Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

The wicked have long known that if you can't beat the argument, beat the table. As it turns out, this is just as effective a weapon in righteous hands.

Demeter is an old lady. She is patient, a creature of seasons and cycles, so hand in hand with Death that it took her daughter. You are beneath her and your outburst has no effect. But Demeter is not Demeter alone, and now it is a different voice speaking, different eyes looking out - no thing of pure nature, red in tooth and claw, but the high pitched whining snarl of someone with too much to prove.

"How dare you talk to me that way!" said Hephaestus-as-Demeter. "You are nothing more than a genetic defect, the product of broken biochemistry, part of the unlovely and unblue Azura slave race! Statistically lower in intellect than those of bright blue, ancestors forced to the lightless depths where they were forced to dedicate biological resources to camouflage rather than social intelligence, only given delusions of equality because my gifts have so long allowed for the correction of your ilk that mainline society has forgotten how to deal with you! Well I have not! I curse you, wretched mortal, as the Lord of Life: your genetic line ends with you! You will never have a family!"

Dolce!

Artemis holds the door open for the service entry.

"The choice of doors is, itself, sufficient," she said quietly. "That is what keeps this strange world alive. Its rulers imagine themselves servants, and so they serve. It would take a very simple twist of perception to alter that, to turn utopia into nightmare. Have faith that it can happen the other way around as well."

Wretched things, scared and shivering, leave through an invisible door, huddled together for warmth and support. They do not walk through the Master's Gate, are not saved, are not unleashed. This is an escape, and the gentle pressure of Artemis' fingers on the metal of the doorknob ensure that no other God can undo its framing.

"How many times have you seen it done?" she asked. "Good turn to evil, and evil to good? Do you remember the village in the belly of the Eater of Worlds? Do you remember the machines dancing on the ruins of their irradiated homeworld? Do you remember the beauty of the Skies turning to ash in your mouth? You who have seen so much, can you see the shape of Hell? Do you hear it shout its name?"

Aphrodite!

And here, at the close, you stand. You raise your hands, withered and frail, a conductor in the moment before the symphony. These beautiful, doomed creatures thought they could overcome you? They thought they could defy you? They thought they could use secret swords and the power of love to undo what you had done? They think that this moment was one of redemption, one of glory, heaven reached through violence?

Hell could be reached through violence too.

"I see your love," said Aphrodite. "I see it is Persephone's. She has broken my hold on you. You are her creatures now, open palms letting the galaxy slip through your fingers. But you have not begun to see mine. Behold!"

Above the Imperial Palace, the sky fragmented as a new dimension shift ripped into place. Out of it came a ship, burning and terrible and broken, spilling an avalanche of saffron warriors. They descend upon Yue, magnificent bodies flashing forth from beneath saffron robes, ten thousand and more. "The Coherent!" said Aphrodite. "The craven mercenary transhumans! You did not have the coin to pay their way across the Rift - but I do."

Old comrades. Old shipmates. Seekers on a path of transformation - here at last, transformed. Each of them is perfection in flesh, every barrier between desire and reality broken down, strong and fast and beautiful and terrible in so many different ways. Their robes are open now, revealing the perfection of their completion. Revealed too is the rot - the black lines already rippling through, a ticking timer until this dream of divinity fades. Each of them knows that the price for this eternity.

And then Redana is struck by an avalanche of marble and gold.

"And of course you know Alexa!" gloated Aphrodite, as that old familiar wrestler's grips locked into place after place after place. A golden blindfold was wrapped around her eyes. "You know how long she craved friendship, community, selfhood. After so long struggling alone, you expected her to give it up the moment she found it? I did not. So here she is, still fulfilling her function - teaching the Princess one last lesson."

And for Bella...

Her reach was wrong. Wrong! She had been slight - she was slight - tips of her ears barely reaching your nose. But now everything's backwards; you feel small, feel like a child, caught in the grip of a predator that was larger and stronger and had authority over everything you were allowed to do.

"Do you know how much she envied you?" said Aphrodite. "Your strength? Your authority? How you lifted her species out of bondage on a whim? She wanted you. She wanted to be you. She wanted everything you had, everything that you let carelessly spill from your fingers. You think it is easy to give up Imperial authority and assassin's strength? You think that powerlessness is desirable? She does not."

