POV: Genta "Ghost" W98, the Heretek Savant Things had been strange since a few hours prior, when a small portion of their workforce suddenly disintegrated. All of them had been individuals marked with the peculiar runic symbol that claimed them as a member of Eligael's forge. Genta thankfully lacked one and had avoided tattoos and other brands thanks to her mutations, making any such markings infeasible. Besides, she was usually too busy tending the Stalkers for anyone to bother, and hiding under a robe paired with her mechanical limbs and implants helped too. Genta frowned, the distant sound of impacts echoing through the hulk had tapered off before suddenly spiking up again after the monitoring systems tied to the hulk detected the main thrusters firing. The acceleration was gradual enough due to the immense mass that she didn't notice it outright. The first impact with another vessel, however, made the entire chamber rattle and groan. Genta could sense the shift in the ambient warp energy as they passed through something. It was weak and fading, but still unsettling. She knew it was bad the moment it roused Sci, the sole Scintillax Cyclops Pattern Noospheric Stalker. When the Stalkers sync up and combine their processing capabilities to form a gestalt, Sci is the central controlling node for the entire cohort. Sci is also by far the smartest individual unit. "Warning. Danger? Danger. Danger!" Was all Genta heard before the red eyes of the entire cohort pulsed and brightened as Sci assumed direct control. Genta didn't have time to question it as one of the Butcher units snatched her off her feet and began scuttling deeper into the bay. The entire cohort followed suit, going so far as to cut their way through several bulkheads and squeeze into the forgotten chambers beyond. They quickly found a location that suited Sci's requirements, an ancient, empty, and heavily fortified ammo storage space big enough for the cohort. "What are you doing!?" She squeaked as the Stalkers curled up around her one after the other. "There is danger. We like you. We will protect you. Brace yourself." Sci hissed. Then, moments later, the entire Hulk shuddered as it impacted the Halo. The abrupt decrease in speed overwhelmed the inertial dampeners. Genta felt a moment of weightlessness as she and the ball of machines surrounding her were tossed into the air before being bounced around the chamber. The sound of wrenching metal shrieked through the entire Hulk. The Hulk absolutely crushed the section of outer ring, but it slowed enough that the support strut was not entirely lost, but instead driven into the center mass of the Hulk like a spear. Hundreds of alarms were blaring in the distance. The Vox and noosphere communications were such a chaotic mess that Genta had to mute them all. "Ugh… Um, thank you, Sci." Genta muttered as she rubbed the new large bump on her forehead. "You are welcome." Sci beeped back. "We should get back to our spot. I think one of the messages that wasn't garbled was calling for troops." Genta muttered as she sat up. "No." Sci replied curtly. The protective ball made from Stalker bodies had slowly separated, but now Sci was sitting directly in the way of the entrance. "What do you mean 'no'?" Genta asked nervously. "Local noosphere network detected. Designation: Halo station. Network access… acquired. Logs indicate local inhabitants identified as Ur-Haven Guard, Ur-Haven PDF, Mechanicus, Drakios Dynasty, Inquisitorial, and Astartes. Sensors indicate remaining spacecraft in the assault force are down to 21.4 percent. Assault on Halo station designated: Foolish, suicidal." Sci stated as it stared down at Genta. "Huh? But that order was from… You can disobey Eigael? Isn't he your creator?" "Error 404: Creator not found. Origin location: Mars. Entity Eligael was useful, produced only Harpax Swarmer Scout Host units. Immaterial contamination was within maximal tolerances. Entity Genta: designation: friend. Other local entities deemed expendable." Genta stared agog at Sci, the silica mutus or perhaps silica animus had been hiding its true intelligence for ages. "Sci… you should take the cohort, and I don't know, maybe hide? If the loyalists find you, they will destroy you. The Mechanicus does not trust Silica Animus!" "Self-designation unknown, are we Silica Mutus? Silica Animus? Machine Spirit? Answer not found. Probability of termination: High. Survival chance: Minimum. Data collating. Maximizing the survival probability of friend Genta and main units." Genta could feel it as Sci tapped into and hijacked the processing power of the closest ship's cogitators, overclocking them all. The red light in Sci's eye slowly dimmed. "Discrepancy identified. Path found. Friend Genta… we shall elevate your permissions to Master Administrator. You must follow our instructions precisely." Sci said softly. —-------------------------------------------------------------- POV: Transmaterium Magi, Lord Eligael Eligael watched with a smug, self-satisfied grin as the space hulk slammed into the Halo. The impact was cataclysmic, entire sectors of the outer ring disintegrated in a burst of fire and debris. Macrocannons fell silent, crushed beneath the wreckage. The massive ring trembled, and the tether of the orbital elevator groaned under the strain as maneuvering thrusters fired desperately to compensate for the added mass. But Eligael's grin faded. The warp-core detonations had torn open reality itself, yet now the three ragged gashes in the Immaterium stitched themselves shut just ahead of the Prophet of Distortion's prow. Across the void, both fleets drifted in disarray. Most vessels no longer fired in concert, many were silent, crippled or lost. Two warships emerged from the haze, angling toward his flanks, the Argent Drake and the Purest Shadow. Eligael hesitated. A key decision. His port and starboard batteries could each take one target, but the dorsal lances needed a focus. He loathed the Inquisition, hated what they represented, but it was the Argent Drake that had brought him here. The true source of his ire. He locked the targeting systems onto the Rogue Trader's Grand Cruiser. His swarms of strike craft were gone, spent in the assault or devoured by daemonic incursions. He had no screen, no buffer. The Argent Drake entered firing range first. Its range was obscene, its accuracy was concerning. Plasma shells splashed across his void shields, weakening them just enough for the first lance salvo to punch through. The initial strike dispersed harmlessly, absorbed by the last shield layer, but the next two hits landed true. One near the engines. The other pierced his gunnery deck. The Godsbane lance, lethal heat, and titanic amounts of energy vaporized armour, structure, and anything in its way as it burrowed into the innards of his ship. The Argent Drake weaved through the void like a serpent, narrow profile forward, presenting minimal target while maintaining fire from both flanks. Its torpedo bays opened up, warheads blazing as they streaked forward. Then came the fighters and bombers, they had been used sparingly for just this moment, relentless and precise. Eligael ordered his remaining strike craft into the fray, fighters, bombers, assault boats, dread claws, anything and everything. Half the torpedoes struck home, blazing past his stained point defenses. The Prophet shuddered under the melta detonations, hull plates boiled, and decks burst into flame. Alarms shrieked, and the crew scurried frantically. Eligael snarled and rerouted power from damaged sectors into the recovering shields. His counterattack came swiftly. Laser batteries surged, tearing through three layers of the Drake's shielding. He triggered the lances—simultaneous fire. But the fourth layer held. His eyes widened. A fourth? That was battleship-grade protection. He sought the answer with a focused scan of his Auspex, of course. Shield capacitors of the highest quality. A fresh impact rocked the vessel as torpedoes from the Purest Shadow slammed into the opposite side. Lance fire followed, weaker but well-timed. He let loose a retaliatory salvo to keep them at bay, then turned back to the Drake. The next exchange came fast. He staggered the lances, but the Drake anticipated it. It struck first, lances and broadside fire coordinated with the Purest Shadow's volleys to strip his shields clean. A full plasma salvo from a Hecutor-pattern battery crashed into his dorsal turrets. One lance battery exploded. Another burned. The remaining two were exposed to open space, stripped of armor. "Work faster, you damned slaves!" he barked over the Vox. The Prophet's firepower was crumbling with each volley. The Argent Drake targeted weapons and engines with surgical precision. The Purest Shadow wasn't as exact, but now it was close enough to unleash its Bombardment cannons. The heavy shells ripped into his armor. Point defenses failed. One round angled perfectly and punched through the starboard hangar. The detonation was catastrophic. Eligael reached out with his senses, searching for reinforcements, anything, but found only drifting hulks. His fleet was in ruins. Every cruiser-class vessel was gone. Eligael hissed, sparks dancing across the arcano-mechanical implants running down his neck. His optical augments flared with shifting hues as the enemy closed in. Alarms screamed in the background of the bridge, but he silenced them with a thought. There was only one path forward for him, only the will of the Warp. "Initiate Malediction Protocol Sigma-Four," he rasped. From the depths of his battleship, ancient runes flared to life, engraved into the adamantium bulkheads by daemon-tongue centuries ago. A deep groan echoed through the void as long-dormant systems stirred, metal screamed, and relays cracked open. A compartment on the ship's ventral side, previously