“Daemons,” I started out calmly. The main task here would be to convince these bullheaded Tau that the silly idea of ‘the Warp’ that those superstitious humans believed was really a thing. “You already know of them. Likely believing them to be a species of alien adept at phase or teleportation technology, and probably long ago ascertained that they are fundamentally incapable of ‘peace’ or anything of the sort. Yes?”

  The admiral gave me a nod, though my enhanced eyesight caught his expressions minutely twitching in a show of nervousness.

  “There were hundreds of what I, and those in the know in the Imperium call ‘Lesser Daemons’ down on the pnet, summoned forth by the Chaos-worshipping mongrels you had been fighting there,” I said. “Bloodletters to be specific, little red things screaming about blood and skulls as they do their best to cleave off your face. Small, weak, dumb as rocks, but many in numbers. Can this hologram transmit illusions I make?”

  “It should.” Aun’saal gave me a nod, though he didn’t seem entirely certain.

  I snapped my fingers, and a lifelike replica of a Bloodletter snapped into being at my side. I patted its ugly, bald, elongated head between the curling horns. “So?”

  “There is some interference, but the software should calibrate itself in a moment … and done, the image is being transmitted,” Aun’saal said.

  “You Tau, as a species, are incredibly fortunate in the grand scheme of things,” I continued where I left off. “Your civilisation is what? 6000 years old? You have advanced faster than any other species, grasping technology that took humanity many more millennia to build after they first started urbanising. You are a civilisation that got into space as a very young species, and thus, you likely still have many thousands of years until your souls grow to a size where it can establish a substantial presence in the Immaterium. Or perhaps you truly won the genetic lottery, and you will never evolve to that point, forever remaining hidden from the monsters that dwell in that realm.

  “You probably think it’s just mysticism, human superstition, but it is not. Psykers are those whose souls become strong enough to establish a permanent link between the material universe and the Immaterium; they are gateways, conduits. They draw on the ever-present energy in that realm to work their ‘magic’, if you want to use that word, but they must be careful lest they open the gateway too wide and something manages to slip through.”

  I patted my little daemonic illusion on the head again at that point. “Like this little guy. They kind linger near souls strong enough to summon them, or let them through; they whisper, they promise power, riches, influence, strength of arms, knowledge that shouldn’t exist. They tempt, they twist, they corrupt. Usually not these little ones, though; they are dumb as rocks, as I’d said before, but they have rger kin, stronger kin, ones with eldritch minds that can run circles around mortals. That’s what I fought, a Greater Daemon, the most powerful of their kind that can manifest in realspace. I fought one of many, and while that specific Daemon is now erased from existence, it was far from the only one of its kind. Questions?”

  I saw dubious expressions on their faces. Suspicion, distrust and dismissal were the predominant emotions painted on their blue faces. They thought I was talking out of my ass, just another human too blinded by superstition to have a scientific expnation.

  “This … Immaterium, this realm you mentioned,” the Admiral spoke up after a few seconds, his gaze having been focused on empty space for the time. He probably got questions to ask sent to him by some twats too high and mighty to talk to me themselves. “We know little of it. Could you expand on it?”

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “It is a reflection of our universe, a dimension of pure energy on the surface. In truth, it is concepts, emotions and thoughts that rule it. It is where faith and belief manifest and turn into something substantiated. You would know of this, wouldn’t you? I have felt your nascent God, the personification of the Greater Good that your human subjects’ belief formed.”

  Incomprehension was the most common reaction, followed by disgust, but on the floating heads? The eight Tau who were the ‘high command’ of this fleet? They frowned, even the three Ethereals. I grinned. They knew. Jackpot.

