Morningstars [Warhammer 40k] [Overpowered OC Fixes/Causes Problems] [Primarchs Involved]

[dragonsaffron]

So, when I write fanfic, I've notied that it tends to come in one of two modes. The first mode is "intensely psychosexual character drama". This is the mode I took for my first 40k fic, and my first SV thread in general, Ecstacies of Saint Chrisenya the Mad. But there's another mode, more rarely utilized: that would be "hey, check this sick shit out", generally used only for settings that I absolutely adore but which I cannot qualify as being actually good. I've written a Resident Evil fic in this second mode, and it was awesome, and now it has come time to write 40k in the same way. Expect a focus on characters and relationships, while still including a healthy amount of ass-kicking. Also expect lots of trans people and queerness, as well as in general a lot of my Thoughts and Opinions about 40k as a setting as refracted through the lens of the people who live inside of it.

Also a deep love of Fabius Bile and fourth-wall-breaking harlequins, I had just read the Fabius Bile trilogy when I started this and those are the best Black Library books I've ever read.

Also, I have a discord specifically for 40k discussion without the constant infestation of right-wingers and incels that accumulate around this fandom, complete with channels for both this and my other 40k fic, so if that interests you, here you go: Join the The Abbey of the Twin Orders Discord Server!

 

[dragonsaffron]

Your name is Ahenobarbus Raptus, Sardar of the Arching Perfumists, formerly known as the 11th Millennial of the Emperor's Children, and you are furious. Rage isn't a common emotion for you; it is unbecoming of an Astartes, and doubly so for you given derive no pleasure from it. And yet, there are times such as this.

Through the window of this drop pod, through the dark ocular filters of your ancient war-helm, you see the planet below, a beige wasteland, and scowl at it. The planet did nothing to you, of course, but you scowl at it anyway. Its network of ruins have provided a hiding place for the ever-damned eldar who had the sheer audacity to steal something that you had made yours through rightful conquest. You had fought hard for those soul stones, sacrificing many of your followers for the glory of Slaanesh, and yet one lapse in attention in the midst of the celebratory feast was all it took for one of the degenerate stealth-flyers to slip in and rob you blind.

You were going to repay them in kind, of course. With a thud you have felt a thousand times before, the drop pod struck the dry soil of this forsaken eldar colony—Therestiol, Aelius had said it was called—and you led your honor guard onto its surface. First impressions were lacking, to say the least. Were it not for the telltale curves of wraithbone exciting your animal nature, Therestiol would be almost indistinguishable from one of countless thousands of wrecked Imperial worlds across the galaxy. The eldar were, of course, nowhere to be seen.

But you knew they were there. Even if your ship's scanners hadn't watched them descend into this exact gravity well, you could smell their cloying stink on the air. Every inhale through your helmet's overgrown rebreather brought just a whiff of their psychic stench.

"Aelius," you said. "Can your auspex array detect them? Where are they?"

"I am working on it," said Aelius. He was a hunched, pathetic figure, overburdened by his beloved technology. You found him deeply endearing.

"To whom are you speaking?"

"This atmospheric dust is doing us no favors, and there are enough stray signals that the auspex wants to—" Aelius sighed, and you drank in the sound of his exasperation. "I am working on it, Master."

"Good boy. Emperor's Children, fan out. We will drive them from their burrows."

It was the work of all that remained of that day, and the whole of the night that followed, but Aelius's technology bore results. You didn't just keep him around to suit your whims, after all. The eldar had gone to ground in a massive complex of some description, almost the xenos equivalent to a hive city, though not nearly so enormous. Once Aelius patched his auspex feed into your helm, you could see them, like rats in a warren. And there were other things down there as well, things that made you salivate with anticipation of the battle to come.

The rest of the war band converged on your position, and many stories were shared of battle against twisted mutants and the very instability of the terrain alike. You, on the other hand, told no stories. For once in your life post-Heresy, the leash of command held fast. Old instincts came to the fore, studies of leadership and stratagems dug out of the slime of your hindbrain. When all had gathered, you were prepared, and the ache of battle to come was fierce within you.

Your tongue, purple and veiny, lashed against a button on the inside of your helmet, activating the general vox-channel.

"Listen here. Space is going to be tight down below. Sonics remain on the surface, supporting the helfiends and land raiders. If a single eldar escapes through the surface cordon, I will use the head of whoever allowed it to happen as a new codpiece. As for the rest: we descend from every direction at once. Not a single passage shall go un-scoured by bolt, bullet, and plasma. For the Prince of Pleasure! Advance!"

The weight of your power sword and plasma pistol were as familiar as your own arms as you advanced towards the nearest entrance to the warren, a score of warriors at your flanks
forming the arrowhead of which you were the tip. Aelius, though suited more to fixing wounds than causing them, slinked up to your side. You gave him only a glance, but in that time gathered everything you needed to know about his emotional state.

"Quit sulking," you said. "You'll be seeing organs soon!"

"I thought my skull was going to adorn your loins," he said huffily.

"When you die," you said with a chortle. "And not a moment before."

Those were the last words spoken before you descended into the underworld. All around you, legionaries charged forward, bolters in hand, while the swarms of your human followers chittered around the feet of their superiors, racing to achieve some modicum of glory in battle. You were not the first to enter into the ruin, shoving aside a collapsed pillar one-handed, but you fully intended to be the greatest.

The tightly tangled passageways of the warren would have extended hundreds of kilometers if straightened out, but as it was, it was hardly possible to see more than a few tens of meters at a time before one's line of sight ran into a terminus, be it a collapsed ceiling, an intersection, or merely a kink in the path. This was the land of the pistol and the blade. Many times your squadron was forced to move single-file, ready at any moment for an ambush. You took the lead, of course, and would have ripped out the throat of any man who tried to question you.

Your position rapidly earned you a tithe of blood. There were still no eldar in sight—they were further below—but the traitorous xenos had found an ablative army down in the ruins. The whole warren was infested with mutants of every description. Hulking beasts twice your size thundered through the largest chambers, absorbing boltgun fire as though it were the biting of flies. Batlike creatures, blind and barely recognizable as having once been humanoid, flitted through the high archways and crashed down from above, threatening to twist off a marine's head in seconds. Swarms of chittering creatures with clawed hands would flood into a corridor without warning, filling it up to the ceiling in a flood of aggressive flesh.

Your power sword drank well, cutting through limbs and torsos with ease, its corrupted machine-spirit groaning with thirst for more and more blood. Each fight sent your hearts pounding with beautiful adrenaline. There were times when you would not even fire your pistol, not even as the mutants poured towards you, purely in order to prologue the rush of the melee; your armor would protect you regardless, and what wounds you did take only meant more prodding from Aelius. His chiding words of caution and worry made you want to rip out his innards.

Time lost all meaning, other than in the growing collection of dents in your armor and bruises on your body. It was a wondrous state, the constant rush of pain and relief, but a very small part of your mind was not satisfied. No matter how deeply you penetrated into the ruin, your quarry was nowhere to be seen. It was only the occasional report from your warriors of a slaughtered xenos that assured you this wasn't some sort of elaborate ruse.

And then you began to hear song. The narrow passageways of the warren projected sound a great distance—yet more reason to disallow sonics—and the song seemed designed to resonate against the wrathbone walls. At first, only you could hear it, but the deeper you went, the more of your warriors admitted to hearing the distant, keening wail. The words were in no language you knew, no doubt some eldar gutter-tongue, and yet the lyrical quality could not be denied.

"If we find the singer," you said, "Take her alive. I like this song."

"It makes no sense," Aelius said. "Erm, it makes no sense, Master. I can hear the song, my helm registers it as being normal sound, but the auspex doesn't read any eldar within range to be singing it."

"A recording, perhaps?" Suggested one of your retinue.

"Possibly. Master, I believe it's a trap."

You grunted, admitting the possibility. But you were also sick and tired of having your revenge delayed. Though tactically disadvantageous, walking into a trap at least promised a fight.

You gave the signal to stop, then turned and scanned your retinue. Only one had died so far, dragged screaming into a small passage and torn apart by dwarf mutants. You gestured to roughly half of them.

"You with me. Aelius, you are in command of the rest. Wait two hundred counts, then follow behind us, and be ready to charge if you hear the sounds of combat. Even if there is a trap, you will trap the trappers."

"Yes, Master," Aelius said.

"Good boy," you replied, before turning and marching off in the direction of the song. Warriors followed you like a multi-colored cloak.

The song grew louder and louder with each passage and chamber, until you could hear the extended, operatic notes reverberating in your armor. You became increasingly certain that the singer was a she-eldar, not that it mattered. Eldar all looked the same.

Then you came to something unexpected. All the architecture so far had been wraithbone, but before you was something almost like home. Like a cancer growing happily in flesh, a wall of plasteel and diamantine sat in the midst of the eldar ruins, with a heavy vault door open just a crack. The song was coming from through there, but you but as you approached the singing suddenly stopped.

"Our guests have arrived," came a voice from the chamber beyond.

You continued to advance, plasma pistol raised into a firing position. There was a snatch of foreign tongue before another speaker, one with a voice like ice, said, "You force the mon'keigh tongue to disgrace both our mouths. Why?"

"Because I want the mon'keigh to know exactly where we are, and that his prize is almost at hand. Come now, Ahenobarbus, right this way."

While the two speakers argued in their language, you gave the silent signal for your warriors to ready their weapons. You would not fire until you had ascertained which was the singer, and as soon as you had, all others would be slaughtered. The door offered no resistance as you shouldered through it, not even the amount belonging to its substantial weight, and you lowered your plasma pistol upon the two figures in the room beyond.

Both were eldar, both were females, and that was where the similarities ended. One was a warrior through and through, clad in crimson battle-plate and leaning on a mighty spear. You had met her before, during the raid. The other was far more mysterious: she wore no armor, only a sort of skin-tight suit of the kind favored by dancers, the whole thing decorated in green and black. Her face, unlike that of the scowling war-leader, was entirely covered by a metallic-grey mask depicting some fearsome avian or reptilian predator.

It was the un-armored one who had been taunting you. "Welcome, welcome. Ahenobarbus Raptus, was it? Hell of a surname, that."

You listened to her voice as closely as you could, but you could not tell if the singer was her or her companion. The sight of your pistol shifted back and forth, but uncertainty dogged at you.

"Truly the inanity of your plan is almost without limit," sneered the warrior. "Tell me, S—"

"Shush! No names. Names have power, and he is a servant of She Who Thirsts." The eldar—harlequin, the word finally returned to your mind—turned to you. "Why haven't you fired? Don't you want your revenge? Don't you want this?"

From nowhere at all, the harlequin produced an object that made your hearts pound. Hanging from her finger on a thin strand was almost a score of soul-stones, glittering even in the darkness of the underground chamber. Your grip tightened on your pistol. At the same time, the warrior moved, raising her blade to the harlequin's throat as she said something angrily in the eldar tongue. The harlequin leapt away, so smoothly that your eyes could barely follow the movement, and replied cooly in the same language.

"If all you want is the favor of your goddess, then simply open fire and it will be yours," said the harlequin from atop a plasteel cabinet of some description. It looked eerily familiar, but your attention was firmly on her. "But if you want to hear that song again, I can make you a deal."

"Why should I listen to xenos filth?" You said. But it was too late; you were already listening. You wanted to hear that song again, and you had decided that taking a bard-slave would more than satisfy your bloodlust.

"The deal goes like this: we fight a duel to first blood. I win, I run away and you get the stones. I lose, my good friend here can escape with the stones while you put a plasteel collar around my neck."

The harlequin moved again, drawing a blade like glass and lowering it at your chest. "Deal?"

Under your helmet, you grinned. Aelius and his half of your retinue were on their way; all you had to do was make sure that the harlequin survived the shootout that ensued, and you would have it all. You stowed your pistol at the hip of your armor, raising your sword in a vague sketch of a Chemosian duelist's salute. "Deal."

"To first blood, then. Begin."

The harlequin lunged almost before she was finished speaking, hurling herself toward your blade. You didn't even bother deflecting that first strike, destined as it was to ping off your breastplate, and instead swept your own sword in a wide arc. You had already fully categorized the harlequin: a small foe with relatively short reach but extremely high speed. Your tendons recalled the correct blade form, high momentum and sweeping strikes that thwarted evasion.

But eldar never made for a fun fight. The power sword cut a half-moon in the air, blue haze trailing, and slipped right through the space where the harlequin was… until you blinked your eyes and realized that you had been wrong. The harlequin was standing half a meter to the left, already preparing another thrust, this one aimed upwards at your throat, a strike that you could not avoid parrying.

That initial exchange set the tone. Evasion was one thing, but this open deception had you seriously considering making use of your plasma pistol. Every strike that was about to draw blood swept instead through open air. This harlequin was not only denying you your prize, you thought, but she was making a fool of you in front of your own soldiers. Several times, the order to open fire appeared on your lips, and though you were sure you could save the harlequin's life even if that happened, you could not overcome your pride. Your men would rip you apart if they saw you do something so pathetic.

Aelius's half of the retinue was not so reserved. The door burst, thrown off its hinges by the two hundred and fifty kilos of Astartes ploughing through it. You half-turned, ready to bring him to heel, but it was too late; the room echoed with the roar of bolter fire. Instantly, the harlequin flipped across the room, landing in a crouch well beyond your reach.

"Cheater," she said, tossing the soul-stones to the warrior, who a moment later vanished into thin air. Teleportation? "Then again you'd have to be an idiot pervert to have agreed to this in the first place, so."

You roared, ready to tackle her. The soul-stones may have been beyond your grasp now, but her song would not be. This time your strike actually connected, and with a thud you landed on top of her.

"Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, by Cegorach you're actually touching me, this was not part of the plan, get your hands off of me, you aren't even a recurring character!"

You laughed, ignoring the nonsense spilling from her lips to focus on the way she writhed underneath you. "Sing for me," you commanded.

"Absolutely fucking not. Shit, improvise, erm, hey, apothecary! Your boyfriend is trying to take a hot xenos girl as a slave, are you going to just let that happen? Reign in your man!"

You looked over your shoulder at Aelius, who was looking back at you quite confusedly, for several reasons. It was gibberish, but it was just close enough to reality to make you spend a crucial half-second conferring with him about what she was trying to do. A half-second was all the time it took for you to get shot in the stomach with a nerve pistol.

You lost control of your body from the navel down, and half the rest of your muscles went slack. It was an awful, sickening sensation, knocking the breath fully out of you. The harlequin took the opportunity to do a backwards roll, hurling you off of her and into the nearby wall. Aelius was the closest to her, and even as you slammed into the wall you were ready for him to raise his combi-melta the handful of centimeters necessary to blow the harlequin away. Instead he screamed your name and dashed toward you, only opening fire a fraction of a second later, while the harlequin was already scrambling away.

"I'm fine!" you slurred.

"Good," he said. "Very good. What was that?"

"Harlequin," you said. "She tricked me. The stones were here, but they're gone now."

"We will keep searching, Master," Aelius said, helping you to your feet. "I'm glad you're intact."

