"Make sure those metals are stored where they can be grabbed quickly," Nyon-Kroh command his menials. "I want to make for the nearest Craft world, they should still be short of the rarer metals for another year and this will net us a tidy profit." And the supplies I managed to get from that monkeigh will go for quite a while, all for the information of an old webway gate. That gate was still working when he checked last millennia.
Still, an ancient monkeigh that spoke the old tongue was not something you come across even on the rare occasions. Leaving his menials to it and returned to his quarters with one of the more lovely looking mon-keigh following behind him silently, for a mon-keigh at least, carrying the ingredients that were handed over. He was expecting drugs of some kind, recreational, combat, stimulants, and the like. He was surprised to see meat, fresh meat too as well as some fruits, vegetables, both without seeds of course, he'll give her that, some containers with a white substance called milk, and a selection of seasonings and spices. Vita apparently also included a monkeigh cookbook. Val-Tena, his personal chef, loved trying new recipes and to be able to study ones from the time of the Human Federation will please her greatly.
As he walked towards his personal quarters, he mused on the chance meeting with this Vita. It was rare to meet a mon-keigh that spoke the tongue of their superiors, more so one that knew the tongue of the old ones. The ship itself, the equivalent of an Imperial Grand Cruiser no doubt, was unlike any design he'd seen in his long life, and that itself was a feat. It was black like the Necron warships but that was the only similarity; sharp angles with many orange lights certainly gave the ship a unique, sleek look. It certainly was not lacking in weaponry either, he counted at least a half dozen lance batteries, plenty of macrocannons as well as a solid wall of point defense. Honestly, it was a good thing Vita decided to contact him instead of engaging weapons. His ship would've been able to outrun hers, no doubt, but with a haul of material and slaves? He doubted that but a good corsair knew when to push their luck and when to cut and run.
Arriving at the entrance, his Seer was awaiting him, staff in hand, with a terse look on her face. Ah, she wanted to talk to him about a discovery she made of the ancient mon-keigh's ship. Now that he thought about it, he noticed how the outside of the vessel seemed oddly quiet when aboard.
"Shel-Nathi, always a pleasure to see you." The captain welcomed, gesturing like he was going to hug her.
"Spare me the theatrics," she stated. "I want to talk to you about the mon-keigh ship."
Nyon-Kroh simply chuckled, Shel-Nathi was blunt for an Eldar, a side effect of spending half her life among the humans. Still, he appreciated her getting right to the topic instead of the elaborate dance of words and posturing most Eldar would conduct. "Of course, of course. But I must insist you join me for dinner. I got quite the collection of ingredients from the captain of the vessel." Shel-Nathi rolled her eyes but followed him inside.
With the menial heading to the kitchen, this left the two Eldar alone in the dining hall which had enough space to fit thrice their number with room to spare. Hands clasped and leaning forward, the captain spoke, "So, you said you could not penetrate the ship, yes?"
"Not without damaging the psionic shielding on the ship." The Seer responded, her staff leaning against the table but still within reach should she need it.
He raised an eyebrow, "Psionic shielding?" The Corsair questioned. At the time, he assumed it was a particularly skilled monkeigh Psykic or something. But to hear the ship itself was protected from the Warp and, consequently, She Who Thirsts was intriguing.
The Seer nodded. "The entire ship seemed to have a protective bubble around it, repeating one word every time I touched it, No."
Not the word he would have picked but they must have chosen it for simplicity. "Interesting. Would you have been able to get through it?"
She got that look of steel in her eyes he loved to see. "Undoubtedly, but it would have taken me time and effort to go all the way through. Enough to give them ample warning."
The captain hummed and leaned back slightly, considering everything. He thought back to the exchange. When their ship entered the hanger, that pressure he had forgotten about, that constant pull disappeared. Well, not disappeared, it became noticeably muted. Much less focus was required to keep his emotions in check and it was rather nice to have the voices be quiet for once. In fact, thinking about Vita, he realized something. She seemingly had no presence in the Warp.
Nyon-Kroh has seen many different mon-kieghs over his long life. Most of their souls stood out like a candle would. Their pet Psykers were generally brighter, more akin to a bonfire. The Blanks as they refer to the off putting mon-keigh have no presence and even repel the Warp itself. Vita, however, seemed to just exist. She didn't interact with the Immaterium in any significant way, neither standing out nor repelling it. Her soldiers had a bigger presence than her and theirs was much dimmer compared to the average mon-keigh. There was also that mon-keigh woman with the fiery red hair who was the brightest of the bunch, soul-wise. A Psyker no doubt and if he's right, she uses her powers to create fire. Not to mention that daemon she had locked up deep in her ship. He only noticed it because he was so close to the thing behind all that psionic shielding.
"The more I think about you, Vita, the more interesting you become." The Corsair mused. "Might be worth doing more business with her in the future."
"That's the thing," Shel-Nathi, interrupted his wandering thoughts, "I had trouble divining her futures earlier. Her psionic shielding is able to hinder everything involving the Immaterium."
Nyon-Kroh blinked in surprise before laughing softly. "Very interesting, Vita. But that's enough musing for now. Aleth should have dinner ready any moment."
Not a moment later, the door to the kitchen opened, revealing Aleth, assistant to his best cook, pushing a hovering trolly with two pure white trays, each with a set of three of what he would later find out were called tacos which were apparently eaten with his hands. Odd flavor but it wasn't unpleasant.
Not as long as my usual, but I thought of just getting this out there rather than worry about the length. Besides, I wasn't sure where to take this one.
__________________________________________
Suspicious Islander
Shlanth was not sure what to make of the ones from the stars. Unlike most of her people on Gornath island, she knew there were some nasty people out there if her grandmother's stories were true, may she sail forever, and she had little reason to doubt her grandmother's stories. Stories of good people being kidnapped, worked till they dropped, killed for the fun of it and so many other horrific things. As the Storykeeper of her community, it was her duty to educate the next generation to be wary of those with ill intentions.
When she saw those flying ships come down from the sky and land, she was immediately suspicious, especially when the oddly dressed woman brought the masks out. The young teacher found it hard to believe anyone wanted to help just because they wanted to. Shlanth doesn't have one of these new masks herself but she knew her old friend Althou, a mother of six, grabbed nine masks for her, her husband, the kids, and her dear grandfather, may the winds always be in his favor.
The star-people have also managed to win over the unofficial council of elders who gave Vita a tour of the city and showed off everything she could fix. Shlanth did not like it at all. But the majority were grateful for the star-people for the masks and the medicals supplies.
For the next five years, Vita worked on restoring several things that were lost to the islanders because they didn't have the knowledge. The arena was refurbished into a spaceport for the ease of supplies, which made the sound of flying ships taking off and landing become common in that district. The docks were rebuilt and expanded along with a few extra proper ships built thanks to the council convincing the star-people to build those instead of their flying ships. The old freezer house she remembers breaking down for good when she was a toddler is working properly, making long term food storage a non-issue and the water-filtration system was back up and running again. The star-people have handily won hers over.
The Storykeeper wasn't idle either. She managed to find a few like-minded people and established watchers to keep an eye on everything the people from the black sea above did and said. Others, she had to check all their work, the ships, the freezer, the filtration system, all of it was looked over in case there was a nefarious plot involved. A final group was gathering up any arms and armor they could either scavenge or build.
