Silvana sat carefully at the top of the circle. The purplish chalk marked well on the smooth stone floor of the bedroom, a blessing that had spared her from the need to seek more exotic means of demarcation. The lower half of the circle was inscribed with a stylized aquila. At each point where the eagle design intersected the circle sat a thin tarot card, face down and unseen. The cards were thing pieces of psychoactive plastic. The tarot was in fairly wide use across the Imperium but most of the decks were simple printings of the designs, pale imitations of the carefully constructed versions astropaths used to peer into the future. A small stick of incense blessed at the shrine of the Saint Euchana smouldered off to her side, filling the air with a sweet spicy scent, slightly cloying, like Lho that had been treated with perfume.
With slow ritual care Silvana removed her veil and unwound the scarf of black embroidered silk to reveal her face. Reconstruction work had healed the terrible burns that had once disfigured her and her face seemed almost normal save for the fact that her eyes were dark empty sockets. Periodically, at Alrik’s request, she had worn glass prosthetics, though these were usually of a solid black rather than anything more elaborate. Eyes that didn’t track and focus were distracting and distinctive. She did not make a habit of it unless it was absolutely necessary. The smoke coiled into her nostrils as she took a deep meditative breath, allowing the world of the purely physical to fade into the background.
Her mind hung amidst the blazing majesty of the universe. Before her mind's eye the galaxy wheeled in its endless spiral. A billion billion stars winked and glittered. Streaks of, light wasn’t the right word, but something like it leaped between them like fireworks on Throne day. Astropathic messages crossing the vast Immaterial gulfs to the bright receptive minds of her fellow Adepts. Many flashed towards her, she could have listened to them if she wished, though it would have been unwise without the proper meditations and the aid of a sending chamber. There was a distant coral thrum that extended from a bright star in an otherwise unremarkable stellar arm. The voices, indeed the souls, of uncounted thousands joined in psychic song. The Astronomicon, blazing like a beacon from Terra itself. Silvana wanted to stay here, free of the prison of her flesh, to exist beyond the bonds of space and time. That way lay damnation, for the things that lived on the other side of the Immaterial spaces would find her eventually, she could feel them, hungry abominations just beyond sight, scrabbling at the gossamer thin walls of reality. She spoke a word.
Silvana stood in the bedroom but not the bedroom. It was far sharper than it had been to her senses when first she saw it for now she beheld it with her True Eyes. Every detail was perfectly distinct, the slightly differing grains of stone, micron thin distinctions were as obvious as if they had been painted a different color. She could see where a drink had been spilled a week before, smell the glues that held the joints of the bed together, pick out every joint of dust. The circle was gone, it existed only in the bedroom, not in the not bedroom.
“Leopold Cornellis Abrobae Sarkonad,” she whispered. A young man was suddenly sitting on the bed looking up at her in shock. He was athletic and muscular, the result of genetic conditioning and medicae treatment rather than exercise. He had a strong jaw and high cheekbones as well as a shock of sandy blonde hair. The sockets of his eyes were sunken from lack of sleep though his grey eyes were fever bright.
“Leopold Cornelius Abrobae Sarkonad,” Silvana repeated and the phantom youth looked up at her in shock and confusion. Silvana found herself standing in a sheer dress of translucent fabric. Lingerie designed to entice rather than conceal was clearly visible beneath the shimmering garment. Leopold’s conception of women evidently ran along certain lines. The smell of incense burned in her nostrils.
“Leopold Cornellius Abrobae Sarkonad,” she said for the third time, completing the invocation. The youth blinked in confusion. It wasn’t really Leopold, rather a psychic echo that his presence had imparted on the Immaterium in this place but even an echo could provide you with information if you knew how to tease it out. Leopold was dressed in a garment of fine grey shimmersilk with buttons of opalescent bone polished to a mirror sheen, tiny flecks of paint stained the cuffs and collar as well as his fingertips and the right side of his face.
“Who are you? Did Mother send you?” the boy asked as he stood up of the bed. His face twisted in confusion and he sniffed at the air as though trying to identify a strange scent. In the bedroom one of the tarot cards rose into the air and turned to reveal itself to Silvana. The Harlequin Reversed. Trickery and Concealment. The Silvana in the not bedroom could not see the card but she knew of its revelation as surely as she knew that water was wet and Terra was distant.
“What were you painting Leopold Cornellius Abrobae Sarkonad?” Silvana asked, a slight strain entering her voice as her mind held the time and the place, unique and unimportant amongst the great flow to time and place, together. The youth took a step towards her reaching out to brush her breast with outstretched hand. Silvana shivered at the touch not touch sensation. Leopold drew back his hand looking perplexed. His mouth worked over the word paint several times. He looked down at his fingers and suddenly a brush was held between them and a canvas stood on an easel. It was the canvas she had sensed, six feet tall and broad. On it was an impossible landscape, like something out of a children's holo if every drop of a holo could be burnished to painful detail. Curling trees of unfamiliar design wove their way out of sand that shimmered with ancient black volcanism. A second card floated into the air and turned. The seven of sceptres. A sealed and sacred authority. A judge with righteous intent? It was a sign she would ordinarily have associated with Alrik.
“I cannot get the angles right,” Leopold explained. He was painting now, short fussy strokes, precise as a medicae surgeon. The paint on the tip of the brush changed color without being dipped in the pallet. Clouds the color of fire spilled out behind the scene, writhing with disturbing life. It was clear that the painting was unfinished, details sprang to life before her eyes, bearing no relation to the strokes of the brush. Distant whorls of smoke. It was so beautiful, Leopold’s creation could be a masterwork that would spread his name across the sector and beyond. It was as if all the hints of talent displayed in the works she had seen in the room were being distilled down to perfection in this one burst of creative genius. The Shattered World. Disaster, or potential disaster. Sweat began to bead on her forehead, something was straining against her, it was as though elastic resistance bands had been stretched around her mind.