Jil's teeth flash, and her eyes shine like lanterns. She is so strong. As strong to you as you were to her.

"Don't get it twisted, I am grateful," said Jil. "But you could have done so much more."

Breathless Dead

Nero!

"Oh!" cried Nero, putting her hand where here heart once was. "You wound me, children! Carrying on as though I am some awful tyrant - can you not see that I am in the process of setting everyone free as we speak? As we speak the chains are breaking, the cell doors are opening, and humanity is stepping out onto its long-awaited homeworld! From the moment I became aware of Molech and his Spear I swore to rescue my beloved humanity, and that plan is accomplished. From here on out your destiny is in your own hands. Everything I have done has been to ensure that humanity is set strong, healthy and united upon the path together when their mother takes away her guiding hand. Because an Empress is more than a mother to her heir, she is mother to the Empire. If my love seems cruel it is only because I must split it a trillion ways! If your love seems pure it is only because your view is small!"

She stood in magnificence, crimson dress arcing out behind her, Aphrodite at her back.

"Behold the scale of my love!" cried the God Empress. "Behold how it is stronger than my flesh! It was stronger than my eyes! It was stronger than my heart! And it shall be stronger than my children! Humanity must rise, no matter the price I must pay! Codexia! Unleash all of your arts of war! Ensure the freedom that my daughter craves passes to her in full!"

They open with a storm of knives. They arise on bolts of lightning. A phalanx that flies, unfolding like a kalideoscope fractal, spears and shields, thirty perfect warriors overlapping and interlocking. Every mechanic of limb and reach calculated, every transition between spear and solid and esoteric honed, every warrior Achilles, a monster formed of perfect solved violence. This is War as Athena intended.

*

Demeter!

"Oh yes, yes, it's all very entertaining and noble that you think you can think that way," sighed Demeter. "You want to engage me with Facts and Logic and How It Should Be, but if you learned anything from my art it's that language is a courtesy. All the relevant decisions were made long before you were born. Here is one of my favourites:"

the screaming

"Biologically, you cannot endure the sound, can you?" said Demeter from atop her throne of crab. "You hear the screams of pain and your prefrontal cortex responds. You can imagine that pain in yourself and feelings of aversion, avoidance and fear are triggered. Straightforwards enough. Communal survival technique, good enough for buffalo. But that is only a fragment of the complexity of your biology. Observe -"

the screaming

"Change the pitch a little and now it registers as a child's scream. An entirely different coalition of limbic responses trigger; the preservation of a new generation becomes more biologically important than the maintenance of an existing one. And you'll find that your neurological response is fixed, it imparts upon you a terrible sense of immediacy that, sufficiently stimulated, essentially forces your entire decision tree. This process will compound once you enter and you see entities with large heads, large eyes and small bodies. The chemistry of your brain only plays out one way. If you wanted it to play out a different way, you should have taken advantage of my gifts beforehand, before your hard-coded responses were triggered."

the screaming.

"You will quickly find it will not matter that some of the creatures that are screaming are monsters," said Demeter. "Some of them are little more than collections of organs, or dispensers for viral weaponry, or machines for generating catastrophes. Plenty of them I have wrapped with empathic camouflage, like the assassin XIII who you have traveled with, unable to comprehend that she is neither cat nor girl. Well, here is her family, here are ten thousand just as appealing as her, and you have no more choice about saving them than the starling has about feeding the cuckoo's brood parasite even as it murders her children. Now, little robot, it's time to fulfill your programming."

The... screaming?

Demeter paused. Something was missing. Something was wrong. She smiled and brushed it off. No matter. It couldn't be her. She was here, and she was correct.

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

Hagar and Geron!

Atop the palanquin at the heart of a procession rests a cat. It looks down upon you with an indifference colder than the stars. Then it looks down with sixteen additional eyes.

Not all on the same cat - nine cats together, some mangy, some proud, some dressed in ribbons and some scar-faced toms. Orange and brown and black and majestic, all of their tails tied together into a nightmarish knot. Where it has naught but disdain for you creatures of soul and flesh, it has active antipathy for itself, hissing and clawing at its own other selves in a constant note of inhuman violence.

