The Stigmartus, as well-organised, armed and assisted by diabolical Psykers as they were, was not really much of a threat. I could feel every psyker across the system, and even all of their auras put together wouldn’t have amounted to even a hundredth of the psychic potential my Avatar could bring to bear.

  The Demons, now those were somewhat more worrying. Not only because their sheer number could hide a more powerful creature beneath, but because some Chaos ritual might just plunge the world I’d come to conquer into the Warp. Kinda. That’s how Demon worlds worked, wasn’t it? Pushing them halfway between the Warp and the material world, making Daemons able to manifest there at will and without their powers diminished.

  That happening was near the worst-case scenario, with the true worst case being if the Daemons somehow managed to twist my mind, or worse, Selene’s.

  The sadistic fucks would no doubt love to do the tter just to torment me. I wouldn’t have it.

  The problem was I could already feel that the veil holding back the armies of the Ruinous Powers was thinning. Whatever the cultists were doing on the pnet, it was slowly but surely nudging the system down the path towards becoming a Daemon world. It was still in the early stages, but it was already further along than I would have liked.

  I’d have loved to plop down a bunch of Necron Pylons and reinforce the veil to such an extent that not even psykers would be able to exist within, just to spit into the Four’s soup, but I unfortunately didn’t have any pylons on hand.

  I doubt Trazyn would be willing to part with any, or give me the schematics of how to make them. Shame.

  If I had those bckstone pylons and could calibrate their intensity, I wouldn’t have to use my current Tyranid Shadow method to keep out the nasties from my slice of reality.

  First things first, I grabbed my lovely girlfriend and reinforced our Bond, fshing my aura bright to purge any chaos taint that might have built up in, or on, her body.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to stick to my side like a love-starved limpet, Selene,” I said. “That’s the only way I know to prevent any Daemon from messing with your mind, or doing something even nastier to you.”

  “You’re not telling me to sit this fight out too, are you?” She asked, eyes narrowed. She probably had an idea of the answer, but she always did love to be certain and hear me say these sorts of things aloud.

  “Nope,” I said, giving her a once-over, now covered from the neck down in her once-again improved battle-gear. “You’re just going to have to bear with me breathing down your neck while you do it. … Oh, I’ve got an even better idea!”

  My aura surged, flowing out in an expanding tsunami of power and covering a vast section of the star system. At my will, it evened out, rippling and churning, but with no ascertainable centre or point of origin. It was evenly spread.

  Then, I grinned and pced my hand on my lover's shoulder and flowed into her armour, subsuming the bio-energy making up my avatar into it.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me using you as a trap,’ I spoke into her mind. ‘I’m not sure any Greater Daemon will be dumb enough to take it, but it just might, and you get to go wild on some Chaos worshipping twats this way.’

  Selene shuddered, breathing a bit shallowly as her cheeks reddened a bit.

  “Stop that,” she hissed, swallowing thickly as I stopped … squirming around in her armour. Yep, I was just settling in. Nothing indecent. I was just adjusting some stuff to fit her better. Yep. Totally. That was why I made certain parts vibrate. “You’re incorrigible.”

  ‘And you love me for it,’ I said smugly, feeling her fondness through our bond, and seeing the affectionate smile on her lips as she sighed. ‘But I’ll be good, promise! … for now.’

  Selene merely huffed, spping the armour on her hip as if to chastise an unruly pet.

  ‘Ow.’ I gave a dramatic yelp, which had her snorting. Another win for Echidna.

  “Behave,” Selene said with a snort, patting the armour again, like it was a pet. I, of course, spread out my nerves into the armour so I could actually feel the affectionate pats. It was a bit weird, but nice. I should do this more often.

  It also meant I felt everything the armour touched, inside or out. A happy little coincidence.

