Thanqol

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

The Master of Auspex comes to report in person.

She marches at the head of a procession - five hundred statuesque men, naked but for the twitching trio of eyes that each one holds cupped in their hands. They are bound together with golden collars and velvet ropes, run through with crackling electrical wires that find their termination in the shadows beneath the Master's filthy crimson robe. She snaps her fingers; her escort stops, shudders, and kneels.

"Lord, as you have commanded, I have consulted the augurs and auspexes," said the Master of Auspex. "Yet in much I stand thwarted. The slaves of the Ring have come in hypocritical blasphemy - they wear hexagrammatic wards against warpsight, their noospheric defenses are hardened against scrapcode and they wield xenos jamming technology without even the pretension of concealment." She takes a deep breath in through her nose, suppressing a rant about hypocrisy. "Yet there are lines they are still unwilling or unable to cross, and I have extracted some information nonetheless. There are multiple small teams of Pteraxii and Sicarians rapidly moving around the complex, maintaining stealth to avoid drawing counterattack. In close air support they have a squadron of Astartes Thunderhawks of the Ringbearers Chapter - Draupnir's bonded slave legion. These are not landing - I believe they are a reserve force to be summoned in emergency or to cover an extraction."

Leuric!

The twist of your voice catches on the immanent warp. It bypasses the conscious levels of the handmaiden's minds, creating a fear that cuts right through any hesitancy. The words that come are found, instructed; inspiration from a muse in the dark.

"It's M43, I'm out here sailing again
Through the wicked, winding streets of my world
I make a wrong turn, break it
Now I'm too far gone
I've got a siren on my tail and that ain't the fine I'm lookin' for"

The bridge crew has fallen into a transcendent focus. The captain does not even need to issue orders; when the glittering lance strike of a ground battery cuts through the clouds in the surface around Tiger's Gate, slicing towards your voidship, you have already turned away from it.

"I got a mind full of wicked designs
I got a non-stop hole in my head, imagination
I'm in a building that has 2000 floors
And when they all fall down
I think you know it's you they're fallin for"

You can see the shadows of it now, a new void in the center of the handmaidens. It arises from the flickering gaps in their lace dresses, beak and hooked talons, a black shadow puppet amidst the void of their brilliance. So many feathers, falling, falling, falling -

Beneath its ten feet the metal has corroded. Water seeps in. Reeds grow.

I can't forget I am my sole architect
I built the shadows here
I built the growlin' voice I fear
You add it up, but to do better than that
You got to follow me
Boy, I'm trying to show you where I'm at

It offers you its claws; the liminal space between five extended pale hands. It is dark and it is light and it is rot and it is everywhere here. It has come to welcome you to its world.

Hey pretty.

Hagar!

feels like flying
The thoughts are gentle and jagged, like a monomolecular needle to the brainstem. Everything of this creature balances on a single point, white hot and impossible. It shifts as it acknowledges you, a frictionless whirl of glass, sharp and clear.
no redundancy. no vigor. no health. strike. enough. sufficient. time is a renewable resource.
It pauses, the internal narration finding synchronicity with words you have said. It draws itself up, spreading its wings - a glittering archangel of stained glass and cannon masonry.
you are correct. this is a flawed approach. abandoned i greet you, and welcome you to my sister's world: i am the Glass Knight. once i ruled here in harmony, but the Ancient Raven has cast us out. fear her. please.

Her back ignites, a glittering rainbow arc of laser fire, the pinion of each wing the focus of a crystal laser. The void behind her burns with the detonations of shattered mines. She pivots, a dancer's step, and slashes another swathe through the dark.

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

"It would," said the Formless One slowly, begrudgingly - coming around to the idea as a distant second preference. "If that is to be accomplished, your target is Archivator MPRX, a member of Magos Kyria's retinue. They are each here on the planet, and the Archivator has all of the pieces to draw the final conclusion and write a definitive history of the Scribes. Killing the Archivator is insufficient; it is her history that must return to the Imperium in a compromised state."

