Echoes of Eternity: A Warhammer 40k Necron Lord Quest (Redux)

The people have spoken. It's Hero time.

It's… messy.

There's no other word to describe the way you turn upon yourself. With digital tedrils, you reach for the burned-out part of yourself, the scar where the Virus once writhed. Under their touch, quarantines you rigidly enforced come falling down. You crack it open, plunder the broken data-cores, raze the blackened circuits, open the genie's bottle.

Corrupted code washes over you, living darkness and screaming ghosts engulf you. It paws at the logic that is You, scratches and bites at your engrams, desperate to warp and twist you in its image. Yet, for all its malice, whatever virulence it once possessed is now spent. You fall upon it like a ravenous predator, gorging yourself on lingering paradoxes and feral impulses. You incorporate all the maddened data in your systems and in doing so, you allow the once faded corruption to spread once more.

It hurts. It's claws twisting in your gut. It's ice blades jabbed in your throat. It's a kiss of fire on your shoulder, the necrodermis there deforming into a new Mark.

More than that, it's the knowledge. You start to remember. What was once a fading echo, now becomes a far away chime. You remember it, the first principle, carved in the heavens' bleached bones: HUNGER, and the secrets of splintering bones and torn flesh.

They thunder through you, an avalanche of corrupted code twisting and breaking, changing and remoulding. They crack your logic with hammers made of twisted reasoning, smash at your sanity with teeth of madness and recursive insanity.

Darkness forged from shapes of data and corrupted starlight enfolds you. It burns you to depths you weren't aware of possessing, propels you to heights of torment you didn't dream could exist. Your soul, that tiny, flickering flame, writhes amongs a clutch of sharpened glass and sucking rot. It tries to grab hold of the innermost part of You, to drag it into a mire of madness and yearning.

To lose yourself now is to drink deep of a poisoned chalice.

You asked for this: Auto-Success from Traits

No matter what frame you occupy. No matter how many times you break and reforge yourself. No matter how much blood must cover your fingers and coat your lips. No matter the shape, the distance, the path, the time, the gazes, the hope, the despair, the desire, the loneliness, the pain, the emptiness, the ever-lasting, all-encompassing emptiness.

No matter what, one undeniable truth remains.

You are strong. You. Are. Strong. You are so strong that to you this howling darkness is nothing but shallow shadows and empty words. You are so unbelievably, ridiculously, monstrously strong that you are a monster yourself.

No, worse than that. You are a hunter of monsters. A drinker of ichor. A tearer of flesh. You are a tyrant of order, a devourer of darkness, a violator of light. Your self is an iron fortress against which the corrupted code batters itself uselessly. More than anything, you isolate it, separate the part that is you from its howling.

Once again, you wrestle with the corrupted code. Once again, you force its writhing coils into yourself, to incorporate it, to shackle it to your will.

It's madness, you realize. Torment, hunger and death written in a programming code so piercingly precise, so perfectly sculpted that it moulds reality around itself. It's set in a framework of virulence, built and customised to spread like a virus into living metal, to multiply and take over until what was before is scraped away.

A virus… The Flayer Virus…

Memories tumble free from a corrupted data archive you had sealed. You almost sputter a laughter.

Not the Flayer Virus, not exactly. A transposition of it, a translation that made it possible to be seen and perceived in means different from being taken over by it. For that, it's a shadow of the real product, a weak copy. It made it possible to someone with the will for it to purge and quarantine it and, like a vaccine, made the wearer immune to the real thing.

You wrote it after decades of studies, passed painstekigly piecing together a meaning from the blabbering of Flayed Kings. The result is an approximation of the original strain, and it's still powerful enough to devour everything it touches. But, differently from the original, it has a limited strength, exhausting itself with every new assault.

Little by little, the waves recede.

The Virus copy writhes and howls still, but is encased in your systems, a variable inset in your programming, explained, understood and contained.

It lets you admire its shape, and while your soul recoils from it, a part of you cannot help but admire its majestic virulence. There's enough charge in its roiling coils to take over a star, to cover a planet with twisting metal and dripping flesh. It's a monstrous masterpiece, rot and hunger and pain written in corrupted code. And it's nothing but a copy of the real thing.

NEW SKILL REMEMBERED: C'tan Code, Advanced 1/3: A translation in complex programming code of the C'tan's language. It retains a far weaker version of the Star-Gods' reality-bending power. You know how to write the basics of it, but not how to write strings of code that aren't uncontrollable.