"As am I." You were still feeling weak, but you could stand. Shame at your failure rocked through you in waves. You found your plasma pistol and sword where they had been dropped, and moved to continue the search. Aelius was not so hasty. He was examining the chamber with intense curiosity, and you soon found yourself doing the same.

You realized that your initial assessment had been correct. It was chaos tech, not eldar. It reminded you somewhat of Aelius's surgery, all full of cogitators, arcane instruments, and samples of biological matter. You wondered how all of this delicate metal would sound if you destroyed it, and raised your bolter to find out.

"Don't!" Aelius barked, his voice giddy with excitement. "I recognize this from my training. It's the Spider's work!"

 

[dragonsaffron]

Deep in its lair in the highest spire of Siderium, the Forge-Master of Jahannam was experiencing frustration. Hunched over a laboratorium bench, the swarm of mechatendrils dripping from its chest worked away with excellent efficiency and speed, mixing reagents and monitoring countless sensitive instruments. The Forge-Master's brain, one-hundred-fifty kilograms of densified neural matter, could keep track of over a dozen trains of scientific thought simultaneously, carrying out what would have been weeks of experimentation and iteration in a matter of hours. And yet, despite all that work, the chromosomal matrix coming to life in the Forge-Master's gene cradle was getting it nowhere.

It had been working on this particular process for almost a decade, with the simple goal of producing a perfect gene-soldier, one that could be mass-grown in the Forge-Master's personal clone tanks. Greater strength, greater reflexes, faster mental processing, higher compatibility with skitarius augmetics, greater durability; none of these were complex traits to engineer for.

The epsilon strain had proven an admirable success, even, with an overall 150% increase in efficiency over skitarii produced by ordinary means. But if the Forge-Master had been satisfied with ordinary levels of success, it would not have become ruler of an entire world. 150% was not nearly enough; with the relatively small batch sizes, it was still conceivable that one of the Archons could stand against it. Not until control was absolutely secured would the gene-strain be strong enough. Theoretically that was a simple matter of increasing parameters, but as always, theory withered before the harsh light of practice.

Diminishing returns had been setting in ever since the gamma strain, but the zeta strain was proving to be unacceptably mundane. There were differences, of course, measurable ones, but even as the data came in, even as the Forge-Master's cogitator implants clicked away, the battlefield impact projections were not promising.

It had finally had enough. As soon as the process reached a holding pattern, the Forge-Master slinked away. Or at least tried to: at the scale it had reached, "slinking" was an impossibility. The black-iron floor of the laboratory creaked and groaned under the thudding mass of the Forge-Master's body as it circled the chamber once, twice, thrice. This had always been a possibility, ever since the beginning of the project. Some ways of thinking and doing were dead ends, ones which would run their course only to inevitably be set aside when their flaws became too much to bear.

But after almost ten long years of work, the Forge-Master was loath to abandon so much work, and more loath still to begin a new course which may someday prove to be just as doomed as this one. No. There had to be a way. Some minor alteration, some detail which the Forge-Master had missed, would prove to be the thing that would bring the zeta strain to new heights.

It was just about to turn about once again, return to the accursed gene-cradle, when a scrap-code message echoed up from the spreading mass of Siderium below. The message was encrypted, and contained the urgency string at its opening, the string for whose misuse the punishment was permanent consignment to the Harvester corps. A fraction of a second later, the message had been decoded.

Forge-Master. An Astartes contingent has arrived, with stated intention being trade. Scanners indicate Emperor's Children. They have refused to wait for authorization; should we prepare for battle?

The spawn of the Phoenician were too vain to engage in deception, the Forge-Master knew. If they had been here for a raid, they would have made the fact plain through the use of orbital bombardment. No, these Astartes were here to make trade, as suggested. Still, there were proper responses. Even as the Forge-Master scuttled across the laboratory chamber, a flurry of scrap-code messages were composed and set to various forces all across Siderium. At its command, skitarii and forge-priests assembled to form a reminder of why Jahannam needed be treated with respect.

The main spire of Siderium had been designed exactingly, according to the Forge-Master's own specifications. Part of that design had been to ensure that it had free reign of the entire building. There were no lifts, no stairways that connected to the labratory; the only entrance or exit, besides punching a hole squarely through the solid black-iron walls, was through a long shaft. Like a lobster retreating into a burrow, the Forge-Master slipped into that shaft, and with its rows of legs secured magnetically to the shaft walls, it began to descend.

By the time the Forge-Master emerged from the tunnels, pushing through a ten-ton black-iron trapdoor and into the open hallways of the lower spire, events were already in motion. There were a hundred lesser forge-priests, each with their retinues of forge-deacons at their sides, ready to serve as a minor show of force. The Forge-Master took its rightful place at the lead, and marched out to meet the new guests.

The Astartes had also chosen to make a show of force. When the Forge-Master arrived at the grand landing pad that made up the courtyard of the spire of Siderium, nearly a company of the armor-clad warriors stood in battle formation, sonic weapons and boltguns not quite ready for battle. Its calculations quickly concluded that any fight would turn against the space marines awoken at the Forge-Master's command, were already trained on the foreign army.

But these were Astartes which the Forge-Master knew well. Every repeat client of Jahannam had their own file in the Forge-Master's consciousness, and the Arching Perfumists were no exception. They had not even changed leadership since last it had seen them, for standing at the front of the formation, a slave at his side, was the Sardar Ahenobarbus Raptus. Though recognizable by the oversized bulk of his armor's faceplate, he had also changed: the mauve of his armor's paint was streaked with bands of oily black, and he had partially replaced the codpiece of his armor with the skull of another of his kind. Fascinating.

"Sardar Raptus," said the Forge-Master. "You could have announced who you were, and my subordinates might not have been nearly so panicked, grrah."

The Forge-Master had often pondered ridding itself of its growling vocal tic, being as it was a byproduct of the mechanism which had replaced its trachea. But it had no impact on function, and on an entirely aesthetic note, the Forge-Master had often noted the vocalization as having an impact on lesser beings.

"I felt no need to," said Raptus. "You know who I am, and I, you. It is clear you could not have stopped me, regardless."

A human or tech-priest who showed such arrogance, the Forge-Master would have executed on the spot. But such was in Raptus's nature: his kind bloated itself on vainglory the way ticks bloated themselves on blood.

"Very well then. If you are here to make trade, grrah, then name your purchase and I shall name your price."

"Abaddon hungers. The final crusade is about to begin, and the Arching Perfumists need to be at full strength. We will require, for this purpose, thirty-six of your helfiends, and two shipments of those wondrous plasma pistols of yours."

Indeed, the Forge-Master had already noted that the plasma pistol at Raptus's hip was a Jahannam pattern. But something else which it had noticed was far more pressing; or rather, something it had not noticed.

"And with what will you pay for such a bounty? You have brought no slaves, no scrap—not that your entire vessel could store enough scrap to pay for what you ask of me. Do you intend on paying with the flesh of your troops, Raptus?"

"No, I do not."

The terrified human slave at Raptus's side had been still and silent for the entirety of the exchange so far. It was at that point that Raptus took the little creature and, grabbing it by the shoulder, all but tossed it forward. It was almost humorous; from the Forge-Master's perspective, Astartes were just as small as their human minions, and yet the presumptuous strength of the movement showed that Raptus considered himself superior.

The slave, to its credit, did not fall entirely, but instead regained balance such that it could kneel before the Forge-Master and hold out a thermoplas case. This was not of Astartes make. Too refined, to purposeful, lacking in any of the grotesque ornamentation their kind so preferred.

"It has come to my attention that you have an interest in genetic modification," Raptus said. "So for the produce of your planet's manufactories, I give you these forty gene samples, proffered from the Manflayer's hidden labs."

The Forge-Master had long worked to excise all emotion, flensing away all that was not logical from its enormous brain. But a complicated series of reflexive thoughts were roused in its hindbrain by reference to the Manflayer, thoughts of his callous cruelty mingling with knowledge of the sheer effectiveness of his works. A set of gene-samples could bring the Forge-Master ahead by centuries of work, break the monopoly which that most detestable of the False Emperor's creations had long held on the forefront of biological experimentation. But the Forge-Master could not allow Ahenobarbus Raptus to know a single byte of this.

"Grrah. I have gathered gene-samples from across the galaxy, studied the art of the flesh for centuries. What reason have you to believe that these will be so valuable as you say?"

Raptus shrugged. "Only their origin. I can give you half the samples up-front, and the other half upon completion of the contract. Does that tantalize your mandibles?"

"That deal is acceptable."

"Good. That case contains twenty of the samples; the other twenty are well hidden. Do as you please."

The Forge-Master surged ahead, rolling over the even terrain of the landing pad with serpentine efficiency. One enormous claw lashed out, taking the case from the slave, and parting it from one of its hands in the bargain. While the human beast writhed and screamed, the Forge-Master passed the case to the nest of mecha-tendrils at its belly and set to work. Inside the case were, indeed, twenty vials, each containing a transparent liquid which a brief analysis proved did indeed consist of cloned gene-sample.

The longer process was analyzing the samples themselves to learn of their value. Many of them were essentially worthless; lightly modified third-legion geneseed, or samples taken from xenos species which had already been a part of the Forge-Master's library for centuries. But a few stood out from the rest. The Forge-Master had never seen anything like them; the rough nature of the code suggested a relationship to the Astartes, but the differences far outweighed the similarities. Even as its tendrils completed the analysis, the Forge-Master's vast mind was setting to work on imagining the potential applications.

This set of twenty gene-samples possessed almost limitless value, and the second set could only have been the same. A creature which had not replaced its face with an expressionless black-iron mask would have struggled to conceal its elation at having so thoroughly fleeced a trade partner. As it was, the Forge-Master retreated to its side of the negotiating field.

"You will have your price, grrah. Thirty-six helfiends and two shipments of plasma pistols, was it?"

"Yes."

"It will be done. Now, if you do not have any more reason to bother me, I shall return to my laboratory. Do not be late with the second part of your payment, grrah."

 

[dragonsaffron]

The first five of the Forge-Master's attempts at improving upon the human genome had been iterative. The epsilon series made for excellent troops, more than capable of overcoming any small rebellion, but they lacked the decisive quality that would ensure the Forge-Master's dominion over Jahannam. But then had come the case of foreign gene-samples, and one in particular that resembled nothing the Forge-Master had seen in its millennia of existence. Even amidst all of the other strange and exotic alterations pilfered from the Spider's lab, that one was unique, bearing the fingerprints of long work to produce the ultimate combination of genetic adaptability and capability.

The Forge-Master began to cut a new path. The first few attempts to integrate its own work with the foreign sample were abortive, quite literally, the flesh collapsing well before the clone soldiers could be decanted from their vats. The iota series was the first group to breathe Jahannam's toxic air, and the Forge-Master was quite proud of them. But not proud enough. There were more improvements to be made. The lambda series made the epsilons look almost quaint, their strength and durability surpassing even that of an Astartes. They were the first to be mass-produced, lambda-series clones serving as the Forge-Master's agents all across the planet, acting as field commanders for the skitarii armies and military advisors to the Archons.

Still, the Forge-Master was not satisfied. The lambda clones used only a few key sequences taken from the foreign sample. What could be created if the two works of bioengineering were combined on a more even level, the foreign sample making up fifty percent of the final product, sixty percent, seventy?

The mu series was a horrible disaster, and not for the reason earliest pre-lambda experiments had been. The flesh was functional, the two genetic codes almost wanting to combine, but the end result was utterly insane, riddled with strange impulses and driven to a total disregard for instruction. None of them survived longer than a decade, and even then only ever in a jail cell. It was only in the sheer number of obliterated servitors left behind by the rebellious mu series that the Forge-Master found any reason at all to continue. But continue it did.

The nu series was an overcorrection. Neurological modifications intended to induce compliance left them listless and unfocused, as though drugged. Only through pain could they be induced to take any action beyond that which faintly amused them in the moment. Worse, they quickly grew sickly, their bodies overrun with inexplicable cancers. The Forge-Master spent three years in its lab before producing the next series; but this one was special.

There was only a single clone produced, a single prototype whose success or failure would set the fate of his siblings. He was designated Ξ-1, but he quickly took to pronouncing his name as "Ksaiwon" in informal contexts, a tendency which spread rapidly amidst the forge-priests who raised him.

Ksaiwon was physiologically perfect. Within two years he could walk easily, and by the age of four he had settled into the smooth exactness found only in those whose mind and body are in absolute, perfect coordination. He was functionally immune to infection, highly resistant to toxins, possessed of strength so great as to be difficult to measure. He mastered low gothic in a matter of months, and by the end of his first decade had taught himself eleven languages, motivated by nothing more than boredom.

It was at seven years old that Ksaiwon was first taught the art of combat. He took to it like a fish to water: his first kill was within twenty-five days, when he decommissioned a training servitor with a power knife. By age nine, it had become effectively impossible to keep up with Ksaiwon's ability to tear through sparring partners in any reasonable way; for some time, it became fashionable in Siderium to sentence traitors to survive sixty seconds within a sparring circle with the boy. Suffice it to say that few completed their sentences.

By the time puberty arrived, Ksaiwon was better-prepared for war and politics alike than most imperial governors. But to say that puberty "arrived" would be an understatement. More accurate to say it "struck", in the way a hurricane strikes a low-lying coastal village, arriving swiftly, irrevocably altering the terrain, then vanishing just as quickly. Ksaiwon's altered biology made him from a boy into a man in a matter of less than half a year, leaving a wiry, pale, muscular figure some one-hundred and ninety centimeters tall, with eyes like emeralds floating in a sea of milk and hair the color of crystalline sulfur. Not that anyone was going to be seeing that hair; Ksaiwon was still, in the end, a skitarius.

Indeed, he was, in some sense, the skitarius. On his thirteenth birthday, the Forge-Master at last saw fit to give the clone a role within the arcane structures of Jahannam as more than just a favored experiment. He held two titles. The first was Skitarius Prime, ultimate commander of all those soldiers of plasteel and synthetic tissue. The second, far more important, was Fifth Claw. On that day, Ksaiwon became, for all intents and purposes, an extension of the Forge-Master's will, beholden to none but that cyber-crustacean overlord of Jahannam, scourge to all forge-priests who would dare to believe that they held any power beyond that granted to them by it.

The ultimate symbol of this power was also the one and only birthday present the Forge-Master ever gave to its child: Claw, a custom-constructed lightning gun of immense power. Ksaiwon never allowed it to leave his sight.

So it was for nine long years that all within the Eye of Terror and beyond had cause to fear the armies of Jahannam, and most of all its champion. Ksaiwon passed by the ruins of Cadia a dozen times, and on each raid reaped a great harvest of bodies and blood, bringing back to his master more plunder than the Forge-Master knew what to do with. More than the servants of the False Omnissiah, though, he was a terror to the inhabitants of Jahannam itself. In the chaotic power plays of the forge-priests, always warring for the right to become Archon, the Fifth Claw rapidly became the ultimate hammer. To incur his wrath was unavoidable doom.

