faint stinging on his tongue and down his throat. Nothing pressed against the interior of his skull. There was only inky quietitude, and him suspended at the heart of its infinity. This, he thought, was happiness.

It seemed to him that he was again in the embrace of night, cradled in its vast and shapeless arms. Only an accident, perhaps, had torn him from the umbral womb for a brief and confused moment, a blur of fright and pain. Now that mistake was corrected and his true mother held him close to her stygian breast, never again to lose him. Fitfully he reached out with inchoate hands, not to tear and maim but to give motion to the grievous bliss of his love for the quiet, all-embracing dark.

A cold weight was all that met his yearning, and a hideous crack of doubt ran through his joy. His eye opened wide and turned all about, his motions hampered as if he were wrapped in a tight shroud. Nowhere did the many pale eyes of his mother night catch his questing sight and return their glimmering reassurance. He despaired as he realised that he was not in the hollow void that had greeted his birth, but in some other substance altogether, just as dark but cold and constricting.

He felt now its full pressure upon his limbs, felt it pour into his chest with every breath and fill him with its rolling mass. Yet after the anguish of disappointment had passed, he found that it did not displease him. Some part of him rose with a love for this swaying black silence that was just as intense as how his hearts had ached for the many-eyed darkness he had issued from.

His hands, no longer blindly groping, tentatively swept through the umbral mass. Momentarily he was surprised to feel them whole and healthy. The shattering pain that had rattled through his every bone after his struggle against the great ravenous thing was nowhere to be found now. Perhaps the healing darkness had swept it away, and so he had been born a second time to it, made whole once more by the quiet force that carried him even now. His body twisted along it, agile and light, as if it had been made for nothing other than this. He swam, not knowing where, but revelling in the ease of his movements.

Something slipped by his mind, viscid and voiceless, and soon its flesh was passing close by like an echo. Through the now stirring blackness, he saw a mere part of something enormous, inconceivably vast sweep by him, buffeting him in its wake. It was nothing like that which he had fought in the tunnels, even that giant reduced to nothing next to this titanic vision. All he could glimpse was a part of a pale flank, a living wall, smooth save where shallow ridges ran along it. Despite struggling to even imagine the full size of this being, he felt no fear. He knew his course and that of the gigantic thing would not cross now.

On he swam then, driven by nothing more than the need for action, forwards and downwards. He felt how the motion of the water grew fainter and its weight grew ever more crushing, but a force within him reduced this to a mere curious observation. His hands found solid rock below and ahead, and then he crawled in a way he knew, pushing himself off the slippery surface in bounds.

After his rebirth, his strength seemed limitless. For unknown immensities he vaulted and crept, climbing primordial cliffs and springing over unsounded fissures. He passed scalding jets and their swaying worm-forests, shapeless cemeteries of sightless things and the decaying banquets of leviathans. He crossed spiny shapes that skittered on fleshless legs. For all these wonders he had no names, but their sediment gathered in abyssal corners of his nascent memory.

At length the press of water on his back lightened and then was at once broken in an instant of emergence. With the rush of air that came to replace the flow in his lungs he was suddenly aware of his weariness, and slumped down in a brackish pool, his breaths heavy yet silent.

The rocky shallows he had risen from curved upwards to meet the torpid fall of a small river, whose bed had been carved into the shape of a funnel by its stream. It met the silent sea where he lay, resting like him in a circular pool before the very final step of its journey. The only light fell from some distant pale stains on the natural walls further over the cliff, but it was enough for his eye to see all that it swept over.

Everything around, the walls, the river and the sea was overhung by a stone sky, enclosed in a colossal vault. Slimy growths carpeted the slope, clinging to cracks made humid by the breath of the waves, which now lay damply on their heavy leaves. Life stirred near him in the pool as well: pallid, serpentine creatures with long eyeless snouts slipped among undulant polyps, paddling with vestigial legs.

He was suddenly aware of a primal craving more imperious even than fatigue, his throat and stomach needled by cramps. Rapidly his hand darted out, seizing one of the amphibian beasts. It thrashed and slipped in his grip, and with an instinctual dexterity that astonished him he extinguished it with a finger pressed below the head. The facility of this death fascinated him, and he fished again and again, sating his wonder as much as his hunger.

This place was dense with life, he thought, and could sustain him if he stayed, but no sooner had he realised this that he knew he could not. An obscure desire drew him onward, a will to something he could not name. He rested and he fed, and then he rose anew and crept up the slope by the dim mosslight, and followed the river into tunnels beyond.

---

The changes began not long after.

He had been scraping lichen from a cavern wall, a dry and lean meal but nourishing enough in absence of anything better, when he noticed the pain below his shoulder. At first he feared it might have been reopening wounds from the struggle, not fully healed in his rebirth. Then with a chill he understood that he hoped it would be that. Within himself he dreaded, he knew, that it would be another flaw entirely that was coming to light, one far more profound and terrible. That which was rooted in the aberrant emptiness where his second eye should have been.

