Damn, really?
If we pull that off the next Tzeentch incursion might just be daemons cuing up to offer their congratulations.
-
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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
Damn, really?
If we pull that off the next Tzeentch incursion might just be daemons cuing up to offer their congratulations.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
help a good bit and give you a few targets that would give you a major favour if you could direct the fleet at them
- Location
- Australia
Holy crap a major! I am now officially advocating for this plan.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
I alright I admit now...I really want to do this.
@Durin
1. To check, assuming everything goes wrong and Vlad's cover is blow, what would we/he estimate are his chances of exfiltrating are?
1i. And Exfiltrating without reavealing he's from the Trust and not an Alpha Legion pawn?
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
1. pretty high, HWWO is really good at getting into and out of places. That is what his species was made for and his tracendent is about
1i. decent, there is a good chance that rather then being Alpha Legion it will be classified as Unknown
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Ok this plan is actually kinda practical now...am surprised, but also enthused.
RogueInquisitor
Unexpected!
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
low, for Vlad
Nianque
Verified Dragon
... What about HWWO?
aren't Avernus creatures basically immune to Chaos corruption?
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Yeah, he's an Avernite transcendent, its reasonable to assume he's incredibly resistant to corruption.
In fact he's demonstrated it by assassinating an Exalted in the Warp.
Nianque
Verified Dragon
Yes, but how he answered had me worried.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
I think that was meant to be read as low given it is Vlad and even lower for HHWO.
- Location
- Somewhere on Earth
Hmm, alright, so Discord is having a bit of a debate over some things, so I'll put the questions here for clarity.
@Durin, What's the most we could stack on anti-chaos stuff for Vlad (like runes of warding, purification, potentially (based on what Andres suggested) nipping back to Avernus on HWWO to get a cleansing from Lin, etc etc) before it starts being a notable detriment to his infiltration efforts?
@Durin, What's the most we could stack on anti-chaos stuff for Vlad (like runes of warding, purification, potentially (based on what Andres suggested) nipping back to Avernus on HWWO to get a cleansing from Lin, etc etc) before it starts being a notable detriment to his infiltration efforts?
Last edited:
[X] Plan Enchlorgleard T133
Sweet Dreams and Nightmares
- Location
- Australia
@Durin
-----------
Story
In the waning century of the Imperium of Man, the space hulk Fearful Hangman drifted into the solar system of the nebula-shrouded Knight World of Kimdaria. After bio-scans of the gargantuan vessel revealed no signs of life, and desperate for more resources, armsmen from House Mortan's fleets as well as a few Knights boarded the space hulk to explore its depths.
Within they found piles of scrap that included Imperial equipment, orky know-whats, a few archaeotech curios, and artifacts from a number of miscellaneous xenos races. Work crews from Kimdaria were quickly brought up to process the findings before the Fearful Hangman could reenter the warp. One of the workers was drawn to a ruby red jewel of immaculate workmanship that glowed with an inner light, and entranced by its impossible beauty, she would swallow it and smuggle it out.
For the next few months, nothing extraordinary happened. The smuggler, Kayyan, never passed on the jewel to her disappointment and mild worry, and resumed her normal work. One day, however, a mining accident resulted in nearly her entire crew perishing, with Kayyan herself only barely surviving. The traumatic event scarred her, and she began having recurring nightmares of the event.
The nightmares grew worse and worse over the following weeks, until finally, she broke. Locked in a moment of pure terror, Kayyan's latent psychic abilities were unleashed, coating the walls in psychic hoarfrost as the jewel finally reemerged embedded on the back of her right hand. Visions flashed in her mind of having the jewel ripped out of her and being burned at the stake for witchcraft. Terrified, Kayyan fled out into the dark, monster-filled landscape of the Kimdarian wilderness.
