I was still watching the fight between Orikan and the st Deceiver Shard when Trazyn finished up, his newly filled Tesseract Labyrinth hanging from his metallic hips.

  “If you are interested in World Spirits, I have a sizable shard of another one in my collection,” Trazyn said conversationally. “I believe it would be well within your rights to ask for it in return for services rendered today.”

  I thought about it for a long second before shaking my head. Those souls were perfectly safe in the Prismatic Galleries, and besides, asking for that as a reward would be stupid. From a purely statistical standpoint, there were many better things to ask for if my sole deciding factor was how many souls I could save with it from becoming a daemon snack.

  The only way that World Spirit stood out was that it might make me feel better about myself and erase my guilt.

  Fuck me, since when have I got a hero complex? That shit needs to go if I don’t want to drive myself absolutely bonkers.

  “I have something else in mind,” I said after a moment. “A few somethings, a list, really. Since I’m not certain what you do have access to and what you don’t.”

  “Well, ask away,” Trazyn said, clearly inordinately pleased with himself after adding another C’tan shard to his collection. “In the meantime, we might as well finish up this battle. The Fyed Ones have lost cohesion with the Deceiver on the back foot, victory is inevitable, but I am loath to have so many tomb guards destroyed when it could be avoided.”

  “My Draugr have it handled,” I said, and at his questioning look, I gestured at the pair of combat drones who were tearing a way through the Fyed Ones’ ranks. Gauss Fyers were somewhat more problematic for them than other types of firearms, but I could easily manage them by moulting off the surface yer of the drones’ armour just before they got hit. Not that I allowed them to get hit a lot, nor did the majority of the Fyed Ones use their -ranged weaponry. Which was cool of them; it was much easier to deal with regur cws than molecur disintegration beams. “I found myself with a nice bit of real estate, but it sits right at the edge of that disgusting Great Rift. So Bckstone. How to produce it, how to work it, where to find it, how to use it optimally. Anything from that list would be immensely useful.”

  “I am no expert, so the only information I can give you is where to look for the knowledge you seek,” Trazyn said. “However, if merely pure bckstone is also something you are interested in, I have recently stumbled upon a pnet with a solid bckstone core. The entire pnet is made of it, in fact, aside from the few kilometres of regur rock on the surface.”

  “Might as well get the resources beforehand,” I said, a bit disappointed but not surprised. Trazyn was an Archivist, not a … whoever dealt with bckstone. “And the knowledge? I believe I will have to extract the bckstone myself, so that much should be well within the scope of my payment.”

  “Varius Cryptek specialisations work with Bckstone,” Trazyn said with an easy nod. “The Technomendrites were the unquestioned masters of science once upon a time, the inventors of our greatest machines, and that mastery of science, of course, extended to bckstone as well. If you could find one with an intact data-cortex, you might be able to learn more about Necron technology than the 99% of Necrons alive today combined. Unfortunately, their order was as powerful as it was scheming and greedy; their downfall had been arranged by the Silent King himself. Their punishment for their crimes was wholesale exile into a subspatial realm where time passes at a fraction of the pace it does in our universe.”

  Trazyn hummed to himself, idly swinging his Empathic Obliterator to bisect a Fyed One that rushed him. The resulting psychic ripple that struck all nearby Fyed Ones killed another twelve of them. I made another pair of Draugr, and had these ones circle around us to keep the chaff out of our hair while we were chatting.

  “Of the Cryptek Disciplines of this day, I believe Technomancers and Geomancers would be the most knowledgeable, especially the Triarchy-aligned ones,” Trazyn continued. “Technomancers are our … mechanics, engineers, mechanical scientists all wrapped into one. Geomancers, on the other hand, study what humans refer to as ‘alchemy’, or in more archaic terms: material sciences. My dear colleague might also know some peripheral information about Bckstone as a Chronomancer, but likely only in how it affects his own spells. Aside from them,” Trazyn gave a wry chuckle. “I believe the Silent King would know the most. As, he has not been seen for sixty-five million years. You’d likely have more luck trying to stumble upon the sealed subdimension holding the Technomendrites.”

  I gave Trazyn a strange look, which he took a moment to notice. His still deathmask turned my way, allowing his optics to take in my bemused expression. The green orbs behind the narrow slits he had for eyes narrowed, but I just gave him an innocent smile.

  “You know something,” he said. “Or at least you think you do. But again, the powers granted by the Empyrean have always been unpredictable, and foreknowledge is most prevalent among its practitioners. Did you gain a vision of the Silent King? How do you even know who that is? He is little more than myth.”