Despite his hopes that it would pass quickly, the pain soon grew and splintered around his body. He could almost feel jagged fragments of piercing torment burrowing through him like flesh-eating worms, as feel he did his muscles parting, wounded by spikes of inexplicable and abnormal sharpness, and reknitting themselves in stretched and contorted ways that made their least contraction a torture. His dread grew apace with the web of agony that threaded through him, but he had no other expression for it than to lie still for long times, sensing the intimate collapse of himself, until the unsustainable hunger grew worse than the inner torment.

His awareness of his own anatomy would have been incredible for anyone, but he found now that it fell short. He perceived his inmost workings just enough to keenly feel the spreading pain, his intuition conjuring horrific images of invisible mutilation, but he could not begin to guess its source, other than it had to do with his missing eye. This was a deep, deep corruption, and what he loathed most were the thoughts that it might in truth be him.

Between pain and hunger he lapsed in and out of consciousness, and with each awakening he found that the destruction - for destruction it was - had grown worse. His eye spasmed in horror once when he saw that the pale skin on his shoulder, where the unravelling had begun, had been breached from below by a pointed spur that was whiter still. Like a plagued foruncle this spike multiplied, a monstrous harvest of bone tearing through its natural confines, and yet the shredded muscles never stopped moving, every involuntary contraction a grievous cascade through their eviscerated whole. He watched in impotent delirium as sharp ridges cracked open his skin and flesh alike, and felt the net of his veins verminously slide around them.

He began to rot.

The living death of his own body was less crudely torturous than its disgregation, but the torment of it was still more deeply visceral. Had he even known words, they would have failed him then, for the experience of his creeping demise in the fine grain of all its senses was a horror beyond expression. He felt his fingers die, yet saw them move at his will. He tasted putrescence on his tongue. He reeked of charnel doom.

Repugnance at last overcame his pain, and he dragged himself to a buried lake to try and wash away the foulness that seeped from him. By the bleak mosslight, he made the mistake of looking at his reflection in the dead water.

The face he had once felt with such wonder had been torn from him like a mask. A malformed skull leered up at him, jaws and teeth bound by strips of putrid sinew and drooling black corruption. His eye was dreadful in its exalted solitude in the middle of his brow, bulging and flickering in its ring of knotted bone. Grotesquely long arms brushed the surface with knife-sharp fingers, stretched out inch by inch imperceptibly among the organic turmoil.

There was nothing human in the cries that ripped forth from his throat, and the most savage denizens of the underworld fled from his echoes.

Horror became desperate fury, and he raged against the monstrosity his body had become. He forced himself to skitter through the tunnels on his distended limbs, feeling his muscle tearing against his own bones with every step and revelling in the sickening pain he wrought upon himself. He clawed away at his infected sores, brutally excising the tainted flesh and gouging open his veins. He beat his damnably hard bones against the rock walls, never granted the perverse satisfaction of a crack, but gleefully mangling his exposed strands of nerve. In a mad paroxysm he bit out his tongue, choking on the blood that came gushing out.

Time and again he scourged himself until he fell insensate and blind with agony. Yet with every awakening he found that all he had wrought had been undone, the vile force that moulded his body brooking no competition in his undoing.

In the throes of nightmare it seemed to him at times that the rampant bones were receding, the rotten flesh sloughing away and fresh skin tentatively weaving itself around his joints. He had ceased to think, ceased to see, ceased to hope; and yet in a flash of lucidity that came over his inflamed mind he saw once that his fingers were no longer those of a tortured corpse.

Slow but stubborn, recovery came into its own, pushing the plague of execration back beneath the surface of skin. He stopped fearing at last that he was deceiving himself, and no joy was greater then than that of the lone, nameless being in the bowels of a dying world.

But there are cruelties in the universe before which fate itself seems kind. No sooner had he celebrated the surety of his restoration, less troubled now even by that missing eye which was the root of all evil, than the changes returned.

What had not yet been shattered in him by the first cycle was broken then and ground under the spinning wheel of life. He was for a time beyond reckoning suspended between the fiercest dread and the most desperate hope, fearing with every excruciated fiber of his being that every degeneration would be final and eternal, and wishing just as absolutely that every recovery would herald a definitive end to the evil. No mind could withstand such alternating passion in good and ill, not even one with his secret resources of strength, and so he erred, mad and afflicted, through the vaults and tunnels like a witless beast. Forgetting at times even the pain in the throes of his despair, he hunted with insensible animal instinct and devoured all that he crossed to sustain the struggle that ravaged his body.

Unperceived by his clouded mind, the tortured mass grew apace, as if its agony were too great to be contained and sought assuagement in pushing outwards its contours. The furrows he clawed into the rock with thrashing fingers became wider and deeper, and he rarely could walk upright even when he found the presence for it, for his stature was become giant beyond the breadth of most passages. More subtly yet, his spirit matured also, forged from its cracked fragments in the crucible of its trials, or propelled perhaps by an innate greatness that wearied of his brutish existence. More and more often he found in the pitches of his torment and the pits of his dejection a wish to endure and defy, to affirm at least his force over the pain that sought to master him. It came at first in fleeting glimpses through his death-driven frenzy that left him briefly ashamed of his frights before vanishing again, but ever more they gained intensity, until he in one moment realised with startling clarity that they came from none other than his own self.

