[x] "War. So tiring..."
Flurries of combat protocols thundered across the channels. As one, the Lychguards turned into a shimmering wall of blades, shields and indomitable will. Annihilation Barges and Doomstalkers eased from above, their heavy weapons humming with power as they swiveled toward the Wraithguards. The air grew alive with swarms of Scarabs, their glowing bodies forming streams of black and silver in the murk.
The preparations were mirrored by their opponents. With eerie synchronicity, the Wrathguards raised their Wraithcannons, the psychic energies gathering on the weapons matched by the shimmers of their soul stones. Wraithblades formed a defensive line. Forceshields, axes, blades and staves crackled with power. An army of the dead they were, as fearless and without hesitation as the Necrons.
Above them all, the Wraithknight loomed. The colossal construct moved with a precision that shouldn't have belonged to something so massive, especially after the young Eldar pilot disappeared inside its foot with a shimmer. The heavy Wraithcannons mounted on its pauldrons swiveled smoothly, sighting the massed Necron elites. A Suncannon extended from the monstrous war machine's wrist, almost reaching the ground. The Wraithknight pointed it toward Xorathis, even as his Ghostglaive flared with energy.
Xorathis didn't lower her cup. She took another sip. Combat protocols and strategy algorithms flittered across her synapses, provided by outraged Crypteks and martial Lychguards, their sluggish intellects jolted awake by the impending combat.
[Precisation: The Dead That Walk cannot do so on their own. Requirement: Specialized Seer. Designation: Spiritseer. Advice: Seek and destroy objective readjustment.]
[Aim for the Soul Stones! It'll stop them in their tracks!]
A babble of furious voices and hisses, alongside the sepulchral tones of the elite soldiers. They got into it with gusto, their cold, shriveled hearts finding pleasure in the rage, the hatred, the malice. It brought them back to a shadow of what they were, what they lost.
It was mirrored by the Wraithguards. The constructs, fuelled by dead souls brought back to the battlefield, seemed to gain vitality from the impending violence. Their psychoplastic frames seemed to move with more alacrity, more liveliness, the Soul Stones decorating them almost glowing with eagerness. They too delighted in being returned to that place of furious emotions, where the flaring energy was enough to pierce even the twilight of their undead existences.
Xorathis took a moment to marvel at the sadness of it all.
"Cease."
The word swept the crevasse like a cold wind. It thundered across all frequencies, both physical and immaterial. The command of a God, wrought in metal and indomitable will. At hearing it, the Wraithguards and the Necrons froze. Ghost-axes and Hyperphase swords, raised with so much eagerness, stilled. Rifles and Diffusor Shields, so ready for their ballet of millions of years, lowered by a fraction.
The battlefield-to-be fell silent. Gauss lightning and psychic energy flickered incertainly to a command that was almost unknown in that future of endless war.
All eyes, mortal and immortal, were on the dark figure seated at the table, sipping her drink.
Xorathis set her cup, empty now, down. Slowly, calmly, she poured herself another.
"You truly must be a fool," she commented, conversational. "And a cruel one."
The Wraithknight was an idol of war, a towering statue roused to wrath-like life. Yet, it bristled like a living being. It made for an eerie sight.
Xorathis gestured for the ranks of Wraithguards and Wraithblades. "Don't they matter? Having given their lives once. Now risking their immortal ones as well. Don't they deserve your consideration?"
The Wraithknight didn't answer. Xorathis briefly wondered if he even could. Still, the construct didn't move.