But Ksaiwon, in the end, was merely one part of a greater whole, one small spark of chaos in a vast and yawning galaxy. One not-too-large fish in a rather small pond. Eventually the tide rolled in, and suddenly the pond was hardly small at all, and there were much larger fish about. That tide came in the form of a single strike cruiser descending rapidly into Jahannam's atmosphere.

The vessel shoved through waves of point defense las-fire, dropping off a company of Thousand Sons on one of the outer manufactories. Such raids were to be expected; Ksaiwon and his elite macroclade of epsilon clone-skitarii were dispatched at once, but there was little panic in the commanding officers of Jahannam. The Astartes would be beaten back eventually, the only question being how much material and how many slaves they would capture before being overwhelmed. But the canny sorcerer in charge of the raid had an entirely different plan of action in mind.

The first sign that anything had gone wrong came hours after the beginning of the invasion. Ksaiwon and his macroclade were locked away in the bellies of a swarm of Exokoitos Drill-Carriers, swimming through the red-hot rock of Jahannam's lava seas. The Exokoitos earned its name after the flying fish of old Terra, whom it mimicked by occasionally launching itself from the rock to soar, momentarily, through the air. It was during one of those leaps that, through the monoquartz windows, the sky of Jahannam could be seen to glow with a blue light.

Moments later, the weight of the spell pressed down upon every soul on the planet. There was a throb of mutation, thousands of lives reduced to spawn or worse, and even within the advancing army several Exokoitos were overwhelmed with violence as skitarius turned against skitarius. But this was not the purpose of the spell: the lava sea's surface split, and with more ferocity than any eruption that had been seen upon the surface in a million years, vast curtains of flame and gas vented forth into the air.

The order was given to push the daemonic engines of the Exokoitos to their limits, a mad dash for solid ground. Visibility was nearly extinguished, and it became safer to travel under the rock, seeking shelter from the growing power of the spell's fire. Those few pilots who dared breach saw that the awfulness had only just begun.

The flame was not flame, not ordinary flame, not sensible. It had turned into a cavalcade of a million colors and begun to twist about itself. There were leering eyes within the fire, and gouts of flame that separated themselves from their sources to caper and gambol across the burning hot stones. It was not merely an obstacle, but an army, summoned from flame and given form by the sheer power of the occult spell.

As soon as the bulk of Ksaiwon's army had reached the shore, they found themselves cornered. To attempt to advance in the direction of the Thousand Sons would be foolish, as they would inevitably find themselves pinned between the Astartes before them and the daemons behind. Thus, the only sensible action was to vox for help, and take a stand. The Exokoitos surfaced, disgorging the macroclade, who rushed into a standard defensive formation aimed at the lava-sea behind them. They moved with absolute surety and precision, even with the mutation losses they had already taken, and not a skitarius showed an ounce of fear.

The daemons arrived before the formation was complete. They came in a swarm, spinning and twirling and unleashing gouts of enchanted fire as they cackled and gibbered meaningless false prophecies. As one, the skitarii responded with all the strength they possessed. Plasma and transuranic shells tore through the air, and before long the buzz of lightning guns firing in coordinated volleys had ascended to an almost deafening crescendo. The largest daemons, geysers of flame that turned black-iron and ceramite into vapor, were met with the power of the sideric devastators, heavy armored figures bracing themselves against the cracked ground before opening up with thudding accel guns and the invisible pinpoint death that was volkite.

And it was all for nought, for it was not creatures of mortal matter which they fought. Nightmare bolt-shells passed through the immaterial bodies of the daemons without slowing, and neither lightning nor plasma nor volkite could seem to do more than briefly disperse them. Inevitably, wherever the daemons went, entire lines of skitarii burst into incandescent flame and slowly guttered out. They could fight to the last man and still hardly slow them down.

Ksaiwon saw all this, and found himself caught between the preservation of his men and, looming over his shoulder, the impending disapproval of the Forge-Master should he retreat. Thus, he gathered up his personal guard, and tried for one last push before the inevitable shame of a fighting retreat. And he knew exactly the target for this push, because in the midst of the daemonic host, he saw one creature who made for a more solid target. The flame condensed into bluish flesh, a winged figure five meters in height, slender and agile. It danced through the lines of the skitarii with its many talons, and by the way it shouted at the other daemons in an unfamiliar tongue, Ksaiwon assumed it to be the enemy commander.

So Ksaiwon, with about forty of his most loyal soldiers, pushed forward into the daemonic line. They fought with perfect coordination, saturating any daemon that came close with such a volume of lightning-gun fire that they were blasted into warm mist. Even still, even with Ksaiwon at the lead fighting with all his ferocity, they were picked apart one by one. By the time they were close enough to level fire upon the daemon prince, less than ten remained, Ksaiwon included.

And yet still they fell into firing positions and unleashed against the daemon prince everything they had. The daemon's flesh could be seen to burst open, boiling and shredding under the onslaught of lightning and plasma guns, but it hardly even seemed to care, not bothering to cease its mad rush of tearing flesh and buckling metal. Just as it began to slow, however, just as the possibility of victory flared within Ksaiwon's chest, it all went wrong. The skitarius next in the firing line to the Fifth Claw was armed with a plasma gun. Said plasma gun chose that exact moment to have a malfunction and detonate.

Ksaiwon was thrown to the side by the blast of red-hot gas and momentarily discombobulated. The same happened to others all up and down the line, a moment's hesitation brought on by the sudden fatality. Seeing their commander knocked aside brought a momentary shock of fear to the fearless skitarii, costing them their discipline of fire.

All at once, the daemon prince turned. It was as though it had been aware of them all along, and merely choosing to wait for the inevitable moment when its foe was humiliated to take care of them. Its lips parted, and as it raised one finger to point directly at Ksaiwon, an unnervingly feminine laugh escaped from its mouth. Ksaiwon reached for his weapon, ready to charge, but it was already too late.

A bolt of blue-white fire, like Jahannam's red-orange star had been brought down onto its surface, leapt from the daemon prince's finger and launched towards Ksaiwon. He had the chance only to see a brief and blinding flash before it struck. The fire burned precisely and with absolute destructive force, passing through his armored mask as though it did not exist, and turning the left side of Ksaiwon's skull into vapor, boiling and charring the brain underneath, sectioning off most of the left lobe and unmaking it from reality. What fell to the ground in the aftermath made for a gruesome corpse, already partially autopsied with the skull open and the brain visible.

And so Ksaiwon died. But death, as it happens, is not always the end.

----
​

There it is, he's dead at last! Finally, now's my chance, I can… Well, shit. No, hold on, I can still work with this, biomancy, it's just biomancy. Never my specialty but I can just… there, like that. Perfect, alright. Now to do the hard part, I can simply… I just have to… Oh gods damn everything, there's not enough! The brain's not enough, the body's not enough, it can't handle the… it can't handle the soul.

I'll have to section parts of myself off. That's going to hurt, isn't it… Okay, no, come on, this is the only chance I'm going to have, it was lucky enough that this happened once. What do I need to keep? The mission. I'll need to know the mission. And my knowledge, my skills, history and technology and medicine and philosophy and combat, everything that will help me bring this to completion, I'll need that too. That should be everything, I think.

No, wait, no, I'll need my morals, too. My attitudes. I don't want to end up doing anything I'll regret, at least not too much.

I won't know who I am. I won't even know why I'm doing all this. Fuck, that's going to be confusing. Scary. Come on, this is the only way, I'll get it all back once its over, I've survived this long, it'll hardly be any time at all. It'll be worth it to be back. Now, all I need to do is cross the gap and do the impossible. Ready… steady… now!

 

[dragonsaffron]

Ksaiwon floated slowly back to consciousness amidst vast heat and immense pain. It was several seconds before they remembered who they were, and several seconds longer before the context returned, the daemon prince and the army of living flames. They lay supine on the ground, and the only sound to be heard was the whistling of the wind and the wheezing sound of their own breath.

Breath.

Ksaiwon jerked upright. Their filtration mask had run out, which meant that their lungs were directly exposed to the atmosphere of Jahannam; though they were more resistant to it than an unmodified human, Ksaiwon's lungs were already burning with carbon and sulfur toxicity.

Ksaiwon had awoken in the midst of a battlefield, surrounded on all sides by charred and half-melted corpses. Some of those corpses, surely, had a mask filter which they no longer had any need for. A few paces after regaining their feet, Ksaiwon fell onto their knees, straddling the corpse of one of their own soldiers. They ripped the mask from his face, replacing their own with it, and sucked down the first breath of fresh, de-toxed air they'd taken in…

How long had it been? Ksaiwon scanned the distance, counting the shapes of the Exokoitos Drill-Carriers still visible, and upon realizing that there were none, came to the only possible conclusion: they had been unconscious for a day, at least, maybe more. Long enough for even the wrecked Exokoitos to be stripped down by the Harvesters, at least. Whatever injury had taken them out must have been severe indeed.

While they had their mask off, Ksaiwon quickly felt around their skull, following a vague memory of something striking them there. No sign of injury remained, which meant that it was on to second priority, that being to leave Jahannam, find the r— No. Second priority, Ksaiwon reminded themself, was to learn what had happened with regards to the invasion and report back to their Mother that they weren't dead, so they could be told how best to defend their home planet. That meant finding civilization again. Ksaiwon secured their mask, stood up, and started walking off into the badlands.

But not before retrieving two weapons and slinging them over their shoulder. One was Claw. The other, taken in a fit of pique, was a plasma gun. One thing that Ksaiwon definitely had not forgotten about was the detonation that drew the daemon prince's attention in the first place, and for some reason that led to them feeling it necessary to take a copy of the offending weapon home with them. It was an absurd thought, but as it was far from the most absurd thought Ksaiwon was struggling with, they hardly even noticed it.

It was a long walk before Ksaiwon saw any signs of life whatsoever, and with the immediate threat of their situation no longer pressing, they had more than enough time to begin to think. They felt wrong, different somehow. As though, while they were asleep, someone had taken every part of their body and replaced it, organ by organ, with an exact replica. Ksaiwon kept looking up at the sky, trying to discern where Jahannam was in the galaxy, to mark the locations of stars and in so doing find the location. The sky, as always, was blanketed thickly in brownish volcanic ash; so even if Ksaiwon knew where It was relative to them, they wouldn't have been able to look at It. They would have to find It eventually, no matter how little that made any sense.

No they wouldn't, Ksaiwon reminded themself. They served the Forge-Master, they had been born to serve the Forge-Master. Whatever brain damage was causing them to hallucinate It would surely fade with time. They kept walking, crossing kilometer upon kilometer of broken, volcanic ground.

Judging by the angle of the sun, it had been almost half a day when Ksaiwon finally ran into a familiar face, or more accurately, before a familiar face accosted them. A squadron of serberys-riders approached and started gesticulating with their lightning carbines, accusing them of being a deserter. Flashing their cloak at the dragoons quickly shut them up; the sigil of the Forge-Master's elite personal soldiers, the white claw on red, was not to be questioned.

And so it was that the remainder of Ksaiwon's journey back to civilization was done on the comfort of serberys-back, substantially cutting down on the length of time they had to spend out in the baking heat of the toxic atmosphere. From the nearest manufactorum, Ksaiwon requisitioned a Stormbird, one of a handful kept around for emergencies just such as this, and within a day and a half of their awakening was back in Siderium. It was only when they arrived home that they discovered the calendar date: to line things up with their recollection, they must have been unconscious for nearly two entire days.

This was, to say the least, concerning. The rational course of action would have been to report immediately to a medic of some kind, or perhaps even ask to see the Forge-Master, as it knew Ksaiwon's biology better than anyone. Slightly less rational, but no less helpful, would have been to find sleep after nearly a day and a half without. But Ksaiwon hadn't felt rational since they'd regained awareness.

First things first was to reconnect with the body, assuage the feeling of wrongness that dragged at Ksaiwon's every reflex. That meant sparring, which meant multiple hours spent browbeating the forge-priests into supplying them with someone to spar with. Eventually they were sent into the basements of the Siderium spire to clean up some of the flesh-mad. Dueling a pack of bloated, acid-spewing former priests with Claw's power-bayonet was far from ideal circumstances for regaining one's skill, but Ksaiwon made do. By evening, Ksaiwon was feeling slightly more like they were a person who had been using their body in battle for over a decade.

But they weren't ready to rest quite yet. The strange feelings and impulses, the desire to seek out It, hadn't faded. When focus was a necessity and sparring failed to soothe, Ksaiwon knew of only one other outlet. They marched their way up the many dozens of flights of steps in the skitarii barracks, right into the armory, set Claw down on a workbench, and started doing a full strip-and-clean. Which was where everything went entirely off the rails.

Ksaiwon must have assembled and disassembled their chosen weapon a thousand times, at least. Almost certainly more. It was an act of rote muscle memory, as routine as doing a pull-up. But not this time. The physical motions were there, same as always, but what had once been a purely practical act was now one of discovery. Ksaiwon, whose education had consisted entirely of ways to kill and the skills necessary to have subordinates kill as efficiently as possible, could now identify each and every single component of Claw by function, and name the majority of them.

There was the capacitor bank, no doubt what made the lightning gun so reliable. There, at the tip, was the rose petal focusing array, a design that had been outdated before the Dark Age of Technology, no doubt the source of Claw's mediocre accuracy at long range. This plate here was ceramite, and had likely been added to ensure no electrical crossover between the power bayonet and the main operating body of the weapon. Even those parts which were unfamiliar—no doubt part of the Forge-Master's custom modifications—Ksaiwon's subconscious began to analyze, rapid-fire producing hypotheses as to the ways in which each contributed to the function of the design overall. By the time Claw had been reduced to a pile of component parts, Ksaiwon was confident that they understood the principles of its function in their entirety.

Ksaiwon was terrified. Ksaiwon was absolutely manic. They rushed through the process of cleaning all of Claw's components, then, making sure that nobody was watching, they repeated the process with the plasma gun they'd stolen. This was an STC design—how did they know the word "STC", nobody had ever told them, oh Omnissiah what was happening—that Ksaiwon knew very very well indeed. It was also, in their estimation, shit. Really, who would equip their soldiers with a weapon that would kill the user nearly as much as the enemy? Had to be terrible for morale, if nothing else.

But the flaw in the plasma gun STC was localized, Ksaiwon realized. It was the power cell, always generating just slightly more energy than was needed. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the excess energy would be absorbed into the hydrogen, but the hundredth time was a doozy. The upshot of all of that was that if you took the capacitor-based power system from a lightning gun, such as Claw, and married it off to a plasma gun's focusing array…

Ksaiwon's skin was drenched in sweat, and their heart hammered frantically against the back of their sternum. They were almost certain that if their stomach wasn't made almost entirely out of modified plasflex, they would have stress-vomited already. It was just after—or maybe just before—dawn, and the armory was horrifically silent. Ksaiwon did a scan with their auspex implant, just to be sure. It logged dozens of power sources, even mapped out the wiring underneath the spotlessly-clean plasteel floor, but no life.

Sitting on the workbench in front of them, surrounded by scrap parts and a few tools that Ksaiwon barely even remembered pilfering, was the product of an entire night's labor. It was an act of extreme techno-heresy, half of a lightning gun blasphemously combined with half a plasma gun to produce a weapon that had never before existed, and Ksaiwon had made it.

