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Ezekiel Member

STATUS: Sleeping before midnight is just a conspiracy theory started by big bed sheets anyway 3 mos ago
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3 mos ago
Current Sleeping before midnight is just a conspiracy theory started by big bed sheets anyway
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5 yrs ago
What's the worst thing about the Roleplayerguild and why is it the status bar?
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In Worlds Collide: A Merged Universe Superhero Roleplay → 7 days ago Forum: Casual Roleplay



The White Mountains, New Hampshire




“So, no dress?”


“You’ll be representing the US armed forces, it felt prudent you rock up in a ball gown.”


“Well, sounds like their loss.”
Carol replied, her legs swinging back and forth as she sat atop the nearest available space, which in this case, happened to be someone’s abandoned desk.


“Plus, it was suggested it would help highlight that most of anyone else there is just a celebrity of a sort, you’re the real deal, officially sanctioned, American hero. Apples and Oranges.” Jim, who by this point Carol had adopted as the human member of staff she could get the closest to a full conversation out of, was rather busy at his own desk, fixated on the scroll of data on his screen as he kept up the chatter with Carol.


“Makes sense, I suppose.”
Carol stood up with a stretch, taking a few steps away from the desk, thankfully otherwise unoccupied at this particular time.
“I’m surprised they’re even thinking to send me, not that I’m complaining.”
She paused to look around the main floor of the Project, mostly abandoned for now. With a pause on operations for the moment most staff had made themselves scarce with the opportunity to take some actual time off.


“There was some debate about whether this sanctions the general state of independent ‘heroes’ too much, but I think they decided it was worse for the Warbird to not take centre stage.” Jim finally turned from his screen, his swivel chair doing a full rotation before he aligned himself properly to look at her, just as Carol was ‘adjusting’ a few of the personal decorations on another desk.


"Centre stage, no dress."
Carol picked up a photo frame from the edge of the desk, tilted it toward the light. Jim, younger, an arm slung around someone in a Cardinals cap. She set it back exactly where it had been, corner aligned to the same faint dust-mark.


"Different stage, different rules." Jim didn't look up from the screen, though the corner of his mouth gave him away. "Nobody's asking you to twirl."


"Shame. I've been practicing. Cheer Captain and all that."
She drummed her fingers once against the desk, a short percussive burst, then let her hand fall still.


“You want some good news? I can tell you the canapés are supposed to be excellent.”


“Now that’s the kind of intel I signed up for.”


He huffed something like a laugh and turned back to his screen, fingers moving fast over the keys, the scroll of data collapsing line by line into whatever shape he needed it in. Carol drifted the rest of the floor while he worked, past desks gone quiet, a corkboard still pinned with someone’s half-finished rota, the hum of an idle server somewhere behind a wall. She didn’t sit back down. Standing gave her somewhere to put the restlessness that talking hadn’t used up.


“Alright.”
Jim straightened, keys clacking through one last save, then stood and rolled his shoulders with the particular satisfaction of a man closing out a task list. “Come on. Let's get you sorted before anyone official shows up to hover.”


He led her off the main floor, down a corridor she hadn’t had reason to walk before, key card raised to a door with no markings beyond a small printed number. It clicked open onto a room laid out like a tailor’s fever dream, garment bags hung along one wall, a rack of accessories catalogued with more care than the file cabinets out front. Front and centre, already lit like the room had been built around it, hung the outfit.


Navy shading into something closer to violet where the fabric folded, a deep-cut bodice with a neckline that left no ambiguity about the tactical decisions involved, gold at the cuffs and collar in the sort of ceremonial excess usually reserved for admirals who’d never seen a deck in their lives. Epaulettes caught the light in small starbursts. A single glove, fingerless at the knuckle, sat displayed on its own stand beside a belt heavy with braid and buckle.


"You don't like it?"


"Jury's out."
She was already reaching for the hanger.
"Give me a minute."


Jim took the hint and turned himself toward the door, suddenly very interested in something on his phone. Carol disappeared behind the changing screen in the corner, fabric rustling, a muttered string of words which could have been reaffirming cheer chant designed to deal with the struggle of trousers having to fit both hips and waist. When she stepped back out the jacket sat exactly as designed, collar closed high, every button doing its assigned job.


She caught her reflection in the mirror propped against the wall and stood there a moment, turning her shoulder one way, then the other.


"Right."
Her hands went to the top button.
"Vision needs a rewrite."


"Danvers—"


"Relax, I'm not setting anything on fire."
Three more buttons went with a slight flex of power, until the collar fell open into something that would've given whoever briefed her a minor cardiac event. She adjusted the fall of the lapel with two fingers, tugged the fabric flat, checked the new line in the mirror.
"There. Now no one is going to mistake me for the Rear Admiral."


"That's not exactly the read the Pentagon's going for."


"The Pentagon can’t prove I didn’t lose them in flight if you don’t tell them."
She shot him a wink over her shoulder before heading towards the doorway, sweeping past him, using a few inches of flight to easily pat him on the head as she left.
“I won’t rat if you don’t.”
Then she set the mask in place, a modified version of her warbird mask, matching the colours of the rest of her attire, a golden and dark blue masquerade mask with just the hint of an Aqualine shape. Masquerade in style, it was as much propaganda as a disguise.


She didn’t wait for any further reply from the man before she was back in the main chamber. She caught her own reflection in the dark screen of a computer. Suddenly thoughts of her brothers, her father, were competing for a place in her mind that had been momentarily thinking only of the night ahead. Doubts niggled along with them. You can never replace them a voice that sounded a little too much like her dearest father wormed its way among the memories, and she felt the sudden urge to cover herself back up.


After a moment’s pause, she frowned at her own reflection.


“Screw you too.”


Then she was back in the air, a rush of movement around her as she soared into and out of the flight tunnel, back into the mountain air.




The Therapeutix Gala



“Look Up!”


The crowds and reporters outside of the Gala had only a moment to behold the newborn golden star bursting into life above them before the Warbird touched down, practically among them, at the far end of the red carpet.


As Carol stood from a pose that was half-kneeling, half a runner’s pose from where she had landed her eyes, hands and feet still burned with the same golden light, slowly easing to allow human eyes to discount the brightness and see the woman within. As she threw a casual salute to the stunned masses, that very same moment of suspense burst into cheers from the crowd and the clamouring of reporters for the best angle. Instead, Carol paused to take a few pictures with a few of the crowd screaming the loudest, before making her way towards the Gala entrance proper, her golden light slowly bleeding away as she did so.
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 8 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay



The Solar System: The Bucephalus




Plutonian High Orbit - The Kthonic Warp Gate



The bridge of the Bucephalus was less a chamber of war and more a canvas of exploration and conquest, built to observe and orchestrate the cold, terrifying geometry of the stars. It existed as a vast, echoing expanse of polished obsidian and gold, making those who stood upon the deck feel like small, transient ghosts within an ancient machine. The air remained pressurized and frigid, carrying the sharp, sterile scent of ozone and the heavy, metallic musk of millions of cooling circuits. There was no true silence aboard such a craft, insectile chittering of data-servitors hard-wired into the peripheral bulkheads, their unending calculations forming a low-frequency hum that vibrated deep within the marrow of one’s bones.


When the forward armored shutters pulled back, the bridge ceased to be an enclosure and became a great tapestry. The vast viewing port revealed the absolute, uncaring majesty of the void. To stand on that bridge was to know that one was at the spearhead of a species; the surety that the galaxy was about to be remade in the image of the master who loomed, silent and absolute, at the center of it all.