The demon's voice has regained it's original spark by the time it has finished speaking. By the time it is done there is a new item on the desk - a bone-carved dagger, set with sapphires, stabbed directly into the glyph of the Fabricatum Complex in the echo of the Lion's Gate Spaceport. Invaluable information - for the first time in a long time, you have the jump on your nemesis.

Leuric!

That gets under her skin. The Navigator draws away from you, spiderwebs of frost running across her skin. The crew flinches, knowing well what this means - it means victory, or it means throwing themselves on the mercy of the warp.

"As you command, lord," said Mademoiselle Dizzaralariad sharply, no doubt planning your unfortunate accident already. "I will attire myself for campaign."

She draws away from the bridge, not pausing to look at the spectacular starbursts beyond the viewport as mines begin to flash and detonate. Captain r'Ankis is shouting commands, voice balanced on the edge of control. The fates are favouring you - the rot that has claimed the planet has also lobotomized the iron will behind its defensive grid, and the minefield is not augmented with flights of strike craft and planetary batteries - yet.

But disaster could strike at any moment. The crew has their hands full with the mines and their view is narrowing. A blow from an unexpected angle could be devastating, and you are the only one with the space to see big picture. You can feel the threat on the back of your neck, a cold that lingers even in the Navigator's absence.

Hagar!

You are faced with the Jagged Cluster.

Things have names here, even the short lived - the wise of the Maw left behind the Mechanicus' numbers a long time ago, putting their faith in the glyphic structure of the Warp. The Jagged Cluster is a particularly terrible amalgamation of four different macrocannons, each individually the size of a house, together becoming a militarized hab block. It is not like anything you have seen before; being carved entirely of prismatic glass shards bound together in intricate mural glyphs by orichalcum and quicksilver, depicting a flock of jetbikes speeding ahead of a crashing flood.

It feels alien - this is not one of the ship's 'normal' daemons. But it represents a deeply inefficient caliber of firepower, and it looks like it wants to consume yet more of the lesser macrobatteries to reinforce its bulk, so you need to do something about it. How do you approach?

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

"That they are bureaucrats, lord," said Reikler, brightening as she produced a heavy ledger bound with steel and crystal. "They operate as a registered chapter of loyalist Astartes - the Cerulean Scribes - and they follow all commands given to them, fighting xenos and reinforcing Imperial positions. Their service record is exemplary - and nobody connected the dots between their arrival in sectors and the outbreaks of major plagues. Other than that, very little - other than that the majority of their actions, both now and during the Heresy, were in and around Ultramar."

Leuric!

You can see a twist of a smile before it is hidden behind an elegant fan. A deliberate display - the Lady Navigator previously thought you a fool, now she thinks you weak. Her handmaidens gather around her like extensions of her dress, hands hidden beneath their flowing lace and ribbons, threat evident. The rest of the bridge is frozen in horror.

Navigators are proud creatures to begin with, considering themselves the equals of even Rogue Traders or the Lords of the Legion. They, too, are powerful - they need merely open their Warp Eye to strike powerful souls mad or dead. And more than anything else, they are necessary. Without Mme. Dizzy aboard, the Everthirsting Maw cannot travel. It will be rendered a hunk of scrap no more use than any of these mines, another shard of drifting wreckage around the Jade Bastion. From all this, Mme. Dizzy considers herself untouchable, and she regards your threat as comical.

"As you say, great lord~," she says, letting the needle of sarcasm cut into your ear. "I would haaaaate to be removed from my command position."

Hagar!

"As you say, lord," said Sio-015. "Thank you for your attendance on this matter."

You got the feeling that all the targeting decisions had been made hours ago - but you also got the feeling that the Ordinator appreciated your attention to detail. He was an old man with the aspect of a beasthunter, mechanical eyes looking out from a feral beard, beneath a pith helmet and above a necklace of daemonic teeth.

"Though your assistance would be appreciated on a more kinetic level as well," said the Ordinator. "The cannons need to be driven apart, you see - they are overfused and overlarge for these targets, and the Bridge has commanded immediate action. Perhaps you would be able to assist in driving the daemons apart?"