  “These creatures formed of belief are the weaker denizens of the Immaterium, the most powerful ones are manifestations of concepts, and become more powerful in accordance with how widespread the concepts they embody are across the gaxy. These are the creatures we humans call Chaos Gods, the Ruinous Powers, the Archenemy, the Primordial Annihitor. There are four: War, Decay, Change and Excess.” I said. “I will not name them, for that would draw their attention, but know that they are what all daemons come from, every single daemon is a fragment of these four, a tiny sliver of War in the case of this little Bloodletter, or a much rger chunk of Change in the case of the one that gave me some trouble.”

  They were clearly dubious still, their little blue brains probably working overtime to throw together some scientific alternative for what I was saying. Cut off the superstitious fluff, and you arrive at the true science, or so they probably thought.

  I gave a wry smile, recalling that my own thought process was exactly the same at first when I tried to decipher Adeptus Mechanicus dogma and rituals. Turns out, Machine Spirits were real though, and they were all like cranky old cats that only ever did what you asked if you gave them incense treats and praised them in binary.

  Sometimes, there was no scientific expnation grounded purely in the material sciences. Didn’t mean I would stand for Machine Spirits making a mess of my technology; their chaotic nature grated on my 21st-century sensibilities. Any tool you used needed to be dependable before all else, and easy to maintain. A pistol that needed daily oil baths, an incense sauna, and a prayer to maybe work was not dependable in my book.

  Maybe if I knew they were 100% loyal and reliable like my favourite space noodle, or my mind-cores, I wouldn’t mind, but regur Machine Spirits were too whimsical for me to trust. Now that’s a thought. Maybe I could make Machine Spirits of my own, loyal only to me. I put trying that out on my to-do list.

  “Is there certifiable proof that this ‘realm’ exists, beyond just your say-so?” The admiral asked, and the way he tensed up and seemed to ever so slightly hesitate before speaking up at the same time as one of the big three floating heads narrowed his eyes. I squinted at said floating head, giving him an unamused look. Did the fucker think he was too great to talk personally with someone as lowly as me?

  “I can throw one of you through a portal if you want first-hand proof, I don’t need rituals or sacrifices like those weaklings down on the surface did,” I hummed. “On that note, that is how the Imperium’s Warp-drives work. Poke a hole in the veil and throw the spaceship into the Warp. The Gelr Field … usually protects them from the realm’s denizens, but sometimes it fails, and they get eaten. If you tried reverse engineering Warp-drives before and the ships inexplicably disappeared, never to resurface, or reappeared years ter with their crews half-dead, half-mad as nails?”

  Seeing some looks of dawning horror before denial washed it away, I didn’t bother suppressing a grin. “Then that’s what happened, they fell prey to the monsters of the Warp, or perhaps the currents tore them apart, or maybe they just got swept up in a Warp Storm and they’ll be spat back out in a few thousand years. Only the Orks are mad enough to travel the Warp without adequate protection. Your usual FTL technology escapes most of the dangers only because your ships coast on the veil, in that thin in-between that separates realspace and the Immaterium, which is why they are nowhere near as fast as the Imperium’s ships: physics still has some grasp in that in-between, while it has none in the Immaterium.”

  “If physics has no grasp on this realm, how come Imperial ships still have a travel time?” The admiral asked almost curiously, trying to poke holes in my expnation. “Our ships are still subject to the ws of physics and retivity, if less so in this ‘in-between’ dimension.”

  “The Warp is atemporal,” I said, shrugging even as my answer gained me only dismissive or disgruntled looks. It sounded like bullshit to patch up my spotty theory even to my ears, but it was the truth. Warp travel always took as long in the Warhammer 40k universe as it needed to for the plot. The easy, science-adjacent mumbo-jumbo answer was that time was a foreign concept in the Warp, or at least in the Deep Warp, but it was still very much fluid in the shallows where ships occasionally travelled. “Well-throdden paths have a reasonably constant flow of time across them, but even then, it can shift from moment to moment. The same ship taking the same Warp-jump might spend wildly differing times getting to its destination. It’s just how it is. If you slip off the path, all bets are off, though, like if a whirlwind swallows you up, you never know where, and when you’ll reemerge.”