One of them made eye contact with Geron, then shoved a glass cup from its shelf onto the floor. It splashed and shattered, and the sound of it ground the procession to a halt. There were so many of them - there must be ten thousand or more people in this crowd, passing through the vast tech-cathedral and out through the doors, with more flowing in all the time. But now their diseased attention was focused.

"Clean it up," said the King of Cats.

Vael!

Your thoughts descend into a world of grey. Flickering, warping cathode rays, corrupted static and babbling, layered voices of static and warped machinery. You hear fast-talking announcers discussing creams for the prevention of oils, war for the extraction of oils, businesses for the prosecution of wars. Two grinning, manic figures resolve, one wearing robes of Mechanicus Standard Grey, the other a suit of Administratum Grey. They are eating sausages with chopsticks and occasionally cackling at the haunting images that flash on the screens around them.

"New programming!" said Mechanicus Grey. "That's right, an exciting new show -"
"An aficionado of classic technology. Classic!"
"A dying art!"
"At risk of being lost by the waves of modernization!"
"Don't you feel like society has gone downhill since things started getting better?"
"They don't make that thing you like any more."
"New generations are growing up every day without even knowing about it!"
"You, though. You're a classic!"

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

The Jade Lancer sways unsteadily. It takes a step wrong and its ankle snaps and its armour fragments, leaving a white stain across the floor where it scrapes like it was made of chalk. It stumbles forwards and falls face-first into the ground, cracking through like fallen ceramic. It lies still, face-down on the ground. Tiny leaves and branches emerge through the cracks of its armour.

A moment of silence.

And then an eternity of chimes.

The host of walkers that had been following in the wake of the Jade Lancer are carrying windchimes, bells, and other instruments of brass and copper. They shuffle past in single file, the unsteady swaying of their desiccated bodies filling the air with a cacophony of music. It is not the intensity of Slaanesh's music; it is a droning, clattering, dolorous non-sound; a warning, a requiem. One by one they come, stepping across the body of the fallen Lancer, and as they do they leave tribute. Each of them sheds blood or tears or sweat or otherwise as their feet rest on that shattered ceramic, and then on and on they go.

As they go, ravens march alongside them. Some carry batons under their folded wings, marching like grenadiers. Some wear little crowns of tinsel, some wear the makeup of sector judges, some the bangles and rings of exotic dancers. They perch upon the shoulders of the procession and eat the fruits that grow upon them and leave their droppings freely as they cavort. At first it seems no end to this procession, but a vast palanquin begins to loom up in a distant corridor, making its gradual way onwards.

*

Vael!

Most importantly, you have performed the proper mental oblations to protect yourself from a cursory exposure to the picts. That gives you some space to contemplate the specific mechanism at work here.

First and foremost, it is important to remember that you are in the Warp. This is a Daemon World; the Immaterium is present here, and the rules of material reality only hold out of inertia. Search for enlightenment amidst the circuits and patterns and you shall find only your own ignorance waiting with teeth and jaws. The disease, the diseased and the screens that transmit them are all aspects of the same being: A Daemon.

"It is important to remember that there is less of a barrier between your own thoughts and a daemonic entity than you would care to think. Corruption is an Imperial word; more accurate terms may include 'Resonance' or 'Inspiration'..."

(It was almost as though you heard someone talking to you out loud just now)

There are Kingdoms of the Mind. Duchesses and knights, peasants and draft horses, incognito princesses and dragons. You stand on the precipice of entering one such as you descend into this place, and...

It is under siege. From more than one direction. The creature that dwells within these screens is distressed, trampled beneath the feet of the Ravens, hunted by the servants of the Cog. It will not maintain this throne for long.

Return to Thellamie

The Mercury Golem does not let anything go.

It is not, to be clear, capable of stopping, containing or mitigating the explosion. The detonation flings debris and shards in every direction. But around every shard of glass is wrapped a grasping tendril, desperately clutching to this might still be useful. A kalideoscopic splash of silver spreads out and spreads thin, the shape of an anorexic giant blotting out the non-sky, shining with the polychrome glitter of a billion glass shards. Three quarters of its great spherical bulk is still intact, a cracked silver egg, a broken crystal planet.