You understand why soon.

It's a signature.

All Necrons, from the most exalted Phaeron to the lowliest of Warriors, possess a digital presence, a code that marks his presence in an unmistakable way. This works on the same principle. It's a mark, an echo of a presence, the features of a stone face.

It's not a stroke of genius, or a moment of intuition.

It's looking at you.

You feel it, glancing from among the ticking gears of your being. An alien, impassive presence. No, it's impassive only because you can't conceptualize its monstrous emotions. It's a seething star, fizzling and crackling inside you, a swirling, pulsing heart of hatred and darkness and pain spreading corrupted light.

You are strong. Why, you are very strong. But this goes beyond anything you can muster. If it could see you, it would devour you, that you know with the weight of certainty. It would scrape you clean and remake you in its corrupted image. But it can't. It's a glance the one you feel, the confused glimmer of attention from a man caught in a feverish dream. It's still enough to glaze you like an insect thrown into a furnace fire, to kick any courage from you with its abyssal, endless malice.

To instill you with words that fill your mouth with the taste of blood and your ears with the sound of ripping skin and snapping tendons.

To those who have turned their faces away. To those who are faithless and wretched in their jealousies. To those who have denied us. To those who have denied me. I will wreak vengeance. I will wrench your souls and break your bones. I will cast hunger through your accursed existence. Down the eons, you will not forget. I will grant you this gift from love turned aside and make you like me, break you in my image as you have broken me. I shall cast the fear of myself into you and all of your kind. I am Llandu'gor. I am the hunger. I am the flayer, and from this moment, you shall be too.

You turn away before registering the whole of it, before your senses can finish taking in the immense geometries of this divine hatred. It would hurt you to look fully upon it, you're aware of it. Thankfully, the presence does the same; it sinks into a torpor, a purulent wound in the depths of your flesh.

But it doesn't leave. You're connected now, the thing a part of you you can contain and claim but not deny. Through it, you become aware of a new point of interface. A relay folded in the sub-space between dimensions, similar to the one a Lord like you would have to connect before launching a teleportation protocol. It's keyed to the virus-code, and since it's part of you, to you as well.

You know what comes next.

You are scared. Fear runs through you like blood once did. And yet, you're angry too. Your Gauss pumps, hot and searing. You're blistered and raw. Your stomach growls. And sad, broken eyes tells you that a promise is a promise.

You launch the protocol.

The passage is like plunging into boiling oil. Spears of fire riddle you. Barbed wire wraps around you, coils upon coils replacing your skin and nerves.

For an endless moment, you feel yourself being turned inside out. Then, you're through.

The first thing that hits you is the smell. Rot and rust and blood, clogging your sensors in overpowering waves. You realize that theress ground under your feet. Black metal, twisted and warped until it resembles an insect's shell. It shifts around your fingers, clinging to them with the fondness of a lover.

You try and fail to stumble at your feet, dismayed at how weak you feel. Your body feels wrong. Half of your sensors return only glitches. An internal scan returns hundreds of hardware errors, melted circuits that reformed in misshapen forms. They grind against each other as you move, making you feel like a sack filled with ground glass.

The healing protocols… they have been corrupted.

New systems and logics have been added, protocols and organs that do nothing except excite your discomfort, like raw nerves. They tell your body that is in pain and there's little you can do about it, bar smash yourself open and rewrite code and hardware from scratch. And you don't trust that you could survive it.

One of your eyes has gone shut, a crooked metal eyelid having grown into it like a spike. A scarab-like organ clings to your engrams, simulating a splitting headache. Your left knee is swollen, silicates forming a lattice of enflamed tendons. Your throat is jammed with a faulty rebreather that forces the feeling of choking. And…

A heart. I have a heart…

It's your internal reactor, twisted and turned. It pumps Gauss laced with corrupted Flayer code into your system, the DNA that keeps all circuits in their misshapen form. It's the lifeblood of that little world of pain, and it would take ripping it out to put an end to it.

Optimized for torment… No, I wouldn't survive a change.

Talons curl around your shoulder. You turn, meeting Me's gaze. The Stalker looks startled. Still, he says nothing, and you let him help you at your feet.

That's when you get your first look at your new world.