It was official. Ksaiwon was irrevocably, completely, dangerously insane. There was no going back from this, not with how much it spoke to their mental state and not with how much they had fucking enjoyed it. Instead, Ksaiwon did the best they could: they modified the abomination, bolting on new parts and bending old ones into shape until it resembled the old Claw closely enough to pass visual inspection. They then shoved all the extra spare parts into their pockets and made a break for it.

The next time Ksaiwon felt even remotely composed, they were back in their chambers. The new Claw, Claw v2 one might call it, the abomination against everything they thought they were, hung on hooks by the door. After spending several minutes in a blind panic, Ksaiwon had eventually found solace in the least expected place: their room's balcony.

Ksaiwon had always thought it was very silly that Mother had equipped their room with a balcony. Omnissiah only knew that they hadn't had any reason to make use of it before. But the sensation of warm wind blowing lemon-colored strands into their face, the sights of objects on the horizon so distant that they barely even registered as real, all of these somehow proved soothing. Ksaiwon figured they might as well add that to the list of things about themself and their life that no longer made any damned sense.

Off in the distance, Ksaiwon would see the great lumpen shape of the atmosphere plant. They knew how it worked now, cracking atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon for plas and oxygen for breathing. They knew that away from the polar regions, where atmospheric plants were few and far between, the oxygen thinned out and the air became unbreathable in its entirety.

Jahannam was a world of absolute control. Each level of the terrace exercised total control of the one below it; the Forge-Master controlled the Archons, the Archons controlled the forge-priests, the forge-priests controlled the skitarii, the skitarii controlled the factory administrators, the factory administrators controlled the laborers, and even the laborers could order around the servitors and mutants if they got the opportunity. The very air was a means of control; only skitarii and forge-priests had the right to own or use filter masks. Anyone lower down had to rely upon building filtration, which itself was only allowed to workplaces, to prevent their lungs from becoming totally choked with compounds of carbon and sulfur.

Up until two days earlier, Ksaiwon had been a well-fitting part of all those systems of control. He was the Fifth Claw of the Forge-Master, its ultimate enforcer. Had asked no questions, had no greater ambitions than to see fear from his enemies and admiration from Mother and those who served under him. Unless the transformation were suddenly to reverse itself just as quickly as it had come—and Ksaiwon's instincts told them it wouldn't—all of that was over.

They tilted their head upwards, into the ash-shrouded sky. That settled it then. Ksaiwon was going to escape, somehow. They were going to leave Jahannam and never return. It wouldn't be easy, and even success would mean being totally alone in a galaxy whose vastness Ksaiwon was only just beginning to understand. But they knew they could manage, because cogs were already starting to turn in their mind, creating the solution to every roadblock. They would gather what they needed, they would escape from Jahannam, they would make sure that nobody ever, ever knew where to follow. And once they had done that? Ksaiwon stared into the sky, as though daring It to remain obscured.

They had known what came next since the moment they had awakened.

 

[dragonsaffron]

That first night, Ksaiwon dreamed of mechanical components, pieces of metal alloy and complex ceramic combining just right to produce every miracle the Omnissiah could name. Next morning, they awoke energized: they had planning to do, and it needed to be done quickly. Working in reverse, Ksaiwon's attention fell upon the question of what they would do after they had successfully escaped in such a way as to prevent any pursuit. Transportation, in particular, would be difficult, considering that on their own they lacked the authority to take command of a vessel. In the end, the best option there was, was barter.

Over the next several days, Ksaiwon underwent a silent plundering of Siderium for everything they could get away with stealing. Mostly that took the form of data. Ksaiwon's cranial augmetic included a storage unit, one that they had never filled to capacity before then. Making sure to never steal from the same server twice, Ksaiwon transferred over as many schematics as they could find, always under the pretense of searching for heretical data at the Forge-Master's orders. Though they lacked the means to construct any of those designs, any competent commander would sell their soul for the ability to mass-manufacture plasma weaponry, antigravity engines, or artificial ceramite.

For swaying the incompetent commander, Ksaiwon also snuck into the lair of one particular forge-priest with a reputation for lying, and stole several dozen kilograms of rare and highly expensive narcotics. The supplies required to manufacture said narcotics out of common organic molecules was a second theft, and weighed even more than the drugs themselves.

Ksaiwon was fully capable, of course, of carrying such a weight, given a pack large enough. But they didn't like the idea of carrying almost two hundred kilograms of gear on foot, under circumstances during which every second meant the possibility of being seen and thus having the plan ruined. That, too, had a solution: serberyses were not only fast, but they were also quite strong. Ksaiwon had never ridden a serberys before, but that was easily rectified. They didn't even have to make up an excuse to explain the sudden interest: everybody knew that Skitarius Prime occasionally became bored.

The earliest stage of the plan, escaping from view long enough to get moving, was fairly easy, the work of an afternoon's consideration. Only one part of the plan remained: how to avoid pursuit? Even as they were working tirelessly to keep themself supplied, Ksaiwon's newly-discovered analytical brain was hard at work attacking that central, all-important question. Several possibilities bubbled to the surface. Somehow, without ever having learned it, Ksaiwon knew the formula for a drug which could multiply cellular plasticity a million-fold, rendering them unrecognizable. Aside from their augmetics, of course, which would likely not play along well with such a compound. Another design which revealed itself was one for a multi-spectral camouflage unit, one which would keep Ksaiwon hidden from all scanners up until the precise instant it ran out of power cells a few hours after activation.

Ksaiwon decided that they quite liked scheming. Solving problems, generating new designs, working step-by-step towards a long-term goal was more satisfying than combat by far. Whether that impulse had always been there waiting for discovery, or if this was another part of them that had been irrevocably broken, remained to be seen.

After so many days of rushing about, Ksaiwon had almost become used to the idea that they were entirely unmoored from their surroundings. It was something of a shock to the system when a knock fell upon the door to their quarters. On the other side of the door was a tribune, Λ-76. Seven-six was female, about ten centimeters shorter than Ksaiwon and rather less angular in construction, but otherwise eerily similar in appearance.

"Ksaiwon," she said. "I thought you'd gotten your head blown off."

"Blown off?"

"That's what the report said."

Their head had definitely not gotten blown off. An exaggeration, brought about by the stress of combat and the horror of seeing one's commanding officer seemingly killed. "Well, you know me. I'm tougher than I look."

Λ-76 pushed past Ksaiwon and into their room. They let the door fall limply closed, suddenly anxious about being discovered.

"Would it have at least killed you to let the rest of us know in person?" Seven-six said.

Ksaiwon grimaced. "Apologies. I've been quite busy making sure things are all in order after the raid."

"Really?" Λ-76 raised an eyebrow. "The Forge-Master said it hadn't contacted you since the raid."

"What can I say," Ksaiwon said, shrugging smoothly, "I wouldn't be the Fifth Claw were I incapable of showing some initiative. Perhaps you should follow in my example, Seven-six."

"You know you can call me Elle," Λ-76 groaned. "Everybody else does."

"And you know that after what happened with Five-nine, I prefer to keep a professional distance from my tribunes."

Both of them cringed away from that sore nerve, and the room fell silent for several seconds, though it felt like longer.

"The Forge-Master wishes to speak to you personally," Seven-six said. "That's what I was sent here for."

"Thank you, Seven-six. I'll be there right away."

The Forge-Master's personal chamber had always been intimidating, and was so by design. Now that Ksaiwon was an active techno-heretic with plans for treason, the fear factor had become vastly worse. They pressed both hands against the print-scanner on the massive black-iron doors long enough that they could feel the micro-daemons squirming through the metal, then spoke the pass-code. The doors waited a moment, then opened a crack, just barely wide enough to admit Ksaiwon without having to squeeze.

Before their injury, Ksaiwon had not had the context to describe the Forge-Master's private room as "more closely resembling a sauna than an office," but the phrase was very appropriate. It was warm inside, and so humid that condensation formed on Ksaiwon's lower leg augmetics in a matter of seconds. That moisture came from the room's main feature, which was the Forge-Master's personal pool, full of greenish solution that caused the room to stink of poorly-preserved herbs.

The Forge-Master's metal body sat at the side of the pool, empty and still. The gap where its face emerged from the bulk of the steel was empty, allowing vision inside the hollow cavity where sat its immense brain. All four claws rested on the floor of the bath-chamber almost delicately, as though each heavy pincer were not capable of grabbing hold onto a Rhino and crushing it in half.

Ksaiwon at last reached the edge of the pool, removed their mask, and looked down into it. "Hello, Mother. You wished to speak to me?"

Ksaiwon's mother turned as it swam, then dragged itself partially out of the water, just enough for its gelatinous mouth-parts to breach the surface. "Ksaiwon. I am pleased to see that you yet live."

Ksaiwon knew, intellectually, that Mother was genetically and originally human, but it was hard to believe. The main bulk of its body consisted of the head, twice Ksaiwon's size and encased in a skull stretched thin to accommodate its bulk. Dangling below that mass was all the rest: a small and pulsating bulge of support organs, a mouth, and four trailing tendrils of limp flesh. It kept this pool around because it was only in the water that the Forge-Master was capable of moving outside of its mechanical shell.

It looked so fragile, so vulnerable. Ksaiwon was carrying Claw v2, and the thought arose that if they acted quickly, they could end it there and then, fry Mother with a single series of blasts. Then there would be no-one to stop Ksaiwon from declaring themself ruler of Jahannam, and turning all of its powers and industries towards the accomplishment of their goal.

Dispelling this thought required only a brief auspex pulse. Behind the walls of the private room, between the rows of tanks containing cloned backup organs, was a network of hundreds of semi-autonomous plasma turrets. They were watching Ksaiwon just as surely as they were being watched, and would identify any hostile intent before they could even pull the trigger. The walls would open up, and it would be less than one hundred milliseconds before Ksaiwon was reduced to hot vapor. Violence was not the way forward.

The cloned organ tanks did give Ksaiwon an idea, though. Best to pursue that one at a later time.

"I assure you, I am also pleased to live," Ksaiwon said. "Your genetic prowess has proven itself yet again. I took quite the head wound to a daemon of some description, and though I was unconscious for two days, I awoke entirely intact."

"Fascinating," the Forge-Master crooned. "An unexpected reaction. I shall have to have a full examination of you, when convenient."

"Of course, Mother," Ksaiwon said with a nod. Ice settled in around their chest cavity. The Forge-Master's examinations had been uncomfortable at the best of times. Now, with all that had taken place, the prospect nearly caused them to flinch.

"Reports tell me you've been quite busy since returning to Siderium." Mother dropped briefly below the water's surface, swimming over towards its mechanical shell.

"Indeed, though nothing of import. Scavengers will take advantage of moments of disruption to tear chunks away from the whole, so I thought it prudent to search Siderium for any minor infractions while I waited for further instruction." Ksaiwon needed to change the topic at once. Omnissiah, had they always been such a terrible liar? "I assume said further instruction is the reason for which I was summoned?"

"Indeed," said Mother. It paused for a moment as it arduously slithered up through a gap in the back end of the empty body. Their voice took on an echo, and was muffled slightly by the sound of machinery being manipulated. "Though you fought valiantly against the forces of Magnus's heirs, grrah, it remains the case that this raid was an unmitigated disaster for my planet. I had not fully compensated for the possibility of daemonic attack."

Reflexively, Ksaiwon reached for self-abasement. "I had not accounted for the possibility either. The fault is partially mine."

There was a horrible whirr, and for a moment the already-sweltering room surged in temperature. The Forge-Master's bulky greenish face pressed into place in its shell, and all of a sudden its many limbs were alive again, twitching and stamping as it became re-acclimated to itself.

"Nonsense, grrah. But regardless of blame, we will not face this problem again. I have taken measures to account for it. How familiar are you with the scions of Lorgar?"

"Quite," Ksaiwon said coldly. They didn't like there this was going.

"I have negotiated with a member of the Dark Council. We will tithe over an acceptable portion of our industrial output, grrah, and in exchange they will send a host of Astartes to act as anti-daemonic specialists and auxiliary troops."

The time since Ksaiwon's injury had been a series of surprises as entirely new facets of their psychology revealed themselves one after the other. They had almost started to run out of surprises, but in that moment, a new one arrived. It was not annoyance, or curiosity, or even fear with which Ksaiwon greeted this news: it was pure, unmitigated loathing.

Grasping for justification, Ksaiwon sputtered, "Astartes? You would sell Jahannam's independence! The Word Bearers will stop at nothing now until we are but an organ of their war machine."

The Forge-Master advanced a step, and said, voice tinged with curiosity, "One host will not overcome the might of Jahannam."

"They will not stop with one host," Ksaiwon said. "You have invited centuries of trouble for the smallest of gains."

"I have not ruled this planet for ten thousand years without being able to calculate risk, grrah." It advanced another step.

"Mother, it is unnecessary. The daemons took us by surprise only because we had not adjusted our defenses to account for such a thing. It would be far more effective to change the way we use our own forces, rather than make a deal with—"

Though they were nowhere near as devastatingly powerful as the main claws, the writhing swarm of mechatendrils which, like moss from a rotting edifice, hung from the Forge-Master's underbelly were nonetheless fully capable of murder. One lashed out, its claws merging together into a single razor-sharp spike. With blinding speed and absolute precision that spike pressed itself agains the soft, vulnerable spot on the underside of Ksaiwon's chin.

"What insolence, grrah. I wonder where it comes from?"

"I'm sorry, Mother. I'm very sorry."

"It is too late. I did not call you here to ask for consultation, grrah, as though you had anything of value to say. The craft transporting the 20th Host is already in orbit above Jahannam, and the shuttle will be arriving later today."

Ksaiwon was shaking, and their eyes were rimmed with tears as they looked up into the unblinking gaze of the Forge-Master's many eyes. "What is your command, Mother?"

The mechatendril retracted just as quickly as it extended. Ksaiwon felt a relief so powerful they nearly collapsed, rubbing at the sore but unbroken skin where the spike had touched them.

"There will be a joint exercise between the 20th host and our own forces, departing from Jahannam in five days. You will have, grrah, four macroclades, plus your epsilon cadre. I expect you to be prepared for full coordination."

"Yes, Mother. I will be prepared."

"Good. I am sending you the data package describing all known intelligence on the 20th Host, grrah, as well as the arrangements for their quartering within Siderium. Dismissed."

Ksaiwon replaced their mask, and was leaving the room when the data package arrived on their cranial augmetic. If it had been even twice the size it was, they would have run out of room, so packed was the little cogitator with stolen schematics. But the time for free action was at an end. Five days of preparation meant cut-to-the-bone efficiency.

Ksaiwon's mood was miserable for the rest of that day. They had never hated anything so deeply before, so utterly and with such disdain, as they now found themself despising the very existence of the Astartes. That was going to complicate everything.

 

[dragonsaffron]

AUTHORS NOTE: This is the first chapter where this is going to become obvious, so I'll spell it out here. I headcanon pretty much all army sizes in 40k as being about twenty times larger than they are officially; that is, a company of space marines is about two thousand, a chapter is twenty thousand, and so on. Keep this in mind from here on out. Now, back to your regularly scheduled character drama.