Unbalanced, it falls. The vast mass of it, all the razor glass shards, all the gossamer thin ribbons of mercury, tumbling down. The broken sphere spills even more mercury as it rolls forwards like an overbalanced cauldron. The vast weight of it descends, more bladed hailstorm than deliberate attack. Parry this, as the proverb goes, you fucking casual.

"When your opponent uses a powerful attack," Injimo said serenely to Mayzie, raising her blade. "Enter a defensive stance and wait for your moment." She is as calm as the tea she recently drank, not a ripple on her surface. She takes a step and leaps up into the impossible curtain of glass. She goes either to certain death or to demonstrate how it is done. She knows heroics are beyond her in this moment; there is no way she could save anyone else from this storm. All she can do is make sure that they don't have to get it right on the first try.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

Empress Nero is not alone upon her throne. Before her stands the ranks of the Codexia. The Thirty Masters of War, the Chosen of Athena, those legendary warriors who internalized every lesson the Goddess of Strategy had to teach. Their glyphs are written upon their armour, tattooed upon their skin, waterfalls of symbols that spoke the full vocabulary of war, death, victory. Their quadranix armour was polished in metallic blue, great horsehair plumes rising up into the sky, eyes cast in shadow. Only the gleaming drips of sweat running down their chins indicates that they feel the heat, only the white knuckles around their spears indicates that they feel the fear.

It is one thing to speak of duty unto death. It is another to watch the flames closing in.

Behind them came the soaring music of a zither. The Empress of the galaxy plays her swan song with all her burning passion - but cuts it short. The only sound she longs to hear more than her own music is applause.

"Triumph!" cried Empress Nero from atop her velvet throne, hands clapping above her head. "Spectacular! You have finished your journey and have won yourself a galaxy. Brava! Redana, my daughter, my champion, my chosen, you have achieved the task for which you were made! You have earned your place!"

The flames roared. Nero pulled her rosethorn crown from her head and gave it to her Codexia.

"Kneel, my daughter! Kneel and accept your reward: the Crown of Man!"

*

Dyssia and Dolce!

Black fingernails snap. A goddess whispers her advice. The collar pulls tight.

Sometimes they speak to you so: from within. It was their first language, before all this, before the rituals and the clarity. Sometimes they speak through hungers, through inspiration, through fury. The line between you and the Gods was never as clear as philosophers liked to hope it was.

You have come not before the Crown. You have come before the Imperial Kennels.

"Come, see the fruits of all this blood and semen," said Demeter from her throne in the basement of the world, the fat end of the pyramid. She sat and could not rise for her legs had been crippled and broken. What force had harmed a Goddess so? Or was this part of Hephaestus' fate mingled through with her own? Her throne stood upon clattering, crablike legs and carried her forwards and sideways. "Come and see what it is that you must rescue."

She paused by a door made of jagged bone. She trailed her fingers over it thoughtfully.

"Dear little Hermes locked all of my gifts away down here," said Demeter. "She ripped them out of the humans they were bound to. A painful, unnecessary surgery; a symbiotic ecosystem of mutual reliance, torn apart by a fascist sense of genetic purity. She taught them to live dull, grey little lives without their networked partners, forced them to bury their shovels with their fingernails, and held onto all those wonderful stolen gifts in case she needed to put her fingers on the scales. I did not object; I wanted my gifts to be used, after all. What mother would want anything else?"

Her crablike throne turned to face you. Claws extended from behind it, reaching out to measure skull and ribs and tails. "Synnefo, household variant. Pure design, unacceptable deviations. Not qualified for decision making," she said as it investigated Dolce. Then Vasilia, "Chimeric hybrid. Nonviable. Not qualified for decision making," she went on. She smiled when the crab crab claws performed their three point measurement of Dyssia. "Azura Administrator design. Qualified for the exercise of Authority. We may speak frankly, dear."

A terrible, earth-shaking roar came from behind that awful door. The fires were descending.