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

The daemon snapped silent again, this time with a pouting air.

"Lord," said S. Reikler, stepping forwards and bowing. She was the latest brave soul to step into the position of your apprentice. Her kind never lasted very long - the greedy, grasping children that they were - but she had at least survived long enough for you to vaguely remember one of her names, which put her a little above the average. She had at least picked up on the basic point that fashion was secondary to safety - her bulky robes were designed in such a way as to maximize the unfolded space for protective runes. It made her look a bit like an ambulatory cardboard box, but she had not been eaten by your astrolobe yet and that itself was an achievement.

"The Warmaster's demands were, uh, 'Convince the Scribes to continue the war, or take their armies from them and do so yourself'. Sorry for interrupting, lord. Do you want me to ask the Mechanicum to begin manufacture on seismic bombs?"

Leuric!

Mme. Dizzy nodded serenely. You got the impression that something in her background had prepared her exactly for conversations with you. "Of course, lord. One other question: What shall we do if we are attacked? One cannot imagine that anyone hiding in orbit will not be drawn by your splendid approach."

Void War was slow. You could watch the point-defense projectiles fired by the Maw hang in the air for long minutes at a time, broken by the eerie flashes of lances like thunderstrikes in a meteor shower. Red lights glittered in the dark as mines armed themselves and activated their thrusters, ponderously launching themselves at their distant target. Some did so with alacrity, but many did not - they flickered lazily, and returned to their sleep, unable to summon the motivation to die.

Hagar!

There is no vertigo quite like the gunnery deck of the Maw. One vast chamber, five kilometers in length, with one entire side open to the black. Once there had been a specialized Void Shield that had held air in and shielded the deck from harm, but that was gone long ago. Now the crew operates in zero-gravity and voidsuits - and the great guns are beyond the harm of mortals.

Exposed to the warp on long trips, each of the building-sized macrocannons is now a living thing, twisted and rooted into the fabric of the ship, crazed eyes picking out targets and firing without the need for calculations. Crew keep a careful distance as they push shells through void towards the empty breaches of the cannon, knowing well that those who come too close will be snatched by pincers and claws. The great cannons move and jostle each other, sometimes seeming to merge into one enormous weapon, sometimes breaking apart into smaller arrays. Only the black robed priests of the Mechanicum dare to approach the beasts with electro-scourges and agony pikes, lashing the daemon weapons and forcing them to merge and separate as the Helm commands.

In the void beyond you can see the glittering fireworks of naval mines detonating.

"Lord Hagar," said Ordinator Sio-015, starboard gunnery master of the Mechanicum. "The Bridge instructs that we are to breach the minefield. Gunnery is at your disposal."

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

"You are right," the daemon agreed immediately. "To hell with the Warmaster. To hell with diplomacy. To hell with the Garden. Burn them from orbit. Burn them from the ground. Shatter the stones. Break the walls. Topple the Glass Knight, butcher the Ancient Raven, dam the Crystal Waterfall, break the Chrome Mirror, burn the Consuming Mask. Ten billion rotten souls line these walls, you do not need them, you do not want them. Bring the edifice crashing down and leave only ruin. Such a feat would draw the eye of the Gods, have no doubt."

Leuric!

The Captain has ripped many things out of himself. One of those things was fearlessness. It is eerie, seeing human fear in the sunken, wasted eyes of an Astartes. Without biochemical regulation, his muscle has sloughed from his giant bones, leaving him sickly and thin; without the ports of his black carapace his armour sits upon him like a dead thing, and without the layered psychological and hypno-conditioning augmentations pain is as real to him as it is to - well, not you. You have a more nuanced relationship with pain.

But the end result of his self-inflicted lobotomies and amputations is that he cowers like a dog in the face of your ire.

"... brace for maneuvers," the Captain. "Disable void shields, disable spinal lance. Launch all void wings, full power and double shifts on point defense batteries. Target all mines within intercept envelope, prioritize activated nodes. Shrine deck, all ritual resources are to be turned towards the Blood Altar. We approach loudly, 'midst fire and ash."