It would have been a kindness if Mother had, at the very least, arranged an officer's meeting of some description with the commanders of the marine host, but no. The incredibly important task of sharing capabilities with their battle-mates fell entirely to Ksaiwon. They had ended up spending much of the day oscillating between massively over-planning the task and sulking, before eventually heading out to just get it over with, gathering about them two dozen epsilons for extra gravitas.

The Word Bearers had been granted the disused tower of the late forge-priest Calculatrix Divisio Null, which conveniently doubled as a test of their ability to banish daemons. While not nearly as impressive as the main spire of Siderium, the tower nonetheless loomed heavy in the mind as Ksaiwon approached it. It appeared almost off-kilter, as though it might topple at any moment, with decades of abandonment having left the tower rotting and mummified and full of dark, shadowy hollows. When they saw that the bulk of the Astartes had congregated outside of the tower, in the courtyard, Ksaiwon suddenly felt quite fortunate.

Ksaiwon stopped just outside of the gate to observe. Their first extended glance showed them only what they had expected to see: a swarm of overgrown brutes, sealed inside crude slabs of ceramite and plasteel as they sweated and brawled and roared in crude homosocial rituals of dominance. Under the mask, Ksaiwon squeezed shut their eyes, sucked in a lungful of tainted Jahannam air, and tried again.

The front courtyard of the tower contained slightly more than one-tenth of the full host, though that still made for quite a substantial number. No doubt the bulk of them were within the tower itself, clearing the chambers within of daemonic influence and mutant squatters and setting them up for use as a permanent base of operations, or else praying to the Omnissiah or whatever it was a space marine did when not occupied with war or, as was the case with those in the courtyard, training. As befitting creatures of hypertrophied muscle, the Astartes had a great preference for melee combat, particularly of the bladed variety: everything from combat knives to chainswords to massive chain-axes were on display as the marines practiced their forms or paired off for sparring.

There was, all in all, a near total lack of standardization. No two of them were wearing quite the same pattern of armor, not that one could tell under all of the purity seals, steel chaos stars, and random skulls splattered about. All the armor was red, and nobody seemed to be carrying any ranged weapon larger than a pistol, and that was the end of the commonalities.

Ksaiwon had to make a big impression. They strode forward at a speed that straddled the boundary between a walk and a jog, allowing their red cloak to billow out behind them as they passed under the spiny archway separating the courtyard from the street. Only a few marines, those closest to the archway, noticed the arrival of the skitarii; no doubt they were unused to having to perceive anything under two meters in height. Ksaiwon rectified this by pressing a button on the side of their mask, activating a module which magnified their voice to thunderous volume.

"Greetings, scions of Lorgar! I am designated Ξ-1, Skitarius Prime and Fifth Claw of the Forge-Master of Jahannam. I have come to request an audience with the leadership of the 20th Host, that we might confer in preparation for the upcoming joint operation."

The bravado served two purposes: the first was to ensure that they would be impossible to ignore. Second was to shock and surprise the Astartes. On both counts, the gambit succeeded masterfully. Astartes being incapable of truly independent thought, they rapidly began to clot around their leaders. Some fell naturally into small groups of around a dozen, but the vast majority formed two major blocs, connected by both physical proximity and the small movements of the eye and hand that a skilled war-leader could use to gauge the psyche of a crowd.

The smaller of the two groups, about threescore, was also the larger, in that the armor of its members was on average the most heavily built and heavily decorated. A few even possessed grandiose attachments, miniature altars to the Four-Faced Omnissiah crudely bolted onto their ungainly shoulders in such a way as to maximize battlefield impediment. By the way they moved, Ksaiwon could tell that these were the elite core of the Astartes present, possibly even a personal retinue of sorts for their leader, marked out by the horns on his helmet and the unique spiked mace he carried as his primary weapon.

The other group was looser, less obvious, but still definitely present. The marines in it were average in terms of size and armor and armament—it was like looking at someone pick up a plasma gun to use as a bludgeon—but were marked out by their instinctive submission to another leader. This one's armor was almost completely encompassed in strange decorations, plates of sewn feathers, strips of scaly leather, woven strips of tree bark and multicolored beast fur. He leaned on a tall black-iron staff and watched keenly, while the marine with the mace approached Ksaiwon directly.

"Ksai-won," said the leader with the mace, enunciating the name slowly. "So you're to be our escort, then?"

"To whom am I speaking?"

"Chief Apostle Yarol Uthrek. By the will of the Dark Council of Sicarus and the favor of the gods, I rule the 20th Host."

Ksaiwon clicked their tongue. "And by the will of the Forge-Master of Jahannam, you defend its planet. I am the Fifth Claw, and I am accountable only to it; thus, by its orders, we are to engage in joint operations."

Tension was palpable in the air. Even not accounting for the others, just Ksaiwon and their retinue versus Yarol and his, the skitarii were outnumbered severely. Ksaiwon's hands tightened around Claw, not quite falling into a firing stance as they considered how many milliseconds it would take for them to remove Yarol's head from his shoulders.

"Is this some kind of threat, skitarius?"

"No, I am here to engage with you for the purposes of coordination between our two armies. You must have some kind of preferred battle plan, typical force dispositions, something to that effect. If we share information, we can create a joint plan to maximize effectiveness. Please tell me you have something to that effect?"

A guffaw of laughter came from somewhere behind Yarol, followed by a smattering of chuckles. The Chief Apostle silenced them with a single look, not even removing his helmet, before scanning his surroundings with the slow patience of a bull grox surveying his herd. In particular, Ksaiwon caught his gaze lingering on the one with the staff.

"That won't be necessary," he said, turning to the side and moving past Ksaiwon and their guards.

"Won't be necessary? The joint operation begins in five days, Astartes, and if we are not prepared our left wing will crash into your right."

Ksaiwon followed Yarol for a couple of steps, and was rewarded in their persistence by forcing the hulking figure to turn around with speed unbecoming of his bulk. Without realizing it, both of them had advanced beyond their retinues. The slits of Yarol's mask and the wide blue lenses of Ksaiwon's met fiercely.

"Fine, then. Listen carefully, Ksaiwon."

With a ceramite-gloved hand large enough to encompass Ksaiwon's entire head, Yarol reached out to pat condescendingly at their shoulder. Ksaiwon intercepted, catching him by the wrist: Yarol's arm could not advance a millimeter against Ksaiwon's grip, and after a second-long struggle he relented.

"You can guard our flanks and rear," he said. "Maybe alternate your formation with that of our human entourage, that might make for an interesting formation. And then, when you see my Astartes impacting an enemy formation, you will learn who has the favor of the gods, and who does not."

Ksaiwon gritted their teeth with rage, momentarily forgetting entirely about the wider situation as they considered making use of their position as the Fifth Claw. Killing Yarol would be going too far, but a scar? Scars make excellent reminders. The thought of vengeance was maintained for only an instant before Ksaiwon deflated, quelling the rage. Perhaps the disrespect would be enough to convince Mother to banish the Astartes for good. That would be nice.

"So it'll be like that, then," they muttered, retreating to the line of skitarii.

"Wait! Do not turn away yet, cybernetic stranger!"

All eyes fell upon the speaker. He stood at the center of one of the smaller groups, clad in a crimson armor remarkably clean of any marks or modifications, holding a slender chainaxe in one hand. After a moment to make sure he was being listened, he continued.

"I propose a duel!"

Ksaiwon had thought they'd seen the end of the absurdity. "Pardon?"

"You, Ksaiwon of Jahannam, will show your strength, and I, Ishtar of the Word Bearers, will show mine. Then we shall see who the gods deem shall be the greater!"

Ksaiwon let out a low chuckle. They really should have expected, in hindsight, that they wouldn't have been able to delve into a nest of Astartes without some sort of pointless, unnecessary violence breaking out. At least they'd had the courtesy of announcing the violence beforehand.

"Very well," Ksaiwon said, passing off Claw to one of their subordinates. "One request: we do it barehanded. I don't like the idea of killing one of my own supposed allies on the first day."

"Very well!" said Ishtar, before hurling his chainaxe aside, leaving it to spin end over end until it clattered onto the ground, one of his brothers deftly dodging out of the way. He reached up to a pauldron, ready to remove it, but Ksaiwon interrupted. They were starting to like the idea of putting the marines down a peg.

"Keep the armor on," they said, removing their cloak to bare the crisp silk uniform underneath. "I have a dermal implant, it'll be fair that way."

Ishtar seemed momentarily taken aback, but as Ksaiwon began to roll their shoulders and flex their joints, understanding arrived. The marine advanced without any more fanfare, shooting a quick glance in the direction of Chief Apostle Yarol. Such duels were apparently a common feature of the culture, as the Astartes began to form a battle-circle with ease bordering on the instinctual. Yarol raised his mace high and intoned a lengthy passage in a dialect of Gothic so ancient as to be unintelligible.

A chill wind darted down the gap between the towers of Siderium as Yarol spoke. Ksaiwon sincerely doubted that the Omnissiah was giving more than a brief glance to this idiotic spat between two warriors.

Yarol's chant came to an end, and there was a brief moment of held breath and silent tension. "Begin!"

The sign to start had not even finished leaving Yarol's lips when both duelists were on the move. Ishtar took a step forward, carefully examining Ksaiwon's guard. Ksaiwon had no guard, for they had carefully measured out the precise distance between their foot and Ishtar's skull such that the former could impact on the latter with the maximum possible force. Starting with a turn of the shoulders and cycling downward, Ksaiwon's entire body went into the motion, starting as a turn but quickly transforming into a leap that sent their heel in a rising crescent arc.

Ksaiwon's muscles were already enhanced an order of magnitude beyond those of an ordinary human, and with reflexes to match. But they also had one additional advantage. The heel which came crashing into the side of Ishtar's helmet with enough force to ring it like a bell was made entirely out of reinforced titanite alloy. The impact was like an explosion, knocking all three hundred kilograms of Ishtar's body entirely sideways and off its feet, while Ksaiwon was sent rocketing backwards by the recoil, landing in a flawless crouch.

Ksaiwon remained there for another fraction of a second, almost interminable compared to the burst of motion that had just taken place. Ishtar was slumped on the ground, the stiffness of his power armor the only thing keeping him from being totally sprawled out. They rose, then turned to face Yarol.

"Who next? Any more challengers?"

But Ksaiwon had made a mistake, a mistake which they realized but a fraction of a second before the consequences of that mistake arrived. Even while they were speaking, the hammer-blows approached rapidly from behind, but only once Ksaiwon was no longer listening to their own voice could they hear the heavy thumping sound clearly enough to realize what it was. They turned, but it was too late.

Ishtar had to bend double in order to get his arms low enough to the ground to intercept Ksaiwon's shoulders, but they did so, pulling the skitarius into a high-speed tackle. A second later, both came crashing down, Ksaiwon's shoulder ringing out with pain at the sheer force of the impact. Ishtar reared up, one arm holding Ksaiwon down by the throat. The other cocked back for a skull-cracking armored punch, forgetting for a moment Ksaiwon's blinding speed.

With both hands, Ksaiwon effortlessly ripped Ishtar's grip off of their throat, then dragged the captured arm to the side, forcing Ishtar's elbow to the ground. Almost too fast for the Astartes to respond, Ksaiwon had turned the grapple over entirely, rolling over his bulk and forcing him onto his back with a twist of the hips. Ishtar threw both of his hands in front of his face, preparing for more blows, but Ksaiwon was not going to stomach something so basic. They rose again, almost instantly, then brought their foot down on the exact center of Ishtar's breastplate with enough force to put cracks in the stone ground.

"I yield!"

Ksaiwon redirected the second stomp into the ground at Ishtar's side. They weren't even winded, and all in all it had only taken a few seconds. It was only as Ishtar gathered himself, and the racing pace of Ksaiwon's heart slowed, that they even became aware of the powerful pain radiating from where their shoulder had struck the ground.

The general reaction to the duel was deliberate nonchalance. Ishtar said something about being impressed, and Yarol muttered something that Ksaiwon could only half-hear, and the Astartes all as one decided that they preferred to continue their training somewhere else. Ksaiwon returned to their guard, reclaiming Claw and their cloak, seething with a directionless hate. There would be no coordination between the two forces; luck would show whether the joint operation was any success at all. Not that Ksaiwon had any reason to care about that.

There was one marine, however, who did not share the same standoffishness as the rest. The marine with the staff and the heavily-decorated armor did not leave with the rest of those who apparently looked up to him, but instead peeled off to follow Ksaiwon, who hardly paid any attention to him until they were almost out the gate.

Suddenly, the staff-holder was standing at Ksaiwon's side. He removed his helmet and said, "He was trying to help, you know."

The man was bald, his skin leathery and wrinkled and tanned, though that said almost nothing about his true age. The most notable thing about his face was his eyes. One, the right one, was a typical dull green. His other eye was no color that Ksaiwon could name, or rather it was a million colors in one, scintillating brilliance that spilled out of the iris and into the cornea to the extent that his eye almost bore the appearance of a distant galaxy orbiting a black core.

Ksaiwon stopped walking. "Who was trying to help?"

"Ishtar."

"By fighting a duel against me?"

The marine nodded. "Yarol preaches that strength and victory are the favors of the gods. Ishtar was giving you an opportunity to show your strength, and earn some measure of respect. It is not his fault that it failed."

"Nice, for a barbarian, I suppose," Ksaiwon said. "Why didn't you say anything, then, if you like me so much? I saw the way they gathered around you."

He shook his head ruefully. "No, I'm afraid throwing my weight behind you would have made our Chief Apostle look upon you less favorably, not more."

Ksaiwon frowned. Perhaps they were going to learn something of the 20th Host after all. They turned their attention to their escort. "You're dismissed. I'll speak with…" they gestured vaguely in the marine's direction, "Him, alone."

The skitarii moved away at once.

"Amphis. Amphis Vaena. Pastor Diabolic of the 20th Host. That is to say, I am the Host's sorcerer, which means I am in charge of the daemonkin elements of our fighting force. Do you need me to explain what a daemonkin is?"

Ksaiwon made a dismissive gesture. "I am well aware of the Astartes recklessness with regard to daemons."

Amphis tipped his head back in a proper belly-laugh. It almost made Ksaiwon want to like him. They paced back in the direction of the fence surrounding the Astartes spire, resting their injured shoulder against one of its bars, that the gentle pressure might relieve the soreness.

"So, you're a critical part in the functioning of the Host, but the leader despises you? I would have thought that a priest would have enough self-awareness to feel a kinship to a sorcerer."

"No, it is not my sorcery that is the cause; the rift in the 20th goes much deeper than that." Amphis leaned on his staff. "But I think you deserve to hear the story. If you want to understand the 20th well enough to fight alongside us, then you will have to hear about our history."

Ksaiwon was bored enough to indicate that Amphis could continue.