"This box contains everything that was stolen from humanity," said Demeter. "Its strength. Its beauty. Its biomancy. Symbotes and symbiote-species. You have seen one such in the person of Bella; a companion, guardian and lover. Innocent and eager to serve. There are many more like her; biotechnology designed to strengthen, to improve, to remake. Graft limbs, replacement bodies, genetic paradigms, hivemind constructs, viral degenerations, pheromantic compulsions - all the possibilities of what humanity sought to become crammed into this Pandora's box. Humanity had been altering itself as intensely as it had been altering its servitors, and all of that recursive self improvement is down here. And now, in her moment of ascension, Nero wants to burn it all to death, to force humanity to live without it. An atrocity, you no doubt agree. One that you can stop. Open the door."

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

There is a kind of laughter that isn't quite right.

The picts start out innocently enough. Cute animals, people in Guard uniforms performing tricks, Skitarii dancing. Hagar moves through the space of the Factorium, illuminated only by the flickering lights and happy images and the wheezing groans of tech-priests and menials who lie drooling on the floor before them. Turning the screens off is easy enough for Hagar, at which point everyone else is free to follow into the rooms. The process is slow, almost numbing, as room after room, console after console passes by.

A flash of interest shows up in some of the picts. Green and white giants from the Jade Lancers chapter move through the background of some of the screens, weapons armed and raised. The shock of their vivid colours is enough to break the trance and make you realize that cute little puppy you've been watching is dead and rotted, and the friends who keep playing with it are two little lords; daemonic gremlins with single eyes and gap-tooth smiles. A moment later both of them evaporate into a greenish mist as mass-reactives detonate inside them and the feed seamlessly cuts through to another video. The playful stomping horse that you had started to look forwards to seeing is a vast sluglike creature, maw dripping saliva, and it claps its flippers together before body-slamming another Astartes against a wall so hard the ferrocrete cracks. It's not something you laugh at. It's just a little chuckle, a corrupted little lazy twist of your mouth, before the next video plays showing a pair of skitarii doing a sword kata demonstration.

The work is so monotonous that even without the compulsion of the screens you might have missed it when that vast white-armoured warrior lurches out of the darkness. It is a Jade Lancer, helmet cracked, one lens flickering, the other bright with the corrupting patterns of the picts playing across its surface. Its armour is rusted and worn and caked in blood and gore. Its twitching fingers holds an empty pistol. It lurches into the room with a violence not even undeath could dim, pushing past Hagar roughly. It is heading for Vael and Geron, a small crowd of blankly inert magi and guardsmen following in its wake.

Black Crusade: Fires In The Garden

The disease is indeed treatable, especially in an early stage like this. Stimulants, exercise, forced sustained activity and good nutrition will beat it back entirely. A taste of this can be shaken off like a mild depression.

The issue is that this is not simply a disease; it is also a contaminant. The disease would run its course naturally if the subject simply did not return to the depths of the facility. If he goes back in and is exposed further to the displays then it will progress regardless of countermeasures. Extended exposure will render him like unto these Mechancius adepts: unable to summon the will to move even as they are executed by servitors.

One other detail - this particular lethargy is location-bound to this particular facility, to this particular Scribe. All of the Lords of the Garden have concocted a unique desolation, and the plague that laid the Jade Tigers low was not the same as the one that ravaged the Children of the Omnissiah. Futures where you simply leave still involve danger and death, but not this danger and not this death.

*

The challenge before you is thus:

The first of the Scribes is within the depths of a Mechanicus facility. The principle hazard of this facility is the cogitator screens - they are still active, displaying corruptive images, vectors for a lethargic disease. A single glance will not immediately cause debility, but sustained exposure will advance the infection. At issue is that the Mechanicus facility is enormous, with tens of thousands of screens on a vast array of devices.

The second complication is that you are not the first on the scene; Forgeworld Draupnir has deployed a strike team to extract the facility's secrets, and if they terminate the Scribe before you can reach them then a powerful asset for the Warmaster will be lost. Going blindfolded may inure you to the diseased displays, but will render you vulnerable if the slaves of the Omnissiah strike.

Return to Thellamie

The collection of eternity shifts. Moves.

Rolls.