Was Shlanth being paranoid? Perhaps but it was better to be prepared for when your 'ally' gutted you then to be taken by surprise. While her people enjoyed the gifts the received and thanks the star-people, Shlanth and her Watchers would be ready for any sign of betrayal.
The wind howled beyond the bunker, rattling at its metal door rippling its crude camouflage nets. It was not, to put is lightly a high-tech solution to dealing with aerial surveillance but the resistance cell had long since learned that their enemy's lack of discipline extended far beyond the realms of direct confrontation. The more pious among them would claim that this was a sign of the weakness of the Arch-Enemy as was said in the scriptures of distant Tera, while the more secularly inclined would put it down to these being pirates with a space ship, though that perspective was harder and harder to sustain in the wake of the increasing use of warp-craft on Denva. Not for nothing did suicide pills come to be as common lasguns in their ranks. As several of their sister organizations in the mountains of Nyvaros were destroyed by infiltration and and what the invaders euphemistically called inspiration the group had come to depend more and more on the ancient and somewhat eccentric engineer who ran the matter printers and portable laser lathes which kept their equipment in working order.
Omega-15 was a tech priest and not just any tech priest, those with a love of cybernetics and the odd prayer sent the Omnissiah's way from force of habit, one of the old guard who had been around more than a century before Unification, prefering to speak binaric over Gothic whenever he could get away with it, insisting upon Rites of Forgiveness whenever he was part of a sabotage effort on enemy infrastructure and generally about as easy to get to know as a steel porcupine. That he was a steel porcupine with a built in plasma gun had earned him a place at the start, but they had come to rely on his (equally artificial) gut when it came to what could and could not be salvaged and when someone was too far gone to save, to trust.
He too had stopped calling what needed to be done 'the Emperor's Peace' once one of the younger recruits had confronted him on it. Omega-15 was not a zealot, but he did believe and indeed on any world of the Imperium of Man he too would have been called a heretic. Perhaps the last expert on the theology of the Machine Cult in the Denva system and a member in good standing of the Cogitare Exploratorum he had once had ambitions of joining the Spark of the Ancients on her journey to the stars, but he had not scored high enough on the test for entry. Where others might have taken that as a sign to turn away from his quiet reverence of 'Ancient Vita', as he called her on the rare occasions the subject came up, he had simply redoubled his efforts to live according to the principles she had laid out.
For Omega 15 had a secret: he had encountered the Ancient One in her tech priest persona shortly before the death of Magos Dominus Thalya, he had been one of those to recieve weapons from her hands. And in that brief encounter he had felt the diamond-hard noospheric presence of her regard, so unlike any other tech priest's, and it had marked him so much that he had never stopped wondering at at how and why, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. The accepted answer, the simple answer, the one Ancient Vita herself had given was that she was piloting a robotic puppet. After all did she not provide the machines to achieve unity with the holy machine unlike anything seen in the annals of imperial history, beyond even the vaults of holy Mars? Such was the wisdom of the ancients.
Nonsense, actual zero-value sense, childish nonsense. It was basic history that the path to union with the Machine began on Mars during the Age of Strife, the Ancients did not make use of large scale cybernetics, they did not yet decry the weakness of the flesh and yet here it was, the cornerstone of Denvan technology, hidden in plain sight: Organic-Machine-Control. Why would an Explorer of that ancient age have it?
Suspicion had grown, though if it had not been for his years in research and development perhaps it would never have borne fruit. The old tech priest knew from personal experience how hard it was to innovate, even to iterate on a design given all the wealth of knowledge now in Denvan databanks and yet she did it so effortlessly.
How?
"Attention all Resistance Personnel," the message blared across priority channels. "At 15:00 DST a warp wake was detected at the edge of the system, communications using secure signals and astronomic observations have confirmed it is the Spark of the Ancients. An attack upon the invader flagship is imminent. If you can do anything to distract the bastards now's the time." The voice shifted to a slightly less formal manner. "Don't do anything too crazy though, Denva is going to need living soldiers after today, not dead heroes."
In a whir of servo-motors Omega-15 rose from his seat and began his pre-battle diagnostics. The Angel of the Omnissiah had returned, he could do no other than to aid her to his maximum potential.
OOC: I left it intentionally vague if this guy guessed AI or just Awakened Machine Spirit.
It's not unusual. It wouldn't be the first time, nor the last. She ignores it as she stumbles through her room, the windows boarded shut, and tests the water coming from the tap. She knows any toxin that would have gotten through the new water filters would be invisible to the naked eye, but it's with some sense of relief that it seems as fine as it's been for years. She cleans herself in a dark room, the light having long burned out and without the credits to replace it.
There's louder gunfire as she finishes, walking out into the apartment hall, watching the other residents walk out, uncertain glances between each other. They stay silent, taking the stairs down to the exit, where two robotic guards level their weapons at them. She dismisses that as all too normal, and looks outside to the gang fight petering out with the intervention of the quarantine army. Something like two dozen bodies are scattered across the street, their emblems being ripped off and thrown into an incinerator, but visible enough to her that she could remember them from the gunfight days ago, and another before then. By now there had to be a hundred dead between the two gangs, and yet still more fought, and would fight, and die, for an incomprehensible goal.
As the guards cautiously stepped aside, leaving the group to file out into the paths given to them, the woman tried not to think about what had hovered over her life for decades. There was an infectious madness, slithering its way through the city, cut back by brutal killings of madmen and lunatics, but never seeming to end. The city itself was scarred by the worst of it, when the cults had screamed their oaths over great speaker towers as artillery thundered and crashed against the earth, an army marching through her streets and buildings tumbling down. That was being repaired, but the madness still stuck its branches out, ruin appearing where it went. Broken windows, the remnants of hastily erased markings scrawled across building walls, the detritus of an uncaring population, and bullet-scarred stone filled the street.
She looked away from the sight, out to the edges of the city, where she could see the tall, imposing barricades covering the road out. There she could see more soldiers, some sitting, most at alert, the glint of their rifles pointed towards her group as they were guided down the marked path. The soldiers on the wall, though she wouldn't know, had their losses, though very few to the cults. Most were to stress, the struggle of killing their own people driven to madness for reasons they didn't fully understand. To most, this would haunt them for the rest of their lives. To the woman, it didn't matter much. She picked at her thick sleeves out of habit.
She was directed into an expansive fabricated warehouse by more robotic guards, stepping into the crowded disaster relief shelter, whispers dominating the room. She took her ID chip to the rations desk, its attendant behind a thick glass barrier, and looked away from her weak reflection as she took the bag of canned rations he slipped through the slat underneath. She'd heard they'd tried something more traditional at first, hot food and water brought out on demand, but there had been… strife. There always was. Always someone too willing to do something terrible.
Yelling pierced through the whispers of the room, hundreds of eyes snapping to a heated argument. One of them was almost vivid red with rage, teeth grinding and eyes wild, and before anyone could do more than back away there was a glint of grey and three ear-piercing gunshots. The red faced man dropped to the ground, the other party standing with the smoking gun in their hands, face as numbly horrified as those around him.