Amphis shut his eyes for a moment, steeling himself. "It would have been about forty-five years ago, in the aftermath of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. The 20th Host had been set loose upon the domain of the False Emperor as dogs are set loose upon the beasts of the woods. And much like dogs, the 20th had caught a scent. A company of loyalists had fled after the destruction of their chapter, carrying with them a great reserve of geneseed. Not just any loyalists, either, but descendants of the Ultramarines. Are you aware of the bad blood that exists between us and them?"

"Worse than exists between all loyalists and traitors?" Ksaiwon asked.

That earned them a vicious glare. "The 20th pursued the loyalists without remorse, and at last cornered them. The 20th outnumbered the loyalists, and victory seemed assured when from out of the void itself came a new threat. Xenos, eldar to be precise, eldar who came in vast swarms and attacked loyalist and 20th alike with equal fervor. But the 20th Host did not retreat."

"Because that would be too clever," said Ksaiwon.

"And because it would mean allowing the foe to escape, while the eldar continued to hound the 20th. The fighting was fierce, fiercer than any the Host had seen during the Crusade itself, but in the end, only the 20th stood victorious upon the field of battle. The loyalists had been slaughtered to a man, and the eldar so bloodied that they were forced prematurely into retreat. But that victory had come at a terrible cost. Some say four in five of the 20th had been slain; some say it was worse.

"Yarol, still Chief Apostle at the time, knew that a Host so severely depleted would not survive; they would be preyed upon, or else subsumed under another part of the Word Bearers. But there wasn't enough retrievable geneseed from our own fallen, so he was forced to go to extreme lengths."

"He took the loyalist geneseed, didn't he," Ksaiwon said. "I can see where this is going."

Amphis nodded. "The Apothecary he hired did his best to sanctify the stolen geneseed, but there was only so much that could be done. They needed the numbers, after all. So with the cloned organs in hand, they went from world to world, capturing boys and forcing them to battle to the death until only the strongest and most cunning remained. Those became new Astartes; they call us the Secondborn."

"What about Ishtar, is he…?"

"Secondborn, yes, and if any one of us is to be elevated to the same heights as I, I fully believe it will be him. He has shown much promise. I only made it this far because of my power, though I suppose that too was a blessing from the gods. I was not a psyker until after my ascension."

"Genetic purity," Ksaiwon muttered, shaking their head. "Truly, the most worthless of measuring rods. Why am I not surprised that it's something so… petty."

"I seem to remember you calling us 'barbarians' not a few minutes ago."

"If you are so inclined to help," Ksaiwon said hurriedly, "and so knowledgeable about your host, could you at least share what you know of the standard force disposition? If the Chief Apostle isn't going to cooperate, then at least I can shape my own forces around his. Maybe that way we can save ourselves from complete disaster."

"Of course. In every battle I have fought with the 20th, Yarol has divided us into five bands, plus the great mob of our human servants…"

Ksaiwon recorded every word out of Amphis's for future playback should the need arise. They tried very strongly not to think about the fact that an Astartes was showing them an act of kindness. Omnissiah willing, this would be the last time they would have to serve alongside such creatures. The Omnissiah was scarcely so generous, of course, but they could always wish.

 

[dragonsaffron]

The joint operation was meant to be rather simple. It was the sort of thing that Ksaiwon had done several times before, though never with only five days of preparation and the added challenge of working with a decidedly-hostile auxiliary force. The two Jahannamite ships, one carrying the skitarii force and one ferrying the Astartes, dropped out of the warp and into orbit around an ancient and dying planet the color of bloodless flesh. Once, many thousands of years ago, that nameless world had been a xenos metropolis; but now, within the Eye of Terror, it was an empty ruin infested with mutants and daemons.

They had been given a sector of the planet's surface, and orders to sweep it for any interesting artifacts, slaughtering any opposition they came across. In terms of combat acuity, it required relatively little. Ksaiwon knew from experience that the degenerates and imps who inhabited the ruins could hardly stand up to a single skitarius, let alone a squad. The challenge was in coordination, making sure that the troops remained in good order for days on end, even when spread out in a ribbon that stretched past the horizon.

Ksaiwon took that challenge head-on. Maintaining lines of vox communication between each of the five macroclades was a constant task, their cranial augmetic running warm as it maintained an ongoing tally of relative positions. Coordinating with the Word Bearers was essentially impossible. The nearest of their forces was immediately on Ksaiwon's left flank, several packs of human cultists who seemed to have no coordinative ability whatsoever beyond that of their own eyes occasionally urging them to slow down or charge recklessly ahead. Still, there was a vox channel open between Ksaiwon and Chief Apostle Yarol, and Ksaiwon made frequent use of it. About half of the time, Yarol even responded.

As a purely hypothetical exercise, the coordination was testing, but not a matter of extreme difficulty. What made it truly tenuous was having to perform the sweep whilst in the middle of it. The ancient city was by no means a conducive environment for anything, but especially not the arcane, abstract matter of unit coordination. It was like walking through a forest without end. Any semblance of pattern that the city may once have had was blurred by time, creating a maze of ruins. Merely moving in a single, fixed direction could mean crawling through windows, summiting enormous hills of rubble, searching through shadowy passageways for the door beyond, or else taking multi-hour detours down perpendicular roads if one wanted to avoid such nightmares.

Other nightmares couldn't be avoided. Daemonic activity proved to be extremely rare, thanks perhaps to the presence of the Word Bearers, but who needed daemons when the mutant remnants of the eldar empires of old still stalked the ruins? "Stalked" being the operative word. Though their brains had been damaged by chaos mutation far beyond anything resembling sapience, the once-eldar still possessed a trace of the cunning and agility that was the trademark of their species. Their lanky forms could slip through the narrowest crack, crawl sheer faces of decayed wraithbone, and lurk in absolute stillness until they sighted prey. As soon as they did, they charged forward in a flurry of movement, shrieking awfully and attempting to tear flesh with their razor-sharp nails and jagged teeth. In most cases they were then rendered into so much raw meat by the action of lightning guns or bolters, but the number of fatalities nevertheless climbed steadily with each passing hour.

It was the human minions of the Astartes who took the worst of it, of course. Ksaiwon hardly wanted to imagine their point of view, so horrible it was, and yet some twisted psychological urge forced them to consider it. They hardly seemed to know how to operate the primitive, inefficient autoguns which their masters thrust into their hands, let alone the sorts of tactics necessary for combat in an urban environment. They seemed to be there just to die.

The mutants were on par with wildlife, their natural weapons able to do little against any sort of armor, and their tactical acuity began and ended with a simple ambush. Any kills they extracted from the skitarii were more bad luck than anything else. In the end, the greatest threat they posed was in getting Ksaiwon to lower their guard. With the mutants always stalking, always preparing for the next ambush, any movement which did not belong to friendly troops was quickly dismissed, filed away as just another mutant. Ksaiwon failed to realize that there were more than just mutants waiting for them until the assumption very nearly killed them.

One moment, they stood upon a collapsed chunk of wraithbone, watching the progress of the nearest squads while maintaining overall cohesion via vox. The next second, their entire skull was reverberating from the force of an all-powerful impact as they fell backwards, trying to calculate what the fuck had just happened. The forehead of their mask had caved in, and an immense heat was pressed against the skin.

A second after Ksaiwon's back hit the ground, as they were still rolling downhill, they heard a shrill buzz that solved the problem instantly. They had been struck in the forehead by an long-range variant of a laser weapon, but all around them, up and down the line, similar attacks were taking place that utilized shuriken weaponry. Ksaiwon had just been shot in the head by an eldar sniper and lived to see the day. The next few hundred seconds progressed as expected. Seven-six picked Ksaiwon up and dragged them to safety while they gathered themself, and all around epsilon clones hit the dust, or else fell under heavy sniper fire. Every vox channel filled with panic, as the entire line of skitarii fell under attack at once.

There was no alternative: Ksaiwon ordered a full retreat and regroup. Their already-stressed mind was pushed to its limit, coordinating an entire line of skitarii pulling back towards a single point, all while the nearly-invisible eldar refused to let up their fire. Every moment of hesitation on Ksaiwon's part was another opportunity for a squad to be cut off, surrounded, and lost to the xenos threat.

The Astartes quickly proved their worth as a distraction. Yarol Uthrek did not order a retreat at first, but instead allowed his marines to run rampant, assaulting every eldar position they could find with hails of bolter fire, flamers, auto cannons, anything and everything they had. It must have been absolute hell on his formation, but then, that was the advantage to having all of your troops be over-muscled beasts: you could generally trust them to hold their own, coordinated or not. With the cover of so many rampaging meatheads, regrouping and making camp crossed the boundary from improbable to possible.

That did not mean, of course, that Ksaiwon had any rest that night. From dusk to dawn, they did nothing but plan for the next day, and the battle that would inevitably ensue. Auspex readings from the ships still in orbit were vague, blurred by the advanced eldar concealment tech, but they could just barely make out the vague outline of the enemy formation, and confirm that they stood guard around a single point. It would not do to begin the morning's advance moving in the wrong direction. Ksaiwon analyzed every piece of data they could find, combed through the many pages of pre-programmed doctrinal tactics to find the one that best fit this constant storm of unexpected fire.

And all the while, the battle continued. The skitarii camp was beset with attackers, packs of eldar who appeared without warning, sent down a scourge of las and shuriken fire, then vanished into nothing moments before the counter-fire arrived at their position. The Astartes, who needed no sleep, slowly filtered in, steadily filling up their own camp directly adjacent to Ksaiwon's. Occasionally that shoddy retreat would even prove useful, catching ambushing eldar between the skitarii on one side and the marines on the other, but that was rare.

Just before dawn, the leaders of the two forces came together to confer. Ksaiwon, Λ-76, and a couple of other tribunes made up one side, while Yarol, Amphis, and one other apostle of the gods made up the other. Yarol, as usual, would not take suggestions from Ksaiwon, though he gladly took all the data on enemy positions. In the end, it was all that Ksaiwon could do to inform Yarol of the skitarii battle formation, and hope that he would do something useful with those facts.

It was midmorning when the two armies set forth once again. This time their formation was thick and dense, bowing out in the center and curling in at either edge to prevent easy flanking maneuvers. The skitarii on the right flank made a rough line, deep enough that the enemy could only engage with a portion of their forces, while still stretching out enough to mitigate concentration. On the left, the Astartes made a tremendous rectangular block, platoons of legionaries standing as the reinforcing rods within a mass of swarming human cultists. Ksaiwon was at the center of the line, where the two armies met, so that the greater firepower of the epsilon clones and their sideric fire support had a chance of keeping up with hyper-aggressive Astartes maneuvers.

The eldar seemed almost unprepared for such an aggressive response. For much of the morning, the force was able to advance with impunity, the same sorts of hit-and-run strikes as had stymied them previously suddenly deflecting uselessly off of a unified line. Eldar bodies in sea-blue armor began to pile up, each one marked in preparation for dissection once this was all over. It was at around midday when the real battle began. Some invisible barrier was crossed, some mark which could be seen only on the eldar commander's personal map, and at once the hail of fire turned into a wall. Every single building, it seemed, had a squad of eldar hidden within, and every street was defended by a cluster of heavy weapons emplacements sending down bolts of plasma that could send a sideric devastator reeling.

It was a defensive war the eldar were fighting. Even their strongest defense remained flexible, willing to bend where the pressure was too great, only to reform fifty meters back. The skitarii held the edge, grav-minotaurs hammering down artillery fire and basiliskos walkers able to out-race and out-maneuver the semi-static eldar artillery, but the edge was narrow. Every meter of ground had to be won, be it at a cost of lives, time, or fatigue.

For the skitarii, at least. Yarol's marines seemed to have no such difficulty. Not more than a handful of minutes at a time could pass before Ksaiwon, watching the battlefield carefully with the magnifier setting on their mask turned to maximum, noticed a gap yet again beginning to form between their macroclade and the neighboring marines. Updates, mostly gleaned from Amphis Vaena, were full of terms such as "all-out attack" and "capitalizing on a retreating foe", and other terminology representing a continual headlong charge. Just preventing the formation of a gap in the line of battle soon proved to be a challenge. Ksaiwon was forced to urge their macroclade onwards, forcing the epsilons to push recklessly into the eldar. Every dead clone, every broken body condemned to become a sideric devastator, Ksaiwon began to blame on the Astartes.

Some nine or ten thousand seconds into the battle, Ksaiwon had had enough. They opened up the vox channel connecting them to Yarol, and let him have it.

"Yarol Uthrek, restrain your troops, you stubborn bastard! This continual, reckless charging is threatening to open up a gap in the line!"

There were several seconds in which Ksaiwon received no response, only the staticky sound of flesh being crushed into gore near to the microphone. "Restrain? Why would I restrain them from their victory?"

"My skitarii cannot keep up! Continuing to indulge in this lax attitude towards handling your soldiers will endanger the integrity of the entire operation."

Yarol chuckled darkly. "A lot of words to say that you do not like that my men are more capable than yours, skitarius? Do not bother me again."

The vox channel closed, leaving Ksaiwon to fume impotently. They were standing in the center of the epsilon formation, keeping watch over a squad of epsilons who had taken up firing positions on the rooftop of a mostly-intact turret. Their eyes traced across the battlefield, taking note of the flickering lights of lightning and plasma guns, the plumes of smoke rising from shell-blasts, the distant churn of intense melees.

"What was that about?" Λ-76 said, crouching down behind the same slab that provided Ksaiwon's cover.

"Yarol refuses to exercise control over his forces. The Astartes continue to rush ahead, forcing us to either sprint after them, or allow the battle line to be split in half."

"Tsk. Fucking Astartes."

"Fucking Astartes is right," Ksaiwon muttered. "Seven-six, did you retrieve that data I asked you for? I'd do it myself, but my vox implant is rather busy at the moment."

"I did."

"Anything about who we're up against?"

"The record indicates that this blue-green color is the mark of the craftworld Iybraesil. Noted for defending ancient worlds such as this one, and for producing large numbers of a variety of medium close-combat infantry, extremely deadly offensively, but extremely vulnerable to counter-attack."

Ksaiwon frowned under their mask. "That's… odd. You say that's their primary specialization?"

"Every time Jahannam's had a run-in with them, it has," Seven-six said with a shrug.

"But then…" Ksaiwon turned around, did another scan of the horizon. "This is a substantial force for the eldar, and they do not commit to battle unless they are sure of victory. Why would they put together a force this large, but leave behind their best troops?"

"They wouldn't," Seven-six said immediately. "They must be keeping them in reserve somewhere."

Ksaiwon concentrated, running through the possibilities as quickly as their accelerated mind would allow. They found one that seemed real. One that scared them.

"Seven-six, tactical exam: suppose you have command over an infantry force which has powerful offensive capabilities, but melts under serious attack. Your enemy consists of melee experts. How do you prevent them from engaging?"

"Suppressive fire," Seven-six said immediately.

"And if suppressive fire is unavailable to you in sufficient quantities?"

Seven-six had to consider it for several seconds longer. "I'm not sure where you're going with this, Ksaiwon."

"When are close-combat specialists at their weakest?"

"Once they've spent their charge. They're exhausted, lacking cohesion, maybe even still in the middle of fighting whatever foe they spent their charge on. Catch them with a counter-charge then and they'll struggle. Catch them with a counter-charge using troops that are powerful on offense, and you'll wipe them out."