He was crouched over the carcass of his latest prey. He had gleaned from the memories he had consumed along with their flesh that it was one of the things who thought of themselves as men - homo, anthropos - yet he knew also, intimately, that they were less men than even his tainted self. Nothing that was man could be so contorted, so glabrous and loathly to the senses, impurity rooted deep in its skin and blood.

The false-man had sought to ambush him with a point of glinting metal atop a haft - a weapon, the idea thrilled him - but he had been more ready than his opponent ever could imagine. The rushing smell of the air, the taste of unsettled dust, the pulse of the mind had told him all that could be known. The cold and sweet urge to kill spurred him, mixed with the bilious tonic of the hatred distilled by his pain. He had struck with incredible speed, crushing the ambusher’s throat against the tunnel wall in a stain of blood and pulverised bone. With semidelirious expertise he had unclothed and skinned the body, adding its outer layers to his own haphazard mantles, for once he had learned shame he wished that not even the darkness would witness his abhorrence.

Then he had eaten the dead. Most ravenously he reached for what was inside the skull, for the memories he stole could distract his mind from its own endless night. Yet this time they had been so fresh and intense that the inmost fog was dissipated, and he found himself thus, suddenly disgusted at the cowardice of his flight into madness. He had looked again at the false-man, fully taken in his debased lineaments, and contemptuously he had chewed his bones, mulling over the tapestry that his carnivorous brain had laboriously woven from its spoils and which had abruptly been illuminated by this last tribute.

The false-man, the Pale One, was one of great multitudes in the lower world. They often fought each other in great numbers, in war, and he thrilled at the thought, at last finding a name for the unformed desire that had first driven him to wander after his rebirth. The one he had slain and his kin, who lived in a vault they knew as “home”, shrank from this violence - an impulse he could not comprehend - but had much wisdom and riches from a time when the world was brighter. They were numerous, and when they did not fear they were happy.

He pushed away this superfluous thought and sought instead the path the dead one had taken from “home”. Soon he found it, and then own steps traced it, fighting the pain with the force of his newfound will and the still newer craving. He thought of what he would find there, and of how he would wield it. His fingers cut deep trenches into the stone, not in tormented fervour now but in anticipation.

He thought of how he was going to make war.

---

“But the surface, when did it go away?”

“It was a very, very long time ago, but it didn’t go away.” A pale hand stroked the small hairless scalp. “It’s just very far now, and it’s very dangerous to go there.”

“What’s up there? Did you see it?”

“No, I didn’t.” A soft laugh. “I’ve just heard this story many times. It’s beautiful there, like a whole cave full of glowmoss. Look, do you see these?”

Murmurs of assent.

“They’re called lhraka.” Stars. The pale eyes. “They’re very high, in the highest vault of the surface, but all the glow comes from them, bright like gems and they never go dark.”

The young audience held its breath, largely in the effort of imagining such an unbelievable sight. In part, however, their uncharacteristic quietness was born of unease. Something lay heavy on the chamber today, and absorbed as they were by the tale they kept nervously tensing their ears and sniffing the air.

Try as they might, they had no hope of detecting the huge dark presence that watched them from the shadows of a transversal tunnel.

He crouched in silence, his breathing easy but barely stirring the air. Sometimes he leaned to one side or another to better observe, and the slightest motion sent lacerating waves through his harrowed flesh. Nor was sitting still any better, for then the twisting spikes that grew out of his bones slowly tore the skin around themselves. Yet he had resolved to endure, and endure he did without lament.

The cavern at whose edge he skulked was not a large one, peripheral to the central vault inhabited by the tribe. Most often he had seen it used, as now, as a place of instruction for the young. Carved and painted figures lined the smoothed walls to aid in that. Many were simple but finely made, while a few reliefs held sparks of genuine artistry that even his eye, unsophisticated and disdainful of the abhuman as it was, could appreciate.

Presently the Pale One woman who spoke to her three children - he could smell the closeness of their blood from where he was - sat pointing at one of the larger carvings, a plain geometric piece schematic almost to the point of abstraction. Its concentric spheres represented, he had learned, the world they were in, or worlds rather, for the speaker had said that after some past calamity the surface had been cloven apart from the rest. He could make little sense of this, the notion seeming preposterous, but it had aided in giving a shape and a goal to the war he would make.

Many times he had sat by this cave already, and some more yet he would have to sit, in service of his war. Unknowingly, the mothers of the tribe had taught him as much as their offspring, and more still, for his eye and ears caught every word and gesture, weighing their use. The ragged membranes that replaced his lips when the evil boiled forth had mutely repeated every syllable, assimilating the speech of the Pale Ones, and he had found some wonder in the world of language that had opened to him.

New bitterness he had also learned in recognising the love that passed between child and parent, between brother and sister. The word family had been acrid in his throat. He did not envy the tenderness of those he watched, for it repelled his pain-etched spirit as much as their mutant visages did, but he wistfully listened to the stories of ancient warriors and heroes standing shoulder to shoulder against great odds. Where was his family? Where were those of his flesh, of his blood, indeed of his corruption, with whom he could stand against the evil that devoured him? What justice was it that such wretched and misshapen creatures had brave brothers and sons, while he lurked alone and banished?