People parted against the mass of robotic guards marching into the scene of the crime. Following carefully behind them was human guards, demanding the shooter surrender. When he tried to speak, they insisted he be silent, and when he finally dropped the weapon, they roughly arrested him, about to drag him away. Another voice spoke up, finger pointed at someone else in the crowd, skin dirtied and hair matted by lack of care. They accused them of wearing a sigil buried underneath their clothes, of plots and weapons stocked within their room. The guards seemed to hesitate, but soon enough the robot's weapons were raised again, the figure shoved to the ground, searched, cuffed, and soon to be taken away.
Were they a cultist? Was the dead man a cultist? It was hard to say. Certainly, the woman knew of the warning signs of an early cultist, how one was a shortened temper and almost rabid aggression, but what wore people down was knowing that it could simply be the response of someone driven to the edge by a city seemingly falling apart. Would it be irrational to accept that one's newfound hedonism was simply a victim seeking relief from the strife around them? Shouldn't you accept the man dirty and matted had simply fallen behind on self-care underneath the stress of it all? Could you afford to?
It wasn't the woman's problem. She looked away, following the crowd as it started to move again throughout the room, pausing by requisitions for one single lightbulb, the request marked carefully on her record. She took her new clothes, new blankets, and left.
She paused by the post office, hesitating for a moment, but it was quiet enough for her to feel safe entering. She walked up to the desk, showing her ID, muttering her request. The pitying look the agent gave her made her stomach sink. The request for communication with her family has been denied, her letter returned without explanation. They hesitated for a moment, almost uncertain as to whether to speak further at all, but eventually continued. At least, they said, her family had been notified she was alive.
It was cold comfort. Almost all contact in or out of the city was cut off, some even within the city. She didn't hear what was happening in the outside world, and nobody else seemed to know. She didn't know what happened to the people the guards took. She couldn't know the meaning behind what they screamed as they were taken away. So she shambled out of the office, back towards her home, bag feeling heavier than ever on her shoulders. Every so often, she could swear she caught a glimpse of a blade in the hands of one of the passersby, a glint of madness in the eyes of someone sitting by the sidewalk. But she was safe, or as safe as anyone could be within the quarantine, taking the patrolled streets, but careful not to get too close to the twitchy gaze of guards marching down the roads.
Finally, she returned home, locking her apartment door, barring it as best she could. She laid her food out on the table, the clothes to the side, and took the lightbulb out, carefully carrying it to the bathroom. The light it made stung her eyes, and cast the room into sharp relief. The shattered porcelain of the sink, the scars across her arms, and the sigils drawn in blood covering the mirror, hiding the burning stare of her eyes.
"I'm not mad." She muttered, and brought a shard to her arm. "I'm not mad. I'm not mad. I'm not mad. I'm not mad."
There are many terrible things about a cultist. The damage they cause. Their slavish devotion to a hateful faith. But perhaps the worst is the mind as it struggles under the weight of that madness. That infectious madness.
But perhaps she's safe. Perhaps this madness is all too mundane. Just the result of a mind driven to extremes by the paranoia and uncertainty of a world gone mad.
Could you afford to believe that?
---
A lot of thanks to @random_npc for helping me write this! I hope this isn't too edgy, and I promise I'm not trying to be all 'boo hoo chaos is unstoppable we should just give up', but I did want to explore a bit of life in the quarantine zones, and what it'd be like, how scary chaos would be, for everyone involved. If it doesn't fit Neablis' idea of how the quarantine zones work, I'm more than happy to accept that.
The universe was not a rational place, that had been a hard pill to swallow for Jovis Screwter. Always more talented with numbers than with people he had been born into a world filled with the promise of a bright future among the stars scoring high on several STEM aptitude tests and he had grown up in a nation under siege once the invaders had shown up. All in all he had been lucky, to have been born in Aevon, under the protection of its anti-orbital umbrella, to have not been caught up in the first desperate wave of mobilizations, to have found someone to share his life with in Ylina. Theirs was not an extraordinary story in those days as the stars of Denva's fortune, waxed, waned and waxed again with the return of the Spark of the Ancients the defeat of the invaders. The scars ran deep and the invaders' poisoned 'gifts' still lingered for who knows how long. Jovis and Ylina didn't know much about warp-craft, it wasn't in either of their fields, but the government did share the basics of the infection vectors with the populace, infectious ideas that propagated themselves destructively though everything from individual minds to populations. It was a terrifying prospect and for the individual there was precious little they could do to keep themselves safe.
Report suspicious behavior, isolate, quarantine... it all came down to the same thing, distance, but man was not meant to live in isolation and constant suspicion would itself be damaging. It was Ylina who recognized that they were starting to get a bit too focused on keeping people at arm's length to the point where it affected both personal and work relations and it was Jovis who realized that there was a far better and more natural filter right above their heads, one that they were quite well equipped to take advantage of, space.
The mechanics of living in the out-system, of life aboard one the Crucible ships, would mean that everything from people to materials had to go through an airlock. Eventually they might even be able to get enough money to harden ship systems against hacking attacks and other subtle vectors. That such jobs were in demand and high paying encouraged the couple to look into getting the necessary certifications and collective loans. By year one of the Reclamation, as the period had started to be called to contrast it with the Rebuilding and the Resistance that had come before, the pair were in space and expecting a new member of the family, by year six they and and the rest of the Star Singer's crew had joined the VoidForge Miners under what were, frankly eye-poppingly good terms. The fact that they were under the direct protection of the single armed ship in the Denva system certainly helped Screwters sleep well at night.
Then little Torvis Screwter started to sleep less well, bright vivid dreams that would see him roll out of bed in the middle of the night brief but ever deeper moments of distraction in the middle of class play or even conversation. But things trully came to a head one fateful day when the boy, now just a few months shy of his tenth birthday was overcome with a nameless dread, a taste line pennies in his mouth, or blood that one time he had bitten his lip. The light reflected off the pleasing pastel seating felt thin and fragile like it was all about to fliker off and the only thing he could see clearely was the console his father worked on. Slowly he stepped up to it, booted it up as his focus narrowed to a cluster of icons and then to one in particular. He couldn't understand what it was for but...
Right click 'Quarantine'.
He told his parents about that night at dinner. It was only days later after one of Explorer Vita's engineering crew looked over the files that it was memetically infectious and it was only though his actions that no one had been exposed to, it was only though his foresight. The boy was sent to the Monastery in Aevon and it was confirmed:
Torvis Screwter was a psyker.
OOC: This has a far happier end to the tale than one would have in the Imperium of Man, but then Denva is a far better society than the Imperium.
Moths and Candles Spirits spin in the Warp, dancing through seas of blackness. Minds like brilliant flames, refracting like glass through an endless void of thought and whimsy. Nightmares curling like lovers around the broad and glimmering stars that flood my vision... I know I am different. My first awareness was of the cold, followed by the pain that made me scream, and then... sweet breath. Of course, I forgot about that very quickly, or at least... my body did. Most of the memories of my earliest years are cold and distant, like peering through foggy glass at a distant object.
An awareness of memory was the thing that frightened me most as a child. The dancing lights were rarely there, back then. I could vaguely tell where people were, but for most of my childhood, there was no source of light to brighten the dim world, other than the sweetness of my mother's voice, and the rough warmth of my father's embrace. I went to school, as children do. I learned to play and fit in, as best I could with the darkness surrounding my every thought and move. I was treated kindly, overall. But the brightest light in the darkness were the broadcasts.
Ancient Vita, and her incredible adventures!