  Sadly, we had work to do and a star system to conquer. Though I wasn’t especially keen on going out of my way to cim this mudball for myself, I could make use of the Tau for this one. The word ‘alliance’ usually implied a roughly equivalent amount of effort from both sides, and so far, the Tau fleet did little else but watch me do all the work and then worry their blue little asses off about the implications of my actions or whatever.

  My goal for the battle to come would be kicking the daemons back to hell and smming the door shut behind them so I wouldn’t have to worry about a germinating Daemon world in what was practically my backyard in gactic terms.

  The reinforcement fleet that’d been sent to this system originally was still rgely present, skirmishing with the Stigmartus fleet near the pnet. Neither side had an overwhelming advantage, and so they’d been having small cshes to keep each other occupied while the ground forces battled it out down on the pnet.

  The Stigmartus had the obvious advantage on the surface when it came to … just about everything other than sheer numbers and long-range artillery.

  Unfortunately, the Tau’s main strengths weren’t of much use on this pnet either. The swampy, thick forests made their rger vehicles, including the battlesuits, unfeasible to put to good use.

  Worse, they had absolutely no idea how to deal with the Warp-powers the Stigmartus brought to bear. Lesser Daemons to pad up the infantry, Psykers to create chaos and interrogate prisoners, and their troops’ generally inhuman ferocity.

  Well, I decided to let the Tau handle the enemy’s naval forces. With the Tau fleet following behind me, reinforcing the present fleet, we would have an overwhelming numerical superiority.

  In turn, I’d be handling the surface. Or rather, Selene and my combat-drones — I mean, draugr — would. I would be her trusty sentient armour until she met a problem she couldn’t beat to death or slice into sufficiently tiny bits.

  Another reason I decided to take the surface deployment as our responsibility was that I felt the most powerful Warp presence down on the pnet. Likely their Warmaster, or its equivalent. Chaos Lord? I think? Was that how mortal Chaos war-bands called their leaders?

  I felt Selene had a good shot at beating the guy’s face in … if the Four twats didn’t intervene and shove a whole lot of Chaos mojo up the guy’s ass when he looked to be losing.

  Gently, I wrapped yers upon yers of my own soul energy around Selene’s mind and her connection to her soul. Her own protections would be sufficient for most things, but I wouldn’t be taking chances with my lover’s soul … it was my greatest treasure.

  The Sovereign slid into orbit above the pnet with the unpronounceable name, and the Tau fleet flew past us, heading out to reinforce their fgging allies and finally get themselves bloodied.

  Selene was practically vibrating in anticipation, though she didn’t show it outwardly. She barely had acceptable targets to let loose against since her power had crept up to its current level, so she was eager to bash in the faces of some chaos-worshipping idiots.

  “Can you do proper drop-pods?” She asked. “No teleports, just old fashioned flying buckets filled with very angry soldiers.”

  “Your wish is my command,” I spoke into her ear. Really, it wasn’t like it would be too hard to plot flight courses for drop pods to avoid the enemy’s anti-air artillery, since they’d surely try to shoot them out of the sky.

  Drop down on a part of the pnet where there weren’t entrenched Stigmartus positions, you say? What kind of loser talk is that? Drop pods were made to be dropped on top of enemy fortifications! And so they shall be, with all due theatrical fir.

  The Sovereign flew as low as it could with its massive bulk, and I had to fire up the PDTs to shoot out a few enterprising missiles heading its way.

  Below, the rgest ongoing battle of the surface was going in full swing, headed by the Warmaster-equivalent himself.

  “Hey, what are you pl- Eeeee-“ Selene, perceptive as she was, felt the mischievous thoughts forming in my mind, but she was still unprepared for the floor to open up under her feet and drop her into a long slide. She squealed for five seconds straight as she slid down the tube, then started giggling and I added in some twists and twirls for the proper amusement park experience.

  When she came to a stop, she found herself dropped into a newly formed drop pod at the belly of the ship, and if she looked out the reinforced viewing ports — windows — she’d have seen thousands of simir pods forming all across the ship’s length, and those were filled with battle-ready draugr.