Alerts start to flash, the patterns beautiful and hypnotic, crimson and blue crystal lights bathing the deck in a strobe with a dancing pattern. The old Imperial alarm sirens have long since been replaced, a roaring thrash of guitar music drives hands shipwide to their positions. A shudder runs through the steel as the Maw rouses itself.

"Marvelously bold, my lord," said Mme. Dizzy. "But I must ask - what are your orders for after we have landed you and your retinue? The ship will be dreadfully exposed, and likely damaged, after carving such a hole, and I would hate to leave you without a way home."

Hagar!

It feels like it might have gone another way. It always does, with Other Blue. You can practically hear the scratching on the inside of her eyes, on the inside of her mind, of the hiss and spit as the fuse tries to light.

"Most people who walk without knowing where they're going are followers, Hag," she said. "And I don't think you're a follower. So you're either bullshitting me or bullshitting yourself."

The emergency lights came on. The thrum of guitars, the grumbled metallic voices of deck overseers advising immanent contact. The game is forgotten - everyone is racing for void suits and mag boots, clipping belt hooks into safety rails. The corridors fill with the howls of terrified beastmen and mutants and the crashing lock-step of companies of ship armsmen marching down corridors in lockstep. Blind Magi trundle through the dark, surrounded by entourages of lesser creatures that cavort and dance about them, marking walls and pulling levers. A voidship may have a mind and eyes and sense of purpose, but down here this is a mad city in the dark, battening down for the coming of a storm.

Breathless Dead

Daily Affirmation Of The Way <3: Stop me if you have heard this one before -

What is the word for someone who wants to be able to control someone's thoughts, but who does not want mind control?
For someone who wants unstoppable strength, but not guaranteed victory?
Who wants to be loved, but demands that love be earned?
Who wants to be the center of the world, so they might be its sun?
Who wants everything so they can give everything?
Who wants to crush without breaking?
To be everything to everyone.

One word for this is, of course, author. It is a truly transcendent greed to want to remake the world in a way more total than can be done with politics and labour. To place one's sword 'neath the chin of reality and make her bend towards justice. Consideration must also be given to the most deranged apex of the author breed, whose greed is so total that they must accumulate a pack of other authors and compel them into harmony with their own utopian vision. But an author takes the long view; they sit and consider and plan and take long walks and late nights as they turn over their ideas slowly. Authorship is slow, and hard, an artificial path towards totality. Princess Qiu, for all her prowess, is unfortunately a mere author.

Imagine being that in real time. To create a world and narrative and quest with the strength and speed of your limbs. To be beautiful enough to enchant without searching for words, to stand astride the border of invincibility without conjuring hopelessness, to be able to make people feel loved and safe and in incredible danger in the same way as an affectionate nuzzle from a tiger. To have that control, effortless, as a thing you do with your body and not with your words.

... That's what I think what it must be like to be a dragon.

*

The attack might have worked against a dragon. A team attack, hearts and souls aligned - there is nothing better for slaying monsters.

Princess Jessic, though, is a dragon Princess - and no Princess loses a fight without getting the opportunity to show off her Secret Sword.

Princess Redana diverts the lance, smashes Jessic's knee, rolls and recovers into a defensive stance that opens Jessic to response from her allies/
Jessic changes her angle in mid flow, shoulder-checking Redana, and catching her with a swat of her tail as she falls, turning a stumble into a ring-out -

Princess Chen grinds along Jessic's back, kicking off her head, sending her blinded and crashing into a wall/
Wings clap together, pinning Chen in place, and Jessic flips upside down and releases her to crash down into the streets below -

Bella's blow strikes true. The lance shatters. The battle resolves/
A serpentine neck twists up. Jaws open. A whirlwind pours from bladed teeth, hurling her back into the sky.

Both memories happen simultaneously. Both realities exist in parallel, jumbling together, the truth of them impossible to judge. Every set, every blow, every exchange with Princess Jessic brings a vision of victory and a vision of defeat. One is true and one is a lie but there is no way to tell which is which - at least, until you sit and count the bruises.