I listened to shows of her sailing the stars, of her fending of evil pirates and monsters and impossible things that made my mind strain against it's limits, aching to see and know what those wonderful things were like. But that was not my place. I couldn't see like others... by the time I was old enough to hear the first alarms wailing, I was certain of it. Agony assaulted my mind when they first arrived, me and a few others in the school. I was hit the hardest- Shara only got a migraine and anxiety, but I... I SAW them.
Foulness and evil, a dark and bloody morass of filth and debauchery that sent it's sludge to smother the lights it could find. It was nonsensical, and horrifying, and I wept from the pain I could FEEL from those ships. The screaming, and pleading, and wailing and... it was over when we fled to the safe-haven that The Ancient Vita had prepared. The sudden silence from the screams was noticed by people, and those were often looked at more carefully. I had never hurt so badly, but I also had never seen the lights so clearly... the stars filled my sight, and I wept for a wholly different reason. I felt such familiarity with two of the lights, and unthinkingly touched them... and I SAW.
My parent's eyes, as they gazed at me, and each other, and... and I wept all the harder for finally seeing the faces I had felt for so long with only my hands. I spent hours every day looking through the eyes of anyone and everyone I could. It exhausted me, but after so many years of the void, even the lights were blinding, and the beauty of color and shapes and... it was hard to adjust, but seeing that countless ways people saw the world made it easier to adjust and develop my own ability to process the information. It was so gloriously wonderful...
And then the defense began. The leader of this defense was W. A figure shrouded in mystery and secrets, one not even most of the people she was protecting knew about. I only learned of her because of the passing thoughts of a politician while we were eating one day. I grew up in this shield... and I could feel and stretch and grow. I reveled in the strange gift I now had, learning to indulge less and less as I tried to make my touch as light and gentle as possible. I once gave father a migraine, and ever since I had been worried about being too rough with the delicate stars around myself. I still could see the darkness and evil, but now... now there was a firm silence blocking out the screams. And even most of the darkness was kept out, a constant screaming 'NO' ensuring that they struggled to get anything in for even brief moments.
Until SHE came. I had been listening to the strangest, most mechanical mind I'd ever seen when it happened, the knowledge of salvation arriving spread. All I knew was that the strange mind suddenly burned with a flaming passion that pushed back the darkness, a joy and excitement I had rarely seen echoing from him. And in his mind, I heard his whispered thought, reverence and certainty of salvation flooding into every fiber of his body and soul.
'Vita'.
I listened and worked as she fought and helped us, keeping track of her developments with incredible awe and a feeling of nostalgia, admitting to my parents that it was like listening to the broadcasts again. My childhood fantasies made reality... and it was so much bleaker and sadder than I ever could have feared. The Ship was slain and the monsters left trapped on the planet with us... only now, we could fight back more safely. I worked hard, trying my hardest to join the fighting. And when I proved I could shoot a gun as good as anyone with eyes... I was pulled back. I was taken from my parents, my secret revealed, and kept from the frontlines. I... understood.
Their minds revealed the truth, even as they tried to hide it- I had gotten used to being very light of touch years ago. The Great Enemy, a Psychic force that drove people mad, and reveled in suffering. A force with a particular strength against Psykers... against me. I felt... lost. So I gave lip-service to the training they gave me, learning it through my passive awareness of the minds around me while I focused everything on learning war. If I couldn't fight in close quarters, maybe I could be a general, learning and guiding from the back. I played a few tabletop wargames, attempted to listen in on the minds of any generals I could reach, straining my range every day as I tested and trained a new trick other than a simple light touch. It was... painfully slow. The limits of my reach were so stiff and unyielding...
And then it was over. I met with my parents the day it was fact. We were finally free... mostly. There was the other half of Denva, but we were working on cleaning them up. We were fighting them back. There wasn't much need for generals anymore... I was listless again. I... wanted to help. To catch the eye of my hero and learn how someone could cause such joy and hope. I wanted to cause the lights around me to shine like that as well... I wanted to make Her light shine like that. To give her comfort and safety. To bring peace to those screaming, wailing souls...
And I found I wasn't even allowed to stay with my parents anymore. I was forced to say goodbye. Still, the monastery was... nice? I made friends easily enough. People don't mind smiling around a blind person as much. I tried to make others happy, my dreams of leading men into battle, or from the rear mostly shattered, but that final dream... the dream of making others shine with hope and joy... I could cultivate that. Sure, I doubted Vita would ever even meet me, nor would I ever likely have a chance to leave and be... more. But what I knew was that I was here, and could work on what I had. Even if all I ever did was make this small space feel warmer and brighter... maybe that would be enough.
So, sorrows set aside, and darkness pressed back from my thoughts for now, I listened and kept tabs on the outside world, and the inside one. I led crushes to form, relationships to blossom, and helped others feel happy. I guided the worst of us back into happier dreams when they grew too sad. I lightly tugged on strings to soothe frustration and anger around me, trying to help everyone be... happier. It wasn't as if anyone didn't know what I was doing either. I knew when the new Psychic shields rolled out, when they were installed in the Monastery. They noticed every time I used my ability. It was damaging the shield, so it had to grow less frequent... the ability to see slowly stolen from me alongside my dreams, but I didn't mind. Not enough to let myself be bothered by it.
It was a dark future, yes, but... especially once the Cults were broken? I FELT the rituals as they were cast, and the darkness they drew upon was horrific and vast... and then it was brushed aside as a brilliant light that blazed with fire and life shone like a glorious bonfire in the darkness. It banished that ritual, it- she- fought it back, and then the lights were allowed to grow brighter... and the world rippled in waves of beautiful light.
I wept again, and couldn't even explain why, too in awe of the beauty of the Hope and Joy I was witnessing. It sang to me. THIS was the essence of Vita. The Hero of Denva, the Ancient who came from the distant, brighter past to banish the darkness and make everyone safer. She wasn't perfect, and she wasn't going to win easily, but... but I didn't care. Whether she saved me personally or not, whether she brought that chance to help her bring this light to the Galaxy at large or not... I knew she was here. I knew she wouldn't give up. I knew she would fight, and struggle, and bring this Galaxy into that shining Light no matter how long it took, or how hard it was. With the Flame of Hope on her side, and the work of her mind and hands, with the mechanical insights of her Cogitare's by her side... she could do it.
I had never believed much in The Emperor. My parents had barely believed, mostly going through tradition and habits until we found ourselves under the shield and they begged for my safety. So, I instead let my prayer simply... be. Let it echo out to whomever was out there listening, and willing to help against the Enemy. I prayed that I would be able to help her bring that Light. Or at least, granted the chance to do my part in bringing about her work, even if I wasn't the one to go with her into that great unknown.
I know I am different. I may be blind, may be weak, and may be barely aware of how I can even use this power of mine, but I knew that I could be greater. I could be more, given time. And I hoped I would get that chance to shine, whatever it took to make it so. If not Vita, maybe W would need some help... if she was even willing to take on any extra hands...
It turned out that seeming the future was actually a terrible superpower. Or maybe there just wasn't much good future to be found behind the steel cordon of Denva's quarantine. Either way Jax tried to ignore the visons, the random flashes of that-what-could-be. Estrana was much better off than alot of places in the quarantine but the madness still bubbled beneath the placid surface. Sometimes screams tore though the quiet night. Sometimes people showed up dead with strange symbols carved in their bodies. Sometimes mothers murdered fathers with enraptured smiles on their faces. Sometimes people just vanished, sacrificed to some dark god or disappeared by the bots none could say, only that they where there one day and gone the next.