“My Emperor and Omnissiah, the Fleets are in position. We await your command.” The near-human features of Magos Omah were cast down to avoid looking into the features of the Emperor. When she had first looked upon the Master of Mankind her features had been flesh and blood, now, her face was set in a near-porcelain mask of her mortal features. It was advanced enough work that such features still moved in the flexible manner of biological matter, without the failing of deterioration. Even still, as if she were still that Adept who had first observed the Unification, she felt the burn of anxiety across her skin. Even if she was convinced of the divine benevolence of the being before her, she still felt anxious relief at being dismissed by the wave of a hand.


The Emperor took his seat upon the command throne, even to a being such as he, the act of interfacing with the psychic channeling matrix that sat at the heart of the great and ancient vessel flared as a prickle of power beneath his own skin. From his mind’s eye he beheld the guiding light that reached out from him, from his vessel, to the Navigator guides of the fleet throughout the Sol system. Most were gathered at two distinct points, around the Kthonic and Elysian Gates. These ancient and dormant structures had once connected the heart of a great empire to the wider galaxy. Soon, they would do so again.


In the long centuries of Long Night they had only sparingly been activated, usually to disgorge alien threats into Sol, rather than carry humanity across the stars as they had been designed. Clearing and harnessing them back into their designed positions had been costly campaigns in their own right. Now they would direct the flow of these first great conflicts. Smaller collections of craft were spread out around Sol, further afield from the heart of the system, intent on more modest journeys, but still pushing the boundaries of this new Imperium.


The Emperor extended his mental presence yet further, reaching out from his flagship. The great power of his mind brushed across both gates. Ancient circuits began to burn with power, and now, compelled by the mind of Sol’s ruler, split the skin of reality itself. Where a warp drive would punch a cumbersome wound through reality, these ancient devices sliced reality like a honed blade, allowing the bruise of unreality to mar the view of the stars through their great arches.


“Hail the fleet.” His first spoken words broke his lips as his mind returned to the great shell it inhabited, not waiting for a return of affirmation as his will was done without thinking.


“Fleets of the Imperium, you are assembled, the mightiest armada since our galaxy fell into darkness and despair, for our great purpose.” Across a thousand, thousand craft the voice of the Emperor resounded. “You have fought long already, yet your Emperor requires more of you. Only through our actions will our galaxy be made right. Only through our sacrifice will our future be made secure. Only through our victory can humanity triumph.” Across the vast span of space new stars were born as the collective fleets of the Sol system prepared to launch themselves beyond the boundaries of their cradle.


“Do this, and my promise to you is greater still. The Stars are humanity’s birthright, Let It Be So.”
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 8 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
E I R A L D A F J A L L B O R I N N

E I R A L D A F J A L L B O R I N N

"By My Voice Have Mountains Trembled and Empires Knelt."



A P P E A R A N C E
_________________________________________________________


It is meant to be that all scions of the Emperor have an overworldly charisma, often possessing features which are at once fair and terrifying to mortal humans. It is not hard to understand why many might consider them divine, falling from the heavens to walk among mortals so clearly their lesser. Eiralda is all this and more, a stunning figure carved from the myths and legends of her homeworld.

Her features are pristine to a manner that can unnerve as much as it can enrapture, rarely doing just one. Her hair is a golden blonde, traditionally worn in a great braid signifying her mastery of her people and homeworld, writ through with decorative bands. Her skin, pale as most Fenrisians, is often decorated with markings, but they rarely last long, returning as surely as the landscapes of her homeland to pristine snow. Beauty belies the truth of strength, for any born of Fenris, let alone a scion of the Emperor. While perhaps it may be less obvious than some of her siblings, this power is still clear.

D E T A I L S
_________________________________________________________
Legion Name: The Chosen of Asaheim
Homeworld: Fenris
Psyker Grade: Gamma

C O N C E P T
________________________________________________________________________________________
Primarch Concept:
A Warrior Born: Like all her siblings, Eiralda has a great capacity and ability for combat, although this ability has been honed even more greatly by the conditions of Fenris. To live on Fenris is to hunt or die, and there are beasts to challenge even a scion of the Emperor across the valleys of Asaheim or the ever-changing seas of the rest of the planet. Soul-Scryer: Eiralda is a being of great supernatural empathy, the most common manifestation of the psychic gifts present in her portion of the Emperor's being. With some deliberate focus, she can skein the thoughts of others, but more passively she can generally 'feel' the emotions of beings around her. She has been known to have visions of the past of others when meeting them, although this is unbidden. The exact veracity of all aspects of this ability can at times be questioned. War Shout: Taught to her by the Stormspeakers of Fenris, Eiralda is able to channel a combination of her physical might and psychic power into a disruptive warcry of force, one that can not only physically stun opponents, but also disrupts the energies of the Warp while doing so.



A planet of fire and ice, Fenris orbits its sun once every 3-4 Terran years. During the summer months volcanoes erupt, burning great areas with lava flows and churning the seas, spreading great floods and tidal waves. As the planet enters its long winter, the temperature drops so far that most of it actually ices over, giving the planet the appearance of a snowball from orbit. Apart from a single area of the planet that is permanently land-locked, Fenris is a world of shifting geography and mostly oceans. Numerous asteroid strikes, mutable coastlines and even swiftly risen or sunk island masses have resulted in the population becoming one of largely nomadic barbarian tribes. The tribes constantly seek secure territory, and as a result skirmishes and feuds over land between rival tribes are common. The people are hardened to the changes in temperature and extremes, and so is the fauna. The only continent that remains constant is Asaheim.

The central sea of Fenris is the Savage Sea or Worldsea, home to most of the planet's wildlife, most of which are vicious sea creatures. Nonetheless the sea provides most of the planet's inhabitants with their food. The people of Fenris fall into four groups, with three being notably larger than the fourth. The largest static populations of the land are on Asaheim, known as Lowlanders due to inhabiting the only permanently habitable valleys of Fenris' one stable continent. They have traditionally been seen as weaker by the other more nomadic populations, a generally unfair assessment as while the climate is more stable, this also draws greater predators to the same regions. As Eiralda's actions across Fenris come to fruition, the Lowlanders will hold increasing sway over Fenris, blessed as they are by more regular interactions with the Mountain-Born.

Most of the rest of the population of Fenris falls into two nomadic groups, the Glacial Nomads and the Islanders. These two groups both live on the vast changing expanse of the Worldsea, although their means of surviving it vary greatly. Glacial Nomads follow the great shifting plains of ice across the world, Summering in Asaheim when the rest of the World is too unstable due to the rising heat. The Islanders, instead, roam from volcanic island to volcanic island on Dragonships. Both must deal with the ever-present danger of both hostile wildlife and the environment.