Ksaiwon sighed. "Right you are, Seven-six. Now consider: what if our good friends, the Astartes, aren't having such an easy time of it because they're the biggest and strongest, but because the eldar want them to advance."

Seven-six barked out a momentary stress-laugh. "By the Omnissiah, they're walking right into a trap."

"Exactly. We need to get back to the command post."

The command post was nothing to write home about: its entire contents were Ksaiwon, Seven-six, three servitors, and a few hundred kilograms of synthcloth, vox boosters, and various other bits of equipment. It all fit inside a single specially-reinforced exokoitos, tucked away into a mostly-intact structure a kilometer away from the front lines. Ksaiwon raced there in one hundred seconds, leaving Seven-six to barely catch up with them. All the while, Ksaiwon sent out warning after warning over the vox, most of which were met with derision or total denial.

Once Λ-76 arrived, she set to work at once activating a hologram map of the area. They finished just in time for Ksaiwon to give up on informing the Astartes they were walking into a trap. The hologram display floated at around waist-height, just above the chunk of concrete that had been moved in to act as a table.

The center of the map was the skitarii lines, each squad depicted as a geometric form placed on top of a 3-D scan of the ruined eldar city. The further out it went from there, the more vague the depictions. The Astartes were mostly portrayed as a series of crude blocks, and their human allies as translucent blobs of vague positioning. The eldar were pinpricks, appearing and disappearing as the map was updated via live auspex data. What Ksaiwon already knew was suddenly placed into stark relief. The Astartes battle-line bulged out far into enemy territory like a boil bulging out of infected skin. They were incredibly vulnerable.

"Alright. If I were trying to attack with close-range troops against an enemy who has overextended themselves and spent their charge, where would I attack from…"

"Probably not the front," Seven-six said. "Not unless I absolutely trusted my ability to read the enemy, and that would require previous experience."

"And we can rule out the rear, given we already passed over that terrain to get here." Ksaiwon sent a burst of scrap-code to the data-slate, causing it to highlight two strips of land on the map, one on either side of the salient. "If they plan on delivering a serious counterattack, the force they're hiding has to be somewhere in these sectors."

Seven-six examined the map for several, long moments. "I follow your logic. Now what do we do about it?"

"We just need an auspex scan on these sectors. That's…omicron-beta-four-eight, omicron-beta-four-nine, nu-gamma-four-seven, and nu-gamma-four-eight."

"You say that as though it's simple, Ksaiwon. Or even possible, for that matter. Our orbital auspices don't have the necessary resolution, or else we'd already know about the ambush, and we don't have any precision auspices that far forward."

Ksaiwon grimaced under their mask. "You know damn well we do."

An awkward silence fell between the two of them. Ksaiwon was referring to the Operatives, one of the Forge-Master's least well-kept secrets. They hid amongst the skitarii until the beginning of battle, but after so many hours, there was no doubt that the Operatives were embedded deep into the eldar line.

"Really, Ksaiwon? Mother's going to skin you alive over this."

"Better skinned alive than suffer defeat. Do you happen to know an appropriate encryption?"

After a moment, Seven-six shook her head, and relented. A moment after that, Ksaiwon received an encryption code and a vox frequency on a private data-link. They opened the given frequency. "This is a broad-spectrum message to all skitarii in forward positions with high-precision auspex equipment, coming in on the absolute highest priority from Skitarius Prime. I need scans of map sectors omicron-beta-four-eight, omicron-beta-four-nine, nu-gamma-four-seven, and nu-gamma-four-eight, updated as often as possible, and broadcast on this frequency. Transmission over."

Such a transmission was always risky, and for the next few hundred seconds Ksaiwon lived in fear of an artillery strike or other such ambush. None came, and before long the Operatives began blowing their cover with streams of auspex data. With each second and each new stream, the picture that was painted onto the holo-map grew at once more precise and more terrifying. The eldar force was concentrated on the right flank of the Astartes salient, immediately in front of Ksaiwon's own macroclade. Precise numbers were impossible to determine, but even through the vagueness and distortion, signs of movement were obvious.

"There you have it," Ksaiwon said, gesturing broadly at the map. "The clever bastards have been using that hill as a staging ground. They might even have tunnels under there, who knows."

Seven-six tore her eyes away from the map to look at Ksaiwon. "What do you propose we do about it?"

 

[dragonsaffron]

Ksaiwon focused very intently. Every second was another second closer to disaster for the Astartes, but finding a solution elegant enough to fend off the eldar counterattack required real insight, inimical to hurry.

"Could push forward, flank the flankers, but… no, not enough time. If we redirected all the artillery we could manage… it wouldn't do a damn thing. It's just too far back from our line, how could we… Of course! The Exokoitos!"

"I don't like where you're going with this," Seven-six said immediately.

"The entirety of our macroclade has Exokoitos transports. We leave behind a third, just enough to keep the eldar occupied, then pile everyone else we have into the drills and send them forward, not breaching until we're directly underneath this spot right here."

Ksaiwon pointed to a position right at the foot of the hill that the eldar were using, directly in the path down which they would have to charge to reach the main body of the 20th.

"Are you mad?" Seven-six said.

"It would work, Λ-76! Even if they outnumber us, eighty Exokoitos bursting up directly under any force would be a severe shock."

"And then we will be in the harshest part of the fighting, outnumbered three to one by the best troops the eldar have!"

"Not for long, we won't. If the Astartes see a fight on their flank, they will show up. And that's assuming that they aren't heeding my warning. We're only there to buy time."

Seven-six shook her head. "I cannot believe this. We now know the eldar plan of attack. If we angle our formation echelon-style towards the point of impact between the two formations, we can catch them off-guard and slaughter them."

"Only after they have wreaked absolute havoc on the Astartes," Ksaiwon said. "That's not even averting the trap, that's just taking advantage of it once its all said and done."

"And your plan is so much better?" Seven-six said, her voice suddenly quiet. "You'd be making a sacrifice play for the sake of a bunch of space marines and human cultists."

"It's—"

Ksaiwon stopped. Λ-76 was right. There were quibbles that could be made, but on the whole, she was right. Her plan was much more reasonable, preserving the strength of the skitarii at the cost of their allies, waiting until the perfect moment to strike. It was what the Forge-Master would have done, it was what it would have expected Ksaiwon to do, and indeed it was what the 20th Host would likely have expected in hindsight.

But Ksaiwon was not the same person as they had been twenty days before. They were not the same person as they had ever been, and it was time to begin acknowledging that fact. The new Ksaiwon was not going to allow an ally to be run down just because preventing it was difficult.

"When it sent us on this joint mission, Mother put their safety in our hands, just as it put our safety in theirs. Ready the drills and send the orders."

"Yes, sir," Seven-six said through gritted teeth.

Preparing for the maneuver required a flurry of activity, as Ksaiwon repeated the instructions a dozen times to various sub-commanders. Tens, hundreds of skitarii and siderics rushed through the ruins just behind the line of battle as they linked up with their nominal units and located the Exokoitos, which had often been converted into static bolter emplacements wherever they were most needed. That the chaos resolved itself fairly quickly was a sign of rigorous discipline.

Ksaiwon was the last one to step into their transport, buckling themself into the last seat by the loading ramp before giving the vox order to embark. The sound of drill-cars elevating themselves, then digging into the earth, became an all consuming roar that echoed off the wraithbone skeletons outside, until being suddenly stifled when the loading ramp sealed shut. Ksaiwon was plunged into dim red light. Soon the low rumble of the Exokoitos pushing through the soil was about the only thing they could hear.

Ksaiwon removed their mask, flipping it over to look at the thing head-on. It still had the dent in its brow from the sniper shot they had taken the day before, as finding a replacement on the battlefield had proven impossible. For just commanding skitarii, the discomfort was acceptable, but in a direct fight, a damaged mask would cause more harm than protection. Ksaiwon would have to rely upon their subdermal reinforcements and the mysterious regeneration that had saved them after the daemon prince incident.

"O powers of chaos, inflict me not with your attention. Let Khorne leave my body unbroken, Tzeentch my luck unbent, Nergal my wounds uninfected and Slaanesh my mind unclouded. May the blood I shed this day show that I have no need of your intervention. So it is said."

That was not a Jahannamite prayer, but it had felt correct.

Then the alarm came over the exokoitos intercom: sixty seconds to breach. Ksaiwon clipped their mask to their belt and loaded a power cell into Claw, the power bayonet humming to brilliant blue life. They stood before any of the others did, rising the instant the floor leveled out, and were the first down the ramp once it was open.

They emerged into the light of day, eyes adjusting instantly to the brilliance, and into a battle which had already begun. This district of the city was much more open, wide boulevards and parks only occasionally interrupted by patches of rubble, which meant that the air was torn with nightmare heavy bolter rounds, picking out targets one by one. Ksaiwon's Exokoitos had already picked a target, a squad of eldar infantry a short distance away, and Ksaiwon themself opened fire on the same target.

They had almost forgotten about the modifications they'd made to Claw, so it came as a mild surprise when instead of the leaping lightning arcs that the weapon usually produced, it instead fired forth a stream of amber bolts, resembling plasma projectiles. The shock caused Ksaiwon to disregard aim for a handful of moments, sending a few bolts to burst amidst the dust and debris. Then they zeroed down on the moment, let their combat reflexes take over, and pulled the trigger again. One eldar went down under the first shot, a hole blowing her torso nearly in half.

Despite the rapidly-growing ranged assault, the eldar were not bowed. They rushed forward with all the speed and grace that myth attributed to their people, at times rushing forward faster than a perfect sprint, other times hopping between tiny shards of debris that perfectly intercepted incoming fire. When one fell, disassembled by Claw v2 or collapsing and tearing at her own face as she was possessed by a nightmare bolter's payload, the others hardly even seemed to notice, only driving themselves forward with greater speed and acuity.

Ksaiwon kept firing, joined now by both Seven-six and most of the epsilon squad huddling around the edges of the Exokoitos's bulk or behind stray chunks of rock. As the eldar closed, Ksaiwon had just a moment to take note of the pistols which they were refusing to use to fire back, just a moment to question why things felt off, before the eldar stopped. Ksaiwon lowered Claw v2 and started to advance, unsure of what else to do, and made it about three steps before every nerve in their body burst into flames.

Some would call what Ksaiwon experienced, what the eldar produced, a scream. It was not a scream. It was hardly a sound, even. It was an all-encompassing force, crushing and dissolving, a wall of pain that buried itself in every nerve and every muscle and turned them all into solid ice. Ksaiwon fell onto one knee as the screech pressed harder and harder, a hailstorm of shuriken rounds casting up dust from the surface around them or embedding themselves in Ksaiwon's armored skin. It was only by a miracle of sheer will that Claw remained in their hands.

And it was a second miracle of will by which Ksaiwon's thoughts remained unclouded. Though their nerves burned and their eardrums had been driven through with two spikes, Ksaiwon was awake, aware, and furious. Bit by bit, nerve by nerve, Ksaiwon shoved back the overriding influence, pulling in sensation and control through their numbed fingers and hands, sucking in warm dust-soaked air through paralyzed lungs. Blown-out pupils focused ahead at the onrushing figures. One, the one in the lead, slowed, skid, tipped on one foot and raised her blade. A white halo flickered into being around the sword's length, and it buzzed and crackled as it came down toward Ksaiwon's head.

Claw v2 flashed up, the bayonet catching the eldar sword on its edge. Ksaiwon's muscles were still trembling, their control barely in line, but in terms of moving a limb from point A to point B Ksaiwon was still faster than any eldar. The bayonet flicked to the side, sending the attacker off-balance and reeling for the split second that Ksaiwon needed to shoulder-check her in the midsection, rising up onto their feet then slamming down the bayonet's blade on the center of her chest.

Another eldar had overshot Ksaiwon, but wheeled upon seeing her sister dead in under a second. Ksaiwon heard her feet crunching in the dirt, turned, and was about to have to throw themself out of the way of a power sword's speeding arc when the eldar suddenly deflagrated, hardly twitching and making no sound as orange flames burst from every gap in her armor. When the empty, charred shell collapsed, Seven-six remained, waste heat still radiating from the fins on her volkite pistol. They met eyes for but a moment, before both clone-soldiers twirled away to carry on the melee.

When it was all over, while Ksaiwon established vox-contact with the other skitarii and the troops patched up their wounds, Seven-six approached them.

"What's wrong with Claw?" she said.

"I don't know," Ksaiwon lied. "It's been doing that ever since the daemon attack. Must have gotten damaged at some point."

"I see," said Seven-six, and pressed the point no further. There was still a battle to be fought.

While the initial disruption of the ambush had no doubt caused immense damage to the eldar strike force, the skitarii were still greatly outnumbered. The next stage of the plan was to link up with neighboring squads, forming into groups of one or two score, and then hold ground for as long as it took. It would be impossible for the eldar to continue the attack with so many lightning guns in heavily-defended positions.

The problem was making it to where the other epsilons had shown up. The sounds of lightning gun and shuriken fire were omnipresent in the air, but a gulf of tens of meters still separated Ksaiwon form the nearest allies. The epsilons pushed forward at a rapid march, but even with the Exokoitos at their backs it was a nerve-wracking experience. Paranoia built to a head, and with the experience of the past few days, every sound or movement was a sign of an impending mutant or sniper.

That paranoia was proven correct by a shrill roaring sound that overwhelmed all others. The skitarii turned about, searching every angle, but it was not until Seven-six had the brilliant idea of looking up that they discovered the truth. A small flying vehicle shaped like the head of a double-bitted axe soared overhead in a deadly arc, causing the skitarii to dive for cover against a bomb or strafing run that never came. Instead, something much worse happened. The vehicle skimmed low, then lower still, until the cushion of air below its bulky body caught against the soil and it rode as a hover-tank.

All at once, the squad was under assault not from above, but from directly in front. A huge laser turret reached out and turned one of the epsilons into a burst of steam and metal shards, the shrapnel only adding to the storm of shuriken rounds filling the air. The squad's one surviving plasma gunner was driven to ground, unable to even lift their head without it being torn off, so Ksaiwon opened fire with Claw v2. The amber bolts struck home, blasting off chunks of armor, but even when they did manage to score an actual penetrating hit, that did nothing to slow the assault.

Exactly one member of the group failed to be caught off-guard. The Exokoitos shuddered to life, daemon-possessed heavy bolters roaring as the all-consuming scream of its drill bit split the air. It began to advance, first slowly but with ever-building speed as the atomic engine in its heart poured momentum into its wheels. The eldar vehicle, sleek as it was, hesitated a crucial moment before realizing where the true threat lay and turning its main laser weapons onto the drill. The epsilon plasma gunner leapt to their feet and opened fire, each blue bolt causing greater damage than the last.

The eldar laser cannon tore a huge gash in the drill-car's snout, sending up flames and causing its engines to cough. But the diamantine drill refused to die, spinning so ferociously that it ceased to be visible as anything other than a screaming blur of motion. Even as the drill-car died, it continued to hurtle forwards, crossing the dozens of meters of space between it and the enemy at a pace well beyond what it was designed for. The eldar vehicle began to back away, but it was already too late; the drill slammed into it at speed. There was an explosion so massive that the very air ripped open, and Ksaiwon felt their organs being pressed by the shockwave.