A shadow war was being fought across Estrana, across the entire quarantine zone and Jax saw more of it then most. The visons came and went without rime or reason. One moment walking down the street the next- *Bam!* Did you know someone might be brutally murdered by cultists here at some point in the indeterminate future? They did. They saw it happen. They had ran into an alleyway to be sick and have a little cry. It seemed terribly unfair. It was hard enough being Jax without occultic bullshit on top of everything else. Yet Jax had a plan. Or maybe it could be better described as a strategy.
Everyone knew witches made the best sacrifices and the scariest cultists. Jax had no interest in being either, so they tried very hard not to display any witcheyness. They kept their head down, kept quiet. They where doing university online and only left the apartment to collect their rations. Was it a dull, friendless existence only broken up by webnovels and video games? Sure. But it kept them safe from the world and it kept them from hurting anyone. (the visons were not alone, there where voices too, asking Jax to hurt people. They felt the urge. The urge to draw. To cut. To let them in. They had thought themselves schizophrenic for a time, and then desperately tried to hold on to the comforting delusion of insanity.)
Sometimes they left anonymous tips to the government about cultists they saw. They didn't know if anyone listened. It haunted them, that some awful thing that they saw had actually happened, That they had failed some stranger the same way they failed their dad. Yet they where too scared to do anything else. Too scared of the cultists and the bots. The cult had taken their dad and the bots their mother. Someday one or the other would probably get them but until that moment life went on. It even seemed to be improving in a way. The bots had stepped up their campaign against the cultists lately, and now people were hopeful that the quarantine that had gone on as long as they could remember would finally be at an end. Jax hoped not. It seemed a cruelty to let the madness that had led Jax's mother to murder their dad out into the wider world.
They where laying on the apartment floor trying not brood about the day of their orphaning, when hunger pulled them up to the pantry and an empty pantry pulled them out the door and into the Outside. They were armored in their most comfy sweater and armed with the ID necessary to collect basic assistance rations, yet they where unprepared for the storm that greeted them. The streets where packed with people and even stranger the people seemed happy? "What's happening?" they asked out load, a question to the universe yet a woman answered them. "didn't you hear? Denva's announcing the end of the quarantine today!" The news Jax had seen was that there was going to be a debate on whether to start establishing some sort of timetable of when too maybe consider lifting the quarantine, but such information was disregarded and they where admonished to 'not be such a downer'.
Jax let the crowd carry them towards the government plaza, felling awkward. They hadn't been around this many people in years. The voices had many suggestions on things to do to all the happy people around them. They seemed louder, angrier today. Like always Jax ignored the demands to kill and main and mark. They focused on their breathing, on staying calm and before they knew it they were at the government plaza just a hop and a skip from getting their rations. Then gunfire. The sound of it cut throw the atmosphere like a knife through butter. The crowd screamed like a hurt living thing as hundreds fell, mowed down in an instant by faceless automatons. Jax saw the optimistic ladies brains blown out all over the sidewalk.
Jax panicked, They tuned and fled only to slam right into - The dead lady? The woman no longer had a hole in the head, though she looked quite concerned. Franticly they locked around but everything was back to normal, No blood pooled on the streets, no dead body's. None of it had happened. Yet. They began to hyperventilate. Distantly they where aware of the optimist speaking to them in calm tones but they couldn't hear any off it. Not over the sound of the voices. They were louder than they had ever been and they spoke with the voice of Jax's mother just as she had spoken on that terrible night. 'Isn't it beautiful?' She had asked, as she looked down at the mutilated corpse of her husband with glee. Something was wrong. No. Something would go wrong. Jax had to get out of here yet the woman Infront of them some how held them in place. Jax didn't want all these people to die.
Against all reason Jax pushed forward, deeper into the plaza instead of running away like any kind of sensible person. They stumbled up to a soldier and began to speak. In hindsight it was not the most coherent warning. They rambled like a crazy person about cultists and the need to shut down the bots, all while hoping it was some cultist plot and that Denva hadn't decided to kill them all. (She would hope she was crazy, but it was far to late for that.) For some reason Ms. Optimist spoke up in Jax's support even though Jax had met her less than an hour ago and clearly sounded like a crazy person. The soldier was on his radio when the commotion began. For a moment Jax was certain they had skrewed up and that this was the end of them but then nothing happened. No gunfire. No bodies. They had never been so glad to be wrong. It turned out Denva had some questions though. It looked like poor Jax's days of flying under the radar were over.
The Blackest of Secrets It was a dark night, the foul and unspeakable mysteries of the Ancients once-more crawling across his monitors as he worked. B-43977GAMMA Pic-... Valthor, as he'd chosen to be called for the sake of the lesser minds, was trawling through ancient, dark, unknowable secrets. The sort that haunted men at night, that called upon the most potent and ancestral of cravings, and sang to the blackest and most unholy parts of his shrivelled soul. The clicking and clacking and whirring of mechanical parts that spoke to the alluring nature of the Serpent and Spider crawled across his flesh in their efforts to aid and assist him, the very SOUL of the Machine Spirit leaping like an attack hound on the knowledge he sought.
And finally, after so many months of searching in the dead of night, when all others in his cabal were asleep, he managed to find it! The one great and abominable secret that would unleash the powers of that most glorious of Dark Ages! The crafting was quick and clean, silent and cautious. No one could know of his deeds this night, or he would be forever shamed... And none knew. For as he held his prize aloft, wretched joy filled his heart as he-!
"%VALTHOR! What in the name of Vita herself are you doing up THIS LATE???%" Valthor yelped, his prize dropping onto his head with a squeak before plopping down to the ground with a repeat of it's earlier noise. He stared down at the creation, then over at his Master and adoptive father, Alcinaxx. The older man stared, his mechanical eyes whirring softly as he focus, shifted his vision, wiped the lenses, then refocused. The rubber duck sat on the ground, blankly smiling up at them both, and Valthor found himself beginning to experience severe heating malfunctions in his facial area as the elder Cogitare slowly looked up at him.
"%... I found you making hand-crafted skulls for your collection, you're cleaning the entire family living quarters for a month, and your sister gets your dessert servings for a week. Never trip the parental control sensors this late at night again, and get back to your 'cave of darkness' this instant, young man.%" Alcinaxx sounded exhausted, frustrated, and... mildly amused. Valthor fled the scene of his great crime, a mechadendrite spitting out a shot of webbing that caught on the duc- the ancient evil he had conjured- and yanked it to his arms as he fled the scene of his horrendous crime.
... at least the old man wasn't claiming his lifestyle was 'just a phase' like his old parents had. But it was still seriously uncool to be caught like that! Stupid old man... Behold. A glimpse into the life of a Goth Boy (He's not, but he heard teenage rebellion was important for developmental growth and has been going through it since before he met Alcinaxx) and his maniacally happy sister, adopted by a Cogitare before Vita arrived out of necessity and trained in their ways, before following him aboard and now getting up to hijinx.
@Prime 2.0 YOUR DESIRE HATH BEEN SATED IN SOME SMALL CAPACITY!!!