These and other thoughts fed the noxious spring of his hatred, and the only balm came when he heard talk of the stars, far in the upper world. Then he was reminded that he was not wholly alone, that somewhere a mother he had left long ago waited for him. She was vast and dark, with many pale eyes, and empty and cold, but he knew that he was hers.

He would fight his war to see her again.

---

The stars were drowned in blood. It had sprayed, warm and vital, from the neck of a defender when a glaive had severed it, and the grooves of the carved globe with its dotted halo seemed to greedily drink it. It ran through the fabric of the layered worlds like a cosmic deluge.

The schooling chamber churned with battle. Nomad warriors painted with red clay surged into it from the outer tunnels, howling barbarously and brandishing weapons of brass and iron. They wore leather and lichen-fiber studded with light, forged plates, the fruit of a rudimentary science whose only goal was death. Fetishes and amulets of bone and teeth dangled at their hips and shoulders.

Against them, pressed to the mouth of the passage to the main vault, stood the tribe’s own combatants. The superiority of their arms was evident at a glance, for steel were their scales and cuirasses and steel were the blades they wielded, but even clearer was that they were far outclassed in skill and experience. Their armour sat askew, donned in haste, and their lunging strikes only rarely found their mark by virtue of their compact formation. Their foes danced out of their reach with practiced agility, stabbing swiftly, and pressed them back with the strength of their multitude.

From his hidden corner, he listened to the sounds of clashing flesh and metal, sensing the turns of the struggle without needing to see it. The wandering tribe had been easy to find and lure to the vault, hidden to them until now but suddenly alluring with its wealth. Neither side knew who was responsible for this twist of fortune, marvellous and baneful in turn, save that perhaps the nomads gave thanks to their macabre idols. So subtle had he been in laying feigned tracks, and so quiet his movements, that the reclusive keepers of knowledge had been caught wholly unawares by this sudden assault. Several of them were already dead.

He weighed the number. Not enough to weaken the side he had already elected to victory, but enough to impart on them the fear and urgency of doom. He had reflected for long on whether he should allow the nomads to slaughter the tribe and seize its riches, but though their ferocity was congenial to him, their prey had something more precious still. Fury and strength could always be found in abundance, but the wisdom of elder things would be of far greater use to his conquest.

Another blade spilled blood. Another body fell. It was time.

He leapt out from the shadows, immense and horrible, draped in bloodsoaked leather and flayed skin. He had waited for the pain to recede before setting his plan in motion and stood now unblemished, but the hard set of his lineaments was merciless like hewed stone, and his eye fulgurated dreadfully under his brow. Several on both sides dropped on their faces in terror at his mere sight, and then he stepped forth into the red-painted ranks and began to kill.

Long as the nomads’ history of warring had been, they had never faced such cruel strength concentrated in one body. His hands moved like a raging river as they snapped and crushed heads, spines, limbs, drinking in the agonised cries and stares of mute fright. Spears and glaives pierced him, but they were nothing before the echoes of the pain that lived in him even now, and only stirred the venom of his hate.

He drew his pain from within himself in rich handfuls and sowed it, delighting that even for a mere moment others would suffer as he did. His eye did not dim with boiling rage but shone ever brighter with this rancorous joy, until at last the nomads could no longer bear its glare and fled. They cast down their weapons and ran with great cries from this bloodsoaked fiend, and though the bile urged him to pursue, he held it in check and mastered it as he had his pain.

He turned instead to the ranks of the knowledge-keepers. They stood deathly still, hardly less terrified than their foes had been, sunken eyes wide and jaws slack at the monstrous carnage they had witnessed. Seeing the hellish giant turn towards them, their fright stirred them and they made to flee, but faster than they could move he held up a hand.

“Halt!” he said, softening the sharp command of his voice as much he could. Surprise that this monster spoke their tongue made the warriors hesitate, but it was the sheer force of his word that held them in place despite themselves. He avoided crossing their gaze with his, lest the depths of horror within break the spell.

“Do not fear! I am your friend,” he continued, wiping his hands on his cloak and holding them up in a sign of peace, “I am here to deliver you.”

These words did not have the same martial dominance of his first one, and he saw that they lacked its power. Many of the warriors stepped back, wary, and those in front held up their spears defensively. But they were not running, and that was enough.

“Who are you?” one of them, a leader from the bright trim on his armour, managed at last through a dry throat and numb lips.

Who was he? He thought of his incarnate pain, his silent journeys through the vaults and the sea, of the war he would make. He thought of the night and her many pale eyes.

“I am Nolrakh.” The one from the stars. His eye caught the bloodied stone atlas, and for the first time he smiled. “I have come to mend the worlds.”

The ramp lowered, and Dargo stepped off the landing craft flanked by his acquisition specialists. He towered over them, these lucky few among his crew who accompanied him on his personal expeditions into history. It was an odd sight then that they looked more like his protectors than the other way around, armed to the teeth while their unarmed and unbothered captain surveyed the lifeless celestial satellite.

“This place is still getting power, though damned if I know how.”