Princess Jessic, you see, had an advantage. Humans practice against other humans every day, but how often did they practice against dragons? When do you get to learn what a dragon's tells or attack patterns are? And even if you have studied dragons in general, what do you do when this dragon pulls out a sword and parries your dragon-slaying Black Arrow? It's not that she's too good, it's that she's too weird - all the powers of dragon and girl - and there's no time to learn her moves before the fight is over.

So she invented a Secret Sword to show people what victory against her looked like. To give them hope. To give them a map, a demonstration of what they needed to practice to have a chance against her. A video tutorial of what a correct dodge looks like, an encouragement for those who wish to swear vengeance and hone their craft and then come and try again -

- but Princess Jessic ain't running no charity, and her Secret Sword does not turn off just because you've done the homework. Even if you execute your technique correctly and land a solid hit on her you still get the vision of having done better - or at least having done different. It makes it impossible to judge where you are up to in a fight, what hits you've landed, what hits you've taken, if you're winning or losing, what strategy you're using, what style she's using. The longer the battle rages the more jumbled and chaotic memories become, victory and defeat melding into the same eternal moment - until suddenly it's over. This is her technique: Ever-Present Mystery: the feeling of walking into an unknown raid boss for the first time, every time. It is a blade that gives hope that she can be solved while simultaneously denying the solving.

[Namespace] of the Rose

"Gentle bain, we ken well enough what the offer is and what you expect to get out of it," said the old lady.
"You'd be surprised how often this comes up!" said the matronly woman, sitting down heavily on the stands with a crash.
"The second a political crisis hits half the maids in power start spillin' their tits out trying to get us to get our master to pick a side," confirmed Serra. "It'd be offensive, if there weren't so many tits."
"But what's this place to us? What's so auspicious about these couple dozen cyborgs that our gentle naf yonder can't take a spell to figure out what's actually happening and if it's worth our time?"
"Those are my men," snapped November-Black. "They're not disposable -"
"Och aye, then by rights I reckon you should be having them shooting back," said the armour-matron.
"Or have thy tits out," shrugged Sarra.
"So, how to?" said the crone. "Is this the work of the Archenemy? Is this the work of the Devourer? Mayhaps we are facing the wiles of the Aeldari and their wicked subornation of the Vindicare temple? Or mayhaps the priests of Mars are having a theological disagreement as to the operation of this arena, and you are trying to sweep us up in the momentum of the thing."

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Vael!

"Empty?" cackled the Formless One. "Who said anything about empty?" (It had, a moment ago. Didn't it? Memories were so very unreliable -) "Does this look like a world with an empty throne? No, the Bastion has found its Master. The Great Lord of the Thirteenth sits atop his throne, crowned and anointed, with a rotting perch and a flaming sword across his lap. That is why you have come, is it not? To rouse him from his slumber? To measure his soul, to test his sword arm, to bring his psychology into compliance, to take every precaution and make this wretched world sing the words loyal, loyal, loyal!? What could a humble storyteller ask from you that the lord Warmaster has not?"

Another silence, colder than the last. Your breathing feels so loud. So wet.

Leruc!

The Navigator placed a gentle hand on your shoulder, giving the smallest of shakes as though to rouse you. You can feel the damp chill of it as her skin melts slightly, like a frost in the dawn. The personal refrigeration harness she wears increases its volume a notch.

"My sweet lord, perhaps you were dreaming just now?" said Mme. Dizzy. "Please bestir yourself. You may be many things - stylish and sweet not least amongst them - but I do not think your bones would hold up any better under a drop pod impact than mine would."
"You want to fly a shuttle through that nightmare?" snorted the Captain darkly. "Be my guest."
"Surely we must have some dashing pilot capable of braving the danger," said Mme. Dizzy as one of her handmaidens filled Leruc's glass. "Or some dashing captain?"
"Out of the question. We'd have to perform high energy maneuvers, and that would light us up for anything else lurking in orbit. There's something out there. I can feel it."