In the following decades, House Mortan would have to contest against a new breed of monster, creatures that surpassed the lethality of all creatures that had come before them: curse hounds. They appeared as mutated versions of another Kimdarian monster species known as the scalehounds, which were quadrupedal, scaled mammalian pack hunters that could make quick work of an isolated Knight. By contrast, curse hounds had four eyes instead of the normal two and reflected ethereal light. They moved with supernatural speed in the darkness and fought with uncanny combat instincts, but even worse was their curse: any Noble whose Knight was pierced by a curse hound claw would be afflicted with perpetual nightmares from then on, and the memory ghasts that infected the mnemic engram reliquaries of their Thrones would remain locked inside them forever more. An exorcism might free the Knight and Noble from the curse, but success in that regard was rare, and slaying the beast that afflicted the curse had no effect.
Any Knights that were mobbed by the creatures would be torn open and their pilots dragged out and spirited away, for reasons no one knew. Between their lethality and their curse they were terrifying creatures indeed. Their only saving grace was that they were territorial, and only targeted those Knights that ventured into their territory, which many did for the sake of glory or vengeance. However, whenever they came in full force, with multiple lances shaking the earth for kilometres around under their stride, they could never be found.
***
On the eve of the Emperor's death, all those that were currently afflicted by the curse hounds' curse collapsed into unconsciousness and dreamed of the same dream: a light going out, darkness spreading, and utter ruin and devastation following. Seeing this as an ill omen, the Nobles locked down Kimdaria, cloistering the astropaths and navigators and mobilising all of their Knights. It was well they did, for when the Emperor died, the warp storms that ravaged the galaxy leaked onto Kimdaria's surface, and the planet was hit with a full scale incursion by the daemons of Slaanesh.
Over a hundred Knights would sally forth and take the fight to the neverborn before they could reach their walls while Sacristans deployed Forgeshrines to minimise the time that Knights needed to leave the battlefield. The planet's wildlife would aid in the defence as well, but they would prove just as much bane as boon, as many would fall to corruption and mutation, presenting new horrors for the Knight Titans to face. Additional help would come from a most unexpected quarter in the form of the curse hounds, who tore into the hordes' flanks. At their head was an Alpha of their kind, larger than the usual specimen and with three tails instead of one. More than that, it showed a remarkable level of cunning and radiated an aura of contra-empathic energy.
Dozens of Knights fell to scything pincers and lashing tongues, and yet they still fought on, motive actuators driving their Knight suits into the incarnate blasphemies and tearing them apart with blade, gauntlet, foot, and gun. As time went by and daemon after daemon was banished back to the aether, the Warp's influence began to wane, heralding the daemons' coming defeat. However, for all their bravery and battle prowess, the Knights' foes were merciless, overflowing with warp power, and inhumanly cunning.
The Keeper of Secrets overseeing the assault on the mountain-city of Phrake saw that the Knight Titans blocking off the sole path into it were too strong to be defeated by his forces, and the minds of their pilots too fortified to casually breach. The same did not go for the Sacristans behind them, however. Weaving a spell of domination and seduction, the Lord of Change overpowered the minds of a number of the servile artisans and bound them to his will. Under Qhinund's control, the Sacristans secretly worked runes of corruption into the lance of Knights they repaired, undermining their corporeal sanctity.
Now given an opening, Qhinund flexed his will and reached out to the minds of the subverted Knights, forcing them under his thrall and destroying the treacherous Sacristans now that their usefulness was at an end. Now with the path to Phrake open, Qhinund's forces scrambled up the choking mountain path and into the city, eager to bring its population to sacrifice to renew the incursion and drown the remaining defenders of the world in a tide of excess.
Before they could progress through even a full third of the city, however, they were countered by a massed attack of curse hounds with their Alpha at their head, all emerging from the city's central keep. Tooth, claw, and curse met blade, pincer, and corrupted iron as the streets flooded with shining purple ichor and pulsing crimson blood. The terrified peasantry could only watch as two nightmares given form clashed, and many went insane at the sight alone. Eventually however, the monstrous jaws of the curse hound Alpha tore out the throat of the Keeper of Secrets, breaking the back of the Chaos forces and spelling an end to the assault on the city. The Knights defending the rest of the planet managed to hold out as well, and soon the last fragments of the daemons dissipated back into the Warp, though leaving the surrounding wilderness even more dangerous than it was before.