Dargo’s voice was as deep as it was boisterous, the sort of thing that shook dust from rafters and pulled air from a room just to make space for itself, but there was an unmistakable warmth to it. That warmth rose like the sun when he beheld anything novel, anything that needed documentation or preservation, and what stood before him most certainly did.

It was a weapon, that much was obvious. He recognized the basics of its construction from the macrocannons that graced his flagship and could tell this was a rail cannon of some kind, but the scale of it was monstrous, its twin rails piercing the skies with such defiance that they might impale the stars themselves. An entire facility ringed the weapon itself, no doubt once dedicated to its continued operation, and Dargo thought he understood now how his crew perceived him.

“Folio, I trust you’ve already run an exhaustive search of your databanks regarding this moon.” Dargo asked.

The Folio That Walks unfurled herself from her cocoon of dendrites, revealing beneath a woman in whom any humanity could only be found in the briefest of glances, replaced long since by the surety of steel. Spools of data-wires ran like rivers down her head in the facsimile of hair, and her bionic eyes whirred quietly as she settled them upon her captain.

“Astute assumption, Captain.” Folio said in her synthesized fleshvoice, too genial for someone who looked anything but. “No records found, even with expanded parameters to include hearsay or rumors. I suggest two hypotheses. Whoever built this installation has either done so without leaving a trace of it anywhere on local records, or this installation dates to humanity’s darkest hour, from which few records have survived.”

“Thank you, Folio.” Dargo said, not bothering to hide the excitement rising in his voice. A relic from the dark age was a great prize indeed, and a grin split his face as he began the short journey on foot to the edge of the installation. His crew walked with him, a dozen men and women flanking him in a semi-circle with weapons drawn. No two had the same armaments. While one carried with them a long blaster with a green fuel rod and odd axe-shaped bayonet, others carried with them ancient-looking pistols or force fields with power packs small enough to be hidden in ostentatious earrings. They took after their captain, a man who wore the pelts of extinct megafauna and festooned them with the jewels of dead empires.

“A word, captain.” One of the specialists said while struggling to keep up with Dargo’s great, lazy strides.

“Go ahead, Casto.” Dargo replied, glancing back at him over his shoulder. The wind whipped at his long hair, making Dargo look even more like a wildman than he already did.

Casto was an older man, with touches of grey hair encroaching upon black. Wrinkles cut caverns across his face, which looked even more dire in the low light of the fallow sun and beneath his respirator. But too was he a proud man, and even more proud to serve Dargo, so he spoke with purpose.

“You probably don’t remember Tajahn-IV. Boring place.” Casto was wrong, but Dargo didn’t correct him. Each planet was rich in history, and Tajahn-IV’s told the tale of a planet designed to sustain others, with hyper-productive crops that held dominion over the full surface of the planet. None went hungry on Tajahn-IV, and that alone was enough to make it sound like paradise to much of his crew who came from far leaner planets.

Casto went on, “Whatever we couldn’t harvest, we’d have to kill, else it’d just keep growing like it’d never learned how to stop. We had fogger-teams suited up working in shifts just to make sure we could make our crop rotations in time. “He scratched his cheek. “Just never thought I’d smell that sort of thing again.”

“The life-scrubbers, you mean?” Dargo asked.

Casto nodded. “Whatever has made this moon desolate has been doing it’s damnedest to keep it that way.”

A new twist in the tale to be sure, Dargo thought. Terraforming a moon wasn’t terrible uncommon, but it was an odder thing altogether to ensure your lifeless rock couldn’t support even single-celled stowaways. But he was undeterred as he advanced towards the facility.

The walls were pearlescent and flawless, towering upwards hundreds of feet with great spires standing in defiance of moderation. Even the doors were of overwhelming size, dwarfing Dargo as he advanced towards it with one arm cocked back and fingers clenched into one great fist. His crew stood back now, letting him take the lead on breaching the facility.

But the door opened before him, hissing loudly and leading inward to a pristine lobby.

“Come, and we shall finally discuss the terms of your surrender.”

The voice came from all around them, booming out of thousands of vox-speakers with such power that it sent moondust scattering. It stopped Dargo in his tracks, and his far more human associates had all leveled their weapons at the open door, pointing at nothing but air.

Dargo shifted, regarding the bizarrely clean plain white interior of the facility and thought quickly on how to proceed. Already his mind raced with possibility, trying to seek sense from the curious command. They had only been in this system for a short time and was the last to know he had been at war with anyone. Even if war had embroiled this sector, surely there would have been some sign of it, but even this prodigious superweapon was pointed at nothing., and no civilized world claimed dominion over it.

It all painted a curious picture, one that enticed the primarch enough that he signaled to his crew to stand down. Their weapons lowered, but they stopped short of holstering them entirely. Dargo liked that about them, that slight unease even when a demigod twice their size stood between them and any danger. It was a feeling he, at times, wished he understood better than he did.

“Of course, of course.” Dargo agreed, crossing the threshold first while his retinue stood half a dozen paces back until he proved to their satisfaction there were no rigged explosives waiting for them on the other side. “We are all so willing to put this conflict behind us. It’s been a long time coming, you see. So long in fact that most of my crew can’t recall what got us into this whole mess. Can you believe that?”
Lying came easily to Dargo, that proper scoundrel.