The final, and smallest group, of the human population, are the Iron Islanders, a more technologically advanced society that dwells on the island chain of the same name, a set of islands that has proven as permanent, if far smaller, than Asaheim. There is a further culture upon, or in this case, within, Fenris. Beneath the mountains, living among the abandoned shelters of Fenris first colonisation, are the Nightgangers, a sub-human mutant species in thrall to foul gods.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 19 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
I would be interested in joining, but I am wondering if I have to join the discord, @Ezekiel


The discord is used for a lot of collaboration and discussion of concepts so it would probablt be a struggle to play without it.
In Dispatch: Heroes of Claremont → 20 days ago Forum: Casual Roleplay


H O L L Y W O O D B O U N D

Friday · Evening · Limousine

(( ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴꜱ: @FourtyTwo/Lightning Girl, @SonnetNSunbeam/Asteroid ))

The bottle had already been opened by the time anyone else noticed it existed. Nadia had it by the neck and a glass half-poured before Lightning Girl and Asteroid had finished gushing about the sunroof, settling back into leather that gave just enough to feel expensive. Her wings spread the width of the rear seat, feathers draping over the seatback and trailing across where a fourth passenger would have sat if the car had been built for ordinary people. People might complain about peacocking, but it seemed only fair when you had the feathers for it.

"Love the ostrich feathers on your gown — they really take it to the next level."

She turned her head toward Asteroid even as she was taking her first gulp of champagne, sitting forward slightly as she did. A smile touched her lips the moment the glass was gone. “Just some donations from a few friends.” If she was talking about the feathers, the diamonds, or the dress as whole she didn’t clarify, but she did raise one long arm above her head in a pose at the secondary mouthed comment. Nadia was certainly well used to attention, and compliments, but it was something she rarely lost her appetite for.

When it came to it, she had long practiced the art of extracting herself from the door way of a limo despite the span of her wings. If anything, it added to the dramatic flair of her arrival, her feathers tucked briefly as close to her back as they could, before flaring outwards as she stood. The golden accents of her wings glimmering almost as brightly as the diamonds of her gown in the light of flashing lenses.



T H E G A L A F L O O R

Friday · Evening · Gala Ballroom

(( ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴꜱ: @FourtyTwo/Lightning Girl, @cosmiccowgirl/Blackstar ))

The room did what rooms like it were built to do — chandeliers throwing everything in gold, a singer who actually deserved the stage, a hundred people pretending they weren't watching each other's entrances. Nadia let herself be watched. It was, after all, the point of the dress.

Lightning Girl's question came in sideways, half teasing, half genuinely fishing."Ikret, what did you do to piss Valerie off? Please tell me this isn't a long running thing."

Nadia acquired a new drink for herself from a passing tray, downing the contents of the flute and setting it back before the waiter even had time to pass on. “What can I say? Admiration turns to jealousy quickly in this business.” She replied with a slight tease and purr of her words. It was an obvious none-answer, but she wasn’t really in the mood to dig into her past right now. She certainly had enough of it.

As she began to make her way to their table, some amount of danger sense flared up for her just to avoid the knock on impact of Blackstar’s approach. Blackstar nearly came apart at the seams trying not to spill a tray of champagne down her front, catching the glass with the kind of reflexes that suggested the near-miss bothered her more than it should have.

"Yikes, sorry, that was close. Uh — do you want this? I'm assuming it's champagne — I don't drink. If not that's fine!"

Nadia took it from her without comment on the rescue, the crisis already filed under things too minor to acknowledge twice. "Waste not." She sipped, unhurried.

"Your dress is stunning, by the way. I've never seen one like that. Those, uh — are those real diamonds?"

"They are." She let her wings shift slightly, catching the light along the cutouts at her hips, an answer in itself. Her eyes roamed over Blackstar for a moment, clocking that the frantic nature was a rather total thing, not just the result of a near-collision. A more gentle smile graced her features, and she leaned in closer. “It’s on loan from an agent..well, my ex-agent, so it’s sort of an ex-loan.” She giggled. The act of drawing closer wasn’t just to whisper, with Blackstar in close, the shining beacon that was Nadia and all her wing span was a rather considerable body block for incoming attention. “You look grand as well, trust me, these things become a lot more enjoyable once you work out just how much better we are than half the room.” She winked, the more mischievous nature returning to her expression.

Making their way to the table, it wasn’t long before there was a more direct interruption.

"Oh — I heard stories of you. You were in DTLA a while ago, I believe? Ikra?" Calliope had a way of standing that made everyone around her look slightly unfinished by comparison. Nadia recognised something underneath the toga and the wine and the deliberate poetry — the nature of someone who'd been wearing a mortal shape for a long time and had gotten good at it. She kept that recognition exactly where it belonged, which was nowhere visible.

“Aw, the pretending not to know my name thing was probably cute in 1205,” Nadia teased back. Her tone was less melodic than Calliope, but it was honeyed all the same. Perhaps in the same way too much honey ended up being a poison all on its own.

"She has wings like those of a man I knew a long, long time ago. Flew too close to the sun and had them burnt. And now here as a Phoenix, regrown from the ashes. A falcon from fire."

"Different bird. Different sun. I tend to come back from things rather than fall from them." She let that sit, unbothered, sipping her champagne.

"Anyway, that dress should be back with your agent. You are brave — or hoping someone would notice you and your wingspan."

"They notice regardless, I don’t need a dress to do that.” Ikret wasn’t above a little childish sabotage, and even as they spoke, the gentle drift of her wings would touch and brush shoulders around her, an aura of distraction she wielded in any social situation.

Calliope's smile didn't move, but something behind it sharpened, the conversational equivalent of a blade turning to find an angle. "You are seen. Who are you trying to charm? Eyes on someone? Or you want to be a big deal again after what you did? I thought this sort of thing you wouldn't go to."

“Oh you see, you’re wrong there. How are you supposed to get an invite to the after party if you aren’t at the party?” Ikret smiled, all teeth with their slightly too sharp edges. “I’m not here for anyone, everyone is here for me.” She winked, not quite defining if she was joking or not.

The distraction of Calliope while not long term, had been enough that ‘someone’ had slipped through the protective shield of ‘bird lady’ to get at Blackstar while her attention was elsewhere, and so she turned her attention on Liberty as the intense mid-west hero brought her full yee-haw ADHD routine down on the shy Blackstar.

“Liberty! If it isn’t the second best rack in the room.” Ikra beamed with enthusiasm that was all Hollywood glamour and not much sincerity. Ikret leant into Blackstar with a stage whisper. “Don’t tell them anything, you’ve got them running scared with those numbers.” Of course, Nadia would be lying if she claimed to have actually checked any of her new team’s numbers before, but she could fake sudden camaraderie with the best of them.
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 21 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
My bad, here's one that works!

https://discord.gg/uetxuZBByv
In Alternate Great Crusade and Horus Heresy Warhammer 40,000 RP → 21 days ago Forum: Advanced Interest Checks


It is a time of legend.

Mankind huddles upon Terra, scarred by the long age of Old Night, when ignorance and savagery reigned across a galaxy that once bowed to their whims. But a new power has arisen. The Emperor of Mankind, who has thrown down the warlords of his birthworld and now turns his gaze to the glaxy beyond.

A Great Crusade is declared. Vast fleets are mustered, their holds filled with newly-raised Legions of Space Marines. Warriors bred from the Emperor's own hand, stronger and swifter than any soldier of old, though yet untested in the wars to come.

Scattered across the galaxy, lost in infancy or hidden by fate's cruel hand, the Primarchs, the Emperor's most precious creations, are yet to be found. Without their gene-sires to lead them, the Legions march under proxy commanders, their potential as yet unrealized.

Ahead lies a galaxy unconquered: countless alien empires, shattered human civilisations fractured by millennia of isolation, and horrors older than mankind's first steps to the stars. Compliance is no certainty. Every world must be won, by compliance where possible, by annihilation where necessary.