***
The following few centuries would be marked by a cold war between House Mortan and the now independent Phrake, which had since the daemonic incursion been ruled by the self-proclaimed Prophetess of Etix, herald of a nightmare goddess. The events immediately following the incursion forced the knight house to regard the rogue city as a non-enemy, and since recovering, House Mortan had failed to produce a casus belli legitimate enough for their own stringent honour codes to allow them to attack.
Beginning in the middle of the fourth century after the Emperor's death, this state of affairs would change forever with the coming of Selenta, the Angel of Dreams, a heavenly being of human form whose wings and dress were as of the purest snow.
Though initially suspicious of the supposed angel, several Kimdarians would come to worship the warp entity. Her benevolence and light put all who looked upon her with ease, she granted sweet dreams to her followers, and she put herself in firm for her rival, the nightmare daemon Etix. Meanwhile, the Prophetess's own denouncements fell on deaf ears outside of Phrake, the antipathy felt by the rest of Kimdaria towards witches providing a shield against her lies.
Selenta's worship grew and grew, attracting followers amongst both the peasantry and House Mortan's Nobles, but as the angel's presence grew, strange things began to happen. Selenta's dreams had become so joyful and intense that to the dreamers, reality was hell. Somnolytics had become ever more popular, and the angel provided them hymns for them to sing in her own angelic tongue to fall asleep easier and further enhance their dreams.
Society on Kimdaria continued to warp as Selena's worship spread. Superstitious prohibitions on intoxicants of all sorts were ended, allowing people to suppress the pain of existence until they could return to sleep. When Knights fought, they did so no longer out of empty obligation to a dead god or life-choking traditions, but to receive the blessed rewards of a caring, loving patron. And with the passing of the old High King and the ascension of his Selenta-devoted son, House Mortan and all of Kimdaria were at the cusp of a new age.
Not all of the Knights had abandoned the old ways. A good amount still resisted conversion to Selenta's worship even at the cost of political status and they were deeply troubled by how their world was changing. Suspicious and fearful, they met in secret with representatives of Phrake. They told the Knights what they believed to be true: that Etix was a true and harsh but ultimately benevolent deity, while Selenta was in truth a daemon of Chaos, who had trapped their goddess in crystal and sought to drag their world into sin. They also revealed to the Knights of their mistress's plan, to enact a grand ritual that would subject every human on the planet to prophetic nightmares, freeing them from Selenta's hold and waking them up to the truth.
While the Knights pretended to believe them and go along with their plans, in truth they were shocked and appalled. Their confession that they would enact such black magic proved their evil nature, and repentant for their apostasy, they revealed what had occurred to the High King.
Furious at the news of what Phrake planned, the High King summoned his Knights and prepared for war. Dozens of apex war machines gathered under his banner, but to the surprise of the repentant Nobles, that wasn't all, for a grand force of grim-faced peasants marched with the warhost as well. The feudal contract dictated that it was the exclusive duty of the Knights to fight, and this was a major breach of that contract. When asked about it, the High King excitedly told them that it was an act of mercy and piety. The peasants didn't have the mental fortitude to withstand the pain of existence outside of their dreams, and to forever free them of their despair, they would give their lives so that Selenta might walk upon the earth and personally lay low Phrake's heretic witch-queen, and for it they would be rewarded with the eternal sleep they desired. As one, the once-repentant Nobles drew their pistols and mercilessly executed him and the other Nobles in the room in a hail of fire.
After escaping within their trusty steeds, the turncoat Nobles warned Phrake of the coming attack and joined in the fight. Between themselves, Phrake's own forces, and their prior destruction of the High King and his Exalted Court, they managed to hold off and disrupt the enemy very effectively, but to their shame not enough. With the sacrifices of countless innocents, the Selentans summoned their icon and looked upon Sihe'lintena's true form with awe and devotion.