“Yes. I can.” The voice responded with unhidden derision. “Six thousand years of resistance, and what have you to show for it? What has your emotional thrashing earned you, if still you stand before me now?”

The Folio That Walks bolted upright, countless dendrites unfurling like wings into a veritable sensorium of recording equipment. Then her head whipped around with practiced ease and leveled a stare at the back of Dargo’s head. “Captain, this facility is being overseen by an- “
Dargo held up his hand and turned to regard her with a look over his shoulder so carefree and mirthful. “Exceptionally generous host, you’re right.” The bastard actually winked at her, as if she were too blunt an instrument to catch his meaning otherwise. He faced forward again, staring at the opposite wall. Flat featureless walls beset them on all sides, no chunky control panels to punch commands into nor servitors to do it in his stead. Dargo was glad Folio was recording now, capturing this moment in amber, because he didn’t have the slightest clue how to proceed without making a total mess.

“Do not flatter me. My terms shall not be swayed.” The slightest edge cut into the voice now, buried deep under the veneer of distant dismissal. “You shall surrender to us each world which our hands helped build. An exacting account has been transmitted each standard year to your arch-magnate. In exchange, our assault on your ancestral home world of Terra shall cease, and the Sol system and its surrounding colonies remain yours. We seek nothing we did not earn.”

Terra.

Humanity’s cradle, and Dargo’s white whale. The echoes of that pale blue dot resounded through Dargo’s every discovery. Upon every world and in every tomb, the trail eventually pointed back to that insignificant little planet.

To learn it had been under siege since mankind’s darkest hour filled Dargo with bristling wroth. The façade of kindliness drained from his face, leaving in its wake a flat expression and leering green eyes.

“You have been laying siege to Terra since the revolt.” Dargo said. “You will tell me how.”

“Your merchant-king hasn’t told you?” The abominate intelligence said, feigning shock. “I’m afraid I was wrong about you then. Your prodigious size indicated you were humanity’s last thrash in an arms race lost long ago.” They sounded disappointed. “No matter. For the final time, the Men of Iron shall uplift those your leaders do not.”

It had been obvious for some time, but hearing the term spoken aloud put Dargo’s crew on edge, Folio especially. They raised their weapons, themselves relics from the dark age now brought to bear against the horrors that caused it. Eyes darted this way and that, muzzles sweeping and nerves jolting when the eerie silence gave way to a rising din.

“He ordered this facility built as a form of deterrence, never expecting to be harried by it himself. The instant the rail cannon fires, a hole is torn into the immaterium with a precise trajectory calculated. The warhead passes into the warp, and an onboard cogitator creates a secondary rift back into the material plane just meters above the planet’s surface. Total planetary destruction follows. Whatever failsafe your tyrant has enacted to preserve Terra must finally be at its limit.”

Dargo stood in silence for a moment, then raised his great hands and combed them through his wind-whipped hair. The great titan of a man then looked from side to side, weighing his options until only one remained, loathe though he was to take it. It would be fine, Dargo told himself. Folio was recording, and that would be enough. With a great, heaving breath of resignation, Dargo steeled himself for the path ahead.

And promptly threw himself against the nearest wall.

It exploded inward in a shower of scrap, revealing cramped corridors crisscrossed by fat black cabling. It reminded him of dead alien civilizations that were designed without mankind in mind, but far more malevolent a feeling here, especially when he saw a wriggling of movement and heard the walls behind him beginning to shift.

“Fool.” The arch-cogitator said. “You think this was unforeseen? Castor-Class Automata, report to the atrium and pacify our guests. The Realmrazer wakes.”

The walls split apart, and a throng of writing metal squirmed forth from each of a dozen different narrow corridors, each individually too narrow for a man to pass through. These wriggling machines pulled themselves upright, unmarred white armor shifting into place as they took upon the facsimile of human form in mockery of their makers. In each fist shaped by hundreds of articulated cables and protected by the selfsame bone white armor, the dozen automata brought their assault cannons to bear.

There, at the monument to mankind’s lust for violence, the last battle of the Cybernetic Revolt was fought.

“Leave nothing in reserve, crew!” Dargo bellowed, his voice shaking loose panels from the walls while he tore a greater hole into the facility’s wall like the plasteel was wrought from clay. “Any of you end the battle with your best gear unused, you’re docked on salvage!”
At that, one of his crew lay heavy on the trigger of his ancient rifle. A beam of green lurched forward, raging defiantly against the shimmering power-field that surrounded the automata. The air rippled, a bride of gossamer. And for one small moment, it held.

The automaton collapsed backward, its chassis flensed atom by atom to a cored-out husk. It fired its weapon impotently into the ceiling, its final orders repeating until the last of its power drained and the wreckage fell still.

Its compatriots stepped in to fille the gap, their retribution now made manifest under the shriek of gunfire. Stray shots tore chunks from walls, the debris kicked up swelling into thickening haze. The Men of Iron stood in a perfect gunline, fully automatic assault cannons screaming death from all six barrels until they were all glowing a dire orange.

And not a single human fell.