"Allow me to be blunt, my young friend," she said. "We know that the Portal at your back doesn't work. I wonder about your reason for staying, watching over the Tombworld? Or just giving your people a way into this system maybe. It doesn't matter. You're stranded here. No help is on the way. No last-minute evacuation will happen. No champion of myth will come vaulting out a storybook. Once you join battle, you will be alone. You will fight wondrously, I don't doubt it. Gloriously even. Your ghost army is a mighty one and it's sure to reap a toll from my soldiers. But in the end, you will fall." She tipped her cup. Oil, thick and slow, traced a line of black and gold to the dry ground. "You stand against a Tombworld. Legions of mechanical soldiers await, and they will rip the marrow from your bones. It's an inevitability, and you know it. Yet, you fight. Do the whispers of the dead, begging for a great fight, a mighty doom, fill your ears? Does your pride and desire to go down swinging blind you? You're a fool then, and a cruel one, risking the immortal souls of your brethren for the sake of one last hurrah that will go unsung and unheard. Depriving your Craftworld of so many honored dead. As for me," she continued, and for probably the first time since her awakening, she felt angry. She flicked her fingers. The cup flew into the air, shattering amidst the fog. "I grow sickened of this foolishness masquerading as honor, of this insensate hatred. Necrons and Aeldari. All of us are trapped inside our own curses. Curses we wrought with our hands and now are too blind to see poisoning our choices. No. No more. I am no dead machine or shackled soul. I can still choose, and I choose a different path. A harder one, but a better one. I choose to talk and rip out this weed of war, root and stem. And you know why it matters?" Her fist hit the table with a resounding crack, splitting it half down the middle. "Because I hold all the power here. I can have you all erased and yet I choose not to. This is the power and depth of my will, and I call you to steel yourself and do the same, to show me the true mettle of Aeldari kin and find a path that is not certain annihilation."
Her impassioned speech echoed in the crevasse. Her voice bounced against the walls of weather-beaten rocks, seeming to multiply with each return.
Silence fell. For a moment, Xorathis set aside the mass of logical data that told her that no appeal, no matter how backed and charged, would be able to pierce through. It wasn't hope as much as she willed fate to shift and change according to her designs.
It didn't work. The answer was the heavy report of the Suncannon. A ball of fire bloomed among the Lychguards, scattering metallic limbs and weapons.
Xorathis didn't sigh and didn't feel sorrow. As chaos erupted all around her, the air screaming with Gauss blasts and flashes of psychic light, she compiled a list. Methodically and carefully, she filed each micro-second of the interaction, encrypted the registrations with her strongest data-wards and then organized them into an archive hidden in the depths of her memory-banks.
For next time.
------------
"Blast its limbs."
The order came with that same reverberating voice that had shaken her to her core. But there was no impassioned plea now, only a frigid logic.
The true face of the Necrons, Aldynn thought, even as her ears kept ringing with the… the Queen's words. She knew that monstrosity. The title bloomed from the recesses of her mind like a once-forgotten memory. Aldynn didn't know how, but she did, and it terrified her.
The Spiritseer was on her knees, struggling to pull a Soul Stone from its casing in the fallen Warithguard. The construct's shell was pitted and cracked with Gauss burns and particle shearings. The thundering bolt that broke the matrix providing it with motion had also bent the psychic wards holding the stone to it, stucking it fast in its nesting despite his proddings and rituals to get it out.
As the order crackled through the air, she lifted her soot-streaked face.
The Wraithknight had fought bravely. The colossal construct was a graceful terror as it rampaged among the Necron hordes. Its wraithcannons blazed lines of devastation among the clustered Lychguards, even as his glaive cut through Doomstalker's limbs and Barges' chassis.
It had cut a path through the mechanical horrors, shrugging the Gauss fusillade and carving its way toward the Queen. But the duel it sought wasn't given. The Queen was a shadow of flickering emerald eyes and skittering limbs. Like a patient hunter, she always stayed out of the monstrous war machine's reach and all the while her troops pounded the Knight relentlessly, shearing pieces off its ornated shell and scoring its psycho-reactive armor.
The Wraithguards didn't fare any less bravely than their commander. They crossed swords and axes with Lychguards, pitting undead indomitability against undying will. Even the ancient machines were no match for the constructs. As statues come to life, they cut their way through the phalanx, littering the crack's floor with twitching limbs and mechanical innards. They ripped Barges apart with precise shots of dimensional-tearing power and thundering barrages of psychic lightning.