Their efforts were not in vain, however, for the time they bought allowed the Phrakians to complete their own ritual. The city's representatives spoke the truth, but only half of it. Upon completion of the ritual, centuries in the making, the ancient aeldari crystal holding Etix shattered, and after countless millennia of imprisonment, the goddess was at last free. A wave of crimson warp energy pulsed out and washed over the planet, subjecting all on the planet to the ancient deity's power.
Countless weak-willed peasants collapsed into sleep and experienced the greatest nightmares ever experienced since the death of the Emperor. The Nobles' strong wills kept them awake, but they too suffered the terrors the newly-released god unleashed. The curse hounds too remained awake, for they had been inured to such visions, having experienced them since cubhood.
A great, final battle ensued. Witch, god, beast, and warrior contested the forces of the daemon-god and her fallen slaves. Blood met blood, with the raw power advantage on the side of evil; Etix's forces were ultimately incomparable to the larger quantity of Knights fielded by her rival. But her side had a decisive advantage: Etix was a truly benevolent deity.
Etix's nightmares were terrible to experience, but to the faithful and favoured, they granted visions of disaster and failure, benefiting the dreamers' waking lives by allowing them to avert their terrible fates. Sihe'lintena's dreams, meanwhile, were pure, ruinous opium - a weapon of Chaos, and the fallen god had employed it on her own forces.
Distracted by terrifying visions and longing for endless sleep, Sihe'lintena's Knights were scythed down by their opponents, whose nightmare visions warned time and again of the fatal blows their enemies prepared to strike. Sihe'lintena was strong, stronger even than the newly released Etix, but the nightmare god's corrupted counterpart could not defeat both the deity and her army alone. Once the daemon's army was destroyed, curse-tipped claws and reaper chainswords tore her apart and banished her back into the Warp.
Summary
Kimdaria is a Knight World in Segmentum Tempestus and home to House Mortan. It's also the home base of Etix, an ancient xenos goddess of Nightmares and Prophecy. Her pantheon was destroyed long ago at the hands of her sister, a goddess of Dreams and Hope who was corrupted by Chaos and turned into a daemon of Slaanesh. Her sister locked Etix away in a magical jewel created during the days of the Aeldari Dominion, though she eventually lost it in a warp storm.
The jewel would end up in a space hulk which drifted into the Kimdaria system. A hapless human from a Knight World would be drawn to the jewel by her latent psychic abilities and unknowingly swallow the god, with the jewel remaining inside her body because it was magic. When a traumatic nightmare caused her to develop recurring nightmares, the power of the jewel was awakened which in turn awakened her own abilities. Cut to a few centuries later after the human taking over a city and mutating some of the planet's wildlife, the daemon sister attempts to recapture Etix by subverting the Knight World and waging war, but fails, instead being banished by angry Nobles and their equally angry Knight suits.
Etix can inflict nightmares on people. Against people she doesn't like, they're just nightmares. If inflicted on someone she does like, the nightmares are prophetic.
Over the centuries, Etix has remained alive by essentially possessing everyone on Kimdaria at once, taking up the space in their minds where their ordinary nightmares would normally go. Psykers especially benefit from this deal, as their daemon-sourced nightmares are replaced with god-sourced nightmares, improving pass rates. Those who seek Etix's favour offer her their other dreams to eat in addition to their nightmares, and in return get a small amount of foresight of future bad events they'll experience while awake.
During her time before her sister's corruption, Etix was a decently powerful god. The crystal she was trapped in froze her, allowing her to survive and keep her power even millennia after the death of her race. In the centuries after being freed, however, much of her power has gone as a result of only having a single world's worth of worshippers. (Though it was enough that she was in no danger of starving to death.)
Her power would greatly balloon following the Nurgle raid. From it, she was able to get a ritual that cursed its victims with night terrors, and importantly, the curse would spread to anyone who dreamed within a certain radius of the afflicted. It's not only a powerful weapon that can cripple an enemy's morale, it also allows fragments of Etix to possess a large number of people with frightening ease.