Hagar!

"Why do you bother?" snapped Other Blue as Blue immediately collects the Lion from the pile. "It's like playing cards with an ogryn!"
"Hey, easy there -" Scar was saying, but Other Blue's fire was up. She had chewed her lip, the mutant blood blackening her teeth, her eyes having that look to them again.
"An ogryn would be better! They look disappointed when they lose. They understand the concept. It's like there's a fucking tree planted in our game and whoever sits to its right gets to walk away with the whole thing! What the fuck is in it for you?"
Everyone shifts uneasily. Scar very clearly wants to say 'calm down, take it easy' - but he also remembers what happened the last time someone said that to Other Blue when she got like this. So he's subtly reaching for a heavy bottle instead.

She doesn't care. It's all happening again. You can see the bloody stains where a sense of patience has been gnawed away. This trip has not been kind to her.

"Is this what you're going to do when we win?" she spits. "Sit on the ashes of the Throne and toss cards on the pile?"

[Namespace] of the Rose

The Angel of Death turns its head, turns its back, and flies away.

Guardsmen ten meters below reflexively duck as it roars overhead, landing upon the gallery where the sniper was emplaced. The moment the roar of its engines silenced it touched the ground as light as a gazelle and as silent as a spider, striding across the gallery. It reached up to remove its visor - noospheric baffles pixelating its face as you view it through servo-skull lenses - and then leaned down to cut the skull of the dead assassin open. It pulled out the poor wretch's brain with a practiced gesture and shoved it directly into the data-blur of its face. The privacy cubes went from silver to crimson.

November-Black, who had fallen into a kowtow, raises her head and lets out a shaky exhale. "Omnissiah. Did you have to -" a flicker of las-light "- you had to. Permission to -" she caught herself. "Fuck, I don't need anyone's permission. B-biotrash, you've got ten minutes before I start making big decisions about the security of my complex."

A grappling hook went over the side of the box. Then one - two more. Moments later the three chapter serfs came over the side.

The first was a young woman who had painted her face with a tyger's orange and black stripes - and triangular nose. She was robed in green, as they all were, but hers was traced with a golden mazelike patten that made her disorienting to look at. She held a nonstandard laspistol in one hand and her grapple in the other, and upon her back she wore some sort of Vox-Butcher, a combination electronic warfare suite and communications array.

The second was an Astartes in miniature - a child wearing her parent's clothes. Too-large battleplate, comically oversized pauldrons, loosely jointed servo-plates - a mortal was inside a half-suit of Astartes battle armour. These were replacement pieces for her master, to be hotswapped in the field in case of armour damage. The effect was so disjointed it took a moment to realize she was both uncommonly tall and wide - not large enough for the outfit she wore, but filling it better than most would.

The final one reminds you of you - as you were. A crone with silver hair and imperious features, bent beneath the weight of cybernetics. She is hunched beneath the weight of bolter and ammunition, of reagents and oils, of servo-claws and carapace plate. Her face is aged and thin but the weight she bears would be enough to crush a strong Guardsman's spine. The other two may be fools, but she is not.

"Prithee," said the youth through an accent as thick as a shieldwall, "nae riddles, if it pleases. Our gentle naf yonder isn't much for mindwork."
"Watch thy tone, Sarra," snapped the matronly tone of the half-Astartes. "Our gentle naf yonder has cut to the quick of things, short the need to spend a half day waving their jaw."
"Our gentle naf yonder is waving their jaw, t'is certain," said Sarra. "But one thinks with all the brains they ingest some of it might rub off."
"Children," snapped the crone. "The barrels a'roar and ye bicker? Wizard, speak swift as you please, for my gentle naf yonder has more appetite than patience when the mood strikes."

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

"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: Loyal, loyal, loyal!

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.

Vael Azaneal, 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 Dizzaralariad), of the d'Ort Navigation Tribe. As Navigators went she was, frankly, awful. Where most of her kind understood that their duty was to avoid 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 Lord Leruc," 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. Hagar, 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?