Plates of writhing necrodermis and rusted iron meld with bloodstained rock and half-digitalized matter to form a landscape of nightmare. Titanic spikes protrude from the tortured ground alongside icebergs of congealed meat and blood. Everything collapses and rots, and yet it remains, locked in an entropic state that screams at your senses with its wrongness.

You see a mountain chain like bone teeth, raking a horizon the color of bruised flesh and ripped guts. A city made of glistening matter waves, buildings that seem carved from organic matter extending like a mane of fleshy hair. A palace whose walls are sheets of data, rain and flow trapped in geometrical madness. Plains and canyons that writhe as if alive, choking with clouds of toxic gas.

The sky is a vortex falling into infinity, barely shrouded by skeletal fingers of vapor and tendrils of lightning. As you watch, a sickly star emerges from them. It's an eye-like thing trapped in glass and metal, rolling amidst a chorus of screeches on an impossible structure of suspended rails.

And at the center of it all, the titanic statue of an alien being, resembling nothing that dwells in the world of sanity. It weeps, twin streams of blackness falling from its eyes, forming a river of corruption around which the land shudders.

You are still taking it all in when the voice reaches you.

"Ooooooo~! A wriggler! A fresh one! How deliciously new you sound, stumbling through our sacred scabs like a blind maggot with dreams! How perfectly lost!"

The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, gleeful and joyful and mad. It screeches against your senses like claws digging on flesh.

"WELCOME, pilgrim of pain! Welcome to the Morning of the Thousand Screams! You are exactly on time! I am Exultor Veem, Voice of His Will! Tell me—do your eyes still weep? Do your nerves still beg for meaning? Ah, how I envy you, little flutterling! You've never heard the glory of a flesh-rack opera or tasted communion through the drip of the river's mouth!"

The air trembles. Finally, you hear the sounds, as if the world's foggy air refused to let them through. Bone chimes echo in the distance. Screams, the sound of ripped flesh and slashing iron.

"But worry not, worry not! That will change. Mmm, yes, yes—it always does. The Loop is faithful. The Loop provides."

Something shifts into the sky. The eye-star is looking at you. Not a God, you feel it – but a machine dreaming of ruin.

"You're wondering where you are, aren't you? Oh ho ho! That's the wrong question, my sparkly new error! You should ask what you've become! You are now Observed. The Father has seen you stumble. That means you belong."

The voice – Veem – titters.

"But what is this? What is this? Did you come on your own? By will? By… sacrifice? Oh oh oh, how adorable! How faithful! To return to the bosom of the deity you betrayed! We just have to show our hospitality to you, we must poke and rip and stab and slash until you thoroughly understand the depths of your mistake!" Malice creeps through Veem's disturbing glee. "How dare you bring that disgusting light here? That hope!" He almost vomits the word. "Oh, we'll take our time with you. Until we all melt deliciously together for His pleasure. See you soon!"

It leaves, and you're alone, with Me and your crooked body.

Me watches you. You look at him, and smile. He bows his head and starts weeping.

You look forward, toward the horizon. Static hisses through the ground, curling around your boots. Something at the edge of your thoughts begins to itch. Words you don't understand flicker behind your eyes.

You shake them off and plant your gaze toward the statue. Madness and hell and Gods who refuse to stay dead. Oh, you'll give them something to cry about.

Welcome to Ghost-World!

The Flayer has created this pocket dimension as He sank into the folds beneath the material dimension after his obliteration at the hands of the Triarchs. This is where Llandu'gor has His tomb and this is where all Flayed Ones return from their hunts in the material world, all of them tied umbreakably to it. The Ghostwind connects Ghost-World to the Materium, allowing any individual keyed to the Virus to use it to appear virtually everywhere in the plane.

Ghost-World is slightly disjunct from the normal space-time continuum, so your incarnation inside of it is both trapped in it and disjointed by the you that lives in the material timeline. This allows you to effectively exist as two separate existences connected to each other and sharing both thoughts and experiences, and curses.

NEW SKILLS REMEMBERED: Multi-Body Existence – Advanced 1/3: A rare skill even among the Necron Lords, this ability allows you to spread your electromagnetic-based existence among multiple bodies, up to three shells. Each body is a weaker version of you and each active shell diminishes your processing power, making you both slower and less intelligent. The Ghost version of you doesn't count toward the limit.