Whatever Etix's personality might once have been, centuries of worship by honour-driven Knights and their peasant subjects have since warped her into developing a mindset similar to theirs.
Etix would survive Nurgle's counterattack partly by virtue of her own prophetic visions and Sophont-sourced military defences, but mostly by the unmatched fighting prowess of one High King Caradoc and the unstoppable might of his Knight suit, Oathsworn Judgement.
-----------
-----------
Sweet Dreams and Nightmares
Story
In the waning century of the Imperium of Man, the space hulk Fearful Hangman drifted into the solar system of the nebula-shrouded Knight World of Kimdaria. After bio-scans of the gargantuan vessel revealed no signs of life, and desperate for more resources, armsmen from House Mortan's fleets as well as a few Knights boarded the space hulk to explore its depths.
Within they found piles of scrap that included Imperial equipment, orky know-whats, a few archaeotech curios, and artifacts from a number of miscellaneous xenos races. Work crews from Kimdaria were quickly brought up to process the findings before the Fearful Hangman could reenter the warp. One of the workers was drawn to a ruby red jewel of immaculate workmanship that glowed with an inner light, and entranced by its impossible beauty, she would swallow it and smuggle it out.
For the next few months, nothing extraordinary happened. The smuggler, Kayyan, never passed on the jewel to her disappointment and mild worry, and resumed her normal work. One day, however, a mining accident resulted in nearly her entire crew perishing, with Kayyan herself only barely surviving. The traumatic event scarred her, and she began having recurring nightmares of the event.
The nightmares grew worse and worse over the following weeks, until finally, she broke. Locked in a moment of pure terror, Kayyan's latent psychic abilities were unleashed, coating the walls in psychic hoarfrost as the jewel finally reemerged embedded on the back of her right hand. Visions flashed in her mind of having the jewel ripped out of her and being burned at the stake for witchcraft. Terrified, Kayyan fled out into the dark, monster-filled landscape of the Kimdarian wilderness.
In the following decades, House Mortan would have to contest against a new breed of monster, creatures that surpassed the lethality of all creatures that had come before them: curse hounds. They appeared as mutated versions of another Kimdarian monster species known as the scalehounds, which were quadrupedal, scaled mammalian pack hunters that could make quick work of an isolated Knight. By contrast, curse hounds had four eyes instead of the normal two and reflected ethereal light. They moved with supernatural speed in the darkness and fought with uncanny combat instincts, but even worse was their curse: any Noble whose Knight was pierced by a curse hound claw would be afflicted with perpetual nightmares from then on, and the memory ghasts that infected the mnemic engram reliquaries of their Thrones would remain locked inside them forever more. An exorcism might free the Knight and Noble from the curse, but success in that regard was rare, and slaying the beast that afflicted the curse had no effect.
Any Knights that were mobbed by the creatures would be torn open and their pilots dragged out and spirited away, for reasons no one knew. Between their lethality and their curse they were terrifying creatures indeed. Their only saving grace was that they were territorial, and only targeted those Knights that ventured into their territory, which many did for the sake of glory or vengeance. However, whenever they came in full force, with multiple lances shaking the earth for kilometres around under their stride, they could never be found.
***
On the eve of the Emperor's death, all those that were currently afflicted by the curse hounds' curse collapsed into unconsciousness and dreamed of the same dream: a light going out, darkness spreading, and utter ruin and devastation following. Seeing this as an ill omen, the Nobles locked down Kimdaria, cloistering the astropaths and navigators and mobilising all of their Knights. It was well they did, for when the Emperor died, the warp storms that ravaged the galaxy leaked onto Kimdaria's surface, and the planet was hit with a full scale incursion by the daemons of Slaanesh.
