Two Avatars, I could get used to this. Lightyears apart, both acting out my will. One worked almost like a drone, pacifying the now awakened popution of the Fortress World of Spite back in the Jericho Reach while simultaneously working on setting up repcements for all the missing orbital defences and void-based fortifications. Soon, that Avatar would venture forth, raking through the Iron Colr’s worlds and securing my grip on the Reach’s beating heart. It was boring work that would have tried my patience if it were all I had to do.

  Amberley, Cain and even Octavian helped me in wrangling the popution, and Selene was just an angel, always there to smooth out my fraying nerves. Even if the naughty little minx avoided paperwork and anything that reminded her of her duties as a noble dy, like they were the pgue, oh well, I had mind-cores for the most boring, repetitive tasks. I was the leader of my … faction — or whatever else you wanted to call what I was building, it wasn't quite the Empire I was hoping it would become one day, after all — so it made sense I’d be the one to suffer the many downsides of that position.

  It was also made much more bearable by the fact that my other Avatar, currently located on the Dead World of Serenade, as the Imperium of Man knew it. I sat with my legs crossed in a meditative pose, floating a few metres off the ground. It was mostly just aesthetic, but I found that pretending to be a Jedi did put me in the right mindset for deep focus.

  Before me floated a small chunk of rock. It was bck, dark as the abyss that swallowed not only the light but the thoughts and emotions that would have sent the waters of the Warp churning. Bckstone. Noctilith. It looked like nothing but a fancy piece of rock. If you told me it was just impure obsidian, I would have believed you in another life.

  I had been poking and prodding this tiny chunk of obtuse rock with everything I could throw at it for two hours now, and I was pretty sure that it was the frequency of the energy I used to interact with it that mattered the most, not the energy itself. It reacted almost the same to both bioenergy and soul energy, aside from the obvious fact that it had a nullifying effect on the tter.

  It was like there was an invisible, ephemeral switch inside the rock that I was just barely managing to brush my mental fingers across when I happened upon a resonant frequency close enough to the correct one. I knew it was there, but I only caught brief glimpses of it, like I was in a dark room blindly filing to find the light switch, but it kept moving around.

  But it wasn’t moving around, I was just … only managing to touch upon parts of it. It was like the switch existed in a hundred ever-so-slightly different yers of reality, and I needed to simultaneously press on each to flip it. Phases, it reminded me a bit of Necron Phase technology with its sub-spatial dimensional fuckery.

  Did that mean Bckstone was Necron in origin? Maybe C’tan? It was spread out all across the gaxy as if it were a natural mineral, though, so maybe not. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was on the right path. I just had to figure out how to resonate the energy I used at like twenty — that I have found so far — different frequencies at once. Easy peasy … not. It was exactly the kind of finicky control exercise that I tended to struggle with a bit, but I decided to take this as another opportunity to shore up that weakness of mine. Slow and steady, I still had a week until Trazyn wanted to leave.

  A dozen other experiments ran in the background, and hundreds more of smaller tasks beyond that to occupy my sizable processing power. It’d be a waste if even a single mind-core spent too much time just idling, so all of them worked on something. Maybe just optimizing an old tempte, iterating on them, developing new ones. A solid number of them directed drones aboard the Sovereign as they went through experiment after experiment, trying to figure out how to produce inorganic things with the Void Kraken tempte, testing out new temptes, processing every tempte through Kroot-based refineries, or experimenting with ways to improve the Null-matter production. I also had a dozen Jokaeroo drones running around, held under careful watch as they took apart the less interesting items from my sizable war spoils and put them together again in new, inventive ways.

  Maybe the smart thing would have been to wait, to get those lessons Trazyn had promised me first so I could get started on trying to work out the mysteries of Bckstone with a foundational understanding of the material already under my belt. However, I wanted to give it an honest try before preconceptions and perceived impossibilities narrowed my imagination. With the power of the Immaterioum flowing through me, everything was possible. Luckily, I’d stumbled upon a path, perhaps not the correct one, but a path that I was reasonably certain led towards success.

  Bckstone … I wasn’t sure whether it was a natural material or entirely artificial. As much as what I was doing made me feel like a common thief trying to pick a lock, that could just be my own perception of it. It could be a metamaterial built by the C’tan or the Old Ones, a weapon that could be used against Warp-based foes or to amplify one’s own power in the Warp.

  Piece by piece, I could feel myself getting closer. Each brush against the ‘invisible switch’ was another step closer to my goal. It wasn’t so much a switch as trying to press against a river’s current to reverse its flow. Not a perfect metaphor, considering that was impossible, but it felt close, like if I just managed to grasp the entirety of the flowing water and push … yes, that’s what I needed to do. The pority would swap over, and then the flow would be reversed, and dampening would become amplification.

