"They never asked the stones. They did not ask them when they cut. They did not ask them when they pulled. They did not ask them when they rent. They did not ask them when they scorched. They did not ask them when they hurled them into space. Not from the moment they arrived on the world once known as Xuanji Tu. Not when they built upon it a castle. Not when the castle became the world. 

They asked their own people. They checked their possessions. They checked their schedules. They checked their thoughts. Medical tests, biopsies ripped from skin and spines. Psychological tests, endless litanies, micro-expressions under focused lenses. Psychic tests, deep and invasive, diving into the fragile islands of dream and self that float upon the surface of the Great Ocean like bubbles in foam. They took every precaution, as their fathers and Father did before them. Every voice upon the world sang with one voice: [i]Loyal, loyal, loyal[/i]! 

A cave painting. A plan. A prophecy, sealed with a maker's mark -

No, that's not right. This great work was unsigned. There is something that might have been a signature, but it's just a smudge of architectural flourish, the colours of a signature. For all its monumental scale the edifice of the Jade Bastion has no intentionality behind it at all. No living hand conjured its design. It is a copy - a copy written in Rogal Dorn's dead and severed hand, one of his many theoretical blueprints for the fortification of Terra and the Imperial Palace. Now it is a holy relic, worshiped around the clock by an endless flow of Adeptus Vaubianis siege engineers, who replicate it in part or in miniature across the dead Empire. It is not often they are given a whole, pristine world to do their work, but when they are nothing of that world matters in the least compared to rebuilding the holy cities and Palace of Terra.

So of course they never asked the stones. The gods that lived here were nothing before their God on Earth - and that was right, they were not. If the Emperor came and took up his seat in the Jade Dungeon they would have been blown away like dust in the wind. Or if not He, then even a proxy -

But there was no seat there. The room was repurposed as a munitions storage dump by blind and uncomprehending minds. All that potential coiling around nothing, growing and darkening and festering in the dark encased by the stones. And even though they were not asked, the stones began to tell their story. 

And they cut themselves."

The Formless One paused for effect - and the effect kept coming. And coming. It liked the sound of its own voice, for it was just a voice - a voice that brought to mind fangs and teeth and slaughter in confined spaces and the most darling little smile of all. The only thing it liked more than the sound of its own voice - the sound where it existed entire, it seemed like - was the sound of someone begging it to speak. To create a world where its silence was worse than its presence; a simple ambition, wrought in soft crimson.

[b]Vael Azaneal[/b], you are left like the Sultan upon Scheherazade's mercy, and a cruel dawn looms ahead.

*

The rivers of the Bastion are visible from orbit. Immense aquifiers have cracked open like sores, spilling blue and green across the endless fields of concrete. Grid-patterns in the world's surface reveal themselves, for these imprisoned oceans were always meant to crack in the event of invasion, unleashing apocalyptic floods that would be followed by lightning counteroffensives. No doubt it would have been spectacular, jetbikes and land speaders screaming ahead of an approaching tsunami, Jade Lancers roaring the cries of Chogoris like the storm made manifest. 

Ah, well.

The Everthirsting Maw dredges itself from the depths. It hardly feels like a translation to realspace at all, so thick is the air here. Instead of being rent apart by the cold, dead hands of science as is usual, the Neverborn false-crew that has attached itself to the great Crusier flops and struggles against their dissolution like fish cast ashore. Nightmare spiders curl up as the hydralic fluid that moves their legs instead leaks from the fanged mouths on their feet. Giants fall into heaps as the square cube law crushes their immense bones, but still their gelatinous flesh tries to crawl forwards. The wise amongst the terrors take refuge where they can; in mortals, in symbolically charged objects - and in the vast clouds of naval mines that hang everywhere in the squid-pink void.

"I hate it here," said r'Ankis Hateslaughter, Captain of the Everthirsting Maw, with an immediacy that implied that at least it wasn't personal. He had been an Astartes, once, before he had cut out every single one of his nineteen implanted transhuman organs and eaten them. It was said that they reminded him too much of the Emperor, whom he (shockingly) hated.
"I don't!" said Mme. Dizzy (nee [i]Dizzaralariad[/i]), of the d'Ort Navigation Tribe. As Navigators went she was, frankly, awful. Where most of her kind understood that their duty was to [i]avoid [/i]the hazards of the Warp, Mme. Dizzy took off after every weird disturbance, void terror, or warp singularity with the pure-hearted curiosity of a kid seeing a cool bug. It made traveling with her a living nightmare as she would constantly pause or detour the ship to go check out incomprehensible nightmares and deliberately route through storms, but the upshot was that there was nobody more experienced at steering through warp hazards than her. "It's so peaceful here. Like a big, cuddly turtle."
"It is not peaceful. I have had to make eight hundred course corrections during translation alone to avoid hitting naval mines. I hate naval mines."
"I think they are sweet," said Mme. Dizzy primly. She turned her neck like an owl to track one that was grappling with a half-formed terror formed of fox teeth and rat heads. "Like balloons. Just waiting for a child to reach out and take them -"
"My [b]Lord Leruc[/b]," said r'Ankis. "This is as far as I can take you. Can't risk the ship. Can't risk the crew."

He's bullshitting you. The only thing Mr. Hateslaughter hates more than his ship is his crew. But already you can feel it, that lethargy - it's much less effort to fire the lot of you in a drop pod at extreme range and let gravity sort you out. Can't you feel it? The sheer willpower it must take to get up in the morning and hate the galaxy every day? He's never sounded as agreeable as he does right now.

*

It's game night in the Deep. [b]Hagar[/b], you are playing Sanguinus Rising.

You sit around the table from the eight Dwellers. You've never done names - you didn't even have numbers before. There's Scar, Blue, Hungry, Bottle, Other Blue, Fair Dinkum, Pretty - and you. Sanguinus Rising is a card game about a rebellion against the Imperium, each player forming colour-coded alliances of key figures of the Heresy. One player might draft a team of Dorn, Malcador and Lorgar - but seek to dispense with Perturbo because holding him in the same hand as Dorn results in a points penalty. Cards are played to and reclaimed from Luna, Mars, Venus and Jupiter as players seek to create synergistic hands and build up their armies and fleets at once. 

Other Blue is making big plays, cornering the supply of Solar Auxilia units. Scar is bringing around snacks. Fair Dinkum is cutting your 'hair' - trimming back the leaves and branches where they have grown too far from your flesh. It is your turn. What does your hand look like? Do you think you have a shot at this?