Over a hundred Knights would sally forth and take the fight to the neverborn before they could reach their walls while Sacristans deployed Forgeshrines to minimise the time that Knights needed to leave the battlefield. The planet's wildlife would aid in the defence as well, but they would prove just as much bane as boon, as many would fall to corruption and mutation, presenting new horrors for the Knight Titans to face. Additional help would come from a most unexpected quarter in the form of the curse hounds, who tore into the hordes' flanks. At their head was an Alpha of their kind, larger than the usual specimen and with three tails instead of one. More than that, it showed a remarkable level of cunning and radiated an aura of contra-empathic energy.
Dozens of Knights fell to scything pincers and lashing tongues, and yet they still fought on, motive actuators driving their Knight suits into the incarnate blasphemies and tearing them apart with blade, gauntlet, foot, and gun. As time went by and daemon after daemon was banished back to the aether, the Warp's influence began to wane, heralding the daemons' coming defeat. However, for all their bravery and battle prowess, the Knights' foes were merciless, overflowing with warp power, and inhumanly cunning.
The Keeper of Secrets overseeing the assault on the mountain-city of Phrake saw that the Knight Titans blocking off the sole path into it were too strong to be defeated by his forces, and the minds of their pilots too fortified to casually breach. The same did not go for the Sacristans behind them, however. Weaving a spell of domination and seduction, the Lord of Change overpowered the minds of a number of the servile artisans and bound them to his will. Under Qhinund's control, the Sacristans secretly worked runes of corruption into the lance of Knights they repaired, undermining their corporeal sanctity.
Now given an opening, Qhinund flexed his will and reached out to the minds of the subverted Knights, forcing them under his thrall and destroying the treacherous Sacristans now that their usefulness was at an end. Now with the path to Phrake open, Qhinund's forces scrambled up the choking mountain path and into the city, eager to bring its population to sacrifice to renew the incursion and drown the remaining defenders of the world in a tide of excess.
Before they could progress through even a full third of the city, however, they were countered by a massed attack of curse hounds with their Alpha at their head, all emerging from the city's central keep. Tooth, claw, and curse met blade, pincer, and corrupted iron as the streets flooded with shining purple ichor and pulsing crimson blood. The terrified peasantry could only watch as two nightmares given form clashed, and many went insane at the sight alone. Eventually however, the monstrous jaws of the curse hound Alpha tore out the throat of the Keeper of Secrets, breaking the back of the Chaos forces and spelling an end to the assault on the city. The Knights defending the rest of the planet managed to hold out as well, and soon the last fragments of the daemons dissipated back into the Warp, though leaving the surrounding wilderness even more dangerous than it was before.
***
The following few centuries would be marked by a cold war between House Mortan and the now independent Phrake, which had since the daemonic incursion been ruled by the self-proclaimed Prophetess of Etix, herald of a nightmare goddess. The events immediately following the incursion forced the knight house to regard the rogue city as a non-enemy, and since recovering, House Mortan had failed to produce a casus belli legitimate enough for their own stringent honour codes to allow them to attack.
Beginning in the middle of the fourth century after the Emperor's death, this state of affairs would change forever with the coming of Selenta, the Angel of Dreams, a heavenly being of human form whose wings and dress were as of the purest snow.
Though initially suspicious of the supposed angel, several Kimdarians would come to worship the warp entity. Her benevolence and light put all who looked upon her with ease, she granted sweet dreams to her followers, and she put herself in firm for her rival, the nightmare daemon Etix. Meanwhile, the Prophetess's own denouncements fell on deaf ears outside of Phrake, the antipathy felt by the rest of Kimdaria towards witches providing a shield against her lies.
Selenta's worship grew and grew, attracting followers amongst both the peasantry and House Mortan's Nobles, but as the angel's presence grew, strange things began to happen. Selenta's dreams had become so joyful and intense that to the dreamers, reality was hell. Somnolytics had become ever more popular, and the angel provided them hymns for them to sing in her own angelic tongue to fall asleep easier and further enhance their dreams.