  The chunk of stone ate my soul energy when I wasn’t careful with it, or perhaps erased it from existence. There was no effective difference between the two. It made working with it harder, but I had much better control over soul energy than bio-energy, so I still decided to use that one. Bio-energy refused to exist outside of an organic vessel, vehemently, which made it challenging to use for this, even with soul energy being messed with by the Bckstone.

  The process was repetitive and extremely tedious, and yet I devoted myself to it entirely in a way I never would have been able to do before. I had the attention span of a squirrel in my … old life, few things managed to keep me focused, and a task such as this would certainly not have been one of them. It helped that my mind was divided, and that when I grew bored, I just focused my active attention on my other Avatar or one of my drones while my body continued working almost by itself.

  Minutes flowed into hours, and hours into days as I slowly, painstakingly put together the pieces of the puzzle. If I were going by that metaphor, then it was like I was trying to put the puzzle together without knowing the result, and while blindfolded.

  The week’s end neared, but I had it. I knew I did; it was within arm’s reach. The st failed attempt to push and reverse the flow had revealed the final misalignment of frequencies I’d made. Now it is perfect. It’ll work.

  I hummed under my breath, despite not needing to. A dozen different sounds reverberated in my alien vocal cords, and hundreds more that the human ear couldn’t catch. I used my voice as a guide to tune the energy, to align it all into a weave that was so complex it would have given a human an aneurysm if I had forced them to visualise it with a bit of telepathy. There was a geometry to it that obeyed no physical ws, nor was it bound to a meagre three dimensions.

  My own human mind couldn’t comprehend it, but it was there, crystal clear and perfectly visualised in my head. Perhaps that, more than anything, revealed that the depths of my own mind were still alien to me.

  I shook off that worrying thought and pushed, heaving my soul energy against the small chunk of Bckstone in my palm. Where before it had always faded into oblivion when I tried it, this time it didn’t. The energy flowed into the Bckstone, fitting into it like a key into a lock.

  A change overcame the Bckstone chunk in an instant, its dampening effect vanishing as the pority flickered and then clicked into pce. I felt my energy fill it as it belonged there, expanding to suffuse every st atom of the strange rock.

  It glowed with a dim silver light to the naked eye, and to my aura, it felt like a tiny piece of my realm. Soul energy inhabiting a physical vessel, but not contained by it, no. The vessel protected it, empowered it, and made it more intense.

  Almost without thinking, I reached out to that energy now separated from me, and it replied with familiar eagerness. It was still mine, still soul energy. I twisted it, imbuing it with the Warp-burning silvery fmes of Smite. To my delight, it worked perfectly. The Bckstone burned with an unseen silver fme, the shadows flickering around me. The fme was maintained, permanent until extinguished by force.

  My mind-cores also noted how the rigid reality and the thick Veil that made drawing on my Immaterial power reasonably more challenging here had lessened by a sliver of a fraction when holding the silvery Bckstone.

  But only for me. Because it is my energy in there, it resonates with my tiny Sea of Souls. The Warp is still being kept at bay all the same.

  I was all but certain then that this Bckstone had to have been made by the Old Ones, the undisputed masters of wielding the forces of the Empyrean. It was too perfect a weapon for it to be natural.

  But then why the Warp-dampening effect? A part of me wanted to say that it was for bance, that the fact it was as potent a weapon in the hands of an Old One as it was when wielded against them might have been what gave it its power. Or maybe I was just trying to find a reason where there was none. This st week has taught me that if Bckstone was an artificial creation, then its creators were geniuses beyond my comprehension. It didn’t matter why it existed, who made it, if anyone did.

  It was here, and it was a magnificent weapon. That’s what mattered.

  I stretched my legs, having the silvery Bckstone float behind me with barely a twitch of my will, and then I flew down into the canyon, down until I reached the Bckstone surface under the regur pnetary crust. I touched it and then prodded it with my energy, willing it into the ‘shape’ of the ‘key’ I had uncovered, and then I pushed.

  I could grab it, sure enough. There was no problem with finding the ‘switch’ this time; the ‘key’ was working just fine. The problem was that, push as I might, it barely even budged. It was like trying to lift a mountain, or perhaps more accurately, a small pnet.

  For its rger size, and even more so due to the strange, fractal structures woven into the Bckstone, the pnetary core of Serenade had an immense Warp-dampening effect.

  Fractal. Szarek had arranged his Bckstone Pylons according to some arcane fractal pattern spread out across many star systems in the Pariah Nexus. Hadn’t he? Those somehow must have exacerbated the effect.