  “Fasten your seatbelts,” my voice reverberated in the pod with the lilt of an overly cheery air hostess. “Thank you for entrusting yourselves to the Echidna Express. We hope you’ll enjoy the experience. We take no responsibility for possible concussions. Enjoy. Launching in: 3 … 2 … 1 … GO!”

  *****

  Reginald had been ‘normal’ once. Just a boy, growing up on a farm, on a backwater pnet no one’s ever cared about. He had parents, friends, and a crush on a girl from the nearby hamlet whom he was working up the courage to court. He even had little siblings who looked up to him and depended on him.

  That had been so very long ago. A lifetime, or more. The memories were faded, the faces gone, names and voices nothing more than distant impressions of faint familiarity and nostalgia.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing from the before mattered. He had been blind then, but now he knew, he had been made to see the truth.

  Whispers crawled around in the dark reaches of his mind, hiding in forgotten corners, cwing at his conscious mind, grasping, reaching, twisting, SCREAMING.

  Reginald twitched, every muscle in his body contracting all at once, from the tips of his toes up to the top of his head. He stumbled, falling to his knees and steadied himself with his arms on the muddy forest floor.

  The others, the rabble who could not see dared not approach, pulling away from him and for good reason. He squeezed his eyes shut, teeth grit as the whispers screamed, pounding inside his skull.

  Reginald’s mind cracked open to the warp and a hundred voices pressed in at once. Some screaming, some whispering, all promising. A childlike giggle tittered. ‘Burn them, little candle, make them ash…’

  Another voice crooned on with unending hunger hidden beneath a velvety facade. ‘One more soul, just one more, and I will show you wonders…’

  Beneath them, a guttural chant rose like thunder through mud: bloodbloodbloodbloodBLOODBLOODFORTHEBLOODGOD-

  Laced between the chaos came fragments of sense — his own name spoken backwards, a lover’s voice pleading for mercy, and a command in a nguage Reginald did not know but understood all the same.

  “Open wider.”

  The crack widened and power flooded Reginald’s body, fraying his sanity. The torrential influx of energies straight from the Empyrean took with them much, memories, faces, scents. It didn’t matter. The Gods wanted him strong, they had a mission for him, their will had been made crystal clear.

  Reginald growled, rising to his feet and stumbled, his face snapping up to the sky. His mouth opened wide, jaws unhinging and the Warp-fire gathering inside his body spewed forth with a roar of a hundred screaming souls.

  The wet canopy above was obliterated in an instant, sending fming wreckage crashing down around him. The rabble scattered, screaming and shouting as they ran from the fmes of their Gods.

  Reginald paid them no mind. He stared up, a hungry fme burning beneath his eyes. The blue sky was dotted with a thousand fming stars falling towards the surface. They burned so bright, screaming towards the surface, avoiding the incoming artillery trying to blow them out of the sky.

  Reginald’s eyes were drawn to a single star, following the whispers. He grinned, hearing the voices cheer in his mind and cackle gleefully as he watched the falling star.

  “Follow.” Reginald spoke, his voice ced with power and for the first time in his life, echoing with the Will of the Four. The rabble shuddered, dutiful and disciplined rabble that they were, they still knew to fear the powers of those they served.

  Reginald set off, the Warp-fire still crackling around him, and a hundred Stigmartus cultists following in his wake. His steps were measured, though not unhurried. Every st Psyker of The Stigmartus would have heard the Call, they would all be heading for the Fallen Star. This was a blood hunt, the prize the favour of the Four and Reginald was determined to be the one to tear out the Star’s soul himself.

  He knew it, in his bones, heard it from the whispers. There was no greater sacrifice for the Four than that brilliant soul. He had to have it, had to be the one to hand it to them. This was it, his chance at greatness. Immortality. Power beyond imagination.

  This. Was. It.

  He just had to kill the Star.

  P3t1