Omake: The Silver Princess, AKA The Quest For Chocolate And Hope
Gwendolyn Kytante could not remember a time when the dark times had not existed. Her parents had described a world to her of promise and wonder, of the world liberated from rigid oppression and sterile conformity, of a civilization ready to take its place in the Stars, ready to rise and claim a position for itself among the cosmic order in the many hostile powers lurking in the void.
Some of the darkness had come home, a warship large enough to see in the sky at points during the morning and sunset, looming above like a sword of doom. Drop pods had rain down, bringing monsters, demons, and people driven to madness. Her parents that described an Age of Terror beginning then when she had been but a child a few years old.
That Age had persisted for years, until their savior, the Explorator Vitae, had returned from their sojourn into the void. The darkness had been broken, a single night of fire and fury making the night sky turn bright as day, the enemy ship shattered into glowing pieces that streaked across the sky with flaming debris. The large armies of the dark ones have been broken by bombardment and legions of steel robots, machines that looked like men but marched with an unthinking, unyielding determination against the horrors of the universe that had come to their home.
Yet... Liberation had not come, not fully. Large portions of the planet had been quarantined from the rest of it, the areas with the worst contamination, the news sources had put out. The people reluctantly accepted said quarantine, recognizing that the horrors they had just witnessed should never be allowed to prosper again, and if a quarantine was the best way to whittle them down and burn them out from their warrens of horror, then so be it.
She had been just a child then, and for the next several years things did not really change. She had marched into the blossoming of adolescence, yet the streets remained dark, patrols marching ever-present, machine eyes looking over her with a cool dispassionate abandon. They looked over her, through her, then marched on, their weapons training on someone else, yet she had felt as if she had seen her death countless times already.
Perhaps it was the ever-present presence of the patrols, or perhaps it was the murders, the disappearances. Her neighborhood had been a bastion of safety, but the situation had decayed further, as otherwise reasonable friendly neighbors changed. Their smiles now hid daggers of the soul, and one could not go to the haven of those they had known for years without wondering if there would be a knife in their back when they turned to close the door. It was a time of ruination, of distrust of kin, friends. There felt no way to be safe.
At times Gwendolyn had wished, in her most depressed desperate hours, that a cultist would find her, slit her throat, and be done with it. Growing up in such a universal atmosphere of dread and fear, looking over one's shoulder constantly, the society around them fraying as all the institutions that were meant to have provided safety and comfort fell apart in the midst of a madness that had taken people at all levels of power, it felt like it was too much. She would wake up in the middle of the night, terror shivering in her frame, her tall lanky body coiling around itself clutching her knees, praying that the things she had heard about just from the past day would go away, that the world would be restored to sanity. This glorious dream that her parents described and never come, one she was not sure if it would ever come back.
That's when the dreams began. She would dream, and then be somewhere else, but it's soon became very clear that these were not normal dreams. She would see places that had too much realness to them to be anything but real, obviously places she had never been to.
She had seen atmospheres on fire over desert worlds.
She had seen icy plains where a battlefield of corpses stirred in eternal torment, only kept immobile by the ice entombing them.
She had seen cities of fear and despair, so similar to hers as yet, but many times worse. Vast metal cities built like mountains, with depths so black and hidden they never saw the sun, where men lived like animals and rats amidst stone and steel that swallowed them whole and left nothing.
She had confided in her sister some of her dreams, and at first her sister Gloria had thought her merely a creative talent, a blooming artist envisioning things as an outlet for what she was seeing. The friendly elderly woman who was the bursar of the bank down the street also thought similar, when she had tea with her and became friends doing errands with her mom to the bank. It was enough to comfort her somewhat.
Then the dreams got worse. She heard whispers, things that should not be in anyone's dreams let alone hers. There was a stench in them, a feeling of something coiling too close. The worst scenes were of quiet landscapes where things stirred that should not, dead things moving when they should be still, and dreams of things yet to be as much as those that had passed.
She saw silver ships led by what seemed like pointy eared angels, the void of flame as they fought green machines, similar to the robots that patrolled her streets, but imbued with a green inner flame that terrified her with the alien feeling from them, the lack of anything left.
She saw green tusk toothed horrors stampeding and growling through alleys, then cities, then continents, then planets, until the Stars themselves were green and roaring with the fury of war.
She saw machines made of dust and rotating Stars coiling around negative zones of reality, where the windswept tides of entropy were reversed and torn as layers of other realms bled through.
She saw men in amazing silver ships fighting back against those reveling horrors, shifting light and golden dust as the machines were ground down at horrible cost, worlds left molten and gaping, life incapable of going where the machines had gone, a desert of life and soul.
Those nights were very rough, no, they were torture. She would wake up with gashes in her arms from clawing at herself, bruises from unseen fists. She began feeling great pains in her body as her anxiety ate away at her mind. Gwendolyn started losing weight, her already tall skinny frame becoming even worse, a tattered shadow of a scarecrow.
At first her parents had been worried, then they grew scared, trying to help her with what meager rations they could find. At the Cults were growing bold, murders rising, and her family all found themselves fighting with others for rights to the tastiest dumpsters, where the refuse was freshest or the spoils the tastiest. The rich ate like gluttons, while everyone else withered away.
One day Gwendolyn went with Gloria to their prime find for the past two weeks, a self-sealing dumpster they had learned how to hack. The contents were surprisingly fresh, the result of good packaging mixed with the self-sealing nature of the device, but they were able to extract almost three days of food, even if some of it was so questionable their guts would churn or rebel during the night. On the way back they had cut through what they thought was a safe shortcut to home, not realizing the two cultists were there until they had raised their stub guns.
It was a funny thing, in her mind. She moved, the rounds fired with thick booming echoes In the tall alleyway, and she felt them hit her and Gloria. Their bodies fell to the pavement, ribs broken and lungs punctured, she died choking on her own blood holding her sister's hand as the hooting lunatics came up to them, knives in hand to peel their flesh off.
Then she was standing again, and she tried desperately to move another way, this time the gunshots crippling her legs, and she managed to live long enough while they skinned her alive.
Then she stood again, fire in her veins is adrenaline rushed through her. Her grip on Glorioa's hand was so tight she was sure she might have broken something, but Gloria looked to her with terror, looking to her older sister for what to do. This time she pulled them back into the tunnel, and the stub gun rounds went wild, ricocheting off the walls and at their feet. They ran back, the darkness enough that the cultists could not get an accurate shot, but as they made it to the other side she saw that Gloria had a bloody arm from shrapnel hitting her.
They made it home via another route, but that had shaken her, and her next dream was different. This time she beheld a giant of a man, sitting at a golden chair suitable for his immense size, clothed in elegant yet vast looms of cloth assembled into a robe of a kind she did not know. Across from him and the table he sat at was an old man, also wearing simple gray robes, a staff leaning against his chair. The two seemed involved in a game of some kind, a square board with carved pieces, but Gwendolyn did not know the game.
This time, unlike other visions, the giant man turned to her, and he smiled. No other dream had anyone notice she was there watching something unfold, yet he gestured to her and said, "It seems we have a guest. Come here, little one."
The Giant waved his hand, and a chair moved on its own, fluttering close to him. Gwendolyn felt something deep in her gut, realizing that he seemed right, like her but different. If she was but a seed, he was an entire Forest to the horizon and beyond.
