Sterbelicht - One Sacrifice At A Time Against The Galaxy (40K)

With orders dispatched, a location for a fateful battle chosen, and the course set to draw the Orks and their fleet into Sophian Paradise, engines flared to life and reactors thrummed to the heartbeat of war, millions of souls moving as one across the void to give battle and death to those who would threaten those who lived in peace and with the hope for better days.

Only the future could tell what this plan may bring.


Story Time:
[] The Doom That Came To Cretonia
(Focus: Lessons of Orbital Supremacy)
[] Piscariii's Graveyard
(Focus: Conscripts against the Tide.)
[] Zoggin' Unfair Nimus Siu' Gits!
(Focus: Desperation makes for strange bedfellows...)
[] The Witch Cabals
(Focus: Renegade psykers, renegade soldiers, renegade horrors.)
[] Klybessan's Speciality: Fried Shrooms
(Focus: Squid'n'kans, Runtherds, Killa Kans, Gun Krews, and oh, so many more...)


AN: Too tired to make an effort today. Choose one of the above to see how the rest of the Sub-Sector is doing. After the second option has been chosen, you get the option to skip everything straight to the Battle for Paradise.

1 = Witches
2 = Doom

Also, I slept for 14 hours today, so I feel like raw sewage. Yay! [:

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

"Whisper of the Untainted Wings," the High Shaman murmured, her aged and wizened form hunched over his body, bound and bare of any cloth or metals that had once adorned him.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

"Whisper of its brush against the Tainted Soul," the High Witch intoned, the words like nails across his mind. Something within his body trashed and squirmed, its resistance to the powers invoked desperately fed by him with what meager might he still had.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

"Whisper of What Has Been, and tell of What May Be," the High Shaman drawled, a finger blackened by decades of use in rituals and by the usage of psychic oils once more plunged into the vessel which contained the substance faintly looking like a cat's purr. Not that he knew what a cat or a purr was.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

"Whisper of the changes that will be undone, for this one is not yours to command," the High Shaman wheezed with the breath leaving her lungs, the water escaping with it frozen in an instant as she began to draw symbols on his chest, head, shoulders, and legs, connecting them with rings and lines that burned across something far more primal than mere flesh and skin.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

"Scream." Not a whisper. Not an intonation. Not a beseeching prayer. A command.

He screamed. He screamed like nothing else he had ever screamed, not when his family was slaughtered by the Orks, not when the powers from the beyond had offered him might to take revenge, not when he had cut and carved and sliced and burned their sigils into those vermins that would fuel his revenge and the protection of all others, not when he had been taken prisoner by one of the Feathered Cabals that sang of The Lord's Rebirth since ages ago and His Chosen's Crusade in recent times.

It was a scream of a soul being ripped apart, the taint of Tzeentch slowly peeling off by a psychic ritual as old as it was dangerous for those who used it.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his gutted souls.

"I offer you freedom from this pain, I offer you a death free from your once master's grasp, I offer you the revenge you sought against the Orks in pursuit of both," the High Shaman whispered, his body contorting as muscles twitched and strained and pulled and contracted by their true strength unchecked by his brains' grasp.

The staves hit the ground, their echoes shivering across his soul.

Something within him ripped apart, and he knew it to be his soul. No. Not his soul. The parasite that had attached itself to it.

He screamed, and he gurgled, and he felt blood trickle from his every orifice and every pore, far more than there should have been in his body, far more than any human ought to possess, far more than enough to fill the basin within which he had been lain, and barely enough to ensure what would follow would become true.

Blackness began to overcome him, but he saw...something before that. A worm, a bird, a stone, a scroll, a weapon, a bag of coins, a thousand things twitching and morphing into one another in the grasp of the Shaman, pulling it from within his body, its essence screaming to him of magic, corruption, and the end of wallowing in mindless drudgery...before it was squashed by the High Shaman, an emotion of rage filling her very being. Beyond hot rage, beyond the icy grasp of murdered and killers without care to spend, it was the rage of one deeply settled into the mists of indifference against the injustices of the universe, fueling their every move with the names of hundreds of killed siblings, elders, children, and peoples as they struck injustice after injustice from a list that never ceased to grow.

"Rise," the High Shaman of the Cult of the Five Hallowed Wings spoke, her eyes blazing with powers of soul and faith.

And rise he did, the blood beneath him rising in turn, reaching for him, caressing him, engulfing him...changing him.

It was not a good change.

But it was one that would set him free.

---

Nobody in the Glimmering Federation, not the High Council, not the Celestial Choir, not the Councillors of any world, nor the Hymnals ensuring the nation could function as a nation at all, not the historians, the graveyard keepers, the shrine tenders, the Magi, technicians, captains, soldiers, toilet scrubbers, executives, or Space Marines, or anyone else at all, would know the name "Sebby Thorn." Even when he had been alive, nobody would have remembered the man, beyond maybe Saint Teeln, Prophet of the Star Child, as one of the manifold clergy he had educated and spent some time exchanging words and ideas with.

To be entirely fair here, he wouldn't have resented anyone for forgetting him; he was never one who wanted recognition. No, his work was administering to the sick, the ailing, and the disadvantaged. He would have turned down any statue in his honor or medal given to him had the Glimmering Federation known about his later life and would have proposed sending the money to a good cause.

At the time when people still knew he existed, it was hardly surprising then that he was one of those people who set out to help others in any way he could. Being a priest, he sought to give succor and healing to broken souls, hoping that a quiet posting to Quintura Diablo's less advantaged void stations would suit him just fine until he had enough experience on his shoulders to do something impactful, long-lasting, and mayhaps even wondrous.

Twenty-seven years later, the man was the leader of the most significant religious movement on Hexian Domus in the Hexe system of the Sub-Sector Macabre, the founder of two different schools of philosophy, and the person responsible for the eradication of the Crone Cults before replacing them with the Shamanistic Creed, a foundation of psykery aped after the mysteries of the Hymnals of the Federation, placing protection in ritual, faith, and collective action against the malicious taint of Ruin.

It was thanks to him, then, that Hexian Domus would not fall within weeks as the Orks came in their millions. His faith given to the people gave them the strength to unite against the Green Tide. His teachings of mind and soul gave them the foundations required to build themselves the bastions that saw their hope of survival be overshadowed by their need to overcome even these interesting times, and it was the Shamanistic Creed that, by age, faith, action, and magic, ensured that those who had fallen to Chaos in these times would find themselves in the grasp of another, far more...not kind, but ruthless in its mercy, being, giving them forms to break the Tide against.

It would not be an easy victory here, on this world, for the Orks as artillery thundered against them with shells inscribed with insults, scores of infantry dug trenchworks more complex than cities, as magics were burned across the battlefields by dozens across the planet beyond the petty temptations of Chaos, and hulking monsters of snow feather and obsidian fist, armored in ruby crystal blood and armed with sunlight scythes, cleansed themselves from Ruin in martyrdom and sacrifice.

Just like the Orks loved it.



Story Time:
[] The Doom That Came To Cretonia
(Focus: Lessons of Orbital Supremacy)
[] Piscariii's Graveyard
(Focus: Conscripts against the Tide.)
[] Zoggin' Unfair Nimus Siu' Gits!
(Focus: Desperation makes for strange bedfellows...)
[] Klybessan's Speciality: Fried Shrooms
(Focus: Squid'n'kans, Runtherds, Killa Kans, Gun Krews, and oh, so many more...)