“What are you painting,” she repeated, her voice tight from the effort of speaking. Her face felt damp but she couldn’t tell whether that was in the bedroom or the not bedroom. Leopold was slashing at the canvas in desperation now. A figure was beginning to take form. It was a female figure of indescribable loveliness. A saintly halo atop a face of heart stopping beauty, the eyes were the piercing deep blue of the unfathomable ocean, filled with a compassion and mercy beyond mortal understanding. Silvana was trembling from the divine visage, if she had still possessed tear ducts she didn’t doubt that she would be weeping. A fourth card lifted into the air, turning with slow deliberation to reveal the three of Discordia, a guardsman holding a trio of grey silver birds by the feet. A long journey, the beginning of an ordeal.
“Leopold … Cornellus Abrobae.. Sarkon… Sarkonad,” Silvana could taste blood in her mouth and her skin crawled and prickled with energy. In the bedroom her eye sockets would be lit with witchfire and snapping with electricity she could smell the microburns though she couldn’t feel the pain. She knew she should abort the seanse but something told her that if she stepped back now she would never be able to learn this secret. They needed it. That much was clear, something monstrous was shifting beneath the surface, like a great predator rising from the deep.
“I CANNOT GET THE ANGLES RIGHT!” Leopold was screaming, there as an audible snap and blood ran from his palm, his grip had shattered the paintbrush and his knuckles were as white as sepulchral bone. Muscles in the phantom's jaw and neck stood out like cables and his pulse fluttered like an occularium exposure overloaded. The Emperor flew into the air before her, the glowing visage of the master of Terra radiant. Silvana’s mind flashed with images of a screaming skull overlying the smiling face depicted on the card. Hope against great darkness but corallary rather than ascendent. Dread began to claw at her guts she wanted to take a step away from the frantically painting youth but she couldn’t force her body to move. She couldn’t abort the seance now, even if she wanted to. The pshycic overpressure shoved at her mind like daggers of razored glass.
“What. Are. You. Painting!” she screamed, every once of will poured into the words. Leopold screamed, blood vessels in his face and eyes were bursting into ugly bruises. The beautiful figure of the saint ran like blood, the pigments resetting into a blasphemous hatching. The kind of crude depiction one might find scrawled in spraypaint on the side of a hab. It was vaguely humanoid and winged. Blaspheous and stinking of the warp. It seered at Silvana’s mind like a hot brand. She was screaming in the bedroom but in the not bedroom all she could do was hold her gaze on the heretical drawing. Leopold dropped his paintbrush and stepped back with a horrified gasp.
“RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT!” he wailed. The Eye of Terror, the final card of the seance, rose and spun maliciously to face Silvana. The Great Enemy. Chaos. Death. The crude heretical rune tore open like a blister and a thing stepped through. It was vaguely womanlike though with vast ragged wings and cruel hooked nails that seemed oddly sensual. The symmetry of it was overwhelming, the wrongness apparent when something was too perfect but magnified a million times over. Leopold had fallen to his knees, tearing at his eyes. The Daemon thing looked at Silvana with fathomless malice.
“Mine,” it thought-said. Its voice like a razor cutting silk. It stepped forward and seized the screaming Leopold in its embrace. Silvana forced her screaming face to pivot to the wound in the blasphemous painting, unable to fathom how it had ever seemed a thing of beauty. Painfully she forced her eyes to focus on the tear where the thing had stepped from. She had a momentary impression of a subterranean space, tunnels of some kind. Instinctively she knew it to be Meridian though she couldn’t explain how. The same symbol smaller with the tricker of perspective was graffitied to the side of a wall.
“Die little mind thing,” the creature spoke and took a step towards her. Streamers of darkness poured off it, back into the rift like smoke being sucked by extractor fans. Silvana reached her fingers out for the floating symbol of the Emperor, the action weirdly bifurcated by occouring in the bedroom and in the not bedroom.
“The Corpse King cannot save you,” the thing crooned. Leopold was thrashing beneath the cloak of the things wings, but it did not seem the motion disturbed the things. Her fingers touched the card, the image burning hot against her finger tips.
“Non enim Imperator te in nomine abdjure,” she whispered. The daemon let out a wail as Silvana dragged the edge of the tarot card through the chalk circle. In a billow of blackness the thing was sucked back through the painting taking the phantom of Leopold with it. The cavas healed like a wound under a time lapse until the symbol stood once again. The blasphemous rune began to glow and pulse. Silvana was laying on the floor in the bedroom but in the not bedroom she could only watch in horror as the symbol grew till it strained against the edges of the canvas. With a sonic scream the painting exploded outwards in all directions a tide of warp energy surging into the material world as the pieces of canvas shrivled into smoke and were gone.
Silvana slammed back against the bedroom wall, her head striking the stonework with a crack. The Emperor was clenched tightly in her white knuckled hand. A layer of frost covered the entire room, crystals of it heavy in her eyelashes and hair, her lips were blue and she was cold beyond belief. Her perspective swirled drunkenly although wether from the physical blow or the psycic backlash she couldnt tell. The place stank of the warp. The energy had washed outwards from this place but it was not gone. With a last supreme effort she reached out with her mind.
“Hiernomys Blademar,” she thought/spoke, reaching for the Interrogator’s mind.
“The Arch Enemy…” she slid into unconsciousness before she could conclude the warning.
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