Society on Kimdaria continued to warp as Selena's worship spread. Superstitious prohibitions on intoxicants of all sorts were ended, allowing people to suppress the pain of existence until they could return to sleep. When Knights fought, they did so no longer out of empty obligation to a dead god or life-choking traditions, but to receive the blessed rewards of a caring, loving patron. And with the passing of the old High King and the ascension of his Selenta-devoted son, House Mortan and all of Kimdaria were at the cusp of a new age.
Not all of the Knights had abandoned the old ways. A good amount still resisted conversion to Selenta's worship even at the cost of political status and they were deeply troubled by how their world was changing. Suspicious and fearful, they met in secret with representatives of Phrake. They told the Knights what they believed to be true: that Etix was a true and harsh but ultimately benevolent deity, while Selenta was in truth a daemon of Chaos, who had trapped their goddess in crystal and sought to drag their world into sin. They also revealed to the Knights of their mistress's plan, to enact a grand ritual that would subject every human on the planet to prophetic nightmares, freeing them from Selenta's hold and waking them up to the truth.
While the Knights pretended to believe them and go along with their plans, in truth they were shocked and appalled. Their confession that they would enact such black magic proved their evil nature, and repentant for their apostasy, they revealed what had occurred to the High King.
Furious at the news of what Phrake planned, the High King summoned his Knights and prepared for war. Dozens of apex war machines gathered under his banner, but to the surprise of the repentant Nobles, that wasn't all, for a grand force of grim-faced peasants marched with the warhost as well. The feudal contract dictated that it was the exclusive duty of the Knights to fight, and this was a major breach of that contract. When asked about it, the High King excitedly told them that it was an act of mercy and piety. The peasants didn't have the mental fortitude to withstand the pain of existence outside of their dreams, and to forever free them of their despair, they would give their lives so that Selenta might walk upon the earth and personally lay low Phrake's heretic witch-queen, and for it they would be rewarded with the eternal sleep they desired. As one, the once-repentant Nobles drew their pistols and mercilessly executed him and the other Nobles in the room in a hail of fire.
After escaping within their trusty steeds, the turncoat Nobles warned Phrake of the coming attack and joined in the fight. Between themselves, Phrake's own forces, and their prior destruction of the High King and his Exalted Court, they managed to hold off and disrupt the enemy very effectively, but to their shame not enough. With the sacrifices of countless innocents, the Selentans summoned their icon and looked upon Sihe'lintena's true form with awe and devotion.
Their efforts were not in vain, however, for the time they bought allowed the Phrakians to complete their own ritual. The city's representatives spoke the truth, but only half of it. Upon completion of the ritual, centuries in the making, the ancient aeldari crystal holding Etix shattered, and after countless millennia of imprisonment, the goddess was at last free. A wave of crimson warp energy pulsed out and washed over the planet, subjecting all on the planet to the ancient deity's power.
Countless weak-willed peasants collapsed into sleep and experienced the greatest nightmares ever experienced since the death of the Emperor. The Nobles' strong wills kept them awake, but they too suffered the terrors the newly-released god unleashed. The curse hounds too remained awake, for they had been inured to such visions, having experienced them since cubhood.
A great, final battle ensued. Witch, god, beast, and warrior contested the forces of the daemon-god and her fallen slaves. Blood met blood, with the raw power advantage on the side of evil; Etix's forces were ultimately incomparable to the larger quantity of Knights fielded by her rival. But her side had a decisive advantage: Etix was a truly benevolent deity.
Etix's nightmares were terrible to experience, but to the faithful and favoured, they granted visions of disaster and failure, benefiting the dreamers' waking lives by allowing them to avert their terrible fates. Sihe'lintena's dreams, meanwhile, were pure, ruinous opium - a weapon of Chaos, and the fallen god had employed it on her own forces.