  “You must have been exceptionally busy these st three centuries,” I mused. “When was the st time you’ve been to … Gheden?”

  It took some doing to dig up the name of the Throneworld of the Dynasty Trazyn belonged to from the depths of my memories, but the minute jolt that ran through him made it worth it. “Perhaps slightly longer than usual, couldn’t have been more than a millennium.”

  “Well, you may not take my word for it, but I have reason to believe Szarekh has returned from his self-imposed exile somewhere around 720.M41,” I said. “So around three centuries ago. He’s been visiting Throneworlds and Tombworlds in disguise, working through unknowing Phareons and Overlords to help along the Great Awakening.”

  “If that is true,” Trazyn said, slow and thoughtfully. “Things are about to become … troublesome.”

  I snorted. “Indeed. Very much so, if what I’ve foreseen is still set to happen as I’d seen it.”

  “I don’t suppose I could convince you to rey what you’ve seen in your … visions?” There was a clear distaste in his voice as he spoke that st word, which had to be entirely intentional for a Necron. I’d noticed he’d been simirly disparaging of Orikan’s Chronomantic Techno-Sorcery, so I shrugged it off.

  “Everything has a price,” I said, then gave him a predatory grin. “The question is, can you pay it, and are you willing to pay it? Put a pin into that thought, though, I don’t think some information nuggets I could have learned by beating up any Overlord I came across are worth my assistance in defeating not one, but two C’tan Shards.”

  “The pnet with the bckstone core is little more than a nugget of information,” Trazyn said.

  “Are you going to tow that pnet over to my new haunt, or will you just give me the gactic coordinates and tell me to do whatever I want with it?” I raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  Trazyn stared at me for a long second, then turned away. “Name your price. First for the services rendered here, then for whatever information you have on the Silent King.”

  I smirked, though he couldn’t see it. “Do you have a Technomancer or Geomancer Cryptek in your service, oh Overlord of Solemnance?"

  “I would have to wake one from their slumber,” Trazyn said. “That is not to be done lightly. If you wish to be given lessons on Bckstone from one of each, that will exhaust your payment for this battle.”

  “Lessons until I’m satisfied?” I asked.

  “If done in good faith, yes,” Trazyn said. “And I will order them to only reveal information about bckstone, and nothing else.”

  “Agreed,” I said, nodding happily. It was as good a deal as I was going to get. For high-end knowledge on working with bckstone it seemed I would have to make a deal with Szarekh himself, or worse, with the Void Dragon. But that was an extreme st resort. You don’t wake the sleeping Dragon without a very good reason. “Then, onto the matter of my information. This might be beneficial for your colleague to hear too, and I have some questions for him about things I’d seen him do in the future. Things that seemed … worrying. I’d like to pick his brain- err, core-matrices about it.”

  “He can pay for the information himself if he wants it,” Trazyn said with a dismissive wave, though I could see that his metallic fingers tightened around the haft of his weapon when Orikan cshed with the Deceiver above, sending a resounding shock wave reverberating across the entire cavern.

  “Fine by me,” I said with a shrug. “Szarekh has recognised the Tyranids as an existential threat to the Necrons, and more so to his ultimate goals of reversing Biotransferance. If there is no organic matter left in the gaxy, then there is no material to use for the reconstruction of organic Necron bodies. However, he has also recognised humanity, and with the opening of the Great Rift, Chaos, as great threats. His first campaign after announcing his return and calling all Dynasties to his banner will be the construction of the Pariah Nexus, or the Contra-Empyric Nexus in your people’s tongue, out in the Nephilim Sector. It is supposed to be the first of many such Nexuses, which are all to join in a network that is supposed to separate the Empyrean from the Materium entirely once fully completed."

  For obvious reasons, I was going to have to throw a wrench into Szarekh’s pns. If that network really did get built, every st living creature with a soul would be absolutely miserable all across the gaxy. Or dead. Probably dead. But the Psykers? Super dead, every st one of them, and I would get locked away in my Realm.

  If all went well, I could avoid torpedoing my chances of making a deal with Szarkh if everything proceeded as it had in canon. Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade should be able to stop Szarekh’s project before it escates beyond being a single Nexus.

  “I suppose that will earn him some enemies?” Trazyn guessed, and he couldn’t have been more right.