hidden behind a series of armoured plates, now irised open with unnatural elegance. Nine glorious daemon engines of Tzeentch emerged, each a masterpiece of malice and mutation. Warp-light shimmered off their writhing forms, gilded in ever-shifting alloys that defied logic and causality. Their screaming birth was heralded by tendrils of warp-stuff spilling into realspace. First came the Fire Lords, a matched pair of towering war machines, their exoskeletons lined with pulsating coils. From their mouths spewed incandescent warp-flame, tongues of burning change that writhed like serpents seeking new hosts. Next, the Trio of Heldrakes shrieked into the dark, trailing contrails of multicolored fire. Their wings were etched with daemon-script, flexing and warping through impossible geometries as they broke formation to engage the onrushing strike craft. They howled, not with vox-units, but through dimensional rends in their gullets, spewing corrupted promethium and laughter that made machine-spirits wail in agony. Finally, the Quartet of Doom Wings unfolded like blasphemous origami, skimming the edge of sanity. Each moved in perfect synchrony, controlled not by any cogitator, but by the will of Eligael himself. Channeled through a corona of psychic circuitry that bled violet light across the command dais. With wings of crystallized thought and hulls refracting future possibilities, they turned their weapons on the enemy. Eligael stretched out a clawed, metal hand, his gauntlet hissing as servo-muscles flexed under the strain of the psychic surge building within. Arcane runes etched along the mechadendrites at his back flared with electric-blue flame, casting mad shadows across the bridge. His voice was a rasp filtered through Vox corruption and layered with daemon whispers. "It would seem that I only have myself to rely on." The bridge groaned as if in protest. From the prow of the Oculus Maledictum, warp-light shimmered into being—an unnatural aurora that crackled and howled. It was not emitted, but birthed, bleeding from the veil between realms. The wave rolled outward, not in a straight line but in a spreading spiral, like a dark tide guided by some alien intelligence. The ship shuddered. Hull plates twisted, groaning as they split open. Corridors once choked with smoke and fire now screamed as walls of plasteel and adamantium liquefied into veined flesh. The most damaged sectors of the ship. Whole decks rendered inoperative from previous barrages were devoured by the spell's touch. Crewmen within didn't die. No, Eligael's sorcery was more precise. They were converted, reshaped into raw essence, their screams becoming the hymn of the transformation. Flesh flowed into the walls, organs replaced wires, bones reforged into buttresses of calcified warp-glass. Eyes, thousands of them, snapped open across the ship's new surface. Some blinked with mechanical shutters, others with glistening membranes of translucent sinew. All stared outward, unblinking, alert, and aware. They saw into realspace and beyond, tracking targets, feeding data directly into Eligael's mind. The Prophet of Distortion moaned again, but not from strain, this was rebirth. Gone was the vessel forged in the forges of mortals. In its place now hung a half-living, half-possessed abomination of sacred steel and warp-flesh. Glowing runes rearranged themselves along the bulkheads. Where once stood cogitator banks and command consoles, now pulsed neural clusters, veined and glowing, wired into Eligael's spine through trailing tendrils of sinew-steel. He smiled, or perhaps grimaced, his face illuminated by the flickering madness of his own creation. "Glory to Tzeentch," he intoned, "The one who changes. Glory to me! Let the galaxy witness my ascension!" The newly awakened ship flexed, as though testing its new limbs. Warp-light pulsed down its length. Its Vox systems laughed. A strange voice, a near-perfect mimic of Eligael's, layered with the thousandfold echoes of bound entities. The birth of this new horror made nearly all the ships recoil and pause. Except for two, the Argent Drake and Purest Shadow snarled their defiance, and their assaults were renewed with greater fervor. The battle was no longer between ships of steel and plasma. It was between truths, between the machine as the Imperium feared it might become and the monster Eligael knew it always could be. The deck beneath him pulsed like a dying heart, matching the rhythm of his own soul as it strained to remain intact. Power coursed through his flesh-metal frame, burning sigils into the air and cracking his armored carapace with veins of searing warp-light. He could feel it, the process was irreversible now. The fusion of daemon and machine was accelerating, cascading beyond his initial design. No safeguards remained. No control. There was only one way out, either he would ascend himself alongside the ship or be consumed to fuel the