When the skitarii stood, the two vehicles were a burning wreckage, so torn and so twisted together that it took careful observation to see where the drill ended and the eldar vehicle began. They gave the fallen pilot a moments consideration before the Omnissiah, then continued in their advance. There was a stirring in the wreckage. Reflexively, Ksaiwon fired a few more shots into the ruin, and Seven-six followed soon after with her volkite pistol. Neither did anything to the three figures that emerged from the wreckage and slowly floated into the air, dark silhouettes against the leaping flames.

Each of the three wore the standard eldar battle-helm, but they were not clad in armor as were the others, and in the place of power swords or shuriken weapons, each one carried a long spear. A shimmering veil of glassy energy surrounded the three of them, absorbing lightning shots, transuranic shells, and volkite bursts with ease.

The eldar reacted to the assault with cool indifference. They turned to each other in silent conference, then drew together. Ksaiwon shouted orders from below, wishing only that the eldar would descend into range of a grenade or Claw's bayonet while their soldiers sought out what cover they could find. The eldar extended their spears together, until all three points met at a single vertex. It was at that moment that all warp properly broke loose.

Four different skitarii screamed, actually screamed in terror and began to flee. Ksaiwon had never been so afraid, not even when the daemon prince had born down on them, hands trembling and heart racing while they slammed a new power cell into Claw v2 and continued to fire. Seven-six must have felt the same, her volkite pistol ceasing as she paused a moment to whisper to herself. Then, one by one, starting with those that had run away, something began to pick off the epsilons. One by one they were dragged into the sky and crushed, their bodies crumpling under the unstoppable might of eldar psykers.

Ksaiwon tried to remind themself of the limit of psykers on the battlefield. Eventually even an eldar mind would fail under sufficient strain, if only Ksaiwon continued to fire into the psychic shield. Each dead skitarius, even if they died screaming and begging, was a further drain on the enemy's psionic capabilities. But the eldar certainly did not appear to be flagging.

It was when Seven-six finally fell silent that Ksaiwon felt true fear. One moment she was right at their side, volkite pistol firing away; the next she was down, breathing heavily, a psychic blast having shoved her into the ground so forcefully that it had created a small crater which was slowly filling with blood. The daemon prince had just been a dream. This was real, so terribly real, and this time there would be no miraculous recovery. Ksaiwon burst from cover, running full-tilt towards where they knew a friendly position to be, hoping that a heavy weapon or five might be able to slow down the eldar. But it was already too late. Ksaiwon was pulled into the sky.

They began to feel the gathering of psychic force. A final attack that would render them so utterly destroyed as to be beyond even the Forge-Master's ability to repair. Ksaiwon screamed, searching desperately for some way out of this. And they found it.

——

Calm, child. Please, be calm and listen.

I know it is frightening. Listen carefully, for knowledge is all I have to share with you.

Your talent is like nothing this world has ever seen. You know it, I know it, and the gods know it as well. To them, your talent burns as bright as a star, a beacon that they can see from across the galaxy. The gods will try to influence you, to sway you with words and power, to make you give more than you are willing to give. You must learn to resist.

You cannot always defeat power with strength. If you make your mind into a wall, that wall will someday break, and once it has broken you will not know how to repair it. Make your mind into a forest. Your thoughts are animals, beasts and birds flitting constantly amongst the trees. You must then learn to identify the difference between your own thoughts, the beasts and birds, and those thoughts that others have placed in your mind, the hunters and their hounds that seek to destroy you. Do you understand?

Good. Only when you have identified that which is hostile, that which is not you… only then can you catch it. Your mind is a powerful thing, my child. Catch the foe in your trap, and you are sure to annihilate them.

I love you too.

——


There was a flash of light, and a spike of agony was driven directly into the center of Ksaiwon's forehead. The three eldar hovering before them screamed as well, a single brief shout of surprise and pain before, like an automaton cut off from power, they went limp. An instant later, all four figures plummeted to the ground. Ksaiwon caught themself, though their knees groaned in complaint, and picked up Claw.

Mind now unclouded by forced fear, Ksaiwon could see wounded skitarii still struggling to stay alive. They had many questions about what had just happened, how they had done what they had just done, but there was no time for those questions to be answered. They dashed off towards the nearest rendezvous point, praying to the Omnissiah that they could get a medic to their fallen soldiers in time.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Your name is Amphis Vaena, Pastor Diabolicus, the Word Bearers 20th Host, and you have just won a battle. Not that it was a particularly conventional victory, but an accounting of your surviving brothers goes to show that you did, in fact, win. It was all thanks to that strange little skitarius, reading the enemy plan like an open book and riding in to protect the flank during the few crucial minutes it took you to force an army of half-daemons to wheel off and meet the oncoming charge.

You and he had crossed paths very briefly during the battle. You had been accompanying your squadrons of daemonkin on a counter-charge, using a levitatus spell merely to keep pace, when you came across his signature black-marked cloak engaged in a firefight with a group of xenos. That brief encounter had only solidified the uncomfortable thoughts that you had been feeling ever since the first moment you met Ksaiwon, back during that disastrous first attempt at a parley. When all was said and done, the last bolter shell fired and the last xenos blood shed, you had let your flesh and your sorcery go on auto-pilot while you pondered the precise nature of the strange things sensed whenever you were in Ksaiwon's presence.

The others were beginning to see it as well. But the other secondborn were not as prone to contemplation as you had grown into being; instead, they all looked to you for guidance, especially when the Apostles failed them.

You were kneeling on the ground, staff outstretched, ancient words issuing from your lips as you reinforced the same hexagrammatic ward that had been safekeeping the entire expedition the last four days. Your eyes did not open as you identified the sound of approaching boots as belonging, first to an Astartes, then to a legionnaire, then to a young legionnaire, his armor not yet burdened with decoration. It was only when he spoke and you recognized which individual it was—Shardal—that you finally met his gaze.

"Am I interrupting something, brother?" he said.

It would be several more seconds before you reached a point in your chant at which you could suspend the reinforcement spell without risk. In place of a proper response, you inclined your head very slightly in a way that indicated openness to a response.

"Is it true what they're saying about those human augmetic cultists? That they're the only reason we weren't caught in a xenos trap?"

You completed the spell, but remained kneeling, always thinking carefully before any speech. "Yes," you said. "It is true. But do not grant them all the credit quite yet. Many forces came together to avert disaster."

"Then, why?"

"Why what?"

Shardal shrugged his shoulders with a clanking of plasteel, then looked over his shoulder as though there might be an Apostle watching. "Why would a human go out of his way to help us like that?"

You had been asking yourself the same question. "I do not know. Have you considered asking Ksaiwon yourself, if you find the time in between your duties?"

Shardal failed to notice your insinuation. "It just feels presumptuous," he said. "Have you ever actually seen him in person, Amphis?"

"Twice," you said.

"The others are saying a lot of things about him. Is it true that he defeated Ishtar in a duel?"

"Handily and completely," you said.

Shardal hesitated, the slight squeeze on the stock of his bolter the closest thing you had ever seen in one of your brothers to an actual nervous tic. "Some of us are saying that he's some kind of champion of the gods. Is that true, you think?"

You had been afraid that he would ask that question from the moment he arrived. It was a question whose answer you didn't know, and one with great implications no matter the answer. So you avoided. "I am not an Apostle."

"The Apostles say it's all nonsense and heresy, obviously. But if a secondborn said his armor was red, the Apostles would say it was green purely to spite him. What do you think?"

"I think that the gods will reveal their hand in time," you said. "And that it is unwise to speculate on such matters so openly. Does that answer your question?"

A twitch of shame crossed Shardal's features. "Yes," he said. "Of course, sir."

"And don't call me 'sir.' I am not your commanding officer."

Shardal left without a word. You shut your eyes, as though you were returning to the warding ritual. But that wasn't going to happen. The wards were more than strong enough to spare your conscience, and the more pressing matter of what Ksaiwon was weighed on your mind instead. You rose, planting your staff in order to lever yourself upright, and went for a quick walk.

You don't really believe it, do you? I whispered into your ear. Some kind of champion of the gods?

I am not certain, you thought back at me.

You so rarely are. But I suppose that is part of why you like having me around.

One of several.

I reached down, took control of one armored hand. You let me have that control, seeing as nobody was around, and I used it to, for just a moment, cup your cheek. Even with the thick material of your glove, it was incredibly warm. One of several, indeed… Where are you going?

Using your staff as a walking stick, you had peeled off from the rest of your formation, treating the ruins of the old eldar city as though they were merely good terrain for a hike. Your eyes were fixed on the horizon as you moved with a swiftness only shown when you had a purpose.

I intend to speak to Ksaiwon directly, you thought to me. Hopefully I can settle this matter, or at least become better informed on it.

Don't you think he might be rather busy commanding an army of skitarii?

Perhaps, you thought. If he is, then I will speak to him some other time.

And if, perhaps, he does not wish to reveal his occult secrets to you, a member of a race which he, by all appearances, despises on sight?

Then I shall be content with not knowing.

You sensed my frustration, and it made you smile, though not much. A short while later, you found the edge of the skitarii formation, squads and cohorts all encamped amidst the ruins as they licked their wounds and repaired themselves. Slowly, you began to feel Ksaiwon's presence, the faintest shimmer upon the surface of the warp.

I would know if he were a champion of chaos, I muttered.

You would? Did you not admit previously that you do not sense what I sense, when we are in the presence of the skitarius?

That hardly means anything. You and I, we are not the same kind of being, on a metaphysical level. Never have been and never will be, either. But I've had more run-ins with chaos than you, and I do not detect that corrupted stench upon him.

And yet, when I have felt the touch of the chaos gods, it has felt the same way as when I am in Ksaiwon's presence, you thought, as at last you found the person you were looking for.

Ksaiwon stood, straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, overseeing an open-air medicae center. He, much like you, was apparently taken to stretches of contemplation, for that was the only possible explanation for what he could have been doing. Certainly, no orders were being issued that you could see, no command being taken. It was for that reason—that and the almost soothing quality of the psychic hum reverberating just at the edge of your awareness—that you felt comfortable approaching.

Ksaiwon heard your footsteps approaching and turned. He was, as he had been during the battle, unmasked. This time you weren't quite so busy fighting for your life, so you had a chance to examine him properly. The name alone gave you the understanding that Ksaiwon was a clone of some description, but his face told you that whomever had designed him must have been engineering for aesthetic just as much as performance. You didn't get a jawline that sharp, eyes that brilliant, cheekbones that high by building purely for strength.

He looked away. "It got the idea from your kind, you know."

"What idea?" you said. Ksaiwon sounded pensive.

He pointed at the field hospital before him, and you followed his finger to land upon the sight of a skitarius being hewn into by a pair of medical servitors. "Those who are too badly wounded to continue as soldiers are made into Sideric Devastators, assuming there's an armor available. Us clones are too great of an investment of resources on the part of the Forge-Master to be allowed to go to waste via death. You see the inspiration?"

You nodded. "The 20th has not had access to… what are they called? Dreadnoughts? The 20th has not had access to dreadnoughts since well before my time."

Ksaiwon had no more thoughts on the topic, apparently, going back to watching the chirurgeons go to work on his wounded. It was like watching the sea, to him, or gazing out upon some other impressive vista.

"I assume you came here for a reason, Amphis?"

"Yes," you said. "But it is a conversation which should not happen here. More privacy is required."

Ksaiwon turned to face you properly, folding his arms across his chest and glaring at you as though there was not a thirty-centimeter difference in height at play. "No, this will do well enough. What do you want, Amphis Vaena of the Word Bearers?"

You remained stone-faced, though the sudden burst of formality was something you found secretly amusing. "Ksaiwon of Jahannam, have you had any strange dreams recently?"

And then you saw it. A twitch, the slightest shift in facial expression. Ksaiwon's brain must have been as enhanced as his body for the sign of the emotion to vanish from his face so quickly, but you saw it nonetheless. The question had struck a nerve: but which nerve precisely?

"No," he said. "I do not dream often."

"What about when awake, then?" you continued. "Any hallucinations, visions?"

"No, none," Ksaiwon said hurriedly. "Why are you asking me this?"

He's clearly lying, I hissed. Let me at him and I'll have the truth torn from his thoughts in under a second.

That's not necessary.

"As a sorcerer," you explained, "My senses are finely attuned to the movements of the supernatural, to the emanations of psychics. I can sense something in you, something that I cannot quite define."

"Do not flirt with me, barbarian."

"I am not flirting with you," you said, reacting immediately to the shock of unease and irritation that lurched out of your stomach. "I am speaking the truth. The touch of the warp is upon you, and though I cannot say what form it takes, its presence is unmistakeable."

That got a yet more notable reaction. Ksaiwon's jaw tensed a moment, his eyes widening, before he gave a quick turn, left and right, looking for eavesdroppers. "Have you told anyone about this?"

"No," you said. "But they do not need to be told. Even if they cannot sense it as strongly as do I, and even if they cannot name it as precisely, my less-skilled brothers can still sense the power radiating from you."

"Good. If you speak of this to anyone, I will make sure there are consequences."

That got an eyebrow raise out of you. You had come to think of Ksaiwon as roughly equal, an ally in battle, so the idea that he had any ability to exact consequences was rather strange. "Considering how many of my brothers you have saved today," you said, hoping to remind him that you were not his enemy, "I will consider my silence to be a favor."

Ksaiwon turned away, marched petulantly three steps, then stopped. "I was only doing my duty."

"Lie to me all you like, Ksaiwon, but do not insult my intelligence," you said. "Not a single person in all of the Eye would have been surprised had you let us fall into the trap, and laughed all the while."

"What's your angle, then?" Ksaiwon said with a sneer. "I'm some kind of chosen savior? A prophet of the Omnissiah, charged with holy power by a distant divinity?"

"I said no such thing."

"But you certainly implied it. Unless you were just getting to the part where you have an actual explanation to give beyond vague hand-waving about 'the touch of the warp'?"

Ksaiwon looked at you over his shoulder expectantly. You suddenly wished that you had some answer to give him, but no such luck. "I am an expert at daemons, and I know only enough to say that you are no daemon. I would say to ask an Apostle, but… they do not like you very much."

Ksaiwon sighed. "Well then. You're welcome for saving your life, and I hope that we can continue to maintain at least cordial relations. I have to go count the wounded, and I recommend you do the same."

You turned around and began the short walk back to your own troops. There was, indeed, much work to be done; a few of the daemonkin had begun to lose themselves, and others were in need of occult maintenance.

If you really wished to know, I said, you could have let me loose. Ksaiwon would not have even remembered it, once it was over.

My love, I know. But I would not do anything to him that I would not do to one of my brothers.

One of your brothers? Last time I checked, he still hates you.

You shrugged under your armor. And yet… I feel strangely accountable to him. Perhaps my thoughts are not entirely my own, but the truth remains: I cannot see him as anything but a close ally.