  Firstly, I recorded everything my aura and all other senses could perceive about the colossal Bckstone globe down to the molecur level, and then I began a ruthless campaign of vandalism, leaving no fractal pattern I could see undisturbed.

  Only a few hours remained, but once I was done with that, I felt that the dampening effect had lessened substantially. Still, when I tried again and pushed, I just barely managed to make the ‘switch’ move. It was progress, but far from enough. I needed more. I wasn’t willing to leave this pnet sitting here undefended. Bckstone was perhaps the most valuable material in the entire gaxy. I wasn’t about to leave a moon-sized chunk of it just lying about while I hauled my ass all the way over here to try again ter, with my other Avatar.

  So I began to sing, drone after drone, each a perfect clone of myself detaching itself from me. Each one joined my choir, soul energy vibrating in their bodies in perfect synchrony with my own, and soon the song of the crotalids reverberated across the fabric of space.

  Inside my realm, my soul itself mirrored the action, and the ephemeral thread that connected my Avatar to it across infinite distances began to shrink. A thread turned into a tunnel, then a cavern, and then … a gateway. The Veil thinned around my avatar, soul energy slipping past between the loosening threads in the fabric of reality.

  The gate remained closed, the Bckstone pnet beneath my feet stubbornly keeping that final and greatest viotion of physics at bay. I took a deep breath, my body trembling as not just raw soul energy cascaded through it in violent waves, but also presence. My soul was so close, closer than it had ever been to truly inhabiting my body.

  Anywhere else, I could have forced it. Thrown open the Gate, stepped into Realspace with my Soul and possessed my Avatar. I think. It would have surely damaged the Veil, or even reality itself, just like the manifestation of Greater Daemons marred the fabric for decades to come across the span of entire star systems.

  But I was greater than a mere Greater Daemon, wasn’t I? How much damage would merely stepping through that Gate do? How much damage would merely opening it and fully unleashing my Soul’s presence upon reality do? Perhaps the only reason the fabric was staying even this solid was because of the colossal mass of Bckstone reinforcing it to a ridiculous degree.

  I need to be careful with this in the future. I decided, but then shook it off. With renewed focus, I flexed my will and then pushed.

  Reality cracked like a pne of reinforced gss, a web of fracture lines cascading across its surface from where the argent glow of my Realm shone through. Energy poured into the now re-porised Serenade like a tsunami, draining my Realm and making those cracks spread all the more. I could feel the energy expand, imprinting my presence over the entire chunk of psychoactive Bckstone as if to cim it, to tie its presence to mine in some metaphysical sense I couldn't quite yet fathom the full scope of.

  I … kinda panicked. More with intent and will than any conscious thought or pn, I yanked the entire pnet through the closed Gate. It passed through, now much less real than moments before, and then it was gone, leaving me floating inside the hollowed-out crust of the pnet.

  Inside my Realm, at the very centre of it, Serenade phased into existence. It was more solid than anything else in my ephemeral Realm; it was real in a way nothing made of soul energy could be. It had an instant and sudden effect on the entire Realm, reinforcing it in a way the pnet had reinforced reality just moments ago.

  The cracks slowly started to fade as I stopped singing, allowing my Soul and Realm to once again grow more distant. Still, the fabric had been frayed, not as badly as when Daemons manifested and left it downright mangled, but still much thinner than it should have been.

  Oh well, this pce was far from civilization, and quite far from the Jericho Reach too. It wasn’t my problem.

  Once I learned how to make proper Bckstone Pylons, I could shear parts of Serenade off for the material to construct them. At the moment, I was pretty sure I was using the material like an absolute primate from the Necrons’ perspective. Sure, you could beat in the head of a person with a chunk of iron ore, but it was much easier to kill the same dude once you’ve forged that raw ore into a sword, a spear or even a rifle. I was firmly in the cavewoman stage of Bckstone technology. The Necrons could achieve a more thorough dampening effect with a single Pylon per pnet than my moon-sized chunk of Bckstone could by default. I needed to learn.

  Perhaps once I knew how to harness its unique properties, how to hone and focus Bckstone’s effect in its Warp-dampening state, I could apply some of those onto its current, Warp-amplifying state too.

  Will I be able to summon it back into realspace without harming the Veil and the fabric of reality? I wondered somewhat hopefully. I’d only stood on the changed Serenade for a brief instant, but for that moment I felt safe. The entire world burned with my own silver fmes, and I knew that if a single Daemon dared to approach the world, or even its imprint in the Warp, they would burn. It was better than mere dampening, which was a passive defence. This had been a wall with teeth that not only would have stopped incursions but would have burned out the source.

  Fun. I hope Trazyn won’t drag his leg for too long. Those lessons can’t come soon enough.

  P3t1