  “Roboute Guilliman, Belisarius Cawl, Vastor the Arkifane, Eldrad Ulthran,” I listed, then smirked. “And of course, Imotekh the Stormlord. The new Phaeron of the Sautekh Dynasty is rather pleased with his shiny new necrodermis form and has zero intentions of going back to being a weak thing of flesh and blood.”

  “Ah,” Trazyn said, his optics dimming. He stayed silent for ten long seconds before giving a grunt of annoyance. “Troublesome indeed. A civil war within the Necron Empire … very troublesome, if it comes to pass.”

  “It’s inevitable,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe it won’t happen that way, but Imothekh is not one to kneel, and his ultimate goal runs contrary to Szarekh’s. They are natural enemies … and from what I’d seen, your Dynasty remains loyal to the Silent King. Despite sitting on the border of the Sautekh Dynasty and being a fraction of its size.”

  The Sautekh Dynasty’s holdings stretched from the gactic north down to the south and took up maybe three-fifths of the gaxy’s entire height while also being rather chunky in width. Then you had to add in the Sautekh vassal dynasties, all of whom rebelled against Szarekh at Imotekh’s order. That civil war was going to be nasty. The other dynasties were all smaller and scattered across the gaxy; very few even bordered each other, and none held such a massive, coherent territory as the one under Imotekh’s control. Szarekh would have his work cut out for him.

  Which might just be the opportunity I need to extort him for all he is worth. Imotekh is going to be a problem sooner or ter, having his Throneworld within spitting distance of the Jericho Reach, by gactic standards. I might as well get paid for causing him trouble, which I would do anyway, considering his foreign policy can be summed up in ‘fuck everyone who doesn’t bow down to me, and doubly fuck anyone made of icky meat.’

  He was the reason Necrons as a whole had a reputation in the Imperium for being murderous, non-thinking robots intent on exterminating all life within the gaxy. With the Sautekh Dynasty being most active and numerous, it was the Dynasty the rest of the gaxy had to deal with. The majority of the other dynasties were rather isotionist in contrast.

  “Any other horrible predictions you wish to ruin my good mood with?” Trazyn asked wryly, though he was probably more worried about all this civil war business getting in the way of his hobby than anything else. I decided to ruin that for him.

  “I saw Orikan stand with him,” I said, peering up at the vaguely humanoid creature made of pure cosmic energy. He was pying with the st Deceiver Shard, backhanding it away with contemptuous ease whenever it tried to make a break for it through the Eternity Gate behind us. “With Imotekh. I saw him swear eternal vengeance upon you for absconding with that C’tan shard you’ve just bagged.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?” Trazyn asked, sounding appropriately concerned, and maybe a bit betrayed by that idea. Not that he had any right to for the tter after what he had done to Orikan here just before my arrival, or centuries before. The Astromancer had spent centuries digging his way out from beneath an entire damned mountain until even his living metal fingers turned into stumps and his internal system alerts’d gotten so numerous that they obstructed his vision.

  Then Trazyn ignored his advice on leaving the sleeping Dragon — or in this case, Star God — lie. You don’t stand between the kleptomaniac and the rgest archaeological find of his life. Orikan had tried, and Trazyn left him a crawling wreck with a chassis dented in more pces than not.

  In his defence, he was kinda infected with the Deceiver’s stupid mnemonic thought virus, which made him even more obsessed with getting the tomb open than he otherwise would have been.

  “He wishes for that form he has now not to be so temporary,” I said mildly. “And he wishes for it to become the norm for all Necrons. For him, reversing Biotransferance would be akin to taking a step back on the evolutionary dder. That up there is the step forward.”

  Unfortunately, the Star God form came with an appropriately sized ego that drowned out the real Orikan. I remembered reading the passage in the book about how his outlook on life changed in that state. He viewed everything as insignificant, too small for a being as grand as him to even think about.

  I paid attention, teasing out what little emotion I could from the Transcendent Orikan and engraving it within my memories. The cold detachment that felt frigid enough to freeze a star, the ego the size of the gaxy, the casual sadism that he didn’t even think twice about.

  That was what I could become if I wasn’t careful. That was what I would become if I didn’t anchor my humanity, if I just … let go. An unfeeling, detached monster.

  Orikan’s mistake was seeing an opportunity for more power and tching onto it without actually considering its consequences, or perhaps disregarding them entirely. I couldn’t make that mistake, neither of them.

  For him, it was tapping into the ancient cosmic power underlying reality. For me, it was Faith and the suffocating Mantle of Divinity.

  I’m powerful enough. I do not need to resort to wielding double-edged swords.

  P3t1