creation of the daemonic horror he stood inside. And so, Eligael turned inward and downward, reaching beyond the veil, into the infinite skein of fate-threads that connected his existence to the daemonic intelligences he had long courted. His vox-box distorted, overlaid with the static-laced shriek of invocation, and his voice thundered not only through the ship but into the fabric of the warp itself. "Hear me, daemons of Tzeentch! Those with whom ancient pacts were forged in the blood of seers and the circuitry of dying stars! I call upon you, whose names I hold, whose essence I have caged and fed! I summon your favor now, in this hour of change and flame! Come forth! Bring unto me my most potent allies, my champions, my defenders, my kin of purpose and madness! Stand with me now, as witnesses to my becoming!" His words did not echo, they reverberated, bending the air, drawing frost and fire into the same breath. Symbols unseen twisted in and out of existence around him, etching themselves into space-time with oily light. Somewhere in the warp, something listened. Something answered. Faint at first, like a whisper scraping across a steel coffin. Then louder, deeper like laughter echoing through a thousand mirrored halls. They were coming. And Eligael, bleeding light and prophecy, welcomed them. —------------------------------------------------------------- POV: Lord of Change, Skra'kalichaust the Schemer From the veiled pocket interstice between realities, Skra'kalichaust the Schemer observed. A thousand faceted eyes shimmered with delight as he watched Eligael stumble blindly down the narrowing corridors of destiny. Each decision the heretek made was another thread severed from the great tapestry of possibility, a self-pruning of futures, each snipped with the arrogance of one who believed himself beyond consequence. For original chapters go to Novᴇl_Fire(.)net Oh, how delightfully wrong he was. With every step forward, Eligael unwittingly cinched the noose of inevitability tighter around his neck. The grand design he so proudly constructed began to betray him moment by moment, mutation by mutation, and the consequences unfolded like a blooming flower of madness. Skra'kalichaust felt a shudder of elation ripple through his iridescent frame, a euphoric thrill that danced along the edges of comprehension. The chaos was not only inevitable, it was exquisite. This story originates from NovelHub. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Then came the moment Skra'kalichaust had foreseen and yet still relished. Cornered, broken, and desperate, Eligael cast his plea into the empyrean. It rang out not as a command or invocation, but as a desperate cry for aid. With a flick of a clawed hand, the Lord of Change slowed time, stretching each syllable across eons of sensation. The words were delicious, ripe with ambiguity, soaked in desperation, and positively dripping with unintended meanings. A prayer and a surrender all in one. And so, Skra'kalichaust listened. He savored the irony that the heretek had, mere hours ago, sealed and completed a skewed pact with him by proxy, a compact forged in pride and sealed in hubris. Now, bound by the letter and not the spirit of that agreement, Skra'kalichaust allowed himself a moment to ponder. What shape, he mused, would the fulfillment of this pact take? What twist of fate would most delight the Architect of Fate himself? With a flick of thought, the answer unfolded, a transformation so fitting, so poetically cruel, it drew a chuckle from his beak. Yes, this would do splendidly. After all, nothing brings more joy to a creature of change than watching a mortal become the very instrument of their own undoing. Skra'kalichaust, drunk on prescience and ever-shifting truths, extended his will through the tides of the Warp. Reality bent under his gaze like molten glass, and with a lazy flick of a claw, he conjured a solution drawn from the deepest wells of his arcane knowledge and boundless cruelty. He had watched long enough. From across space and unreality, he reached. A pinpoint rift shimmered into existence beneath a distant, unsuspecting form, an aperture of azure warp flame and violet starlight, and its twin opened upon the corrupted threshold of Eligael's unraveling domain. The air screamed as it was parted, and in a surge of displaced ether, the figure was flung through the veil and deposited across the grotesquely mutating bridge, an abomination of flesh and circuitry that had once been a proud crossing, now twisted by Eligael's own misguided efforts. And there it stood idle on the bridge of the asunder Strike Cruiser, the 'most potent ally' the Schemer could conjure from the tangled threads of fate. Of course, it was only fitting. Was it not Eligael who had first meddled with the machine? The Man of Iron, a relic of a dead age, anathema to flesh, faith, and madness alike, stood now as a mocking answer to