At first it seems like the Stacks have destabilized, that the mess is coming down in an avalanche - but no, the edges are too clearly defined for that. It is not a collapse, it is a ball - a vast katamari of swords and dresses and shelves, the accumulated wealth of infinity coming towards you with crushing momentum. But for all its monumental size it does not radiate greed - it leaves wasteful gaps in its trail of destruction, and from the crevasses that run through it, it weeps tears of mercury that pool in its trail.

It comes for you Eclair - not maliciously, not deliberately, but unstoppably. A hoard with no dragon is a terrible thing.

"The potion lab on the east side is full of explosive reagents," said Injimo serenely. This was again the girl who had fought the dragon Morning without a single thought in her head; she might die here but nobody was going to say she hadn't made a good faith effort to solve the tactical puzzle in the so doing. "A flaming arrow shot there would inflict critical damage."

Breathless Dead

The Imperial Palace is the most fortified single location in the galaxy. It outshines Capitas. Ceron would fall before the Palace. Demeter's Forge, for all its terrors, would break upon the anvil of the Palace. And all this before it caught fire.

"Do not weep for me, beloved citizens," Empress Nero said from one hundred billion screens and speakers. She sat upon her throne of gold, holding aloft a glass of her beloved wine, the same wine that could be found anywhere on the city. "Drink with me! This wine is the blood of my veins. I bled myself dry on the soil of Tellus so that you could, each of you, drink along with me. Feel this experience! And then look upon your neighbor and realize that they feel it too! They have drunk of me as you have! They have been through Hell as you have! They have risen from the grave as you have! All of you, every one of you, entombed within the shell of Tellus have been on a voyage together, a voyage grander than any other! You have traveled across the length and breadth of the galaxy and the citizens alongside you are not simply your cell-mates, they are the friends you have made along the way! People of Tellus! Humanity, reforged! Remember your birthright, your inheritance, the possibilities that are open to you as a united species! You have seen what the Endless Azure Skies has dreamed together, and the works their unity has made possible!

"But humanity has always surpassed! That is why I love you so, oh sons and daughters of Prometheus! You have reached beyond! You have risen to meet every trial placed before you, setting aside your differences and acting in unity, forming immortal bonds of friendship, forging immortal heroes of legend, raising immortal nations into history! You bound the galaxy in starlit gates, and when those failed 'midst the storm, you set sail upon the black like the mariners of old! All of this awaits you again!

"So do not weep for me. I shall ascend to those immortal ranks and watch you from eternity. I will see how you lash and tame this savage galaxy once again. I will cheer as you collar the wolves and break the skies. And I wait with breathless anticipation to see what new project you will begin from your rightful seat of galactic mastery! It will surpass my dreams and win my heart, as it always does. I am sure of this. I believe in you. I have done all this for you, and to see what you will do next."

The palace burned. Biomanced roses flash and crackle and ignite like fireworks, sending glorious cascades of sparks up into the sky. The deranged glory of it is a shock even to eyes jaded by the vision of Capitas; Capitas was a stagnant thing, for all its beauty, designed to last forever. The burning palace of Empress Nero is using forever as kindling; her twisted shadow's mobile palace was but a pale foreshadowing of the scale of her intentions. Her death was to be one last common experience for humanity, a God crucifying herself on the altar of man.

But it was not complete. The distortion of the incomplete planetary teleportation had the palace fading in and out of reality. Clifflike walls snapped and slid, the ocean raged and snapped as it was forced aside for the roots of towers, and then rushed back into the vacuum when they departed again. Defensive legions fled in terror, pouring down the steps and through the gates of the inferno, diving out into the raging sea in their thousands - columns of black dressed maids, phalanxes of golden-robed aristocrats, routs of soldiery, archivists cradling relics in their hands. Waterfalls of bodies falling out into the ocean, spilling into the sea like oil spills. Empress Nero had ensured that their paths would be free, their evacuation protocols were well rehearsed, and she waved them good-bye from her screens as they fled her madness.

The wind raged. Helicopters have always been violent affronts to the laws of gravity and aerodynamics, beastly machines that want nothing more than to crash, and these are not ideal flying conditions.