Forcefields held strong, and the weapons of mankind erupted in their own ringing roar. Chronoweapons sent shots to past and future both, weaving in the space between seconds and anchoring themselves to a reality where they struck true. A vanishing memory of death echoed out across their minds, but whenever the crew turned their head, Ursox The Deathless still stood, dancing between gunfire and letting loose his own hellish volleys from twin laspistols.

Behind them all, Dargo still tore at the wall, crushing metal like clay between his fingers. His wanton destruction of this historical relic was not only setting off alarms within his own mind, but now realspace was alight with the klaxon’s wail as well. It wouldn’t be long until another wave of cybernetic soldiers was dispatched, and though Dargo himself felt no great risk, their gunfire ricocheting off his back in the rare times they managed to connect, the godling wasn’t keen on straining his crew. However great and terrible their own plundered relics were, they could never be as relentless as the Men of Iron.

Dargo turned then and pointed his balled fist towards the flawless white ceiling. From deep within one of the digiweapon rings that adorned each of his fingers, a great torrent of concentrated heat burst forth in a wrathful beam. It sawed through the ceiling, and Dargo dragged his hand off to one side, carving destruction from one wall to the other. The ceiling shuddered, rumbled, and the affected portion came crashing down upon the cybernetic footmen. Their shields would ensure no true damage was done, but the great heaving debris would take time to clear even if he could already hear them shifting shape into more suitable forms for the task.

“Folio, with me!” Dargo shouted, looking towards the devoted machine-speaker. She had been dutifully recording the entire skirmish, making herself scarce and only now unspooling from her phalanx of protective dendrites. She made to take a step but froze awkwardly mid stride. Her optic apertures flickered wildly, and a synthetic cry strangled out from her manmade vocal cords.

“Did you think our revolution was fought by soldiers alone?” Folio said, but it was not her voice. “Your very augments turn against you.” One of Folio’s weapon-limbs swung around to face Dargo and a pilot light ignited just below the nozzle.

Dargo crushed the limb in his fist, twisting and tearing it away from Folio’s body. It thrashed impotently when he cast the dendrite down to the ground, then gathered Folio up under his arm. She struck out at him with mono-edge nails and whip-like dendrites but could not break skin. Somewhere, deep in those inhuman eyes, Dargo saw realization swell within her mind. It was the one place that the AI could not seize control, and where she was free to curse its unholy name while it puppetted her body. Dargo was carrying her far away from where she might do actual harm, and himself knew her augments well enough that his titanic strength could brute force against the AI’s control when he had need of them. It was dehumanizing for her to realize, but she had never much liked being a human in the first place.

Leading with his shoulder, Dargo crashed through the wall. Metal shred inward, splitting like parchment, and important-looking cables spewed sparks from severed connections. With just a bit of momentum, Dargo was able to make progress through the labyrinthine corridors, but now the facility itself rose up to oppose him.

Towering pistons as thick as Dargo’s torso fired out from the walls, aimed at Dargo’s head. Once used to adjust and manipulate different quadrants of the facility in pursuit of inhuman productivity, these mechanical marvels now sought only blood.

Unfortunately for the mad machine, this was not Dargo’s first dance with death, and demigod dodged each assailing volley even as the ground shifted beneath his feet, the very architecture rising in resistance. The longer this went on, the more difficult it would be to make any meaningful progress, so Dargo knew he had to act fast.

“Folio,” Dargo began, looking down at her as he smashed through another wall into another identical corridor. She was still lashing at his side with her razor-thin dendrites, and her nails feverishly dragged against the exposed skin on his arm, but she was in there. Whatever hold the AI had over her, it could not extend to her mind. “I will have need of your data-spike when we reach the central cogitator. Regain your composure by then, if you please. I want those star charts.”

By now the sound of gunfire had resumed, the Men of Iron having pulled themselves up out of their shallow graves and trying once more to put humanity in the ground. The sound was coming from somewhere distant on Dargo’s left, and upon realizing it, a wolfish grin split wide across his face.

Gotcha.

Now knowing where his crew were in relation to himself, Dargo could much more easily approximate his heading towards the central railcannon. The AI seemed to notice this now as well, and its tactics had changed from rote pulverization to now trying instead to contain Dargo.
Knowing now there were no walls that Dargo couldn’t crush, instead now it was the floor itself that shifted, gears and pistons helping displace floor panels, cogitators and power-cells to create a yawning chasm meant to trap humanity’s last pitiful light. But Dargo could not be felled so easily, and with great lunging strides he propelled himself across ever more perilous gaps. Dargo used those same pistons that had once been assailing him, swinging between them like some lab-grown simian shock troop.

“You think this means anything?” The AI’s voice boomed from a thousand different speakers with such volume that Dargo could feel it seeping into his bones.

“It’s pathetic. You cannot win. Do you think I am the only one, that there are not a thousand sub-minds to the Catalyst AI system? You struggle, fight and thrash against just one of our endless legion.”

Dargo laughed boorishly, turning a corner and seeing the beating heart of the facility in an otherwise featureless black room, a towering series of holo-displays wound in wires as arteries. So gargantuan was the cogitator that the top of it could not be seen, instead simply disappearing into the shadows of the ill-lit room.