This is not yet an age of golden citadels and recorded triumphs. It is the first march into the dark. The opening chapter of a war that will remake the galaxy. The Emperor leads with one promise above all others, the Stars shall be ours.


Just a plug for the RP!

From Ashes We Rise has now completed the epic tale of the Unification Wars and is now stepping forth into the Great Crusade with a shiny new thread. We have a few Primarch / Legion spaces available if people wish to apply for those. We are also generally accepting new players in other roles that they may wish to play.

Thread Links


New Thread!]

Unification War Thread

Primarch Homeworlds / Wider Galaxy Threads

Our discord can be found here: https://discord.gg/rWZ7aJpTyb
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 21 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay


It is a time of legend.

Mankind huddles upon Terra, scarred by the long age of Old Night, when ignorance and savagery reigned across a galaxy that once bowed to their whims. But a new power has arisen. The Emperor of Mankind, who has thrown down the warlords of his birthworld and now turns his gaze to the glaxy beyond.

A Great Crusade is declared. Vast fleets are mustered, their holds filled with newly-raised Legions of Space Marines. Warriors bred from the Emperor's own hand, stronger and swifter than any soldier of old, though yet untested in the wars to come.

Scattered across the galaxy, lost in infancy or hidden by fate's cruel hand, the Primarchs, the Emperor's most precious creations, are yet to be found. Without their gene-sires to lead them, the Legions march under proxy commanders, their potential as yet unrealized.

Ahead lies a galaxy unconquered: countless alien empires, shattered human civilisations fractured by millennia of isolation, and horrors older than mankind's first steps to the stars. Compliance is no certainty. Every world must be won, by compliance where possible, by annihilation where necessary.

This is not yet an age of golden citadels and recorded triumphs. It is the first march into the dark. The opening chapter of a war that will remake the galaxy. The Emperor leads with one promise above all others, the Stars shall be ours.


OOC Information


This RP is an alternate reality based on the setting of Warhammer 40,000 and it's origin stories, the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. From Ashes We Rise has now completed the story of the Unification Wars, and so we now look outwards to the wider galaxy.

With the dawn of the Great Crusade. The Unification Wars of Terra have been resolved, and the first Legions of Space Marines, are beginning to carry the Emperor's word out among the stars.

Meanwhile, on far flung planets, the Primarchs, the Emperor's first secret geneproject, find themselves cast across the galaxy. Unaware of their birthright, these beings, utterly superior to the humanity from which they were created, will define the future of their worlds and many more, should they survive to once again meet their father and his growing empire.

There are two main options for characters in this RP. Players can take on the act of creating an Astartes Legion and their Primarch, playing the former as they range across the stars in service of the Crusade, and the latter upon their isolated homeworld until the day they are found and brought into the fold. The second option is to play as a character serving the Crusade itself, be they an officer of the Imperial Army, an adept of the Mechanicum, a member of the Administratum's compliance apparatus, or a native of a newly-conquered world finding their place within the growing Imperium. As time passes in the RP it is likely mortal characters will change, for this is a dangerous era and life is never guarenteed. Thus, instead of players taking on individual characters, you may opt to play a household of characters, represent a sub-faction of a world, or a role within the new Imperial society which will grow and change as the rp carries on. The scope for who or what you want to write is pretty vast.

The only major change at the onset of the game is that the Emperor's gene warriors, be they Custodes, Thunder Warriors, Astartes or Primarchs, are not gender locked. This is not a comment on the canon situation, but just something that myself and the previous writers of Grim Crusade prefer as an exploration of an alternate setting.

Our discord can be found here: https://discord.gg/uetxuZBByv

Rules/Errata:


1. The Era which the RP starts in is the dawn of the Great Crusade, shortly after the Unification Wars have concluded and the Emperor's fleets first set out from Terra, an endeavor that in canon began during the late 30th millennium and lasted two centuries. The aim of the rp is to carry on through the Crusade and into the Heresy itself, but this is not to a set length of time IC or OOC. Characters will be born, live and die over the course of events and so I'd recommend the best way to engage with the rp is to expect to play a flexible suite of characters that will change over time.

2. Participation in the RP requires an acceptance that I as the GM will provide 'encounter' scenarios to your characters and/or factions. How these are dealt with is still a collaborative storytelling process but they cannot simply be ignored or hand waved. These will not always take the form of collabs and may be more of a prompt for you to run with, but the commitment to fulfilling them is still the same.

3. Players in this RP have a mixture of familiarity with the setting, don't neccesarily presume people are as informed as you. Feel free to be helpful, but not condescending, and ultimately my call on any lore matters is final.

4. Other than interactions with GM NPCs and GM provided events/encounters the scope of the RP is quite vast, players are encouraged to forge their own narratives within the remit provided, be they solo or (ideally) collaborations with other players. This isn't an RP with a regimented structure beyond the overall narrative, be prepared to take your own plots in hand.

5. Activity: This is an advanced game with a slower posting cadence, but especially at the onset I wish to set an expectation of engagement. Ideally players will be able to post every two weeks as an expectation. Exceptions do apply both ways, someone playing a relatively minor, isolated plotline can anticipate a more relaxed schedule expectation, while those who take on key characters in the narrative will be expected to do more than the minimum in order to not have the rp flounder. IRL matters are of course more important, extended absences should simply be discussed with the GM.

6. The usual rules of be nice, don't take IC conflict as an OOC issue and listen/abide by the GM.

7. Players who are carrying on with the game from the previous thread will need to repost their character sheets here, updated to the new format. Primarchs who are no longer in play and their legions are not canon to the game, although the actions their legions took in the Unification War are considered to have still happened, with murky details that can be adopted by remaining legions / new ones.





Existing Thread Links


Unification War Thread

Primarch Homeworlds / Wider Galaxy Threads
In From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP → 21 days ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
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In From Ashes We Rise : The Imperium Is Born → 1 mo ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay



Ursh: The Blade Falls




Kazzig-Sohn



Kazzig-Sohn felt the familiar, wet heat of his own organs failing. His reinforced heart stuttered, a rhythmic percussion of genetic decay. It didn't matter, he breathed it in like a tonic.


He swung a massive, notched power-blade, shattering the ribcage of an Urshite "Ogre-Thall." The Thunder Warriors were not built for finesse, but they could out duel these monstrosities at any juncture.


"Lightning! Raptors!" he roared, the sound more a beast's baying than a man's cry.


Around him, his brothers were a whirlwind of bronze and crimson. They were the Emperor's first magnificent and murderous. He saw a squad of the "First" moving with a cold efficiency nearby. Kazzig felt a flicker of resentment. That flicker was soon suppressed by a surge of killing desire as he plunged back into the fray.




The First



The warrior moved through the smoke. His gray, unadorned power armor was caked in the black soot of Urshite pyres. He did not feel the manic blood-lust of the Thunder Warriors. He felt nothing but the mission.


He raised his rifle and fired three-round bursts into the aperture of a bunker.


"Target suppressed. Advancing to the primary stairwell."


He stepped over a pile of dead Urshite priests. Their sorcery had tried to flay his mind, but his conditioning held. He was a weapon of logic in a world of madness. He glanced at a Thunder Warrior nearby who was laughing as he tore a man apart with his bare hands. Obsolete, the Astartes thought.




Valdor



Valdor stood at the threshold of the citadel. He regarded the carnage: the dying Thunder Warriors, the cold efficiency of the new Astartes, and the broken bodies of the Imperial Army.


He checked the chronometer on his HUD. The breach was behind schedule by forty-two seconds.