It was an eerie battle. No battle cries rent the air, no calls to valor, or grunts of pain. There were no fate-defying acts of valor or last-minute rescues. It was the dead against the dead, the clamor of their weapons their only voices, the logic of unthinking bravery their only push. Weapons rose and fell with clockwork precision, boots stomped on corpses without emotion. It was a fight that didn't belong to the living.
The Wraithguards fought well, accounting for ten times their numbers. But there was no end to the foes. The Necrons kept appearing as fast as flashes of viridian energy announced the retrieval of broken corpses and wreckage for repair.
When two massive Monoliths lowered themselves into the fissure, their Particle Whips searing the floor with blistering beams of green devastation, the Eldar resistance was reduced to scattered pockets.
Yet the Wraithknight kept fighting.
The order had come as a whipcrack. There wasn't a need for it. The Necrons communicated through digital channels and wormhole-based transmissions. It had been uttered to show the doom that came to those too foolish to resist.
Aldynn watched with wide eyes as the Lament of Undine stood surrounded by a field of its victims. The Wraithknight lifted his glaive in defiance. At that moment, he was the statue of a war god come alive, Kaela Mensha Khaine wrought in wraithbone and revenant soul.
A torrent of Gauss energy howled down on it. The blow cut through the graceful plates, searing his left arm and almost half of its torso out of existence.
Sparking and fizzling, the Wraithknight fell on a knee. He still managed to rise as the Queen advanced on him, wielding his glaive.
The Necron Lord seemed to swell as she advanced. Thousands of skittering, silvery forms converged on her, seeming to add to her mass, turning her from shadow to shapeless mass to a tidal wave of darkness almost as tall as the Knight. Like a supernova, she erupted with light that sent needles stabbing into Aldynn's eyes, but she still didn't take her gaze away.
The Lament attacked just as the shadow pounced. Aldynn saw him struggle briefly before the darkness overwhelmed him. His massive glaive clanged to the ground, and the war machine, savaged and broken, slumped, breathing his last.
Holding back tears, Aldynn pulled desperately at the cracked casing, trying to free the Soul Stone. Her sling bag jangled as she did so, the stones she already gathered clacking inside. She had to save them, she had! Then, then she would hide beside the Portal and wait for… for…
A shadow fell on her. Trembling, she looked up.
The Queen of the Devouring Tide's blank visor sized her up.
"What about you?" She asked, and Aldynn trembled at the almost playful tilt in her voice. "Do you fancy a glorious last stand as well?"
Aldynn fell to her knees. She covered her face with her hands and said nothing.
Silence fell on the battlefield.
----------------
The battle is won, for all that matters. As the victor, now you decide what to do with the spoils.
The Soul Stones: You gathered many, both broken and faded and shimmering and brilliant.
[] Break them.
[] Keep them.
The Dead: The Wraithguards and their commander fought to the end, leaving you with a mass of broken chassis.
[] Recycle them for your wraithbone projects (lower DC for next Wraithbone-related action).
[] Keep them as study objects on Eldar psychoplastic manifacture and possible exchange material for the future.
The Living: Two Eldar have been captured, the foolish pilot of the Knight and a Spiritseer. Neither will part with their Soul Stones, the first only one, the latter a satchel of them.
[] Interrogate, then harvest. They will be used as study specimens on Eldar physiology.
[] Interrogate, then keep. They shall be put into stasis chambers.
The Portal: The prize fought over. It's not functioning as you expected.
[] Study it, then destroy it. Let the Scarabs feast.
[] Study it, then guard it. There's something to use here.
[] Write in -
AC - Not adding rolls for now since I am still working out on battle mechanics. But you guys rolled good enough. Mostly. General spoils and losses at the end of the questline. Voting will go by plan. 4-hour moratorium.