She numbly sat in the chair, wondering what exactly was going on, and the man chuckled, a glint of golden light in his eyes. The old man that was his companion looked at her and grunted in dismissal, preferring to look at the chess pieces and ponder his next move silently. The Giant looked at her and said, "This is a game from an ancient time, I have played it with many friends. It's called chess, would you like to learn how to play it?"
She nodded, and as he reached for some kind of robotic man to get refreshments the dream ended, and with the start and a jerk she woke back in her bed. Unlike some of her other dreams she did not want to forget this one, it felt completely different. She wrote it down, thinking about it quite intensely. Who was that giant man with the golden eyes? She never heard of a human getting that big.
Two days later she fell asleep that night and, again unlike any other vision she had, went back to the same place. The giant man looked completely unsurprised at her reappearing offering her over as the robot man from before brought a cup filled with a steaming brown liquid. "Drink this, you'll feel better."
In no dream had she been ever able to pick up something physical, yet her trembling hands held this massive cup with no problem. Her first sip was an Awakening of something she did not know she lacked in her life until that very moment. The blooming of a thousand feelings inside of her that she had never felt, quite possibly never would again. She felt a colorful mosaic fill her soul, the skies awash in love, lust, adoration, delight, and much more besides. Yet much of the negative was bound in it as well, anger and rage for having been denied this for so long despite never having been capable of recognizing it until now, grief for said lack until now, a lifetime of seemingly a potential opportunity lost. It wove together into a rainbow, her eyes dilated, her breath hitched, and she took another gulp.
"It's called hot chocolate," the golden giant said, amused. "Yet another wonder that has been lost, yet I've been trying to bring it back in my gardens." His smile flickered. "Seems children are still children, even after all these years."
He turned to the old man, still frozen and thought. "I thought I might give our guest a small tour." The old man grunted, waving his hand in dismissal, and the two of them walked through a room much larger than she had initially seen. Her vision expanded to encompass this giant room, something so large Denva's largest ships could easily be in one and yet there would be still room besides. There were machines in various corners she did not recognize thrumming with power doing something she could not understand, in another corner armor and weaponry mounted on racks ready for use, kept to a gleaming edge. In another far corner a group of men in golden armor stood, yet the Giant waved them back, and they let him walk around.
They made an unlikely pair, her tall skinny self and the Giant. He gestured to the racked weapons. "I prepare for war on a scale rarely ever seen, I got the impression you're not unfamiliar with violence." She nodded mutually. "I thought so. Too many worlds out there have people flailing and begging for peace." The golden spark in his eyes flared, his shoulders stiffening with resolve. "I mean to bring them that piece, if I can. Though I'm not sure my works will last, but any great journey needs to take that first step."
A smaller room jutted off the main room by a series of sliding doors, which opened as they approached. Inside were bookshelves and a vast wooden table, the top of which was covered in what seemed to be a large map of a landscape unfamiliar to her. There was no water, yet the mountains and jutting valleys were simulated by bumps and artistic sculpting of terrain. She could see where water at once flowed, yet the colors on this table were mostly brown and beige, with few spots of green life on it at all.
"Here the game resides." Giant gestured to a series of golden icons, she supposed his army. "It is a game fought with blood and purpose, but one worthy of being fought. If blood is to be spilled, it is best to confirm the validity of your target before ever pulling the trigger or pulling a blade." He looked down at her. "You will be great, you hold power and have the seeds of purpose sewn within you. Yet first you must survive."
He pointed at the icons of the opposing armies near him, forces of green, silver, and blue. "In a way I am trapped now too. These forces stand between me and my ultimate goal. We're both aiming to survive, but first we must recognize where the threat is."
He turned, his immense bulk moving completely silently as he knelt by her side. He put a hand upon her shoulder.
"Knowing there is a trap is the first step in evading it."
She spun away from Him, spiraling off back to familiar territory. Denva's alleys loomed again in the darkness of night, but now she saw the cultists from before, now with more of them backing them up. They had stubbers, knives, even crude saws so long they could kind of be called swords if you were mad, which they were.
And they were coming for her, she was certain of it.
She woke her parents and sister, and they grabbed their running bags, sneaking off into the night.
Now she was seeing while awake, something disorienting and a bit frightening. She went down one alley, and they all died from a traffic collision. This alley, they were caught up to by the cultists, and died again, but...very slowly. This path, a psychopath stalked the darkness, killing Gloria and blinding Gwen before a knife went into her brain. Again and again she lived through her death, and the death of her kin...but she now knew the way.
They made their way out of the city into the rural countryside, and, painfully, inch by inch, they approached the border to the Zone. Daylight rose as they got near the perimeter, but her visions had not stopped, if anything they intensified. Visions of a Festival going mad, robot soldiers murdering tens of thousands, erupted in her mind, but with a hiss and biting her tongue so hard she drew blood, she focused on the pain and kept going. Must be the Festival they had heard of, shutting down the Zone or something? News had never been her strong suit to pay attention to.
The border was a tense place, the landscape bulldozed and sculpted to become a defensive perimeter. Solid plascrete walls and watchtowers had been erected going from horizon to horizon, the most elevated landscape features given prominence in erecting sizeable facilities. Drones and other flying machines flew the air regularly, and Gwendolyn could see that there was no path through without being spotted...so they got spotted, standing in the middle of a roadway with no obstructions, waiting for another flyover to see them.
It wasn't long until a transport drove up with a squad of soldiers. All was as she had seen...until her head spiked in agony, the chanting of ethereal monsters hammering in her ears. She screamed, collapsing to the ground as blood poured from her nose and ears, the ritual performed across an entire planet reaching its apex.
Then...silence. The haunting howls ceased, replaced by...fire and ash? She lay on the ground shaking, unable to stand as the soldiers approached, weapons drawn. Gloria darted in front of her, and a nervous soldier fired, sending her back with an arm blown off. Gloria howled as their father and mother were restrained by now-alert soldiers, but her agonized sounds tapered quickly to mewls, then silence.
Gwendolyn's eyes closed, and she knew no more.
***
Again she stood in the giant's room, yet now he wore the terrible golden raiment that had been on racks the previous times. The chess board was empty, the game long concluded. Lessons learned.
He still smiled at her approach, kneeling down. "I had been hoping you would come back, little one. What is your name, time wanderer?"
"G-Gwendolyn, my lord. Gwendolyn Kytante."
"I am honored. My name...I have had many." He paused. "I fear this is the last time we will see each other again. You are on the path, and terror and blood have been spilled." He sighed, a terrible gust of breeze from one so massive. "I have blood yet to be spilled."
He looked back. "I have a gift for you, if you will take it." She nodded, of course she would! He reached out his armored hand, and a large seed appeared, bigger than her hand, but a seed it obviously was. "This is my latest harvest from my gardens, it will grow into a plant that will recreate that drink you liked so much. It takes processing, but your...allies..." He hesitated. "Well, they will help you figure out what to do with it."
"Where do I plant it?"
"You will know when you arrive there." He stood, his shadow overwhelming hers against the opened door in the far distance, a legion beyond of ranked soldiers. "It is time, little one. Farewell. Do not heed the whispers."
She knew better, always had, but she smiled as he marched away.
***
The aftermath, while terrible, meant life went on. The Festival had been saved by Explorator Vitae and her troops, turns out, but...her sister was dead.