  That should be enough for now. I decided, watching the wearying emotions fsh across the Tau’s faces as they shot each other unsubtle gnces. Most of them probably thought I was delusional, or something of the sort, but if they took science as seriously as I thought they did, they would frantically try to disprove my words with facts. Which isn’t happening, since I told only the truth.

  The dawning realisation was weeks, maybe months, off into the future. I wished I could be there when the first Tau saw more and more parts of my tale being proven by facts, and started to wonder: what if? What if she was telling the truth? If she wasn’t lying about these, but then maybe she wasn’t lying about anything?

  I’d just have to make do with putting a very literal fly on the wall and watch the recording when the time came.

  “I feel obligated to ask, though feel free to not answer,” the admiral spoke up again, drawing my fading attention back to himself. “It is evident that we have been almost entirely unaware of your true capabilities. Would you be willing to share what we should expect in the future? It would make pnning our offensive much easier if we had a firmer grasp of what exactly you can do.”

  I tilted my head, my face frozen in a stiff smile as I held the Tau’s gaze through the hologram. He gulped, just slightly, masking the act with a frown and a grunt, but I caught it. I wanted to grin, and then I did, letting it break through my carefully crafted mask. It was just so fun to see how unnerving I could be when I consciously took control of every muscle in my face and pushed every single button in the uncanny valley section of my foes’ brains.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” My tone was light, almost singsong, as I gave them all a wild grin. “Only imagination, creativity and willpower limit the powers of a Psyker of my calibre. None of which I ck.”

  Nor do I have all that much, but you don’t need to know that. Finding new, creative, inspired applications of my powers was a work in progress, and I suspected it would remain so till the day I died. Willpower, though? I was cheating on that front with my super sparkly soul, but it was still my greatest weakness. My mind was no bear trap like the Lion’s predatory psyche and nor was it an impregnable fortress like some of those zealous simpletons serving in the Emperor’s legions.

  Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. In that respect, I was cursed, you could say. I was very much aware of the monsters I had to share this gaxy with.

  The Tau looked suitably put upon, and I almost chuckled, but didn’t want to press this alliance to the breaking point just for my amusement. That’d be so much work wasted. I instead pstered a genial smile on my lips and eased back, which resulted in my audience mirroring me a moment ter in response, some even heaving sighs of relief.

  Good, they were starting to shut down. I could practically feel it in how their walls of denial started to roll up as they stopped entertaining my words lest they allow doubt to begin eroding their pitifully limited understanding of the world. Other world-shaking revetions would have to wait for another time, a time where my words would be proven and said words would have more weight to them. Then I could begin enlightening them about their true pce in the gaxy’s pecking order and make them understand just how desperately they truly need me.

  Not that everything I'd said was the truth, my st words hadn’t been all that accurate. A Psyker’s hardest limiter would always be the strain their bodies could bear, the psychic throughput of their souls. Though how desperate they were also pyed a massive role. A psyker with nothing to lose and the willingness to obliterate their own soul to accomplish a goal could bring about powers leagues above anything they could otherwise exhibit.

  If I were willing to … what could I achieve by pouring my very soul into a psychic attack? My mind-cores worked on that question furiously, but came to no firm conclusion. They couldn’t quantify the unnatural quality of my soul, no matter how hard they tried, but I got the idea that it would be a really bad time for anyone caught in the crossfire.

  I hummed thoughtfully, then dismissed the idea. It was a worthless thought; I kinda needed my soul to survive. I had given that ‘dying’ stuff a try before and it sucked massive balls. I was not intent on ever trying it again.

  But the spiteful, paranoid part of me noted it down. If all else was lost, I might as well throw everything I had into the mother of all Smites and shove it up the Chaos Gods’ ass before they could cim my soul.

  It would also save me from whatever nasty thing they would want my soul for. Oblivion was a better end than becoming a toy to one of the Four.

  P3t1