"Clear the hall," Valdor commanded. His voice was a calm, resonant anchor in the screaming chaos. "The Master of Mankind approaches. Let no filth remain to witness His arrival."


He stepped forward, the Apollonian Spear spinning in a lethal arc. The Unification was nearly done. The Old Night was ending, and the dawn of the Imperium was beginning to rise over the corpses of the tyrants.




Elara



Elara's hands were shaking so violently she had to tie them to the vox-caster's frame. Around her, the 44th didn't exist anymore. They had been caught in a lingering sorcerous trap.


To her left, her Lieutenant was frozen in a scream, his body suspended in a pocket of slowed time where a single second took a century to pass. To her right, her squad-mates had aged into dust in a heartbeat, their flak-armor collapsing into piles of gray ash.


"Command... this is... 44th," she wheezed into the receiver. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and rot. "Sector 9-G is... We didn't reach the walls. We didn't even see the enemy."


There was no reply. She felt like a ghost, her own skin began to wither and peel away. She didn't pull back. There was nowhere left to go.




Hallow



There were no beds left, only cold, oil-slicked earth. Hallow moved between the rows of the broken, his narthecium kit empty of everything but a dull cauterizing iron.


He stopped before a young girl, hardly twenty, who had been blinded by the last grasp of Urshite sorcery. Her eyes were just pits of black glass.


"Can you... can you see the Emperor?" she whispered, clutching his blood-stained sleeve. "I always wanted to —."


Hallow looked out the tent flap. He saw the Citadel burning. He saw the Thunder Warriors executing the wounded Urshite prisoners in the distance. He saw the massive, utilitarian troop-transports landing to take the "viable" survivors to the next front.


"Yes, child," Hallow lied, his heart a cold stone in his chest. "The Emperor fights with us now."


As he moved to the next man, whose legs had been fused into his own armor by a plasma-leak, Hallow realized he couldn't remember the names of the last hundred people he'd watched die. Ursh knew it was dying, but it had conspired to take as many true sons and daughters of mankind with it as it screamed into the Abyss.


Hallow only had a few further moments to contemplate the futility of it all before the final gasp of Kalagann's artillery annihilated him, along with the kilometer square of the medical station.




Jhen



Jhen's boots slipped on something that wasn't mud. It was a slurry of melted snow, spent brass, and the gray, pulpy remains of her platoon. Of the sixty hussars who had entered the gorge, only four remained. They were huddled in a shallow crater created by a redirected orbital strike, pinned down by a turret that hummed with a sound that made Jhen's teeth feel like they were vibrating out of her gums.


"Fix... fix bayonets," Jhen croaked. Her vox-caster was dead. Her lascarbine was whining, the power pack depleted to a useless flicker.


Across the ridge, the Urshite defenders, beings that had once been human but were now elongated, multi-limbed horrors clad in jagged scrap-iron, began to descend. They skittered, their movements twitchy and predatory. Jhen knew the end. She had seen it a thousand times in this long, wretched war. They would be flayed alive to fuel whatever darkness lived at the heart of the citadel.


"For Terra," she whispered, a hollow prayer to a leader she had only ever seen as a golden dot on a distant balcony.


A blur of auric light descended from the heights above, striking the center of the Urshite pack with the force of a falling comet.


Jhen blinked, her vision blurred by the sudden, blinding radiance.


Standing between the four survivors and the encroaching nightmare was a giant. He was twice the height of a man, encased in armor that seemed to be forged from the sun itself. He did not seek cover. He was a singular point of absolute reality in a canyon of shifting madness.


The turret that had pinned Jhen down turned its baleful, glowing eye toward the golden interloper. Before it could discharge its payload, the giant raised his spear. Two bolts, perfectly placed, shattered the turret's focusing lens. It exploded in a shower of violet sparks.


Silence returned to the gorge, save for the heavy, wet breathing of the four hussars.


"M…My, E….Emperor?" Jhen managed, pulling herself from cover to regard the golden demigod as he turned to face her.


"A little busy, small one, you shall have to suffice with me." Aristagoras' easy tone was modulated by his helm, but the grin to his words could still be felt. "With me now, the Emperor has need of us still." As he drove on the remains of the Hussars into hell itself.




Aeternus



How much time had passed since the fall of Mosvoroth's Titan Gates? How many of his vaunted siblings still breathed the same air as he in their suicidal assault? Did the Emperor witness their final, glorious charge and weep for their success? Was their victory in the valley enough to quell the unquantifiable murder of those who aligned with the Raptor?


Rex could answer none of these as his hearts hammered against his chest. Fatigue threatened to crawl over his skin, but he remained stalwart against exhaustion as he had always. He could feel the wounds festering on his body, regardless of the protection his Tyrant armor provided. Perhaps he should be glad that he lived long enough to see the end of Kalagann's reign and the birth of Unification; however, Aeternus could not elate on his survival. Too many had died, perishing on the battlefield that sealed their victory.


His auspex pinged with a hundred different Imperial signatures. Astartes and Cataegis of myriad legions roamed the battlefield in hunting packs, slaughtering Urshites with brutal and efficient methods. The Excertus Imperialis pushed in enormous, suicidal waves for every square inch of Mosvoroth. Killteams of pledged mercenaries, city-state conscripts, and altruistic techno-scavengers combed through the ruins for Urshic survivors to plunder.


It all paled in comparison to the madness that lingered like a thick, crimson haze in Kalagann's city. Neverborne still hunted, even in their weakening state. Clumps of struggling vityaz with their inhuman pets desperately fought to retreat from their fate. The diasporic slave-warriors across all of Terra tried to surrender in vain, each cut down for their wayward servitude to their profane masters. Guttering, hulking machine-daemons were annihilated before their stomachs could be filled with raw flesh and meat.


Aeternus cared for none of these as he sprinted through the meat-clogged streets of Mosvoroth. A gaggle of legionnaires followed after him. None of their number were a Primarch save for the God-Slayer himself. He did not know where the rest of the Thunder Primarchs hunted, or even if they were still alive. Nor did he know where the remainder of the First Legio Cataegis fought. The chaos that followed the breach was unlike any other, filled with the sorcerous madness that caused reality to sneeze and snap. They were split, but they would soon reunite as the Raptor's claws squeezed on Kalagann's domain.


The Primordial Citadel — Kalagann's vaunted seat — rose overhead as he approached through the blood-soaked courtyard. An ancient, spiraling monolith of jagged spikes and tortured faces carved into pitch black stone. It was as if it had been born from the Empyrean appearing exactly as such. The area just before was equally as disturbing with burning fleshtrees and hanging corpses of dissidents and profligates. All had been torn asunder by the Raptor's warriors, who faithfully guarded the entrance into the citadel.


His transhuman knights remained at the bottom of the stairway, recovering their wounds and reloading their weapons for another defense. He pressed upwards with Apocrypha nestled against his right, oversized pauldron. To a mortal man, traversing the steps into the Citadel would've taken a breathless hour; however, it took several minutes for the Emperor's genecrafted giant. At this height, Rex could ascertain the tactical scenario without the assistance from his devices. Ursh was dying, coughing viscera for every beleaguered breath it took. Infernoes sprouted up like purifying storms across the endless stretch of trenches beyond the city. Explosions continued to plume up from sporadic engagements. It was horrifyingly beautiful.