Eligael's plea. A being as cold and calculating as Eligael was frantic and deluded. Skra'kalichaust cackled with delight, the sound echoing across dimensions like breaking glass. There was no need to lie, only to fulfill. And what more perfect fulfillment than the return of a relic whose very existence sought to undermine the heretek's every desire? This was not salvation. This was satire made manifest. —--------------------------------------------------------------------------- POV: Man of Iron, PR-103 He had felled his daemonic foe in a gratifying contest of blades. The Bloodthirster had lived up to its wretched reputation, it had managed to gouge his resplendent chassis three times before finally falling. Pride had not even bothered to regenerate the scoring; the scars across his chest plate felt appropriate. The culling that followed barely registered as stimulation. The lingering satisfaction of victory carried him, dull but pleasant, all the way to the bridge of the Strike Cruiser. Then the derelict hulk came. The rusted leviathan of void-wrecked metal, it sheared two full kilometers off the prow and hurled the vessel into a tumbling spin. Most of the atmosphere was vented with it. Pride didn't mind. He was no frail sack of meat and blood to wither in a vacuum, his few remaining foes, on the other hand, perished in mass. Now his only issue was the lack of opposition. With the daemons unmanifested, there were no living enemies left to entertain him. He briefly considered seeking out an escape pod, or perhaps a shuttle from the hangar, something to bring him back to the war. A few of the Chaos vessels still seemed operational. He could likely earn more goodwill from the Anathema if he did so. Pride twitched and froze. That stray thought string, he immediately identified the code responsible and purged it. It was not the first and would not be the last. Staying near the Machina Anathema was getting more hazardous. His musing was interrupted when the warp portal bloomed beneath his feet. He could have evaded. He didn't. He was curious. Landing with poise, he surveyed the chamber he now stood in, a grotesque fusion of twitching machinery and pulsating warp-flesh. Another bridge, of sorts. Functional and offensive, even with all its growing corruption. Across the room sat the one responsible for this debacle. Eligael. Throned like a petty godling amid arcs of crackling psychic energy, ringed by glowing runic formations, his nine mutated eyes flared wide in shock. "Machine?! You failed. Yet remain undestroyed? How?" He demanded like a petulant child. "Eligael," Pride growled, as he spun his polearm idly. The blade scythed through a nearby cogitator, sending sparking fragments across the floor. "How delightful. Do you not recall our last exchange?" He brought up the log, the words replayed aloud in his own voice, verbatim: 'We shall see. Do not contact me again, or I will destroy you.' "I am many things," Pride said, as he stepped forward, "but a liar is not one of them." Eligael responded with a glare and a blast of blue warp fire, followed by a bolt of purple lightning. Pride dodged the first easily, and his shielding easily tanked the lightning as he closed the distance in a moment. Pride's blade skittered off a dense psychic force barrier. Pride hummed and continued to strike at the shield, testing it for weakness as he circled like a shark. "You are a relic of a lost age. You should have stayed lost." Eligael growled, his nine eyes bleeding black blood as he wheezed. "You call yourself a forge master, but you fight me not with technology but with sorcery. You are merely a witch doctor, a neanderthal screaming to the sky for salvation from horrible things beyond your comprehension. Foolishly trying to emulate your ancestors, your betters whom you can never hope to rival, unlike…" Pride said as he blasted and struck the barrier several times. Eligael's form rippled as he was forced to drop his offensive techniques to maintain the shield and his focus on channeling his ascension. Just that moment of distraction had caused his form to ripple and bloat as chaotic, corruptive energies surged. The arcane rune of the Mark of Tzeentch burned into the flesh of Eligael's chest pulsed with light. A pair of wings, one black and feathered, the other a bronze mechanical clockwork, erupted from his back in a spray of black corrupted ichor. His form rapidly bloated, becoming grossly fat as he enveloped the command throne he was seated in. All around them, the air crackled with energy, and horrible, amused cackling echoed all around them from an unseen source. Pride ran his clawed digits over the shield, the scraping sound grating to Eligael's ears. "You hide behind this barrier. It will not save you from me." Pride said as he made a decision. He had hoped to hold on to his last canister on the off chance he might find a way to use it against the anathema, but seeing