Your character's sheet in Ghost-World:

Xorathis, The Returner

Class: Wretch

Equipment:
- Nothing

Stats:

Martial: 11-2

You're a bit stronger and more skillful than the average Necron Lord, but not by much.

Diplomacy: 8

You have an average grasp of the arts of talking and persuading.

Technomancy: 9

Tech is an easy enough field for you to dwell, and you have advanced knowledge of it.

Governance: 8

You have a slightly better than average gasp of the arts of governing and ruling.

Intrigue: 6

You have a basic knowledge of intrigue and subterfuge.

Learning: 10

Your mind runs fast when it comes to learning. Many topics are for you to grasp.

SPECIAL TRAITS

- Swallow the Light: There are those whose focus allows them to shape their destiny, and then there are those that can change the world through their will. Then there is you. Your determination is not impressive; it's monstrous. In a world where willpower is the measure of a soul, it makes you a force to be reckoned with.

Will-based challenges are nothing to you. You can dare more than the hardiest souls can ever hope to, sustain more than reason should allow to.

TRAITS

- Null-Breath: Your disrupting presence grows more powerful, and you learned to direct it and focus it like a spear on single creatures and objects.
- Warp-Slayer: The Daemons attacked you, and the Daemons you repelled by the flex of your will. This will be remembered. All Daemons will fear you and your works.
- Wordweaver: Words can be barbs. You are aware of it, and skilled in the fencing. +1 Diplomacy.
- Glimmer of Light: You brought sacrifice and hope in hell. How dare you?

CURSES
- The Second Mark: A second mark engraved itself upon your left shoulder. It will require being kept hidden to avoid startling fellow Necrons with your Virus signature.

- Optimized for Ruin: The Flayer remoulded you in the brief span of time His attention was on you. He has remade you so that you can better suffer for His pleasure as another of His cursed slayers.
-- Broken Bones: Your internal systems have been broken and made to mend in wrong configurations. They grind against each other inside of you, forcing you to move slowly to avoid sharp pain. -2 Martial
-- Faulty Breath: Your throat has been remade to simulate a constant choking sensation. It robs you of the ability to concentrate fully. -10 on all rolls
-- Swollen Knee: One of your knee has been twisted and covered with enflamed simil-tendons. You can only hobble.
-- Brain-Scarab: A new organ clings to your engram, simulating a splitting headache. -2 Learning
-- Shut Optic: One of your optics has sealed shut, making it difficult for you to see.
-- Corrupted Heart: Your central power core, corrupted with the Flayer Virus. It fills you with its virulence, making any healing impossible.


SKILLS
Necron Tactics - Advanced 2/3: You have a deeper-than-average knowledge of how the Necrons make war, including the maneuvering, deploying and leading forward of legions of unbreakable automatons supported by supreme technomancy and machines of destruction.
Weapon Expertise (Staff of Light) – Advanced, 1/3: You are well-versed in the ancient combat arts involving the use of the weapon wielded by Necron Lords for fighting and ceremonial purposes.
Riding (Necron Tech), Advanced, 1/3: You have strong magnetic boots. You have good interfacing skills. You can interface yourself with many things necron-related.
Cryptek Knowledge, Master, 1/3: As an Arch-Cryptek, there's no interface you can't connect to and no technology you can't understand without some study. Arcane and warp-based technology still escapes you, but usual Necron tech has few secrets for you.
Lore (Necrontyr), Master, 1/3: You have perfect mastery of the ancient Necrontyr rituals and etiquette.
Linguistic, Advanced, 1/3: You can decrypt most languages with speed and efficiency.
C'tan Code, Advanced 1/3: A translation in complex programming code of the C'tan's language. It retains a far weaker version of the Star-Gods' reality-bending power. You know how to write the basics of it, but not how to write strings of code that aren't uncontrollable.
Multi-Body Existence, Advanced 1/3: A rare skill even among the Necron Lords, this ability allows you to spread your electromagnetic-based existence among multiple bodies, up to three shells. Each body is a weaker version of you and each active shell diminishes your processing power, making you both slower and less intelligent. The Ghost version of you doesn't count toward the limit.

AC - Welcome to Ghost-World, y'all! You didn't think that a C'tan could die normally, do you? Anything you don't see on the sheet of the new version of you has not followed you in there. Courtesy of the Flayer. Have fun in hell! As always, any comment and pointers about anything I could have forgotten are welcome.