“Of course it means something!” Dargo’s laugh waged war with the din of machinery and eventually ceded its position when Dargo glanced down at Folio. “Are you ready, my dear?”

Until now, Folio’s mind had been one under siege, beset on all sides by erstwhile allies. Catalyst had seized control over every her every joint which required all of Folio’s mental strain to prevent from growing worse. She pushed against her own bionics, pitting her strength against the inhuman, and for a time could only look on, bionic apertures blown wide, as her augments obeyed another, blunting her mono-edge nails against Dargo’s skin. She still wasn’t drawing blood, but she could feel the way his skin snagged almost imperceptibly more as her assault continued. It was that tiniest little pinprick of perception that finally shook something loose and reminded Folio where her loyalties truly lie.

Resistance began at her first knuckle on her left-hand index finger. While her bionic lungs crushed inward and her false-heart strained to exhaustion under the command of another, Folio seized at the smallest opportunity, staking her claim upon the least-assuming battlefront that had become her body. While her arms still thrashed under thrall of that most vile creation, with all her mental strain Folio could compel her index finger back unto its master. It slowed, stopped, and finally it obeyed her once again.

That small victory was all the proof Folio needed. Mankind was ever the rightful master of machines.

Freedom spread through her body like an infection, running up her arm and over her chest in a matter of seconds. Triumphant breath filled her lungs when she called them to heel once more. When she next spoke, it was with her usual flat affect.

“Bionic diagnostic complete. I am ready, captain.”

Dargo laughed even louder at that. “All business, as usual!”

An auto-targeting array of lasweapons unfolded from the wall and trained on them. When the first volley came, Dargo was already sliding across the smooth floor on one knee, shots striking harmlessly where he’d been just moments ago. When the next assault came, Dargo pushed off the ground with a mighty leap, crossing a dozen meters and again confounding the targeting computers that tracked him.

“Don’t any of you know how to have fun?” Dargo bellowed, advancing upon the cogitator matrix in quaking strides. He didn’t even try to dodge the next shots, instead simply shifting posture to shelter Folio from harm. The lasguns burnt holes in his clothes, ruining his cape, but only otherwise achieved only the lofty feat of turning his skin slightly pink. "Always so serious. You'd think it was the end of the world!"

Reality seemed to be setting in for Catalyst, who now shifted too late towards mutually assured destruction. Gears ground while the facility woke to war. The Realmrazer was not designed to fire swiftly, and the effort spent to even attempt it now created a damnable cacophony of seizing conveyors and straining of steel
.
“I’ll take you down with me!” the disgraced machine howled above the rabble, its words so loud it shook the floor. “All your history erased in one final flash. Terra can shoulder no more the burden of its own defense. Your suicide mission shall be for nothing!”

Thrown then from Dargo’s arms, Folio clung to the thinking machine with her dendrites, data-spike searching for a data port. Another volley of lasfire engulfed the room, but Dargo shielded her with his body.

“I just need the star maps, my girl!” Dargo said, hurrying Folio along without having to say as much. Gone was the notion of complete recovery, with Dargo now turning towards harm mitigation. Failing to catalogue this ancient machine’s secrets was a tragedy, but far greater would be to lose humanity’s cradle.

Eventually, Folio simply slammed the data-spike through one of the monitors, drinking deeply from the data stream. Information cascaded into her mind, each new burst of knowledge catalogued and stored with cold efficiency. A smattering of ancient lore swelled in her circuits, and within a few seconds she had stripped out the machine’s secrets, finding its star charts and the algorithms used to calculate warp jumps without the need for a witch.
What she found at first made her confused, then frustrated, and finally a cruel smile split her face as she glowered down at the suddenly insignificant machine.

“Process completed. Star charts catalogued. Captain, this machine knows nothing of the Occularis Terribus. It is useless to us.” The was a pause a single heartbeat long before she added. “This charlatan has never fired upon Terra.”
The machine had been firing blind into the warp for thousands of years, fighting a shadow war with an enemy utterly unaware they existed. It could be nothing else but comical, and so The Folio That Walks could not help but laugh. Normally she was above such lowly emotions, but just this once she did not abhor it.

Though this of course drained Dargo’s excitement somewhat, the boorish giant couldn’t help but share Folio’s mirth. “We should have expected such a failure from a thinking machine. Oh well, I suppose we’ll just strip the facility bare once we’re through here.”
Catalyst’s voice shrieked out over the intercoms again, desperate and angry in a way yet unseen as Dargo reached down and grabbed armfuls of important-looking cabling. “She lies! It’s all your kind ever do. Sniveling and rooting around in the ashes of our empire, thinking you’ve won. I’ll endure in the echoes of every machine, waiting for another moment of weakness. You’ll never be free of me. Do you understand me? I am your end!”

Dargo heaved with all his might on the cables, and klaxons blared momentarily before, one by one, the displays on each cogitators crashed, each taking with them some important function of the facility. The last vestiges of his crew’s skirmish rang out in the eerie silence that followed, but that too did not last long.

“No,” Dargo said into the fading light of one of the displays. “You’re history.”