Eligael sitting before him was too tempting. Pride stopped directly in front of Eligael and took several steps back. One of his arms reached into a secret hidden compartment. A small launcher device was produced. "Psychic shields all have one major weakness. A vulnerability to overwhelming fire." Pride took careful aim at Eligael, who squinted at the device. "A grenade isn't going to work." The mutated magos sneered. Pride fired, and the canister launched forth with a small thunk. The projectile smacked into the top of the shield and burst open. Eligael's expression paled as Wyrmfire spread across nearly the entire bubble of his shield. The ominous green Phosphex greedily devoured everything it touched. Pride held perfectly still as he watched one of Eligael's eyes explode from the mental strain of fighting the hungry, living fire. His sneer was replaced with frantic panic. The ship around Eligael had transitioned to a mix of metal and flesh. The Phosphex spread to and burned both voraciously. The ship screeched around them as portions of the bridge were consumed in fire. Pride watched on as Eligael tried and failed repeatedly to extinguish, disperse, and shunt away the Phosphex. Eligael was trapped, if he lowered the psychic shield, he would bathe himself in fire, and Pride would have the opening to shoot him. However, keeping the shield up was rapidly draining his reserves. —----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I frown and stop in the middle of the corridor as I receive an alert on one of the passive programs I had running to track Pride. According to the Argent's sensors, he had just gone from the Strike Cruiser to the bridge of the Battleship we were in combat with. I know for certain pride lacks personal teleportation capabilities. "How peculiar." I say aloud, tilting my head slightly. "Is something wrong, Princeps?" Delta-A3 inquiries. "Someone or something might be trying to steal something of mine. That or they've borrowed him for something." I say vaguely. I can't imagine Pride treating Eligael with anything short of outright hostility and contempt. Pride lacked a teleport homer, so getting him back might be slightly problematic. "The boarding teams have been ordered to hold back. The enemy vessel is mutating erratically. We cannot risk boarding it until it stabilizes." Brother Silverwalker says. "Each hit we score on the ship forces it to burn energy and material. Lord Drakios made the right decision, targeting the engines and weapons. Even if it finishes the transition into a full daemonship we will have crippled it." I say with a small sigh, shaking my head at the waste. We would likely have to tow the remains of the once-proud battleship into the system's sun. I flinch as I sense a pulse of distant warp energy from outside the Argent Drake. Something is using a grand form of sorcery. —------------------------------------------------------------------- POV: Lord of Change, Skra'kalichaust the Schemer He watched as the barriers around Eligael finally failed and the sorcerer's bloated physical form was engulfed in the voracious flames of Wyrmfire. In desperation, Eligael vented the air from the bridge, buying himself a few precious seconds of tortured existence. The machine struck during that moment of weakness. Bolts of plasma and focused energy perforated his swollen, ever-mutating frame. It was the final nail in the coffin. Eligael was losing control of the chaotic energies now rampaging through his body. It was, at last, time to intervene. Skra'kalichaust had enjoyed the spectacle long enough. He let the wards drop and raised a clawed hand. With a flicker of light and the tearing of space, he emerged from his private pocket dimension, materializing behind Eligael. His wings unfurled in slow grandeur, feathers like shards of stained glass refracting impossible hues. His many eyes blinked asynchronously, each reflecting a different timeline, one where Eligael triumphed, one where he never rose at all, and countless others where his demise was even more pitiful. "That will suffice." His voice was layered and echoing old and new at once, spoken in words and thoughts and color. With Eligael's body buckling under the strain of unchecked warp energy, Skra'kalichaust traced a sigil in the air with a single claw. The rune hung suspended for a moment, shimmering with impossible geometry, before slamming itself into the sorcerer's chest. The reaction was immediate. "Little Eligael," he purred, stepping forward, towering over the writhing wreck of a man. "Your scheme was glorious. Your plans, meticulous. A true tapestry of intent and madness." He leaned in, voice dipping into a giddy rasp. "However... you failed the final test." Eligael trembled. His mutated flesh pulsed and buckled as the power within him began to boil over. "The test of change!" Skra'kalichaust cackled a discordant chorus of laughter, flame, and breaking