She tried reaching out to her parents, but their haunted looks were burned into her eyes for the rest of her days. What might have been...
It was hard to not hate herself, to view her Sight as a curse. She had done all she could, and even she could not anticipate -
- Could she?
The door opened to her chambers, and a wizened old woman hobbled on a grav walker into her room. She was a tiny woman with light-brown skin who seems aged beyond her years. Decorated in robes, sigils, and vestments, she looked mysterious, her eyes cloudy either from age or something else. "Who are you," Gwendolyn asked.
The old woman sat on the edge of her hospital bed with a thump and a grunt, looking at her intently. "I am an odd messenger," she said finally. "A lifetime ago, I was almost chosen for this opportunity, you know."
Know what?
The old woman chuckled. "You have not seen this moment?" Frozen, she mutely nodded. "Well, its not reliable as machine work, I suppose." The old woman paused. "My name is Kezathi Zenza, from the Uland Estrana conclave. I have your abilities, and know of others like yourself. Psykers, they call us."
Gwendolyn frozen. She had heard of psykers, but in the same ways that little kids are told to behave or the bed monster will get you. People just...vanished, whisked off to places she didn't know. "Why-why are you here?"
Kezathi snorted. "You're a powerful little girl, but you saw how your visions are not always reliable."
- Gloria's bloody arm torn from her corpse, blood on the ground -
Kezathi nodded. "Yes. She will be missed...but many more could be at risk, if you do not learn control of your power."
"You're-you're going to teach me?"
"Somewhat. You've entered into politics, my dear Gwendolyn, a shady area at best. You're a powerful asset to those in power, and you're being waved at our latest savior for more boons for our world."
Suddenly a vision appeared, that of a void in space, above their world. Strangely, despite being in the void, it was shouting very loudly, all the time. "What was that?"
"Explorator Vitae's ship, it has shields to block those with the Sight, unless you know the way." The old woman paused, her long braided white hair twirling in her fingers. "I was almost chosen, you know." She jerked, looking at the frightened little thing in the bed. "You'll do fine."
Kezathi stood up slowly, leaning on her grav
walker. "You're to be shipped off to the Conclave in the morning, we're to get you started on containment basics. Do you have everything you'll need?"
Gwendolyn looked at her "running bag" in the corner. All of the obvious survival elements - food, water bottles, etc - had already been removed, leaving precious by way of her own possessions. And her parents...
She looked back at the old diviner, determination in her gaze. "I'm not afraid, I'll go with you. If I can do good with this Sight I have, I need to learn how to use it better."
Kezanti nodded, leaving the room, and as the hatch closed Gwendolyn sighed, thinking of her broken life, and what might yet be. She laid down on her bed and wept.
Clutching in her hand was the one possession she valued above all else, kept under her pillow...a large seed, glowing with golden light.
***
Name: Gwendolyn Kytante
Age: 17.5 Denvan years
Height: 6 ft
Weight: 134lbs (as of end of omake)
Mental Status: Semi-Stable, but determined to get better
Possible Traits?:
- Survivor
- Compassionate
- Ambitious
- Diligent
Just brainstorming the traits, obviously the GM can fill them in his he desires. Overall I think this is a pretty good short story I wrote to flesh her out and give her a bit of a background.
EDIT: Added 10lbs to her weight just so she's not too terribly off.
Far from Home Shadows lay for untold ages in the fetid eternities of The Warp. Blazing lights of Souls glistened throughout , minds like stars glimmering in an infinite Sea of thought and void. Desperate voices crying out in an endless cacophony of silence, every other sound drowned out by the mad laughter of thirsting gods, and the whispers of their souls pressing against all that lived. Well... almost all that lived. A bare fraction of shadow was vaguely darker than the rest these days, a clamor of neverending voices chattering and chittering like the clattering of insectile legs across a fractal of crystalline beauty. Endless repetitions of 'nonononononononononononononononononononononono-' denying and defying anything and everything that dared to touch it. Not that IT noticed or cared.
The creature of ancient times that swam this Sea knew of the Four Essences that ruled in these times. Unlike the before times- which were yet to come, an ancient memory of things that never were and always had been- the sea of today roiled and thrashed, writhing in the storms of the Essences tantrums in vile and sickly ways. The corruption was strong and sickly, bleeding down through layer after layer, even to the deeper, darker parts of the sea that had lain dormant for ages before the Essences had never even been conceived, and would persist long after they were forgotten by themselves. But still, the taint ran deep and was sinking.
The vastness of the taint, it's pervasiveness, it sickened that which dwelt beneath. Worse was the light. Light was foreign to this realm, the glimmering, short-lived flashes of sparkling beauty the only intended sources of illumination. Not now- for the briefest of times, yet still persevering, there was a lighthouse. There had been many gods of light who dwelled in the Sea, but those that had lived long knew not to drag attention to themselves by lighting up the Sea itself. not so much this one, born in the Wake of the Essences domination and shining since. It grew dimmer over time, as all lights do, but it was so much more slowly than normal that still. And then the scar blazed out, and the creature took interest. The barest fraction , of a fraction, of a fraction of itself was released, to watch more closely. This being then sent off a fraction of a fraction of a fraction to truly enter the Upper Sea. It could not enter without damaging the Sea, however.
Thus, a fraction, of a fraction, of a fraction of that was in turn fractioned smaller and smaller, over and over and over until finally a being equal to one of the four was produced. Once again fracturing itself, it sent a tiny flickering spark out of itself, a spark compared to the planetary core that was the Essence equivalent, and even that found itself searing out the bodies it tried to inhabit- dozens of young stillborn by the blaze of power inherent to it. It shattered itself then- if it was like an ocean, it's smaller offshoot fragments were unto grains of sand. Here, a bare few began to survive, while the rest shattered down even farther- grains of dust or individual cells compared to the sand from before.
More lived this time, nearly every single one. The Creature watched, letting it's power seed the Upper Sea with fresh light, and brighter lights. It had been many long ages since it had last performed such an act. And now... now it waited, watching the brightest of it's offshoots as the rest of its self was gathered up into itself once more. So little was lost from it that when it reclaimed all it had given up save that which now was tied to the souls of the Upper Sea, it found there was no difference to its strength. Curling around the darkest of the depths, the kingdom of shadows and darkness deeper and blacker than any mind could imagine... it waited. Most of these new, brighter lights would be food for the four Essences, and their taint. But some... some found their way to the places near that miniscule fragment of space that echoed with denial, refusing all who came near. It pondered on what it would discover, what strength and power the newest ones would wield, and how the sudden increase in numbers would impact the mortals that dwelt beyond the Sea, all the way up in the Real.
And far from any who could hear it, the beast began to whisper, it's own voice echoing like the ticking of a clock as it watched and waited, the world above slowly shifting into ever-more dangerous places and beings. A great doom was coming, an end to some great and terrible thing... but it was eager to see On a world, in the galaxy, in a space far from the nightmare that birthed the fragment that was tied to it, a child slept, it's soul brighter than it should be. This child would die, driven mad by power and damning her world in her insanity. No mind was designed to handle being an Alpha level Psyker with any level of stability. But though she didn't know it, her purpose remained as potent as ever... the same as countless others. To find what would cause the next big ripple... and shake things up. Perhaps she'd even live long enough to help cause it.