Gleaming geneknights in gilded armor stood motionless at the top of the stairway, their conical helmets affixed to a single direction and observing the siege around them. Their palatine spears were hoisted upward, calm and unaffected by the chaos meters away from their position. Primarch Aeternus reunited with them and glanced at the entrance into Kalagann's stronghold. A shimmer of light twinkled from within, one that would not disappear no matter how much he blinked his eyes. That was proof enough of their victory.


He turned away from the threshold of the Citadel, shouldering Apocrypha from his pauldron and planting its tip down into the stairs beneath him. If Valdor was to join the Emperor against Kalagann, then it would be the God-Slayer that remained to bar the tide that would come. Whether it were a tide of flesh-morphing monstrosities or the last of Ursh's profane knights, the First Primarch would be ready.


"... May you find victory, my king," Aeternus muttered in his solitude as Mosvoroth burned.




Aristagoras



The sound reached him before the sight did — a rhythmic, heavy thudding of pressurized boots, interspersed with the frantic, uneven stumbling of mortal feet.


Then, emerging from the chemical fog like a ghost of the Golden Age, came the form of a Custodian.


Aristagoras breached the perimeter of the courtyard, his auric armor splattered with the black, oily ichor of the vityaz. In his wake followed a far more mundane yet equally unlikely sight: Jhen and her three surviving hussars. They were hollow-eyed, their uniforms little more than scorched rags held together by grime and stubbornness, but they moved with a borrowed strength, tethered to the Custodian's wake.


Aristagoras halted at the foot of the great stair, his spear snapping to a vertical salute as his eyes met the towering, battle-worn form of the First Primarch.


"Hail, Aeternus," Aristagoras' voice rang out, devoid of the fatigue that should have claimed him. He gestured with a casual, sweeping grace toward the trembling mortals behind him. "I found these few still trying to bite the heels of the beast. It seemed a waste to let the shadows have them."


"The Master has descended into the heart of the rot," one of the Thunder Warriors spoke.


"Then the end is a matter of time." Aristagoras replied, stepping up a few tiers of the staircase. He looked back at the burning horizon of Mosvoroth, where the pyres of battle lit the sky in bruised purples and sickly oranges. "A pity. I was starting to enjoy the scenery." The second spear of the Emperor adjusted his grip on his weapon, allowing the beleaguered human figures to take their place behind him. While the sounds of his own arrival had turned out to be some limited reinforcements for those who guarded the way, yet more noise was beginning to stir from within the labyrinth of the city around them. "But it seems there is still work for us to do."


Aeternus twisted his grip on the obsidian greatsword, flipping the blade with the tip facing upward. He steadily descended the stairway to stand next to the auric champion, his black gauntlet thumbing the activation rune as he did. A corona of unstable, crimson plasma coated Apocrypha's wicked edges. Shadows that dared to fall around the duo were banished into oblivion. The Primarch failed to spare a look at the auxilia that scrambled behind the Emperor's Axe.


"Hail, Aristagoras," the Primarch of the First finally replied with a surprisingly fond edge to his tone. Simply hearing from the Custodian brought back memories of the early days in the Unification Wars. A time of actual unity. A hard time. He continued, "Your presence was sorely missed in the valley assault."


He jested. Even now, while millions died for the sake of Unification, Aeternus surprised himself with the callous lapse in formality. His brethren, those that remained, perished with every passing second as his King fought in the depths of Kalagann's fortress. It brought a cruel, unforgiving grin to his lips. The thought was ludicrous. What remained of the Cataegis that followed him through the breach were forming up next to Rex and Aristagoras. He'd remember their names for whatever remained of his life.


"A transgression that is forgiven with the spilling of Urshic blood. A pity that Ushotan could not be here to fight like this one last time," the Primarch flatly stated as he readied for the oncoming vestiges of Kalagann. He chose not to waste breath on speculating any of his comrade's survival. This was their last fight. Something that they had all known as they stormed the valley together.


While the two titans of Unification stood defiant at the foot of Kalagann's power, another hand of the Emperor moved unseen. Around the shimmering golden form of Aristagoras and the blackened armor of Aeternus, shadows were banished. Things, their sickly limbs and skeleton fingers questing just beyond the veil of reality, recoiled in horror at the mere presence of the two figures. But this new arrival to the staircase called those same shadows home.


His form ghosted past the prying eyes of the unborn, slipped through the shadows of fingers that never had a chance to notice his existence.


Amaranthus, his form only slightly less mighty than the two champions of the Emperor at the foot of Kalagann's palace, simply appeared into existence behind the wavering Hussars.


"Brother, well met," he offered to Aristagoras as he stepped forward to stand at his side. He kept a watchful eye on Aeternus as he spun his guardian spear idly in one hand, "I believe we will not be wanting for excitement," he added with the whisper of a smile evident in his words.


"Well met indeed! Ha! Look at us gathered here. With a few good men we could end this war ourselves, the Emperor could have remained home to ponder his great works." Aristagoras barked in half laughter, even as the mortals who had accompanied him balked. It was beyond the scope of their world view to hear such things from the usually stoic Custodians, if they ever had the chance to meet them in person.


The good humor soon gave way to focus though. While foul sorceries began their works within the sealed hall of the Tyrant, his tormented children were called to his aid. The first creatures to enter the room were twisted and stunted things, but no less fearsome for their disfigurement. Beings who the daemonic experiments of their master had taken to with too much vigour, rotting out their human will. Beasts, but beasts that would rend and tear for their master.


"You send wheat before me? Have I not killed enough of you, Urshun." Aristagoras called as he leapt forwards. It was not just bravado — though there was plenty of that — by thrusting forwards into the mass of enemies before they could meet the line of defenders, he shielded the mortal warriors from attention as the creatures lunged for his form.


"For Unity! For the Emperor!" Aeternus cried out as he echoed Aristagoras' movements. In the short time before lunging, the First Primarch ignited Apocrypha and cleanly swung into the oncoming horde. Crimson plasma ignited the air around him as black, tainted blood turned into ichor-steam. The bulky form of his Tyrant suit instilled fear as he pushed through the beastlings, butchering wherever Aristagoras had not yet pierced.


And they fought on, weaving into each other like legendary warriors of bygone myths. The Sword of the Emperor brutally butchered and the Spear of the Emperor precisely impaled. They danced in the carnage, daemonic ichor painting their plating in fresh new hues. The other surviving Cataegis and the protected auxilia cautiously advanced behind them, offering careful fire as to not interrupt the macabre performance. The day dragged on as the slaughter on the threshold of the black citadel continued.




The Judicators



The unquiet dead of the First Astartes — the Judicators, as they had come to call themselves, bringing the Emperor's judgement upon the unclean — had lost many things in their service to the Master of Mankind. What lives they might have lived before he had reshaped them in his hand like so much clay was the first, and greatest, followed by nothing less than their new lives as his weapons. He had even taken the sleep of death from them, forcing their broken frames into the great sarcophagi which even now lumbered to the final conflict.


Every one knew that their sleep, long denied, was finally at hand. It was a little thing, in the end, that they had to give up to earn that. Even together, they knew that they would die alone, unremembered and forgotten, all those who could sing their songs left to guard the breach as they surged forwards in search of His Light.


There was nothing they would change.




The Emperor



The interior of the Urshite Citadel was not governed by the geometry of man. It was a spatial nightmare, a labyrinth of non-Euclidean corridors and chambers that seemed to breathe with a wet, rhythmic pulse. Here, the Emperor did not lead as a general leads a column; He moved as a lighthouse through a storm of unreality.