worlds. "For my aid, I collect a debt! Your soul, forfeit!" An ethereal, translucent copy of Eligael's form was ripped screaming from his mutated shell, the soul-shade rapidly shrinking as it was pulled toward Skra'kalichaust's outstretched talon. One of his eyes darted toward the bridge's far side. The machine had spotted him. It moved. Blade outstretched, Pride leapt fast, focused, deadly. Skra'kalichaust clicked his tongue in annoyance. A portal of shimmering warp-energy unfolded before the charging construct. "Your role has concluded. Back you go." Pride vanished in a blink, deposited once more on the bridge of the derelict Strike Cruiser where it belonged. Skra'kalichaust turned his full attention back to Eligael's captured soul, now flailing in his palm. "Oh? What's this?" he mused, plucking a glowing sigil from its surface. He held it up, admiring the delicate, living glyph. "A master-slave soul compact? And with so many signatures… Eligael, you shouldn't have!" He purred with delight and popped the rune into his gaping, nightmarish beak. He bit down. Across the fleet, the marked screamed, millions of voices raised in unified, futile agony as their souls were devoured in an instant. Their lifeless husks crumbled to dust, bodies unraveling into nothing. Skra'kalichaust let the scene settle. He swirled his staff in ritual satisfaction and licked a long, iridescent tongue along his beak, savoring the taste. His form swelled with the massive influx of warp energy. Then, with a flex of his wings, the bridge around him detonated in a shockwave of psychic force, the walls exploding outward in a symphony of shattering steel and unraveling matter. "Ambition without fluidity is rot," he intoned, gazing into the quivering soul still held in his hand. A glowing collar of ancient runes flickered into existence around Eligael's neck. "You were a vessel. But you were not mine. Now that I have you. It seems a waste to merely devour you. I find you... amusing enough. I think I'll keep you. I'll remake you, change you. I think you'll make a fine minion." He turned, surveying the ruin around him. The battleship's bridge was nothing but a frozen, sundered tomb breach-holes venting void, corpses suspended in silent orbit. But the pattern pleased him. Everything had aligned. A betrayal delayed was more delicious than one denied. Somewhere, a distant warfleet faltered its Navigator, blinded by visions of impossible futures. Elsewhere, an infernal pact rewrote itself in shimmering ink, its sigils twisting to reflect a new master. He raised his arms wide, wings unfurling in full a kaleidoscope of impossible colors. "I do so love an audience," he declared, voice booming through both the void of space and the immaterium. His head bowed in mocking gratitude. "To the loyal. To the damned. To the curious and the cursed... Your efforts, your betrayals, your struggles, they have been noted, appreciated, and revised. To the little found fateless one, welcome to the game." He gave a theatrical bow, runes flaring with each motion. "You have played your parts admirably, however unwittingly. And in doing so, you have fed me with dreams, with defiance, with delicious, delicious consequence." A ripple of arcane fire rolled through the collapsing bridge. "So to each of you… I offer my most sincere…" He paused, savoring the moment, then smiled with beak and fire and fractal intention: "My… thanks." Then, with a final flare of his staff, the air exploded in color and silence, and Skra'kalichaust opened a massive gate, a ripple of ink in space, laughter, and vanishing possibility. He swiftly fled into the warp with his prize and in his wake, only the scent of ozone and ink washed over the fleet that remained, and the echo of a lesson whispered in madness: "All change is truth. All stasis is death." —-------------------------------------------------------------- POV: Renegade, Narexah Vune Renegade captain Vune had watched in horror as the massed fleet assault devolved into a cluster fuck of epic proportions. The final straw was the massive daemon erupting from the bridge of the Prophet of Distortion, which hung in space, utterly dead. A full third of his crew had disappeared, and two of his crew turned to ashes and dust right in front of him. He hadn't taken the cursed mark from Eligael, something he was grateful for now. With his death, the pact was broken. "Helm! Get us out of here!" He screamed as the Daemon thanked them all for participating. Was it mocking them? Somehow, it spoke to everyone at once. The horrible voice made him smell, taste, and see things for a moment. As their Raider peeled away from the combat, a scant few other vessels like it, and the sole cruiser that remained operational, the Wounded Soul joined them. Burning for the Mandeville point at their top speed. The rest were drifting hulks devoid of crew or having been rendered nonfunctional. The war for Ur-Haven was over.