Distracted by terrifying visions and longing for endless sleep, Sihe'lintena's Knights were scythed down by their opponents, whose nightmare visions warned time and again of the fatal blows their enemies prepared to strike. Sihe'lintena was strong, stronger even than the newly released Etix, but the nightmare god's corrupted counterpart could not defeat both the deity and her army alone. Once the daemon's army was destroyed, curse-tipped claws and reaper chainswords tore her apart and banished her back into the Warp.
Summary
Kimdaria is a Knight World in Segmentum Tempestus and home to House Mortan. It's also the home base of Etix, an ancient xenos goddess of Nightmares and Prophecy. Her pantheon was destroyed long ago at the hands of her sister, a goddess of Dreams and Hope who was corrupted by Chaos and turned into a daemon of Slaanesh. Her sister locked Etix away in a magical jewel created during the days of the Aeldari Dominion, though she eventually lost it in a warp storm.
The jewel would end up in a space hulk which drifted into the Kimdaria system. A hapless human from a Knight World would be drawn to the jewel by her latent psychic abilities and unknowingly swallow the god, with the jewel remaining inside her body because it was magic. When a traumatic nightmare caused her to develop recurring nightmares, the power of the jewel was awakened which in turn awakened her own abilities. Cut to a few centuries later after the human taking over a city and mutating some of the planet's wildlife, the daemon sister attempts to recapture Etix by subverting the Knight World and waging war, but fails, instead being banished by angry Nobles and their equally angry Knight suits.
Etix can inflict nightmares on people. Against people she doesn't like, they're just nightmares. If inflicted on someone she does like, the nightmares are prophetic.
Over the centuries, Etix has remained alive by essentially possessing everyone on Kimdaria at once, taking up the space in their minds where their ordinary nightmares would normally go. Psykers especially benefit from this deal, as their daemon-sourced nightmares are replaced with god-sourced nightmares, improving pass rates. Those who seek Etix's favour offer her their other dreams to eat in addition to their nightmares, and in return get a small amount of foresight of future bad events they'll experience while awake.
During her time before her sister's corruption, Etix was a decently powerful god. The crystal she was trapped in froze her, allowing her to survive and keep her power even millennia after the death of her race. In the centuries after being freed, however, much of her power has gone as a result of only having a single world's worth of worshippers. (Though it was enough that she was in no danger of starving to death.)
Her power would greatly balloon following the Nurgle raid. From it, she was able to get a ritual that cursed its victims with night terrors, and importantly, the curse would spread to anyone who dreamed within a certain radius of the afflicted. It's not only a powerful weapon that can cripple an enemy's morale, it also allows fragments of Etix to possess a large number of people with frightening ease.
Whatever Etix's personality might once have been, centuries of worship by honour-driven Knights and their peasant subjects have since warped her into developing a mindset similar to theirs.
Etix would survive Nurgle's counterattack partly by virtue of her own prophetic visions and Sophont-sourced military defences, but mostly by the unmatched fighting prowess of one High King Caradoc and the unstoppable might of his Knight suit, Oathsworn Judgement.
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I thought this was going to be an easy, quick omake to write. I was wrong.
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Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Y4: Make A Request (Use a minor favor to request Farseer assistance with Operation Hecatoncheir)
Y5: Ask Vlad (Operation Hecatoncheir: Have HWWO assassinate the Black Imperium task force command chain in order to implant Vlad as the new fleet commander.)
Slot D (Free Greater Divination)
Y?: Greater Divination (Eldar Choice)
Alright, here's the proposed changes. All in favour say aye.
Y5: Ask Vlad (Operation Hecatoncheir: Have HWWO assassinate the Black Imperium task force command chain in order to implant Vlad as the new fleet commander.)
Slot D (Free Greater Divination)
Y?: Greater Divination (Eldar Choice)
Alright, here's the proposed changes. All in favour say aye.
- Location
- Australia
Aye, let's steal Abadon's fleet.
- Location
- Somewhere on Earth
Aye. Might as well give it a shot.
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
the best option on this front would be going over the top on runes of Warding, and pretend to be Khronate with a Brass Collar. That makes you almost immune to warp effects and is highly believable.