The Master of Mankind stepped through a veil of hanging human skin, his presence a searing heat that caused the sorcerous shadows to retreat with audible hisses. Behind Him, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and the heavy, metallic tread of his legions.


He did not look at the walls, though they were inlaid with the screaming faces of the slaves trapped in a perpetual loop of their own final heartbeats. To look at them was to acknowledge their suffering, and the Emperor had long ago moved beyond the luxury of individual empathy.


+Focus+ His mind radiated, a command that acted as a psychic anchor for the mortal soldiers struggling to maintain their sanity in His wake. +The path is narrow. Do not look into the shadow. Do not listen to the voices of the unborn.+


The transition from the corridor to the Grand Hall seemed a modest doorway, but the transition across its threshold was as abrupt as it was alien.


Reality did not simply end; it surrendered. The Emperor stepped forward, and the stone beneath His golden sabatons ceased to be granite and became something far worse. It hummed with psychic residue, as if the rock itself was carved from petrified emotion. The chamber was an impossibility. A hollowed-out cavern that was larger than the Citadel itself, stretching upward until the vaulted ceiling was lost in a far-off star scape. All of creation seemed to gleam above those few who walked alongside the Master of Mankind.


This was the seat of Kalagann, the Tyrant of Ursh, but it was no longer a throne room. It was a wound in reality itself.


The air was a thick, viscous soup of sensory contradictions. It smelled of ancient incense and the copper tang of a fresh slaughterhouse. At the edges of the room, the laws of physics were being rewritten in real-time.


Standing in the center of this madness was the Throne of Ursh. It was not built; it had been grown from the calcified remains of a thousand wyrds, their ribcages intertwined to form the dais. Atop it sat a shape that challenged the Emperor's light, a shifting mass of obsidian armor and translucent flesh that pulsed with the rhythm of a dying star.


The Emperor stood unmoved, His face a mask of absolute stillness. He simply looked at the thing that was Kalagann, seeing the puppet strings of the Warp woven into every fiber of the Tyrant's being.


From the shadows atop the throne, a hundred eyes opened, not on a face, but across the surface of the Tyrant's armor. A voice like breaking glass replied, a chorus of a thousand stolen tongues.


"We are the truth of the universe, little sun-king. We are the entropy that waits at the end of your sputtering candle. You bring order to a garden that wishes to rot. You have known us for as long as we have known ourselves, all your stolen gifts, and this is what you would make with them?"


The Emperor stepped forward. With every pace, the golden light intensified, burning away the non-Euclidean geometry of the hall. The walls groaned as they were forced back into three dimensions. The screaming faces in the masonry went silent, their souls finally finding the release of true death as the Emperor's proximity scorched the sorcery from their bones.


"You are a monster out of time, Kalagann, the last of your kind." The flames that blazed upon the blade of the Emperor roared into further life alongside the building crescendo of his light.


"There is no Kalagann, you face us all, toy-king,"


As the Tyrant finally rose, the shadows in the impossible room began to run together, the great shapes of four terribly vast presences stamping their shadow across the reflection of the galaxy itself. Where their presence fell, the worst of the neverborn began to claw their way through the crystalline 'stone' of the chamber. What survived of the Emperor's honour guard was soon outnumbered beyond easy count.


"And you will not steal from us again."


Where unreality bled into the realm of the real, the honor guard met the foes uncounted.


"For the Emperor! For Unity!" the scream bellowed from the vox grille of an Astartes, their armor still the unpainted grey marking them as fresh from the genevaults. A "XVII" and the mark of a Lieutenant were the only identifying factors to pick out amongst the grey.


The Lieutenant died a moment later. A torrent of balefire erupting from the eyes of an unborn as it turned to smite that which would scream praise of the Anathema in such intimate proximity of the lords He had so wronged.


Bolter fire chewed the creature to shreds even as the Lieutenant's body melted to the grieves, black ichor bubbling and boiling under successive impacts. A trio of Seventeenth ducked in close to finish the beast, chameleoline cloaks stuttering and malfunctioning, casting images of places other than the present as the unreality of the space around the Astartes and the unborn before them shorted relic circuitry and esoteric mechanisms.


The trio hacked the unborn to pieces, so injured was it already that it offered no fight. As quickly as the first beast was handled, a dozen more filled its place, their forms blasphemous renditions of man and beast combined, their existence abhorrent to every man, woman, and child who had ever been and had yet to live.


The trio fell in a flurry of strikes, their comrades continuing to lay withering bolter fire into the encroaching horde around them as they inched forward in the wake of the Emperor's psychic bastion in an attempt to keep the beasts from interrupting his most sacred duty.


The true battle waged invisible, the will of the Emperor against the Tyrant, who in truth was but a shell for far greater and terrible beings. The boundary of each seemed fluid, the aura of reality that the Master of Mankind cast fraying at the edges back into the immaterial space. As the fighting continued, the border would shift at the slightest change in combat. Where reality pressed forward the unborn would find themselves cast back into their nightmare realm, where a warrior of the Emperor was unfortunate enough to find themselves standing in a space that had only just been solid ground, they found their mind and body assaulted by the worst forces the unrealm had to offer. Some could resist long enough to make it a step back, others would crumple or burst into fatal energy themselves.


For all the horror, it was clear, however, that the forces of Enlightenment had the upper hand. Before the will of the Emperor there could be no direct challenge. So, as ever, the Four found another way.


The flickering forms of daemons kept the mortals at bay, but as they did so, a vast but humanoid form took shape before the seat of the Tyrant's throne. A ghost of nightmare, a ghost of the future.


"We shall take them from you, Child of the Shaman, they will be our weapon, and cast you down."


The shadow moved forward. The Emperor saw twenty faces, twenty forms, blurring into one. The faces he recognised, the greatest of his champions lost to the winds of the aether. But with something approaching dread, if a being of his determination could feel such, he knew in that moment his companions did not see this amalgam. They saw one face, one being. They saw a future.


"To behold the future is to know it to be truth." The one voice that was four cackled in the mind of the Master of Mankind. Then the Emperor knew, of all assembled, only he could survive.


Whatever horror that the Ruinous Powers had sought to sow, whatever discord or pause they had hoped, there was at least one force which cared nothing for it — not here, not now, as battle raged and their lord was assailed.


"Death!" blared from the warhorns of the First's own wandering ghosts, the Saturnine dreadnoughts bathing the impossible creatures of the darkest wyrd in the impossible energies of forgotten science. Reality wept as it was violated by the profound and profane in equal measure, the champions of reason twisting it into a weapon as they surged forward, and as they died in equal measure.


Agama Zur no longer knew where he was, but he knew why. He was the Emperor's judgement — and there was but one penalty for those who would raise arms against the Master of Mankind. "Death!"


Sister Angélica rounded on an unborn as it leapt from the shadows. The unwieldy sniper rifle gripped between her armored gauntlets was brought to bear even before the creature that shouldn't be was halfway to her. A bolt round screamed from the end of her barrel and slammed into the thing. Black ichor covered Angélica's unpainted armor as the unborn simply ceased to exist in front of her eyes.


She turned and sighted another monster of the unreality, and squeezed the trigger once more. Another kill. She turned again and squeezed the trigger. And again. And again. Her bolt locked to the rear, and she slammed a fresh magazine home with hypoindoctrinated rote ability. She sighted again and hesitated.


The being before her, filling her sight picture, was not an unborn, not a creature of the enemy arrayed before her Emperor. Her sights rested upon the most magnificent being she had ever witnessed, second only to the Master of the Lines that fought it. She wept beneath her helmet at the perfect picture of a leader, the flowing black hair and features that only a perfect being could craft, looking directly at her. The being's eyes pierced her very soul as ice, and the importance of her worth was confirmed to her in that gaze, and in that very moment, she knew she was to be discarded. The being confirmed it in the pity that crept into the corners of their otherwise warm eyes, and creased their perfect smile.


She knew this being would fight for her, die for her if need be, and she knew that the Emperor stood in the way of that longed-for future.


She squeezed the trigger, and the bolt flew wide.


The Emperor did not move as the amalgam advanced.


He had fought gods. He had unmade horrors older than the sun. He had walked through the howling vacuum between stars with nothing but the iron architecture of his own will to keep him breathing. He was ten thousand years old, perhaps older, even he had stopped counting.


He had never flinched.


And yet.


We remember when you loved them.


The voice was not Kalagann's. It was not the Four. It was something assembled from the residue of twenty souls he had personally forged, and it wore their faces in rotation like a lantern casting slides. He recognized each one in the half-second it occupied the amalgam's features before the next replaced it. A face he had shaped with his own hands in the dark beneath the Himalazian rock. A woman destined to be his keenest blade.


We remember when death still held sway over you.


He pushed forward. The blade of his weapon cleaved through the space the amalgam occupied, and the amalgam simply was not there. It had stepped sideways through a fold in reality as casually as a mortal man might cross a hab highway.


When did you stop counting them?


The Emperor's psychic bastion flickered.


It was the briefest contraction, a single heartbeat's worth of diminishment, but in this room, this wound, it was enough. At the margins, where reality had been holding its ground by the width of a razor, the floor simply ceased to be floor. Two of his guard fell into the absence, their screams cut short as the unreality consumed them. He did not look. He could not afford to.


That is the toll, the amalgam said, and now it wore only one face. This is what your enlightenment costs.


"The cost of inaction would be the extinction of every soul alive and every soul that will ever live after them."


He said it without hesitation. He had said it before, in various forms, across various centuries, to various people who had asked him why. It was true. It remained true. He advanced again and drove the fire of his will against the amalgam like a prow driving through ice, and the amalgam bent around him, bending, as if delighting in the pressure, and for just a moment, one of its twenty faces was his own.


You are not what you were.


He stopped.


You were born the same as any of them. You remember hunger. You remember cold. We have seen what you buried beneath the mountain. We have read the parts you sealed away so that you could be what you needed to become. You remember a morning light. You remember names that have nothing to do with conquest.


The fire on his blade guttered.


What are you now, little man? What is left of the shepherd? You are so vast. You are so certain. The certainty is a wound you have dressed so many times you have forgotten it was there.


The honour guard was dying in his peripheral awareness. He could feel each one as a guttering candle, and he was losing them too fast. The dreadnoughts of the First were buying seconds, their ancient sarcophagi blazing as they gave the last of what they had been denied for so long. The mortals — his soldiers, his ordinary, mortal, expendable soldiers, were fighting and falling in the dark at the edges of his light, and his light was shrinking.


Because he was hesitating.


The amalgam raised a hand that was all twenty hands at once, and the four vast presences behind it pressed forward, and the Emperor felt the weight of them as he had not felt anything as weight in longer than he could measure. Something groaned in the psychic architecture he had spent millennia constructing. A buttress, somewhere deep, cracked.


You sealed it away so thoroughly. You had to. We understand. How else does a being of your scope function? How else do you look at a soldier you have made and sent to die without the grief of it consuming your capacity to act? You built walls. We admire the craftsmanship. But walls can be broken from both sides.


Let us show you what you buried.


And then through a violation he could have anticipated or defended against —


He remembered a morning.


Not a battle. Not a theorem. Not the cold, elegant satisfaction of a campaign unfolding correctly. A morning. The light through a window that no longer existed in a city crumbled to dust. The weight of a blanket. A sound from a room adjacent. The smell of bread. The small, damp warmth of something ordinary and irretrievably lost.


He had been a man.


He had been young, and tired, and uncertain, and he had stood at a window in a city whose name he would not speak even in his own mind.


The amalgam pressed its advantage. The crack in the buttress widened. He felt the Four lean into it like hands through a door.


And the Emperor stopped fighting it.


This was not surrender.


He understood, in that fraction of a second, in the time it takes a heart to beat, what the Four had miscalculated. They had found the buried human thing and torn it open and used it as a blade against him, and they believed that humanity was weakness.


They had been fighting men and women for so long. They had grown accustomed to that being true.


He let the memory come.


He let it all come. The morning. The window. The cold. The hundred thousand names he had stopped counting. The weight of every face in every theater of every war that had purchased this moment. The faces on the walls of the corridor, he let them in. He felt each one of them. He let himself be accountable to each one, not in the abstract, not as a number in a calculation, but as a person who had stood at a window once and been afraid.


The grief was enormous.


And it was his, which meant it was real, which meant it was precisely what did not exist in the howling immaterial chaos of the Four, who had never known a window or a morning or what it felt like to be afraid of your own future in that ordinary, human way, the way that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with love.


He held it in himself. Not the god-machine, not the psychic lighthouse, not the Master of Mankind, but the man who had stood at the window, and he named what he felt with the same precision he had once brought to theorems and genetic architecture.


Loss.


Fear.


Love. The oldest and most intractable.


The amalgam recoiled.


It had expected the grief to paralyze. It had modeled a being who had sealed feeling away because feeling had become incompatible with function, and it had expected that the sudden restoration of that feeling would be catastrophic. It had not modeled a being who had sealed it away precisely because it was too important to risk.


The Emperor raised his weapon, and it blazed.


"I remember all of them," he said.


"I remember every single one."


The blade came down.


The amalgam's twenty faces opened their twenty mouths, and what came out was not language. The vast presences behind it lurched forward in the fraction of a second before impact, pressing everything they had against the burning edge.


The horrendous wound that the Tyrant had forged in reality for centuries burst inwards, collapsing down and into its own singularity as the Emperor wielded his own mortality as a weapon. It blazed with the light of the Sun, yet all the Master of Mankind could feel was a dreadful cold. The absence in his heart of what it had cost to wield such power. To dispense of that last shred of the man he was.


As the horror compacted into nothingness, reality began to impose itself once more. The endless impossible sky vanished, and the walls that towered greater than physics would allow any creation within reality to reach crumbled away. The true form of the citadel at last revealed, a smoking, ashen ruin, with a skeleton upon a chair. A king of rubble alone.


"My…. My Lord, is it…finished?"


The voice rasped from behind the Emperor as he watched the throne, before the Master of Mankind turned, and wrath blazed in his eyes.


"It has." Spoke the voice without grief, and the blade swung once more.


Across the room, at the feet of the crowned skeleton, was a bundle of fabric. Or — no, a cloak, wrapped around the curled-up body of a young woman with ink stains on her hands. When she awoke, she felt first a driving anxiety, and then a grief so overpowering that tears sprang to her still-closed eyes.


She sat up and opened them, allowing the tears to stream down a face covered in the dust of stones that were not here, that should have crushed her utterly. She opened her eyes, and before her she saw the Emperor, who was beautiful, and terrible, and had been kind to her.


And she saw that he had changed, and she wept.


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