Two hours ter, I found myself in a grand conference room inside one of my arcologies on Ravacene, one of those responsible for reguting the magma buildup around this section of the continent. I rose to my feet, having tracked the incoming Imperial delegation since the moment their shuttles left their ships.
The doors slipped open with an electric hiss, revealing the Deathwatch Commander and the Inquisitor Lord standing side by side, followed by their retinues behind them. On my part, I only had Amberley and Octavian at my sides, with Selene standing back against the wall, acting like she was one of the Draugr I’d pced around the room to act out the parts of my bodyguards.
Not that I needed such things, but it sold the image of me as vulnerable, which would hopefully make my enemies overconfident and, in turn, sloppy. It was a long shot, but even if it didn’t work out that way, I knew that appearing at least a bit vulnerable humanised me, made me more approachable, which was also a nice little benefit … when I needed to project that image.
It was the Astartes who stepped forward, helmet hanging on a maglock at his waist and leaving his face visible. He stared at me with the stoicism of a man who’d faced down horrors beyond comprehension, and came out of the experience hardened, instead of broken.
He raised a hand perpendicur to the ground, then spread his fingers into a V-shape, two fingers on each side.
I stared at him, blinking in incomprehension. There was no way he really was doing what I thought he was doing. Then he spoke. “We come in peace.”
What the hell. A snort escaped me, and then I was giggling like an idiot at the absurdity of the situation. A Space Marine had just greeted me with a Vulcan salute and spoke the trademark phrase of the United Federation of Pnets from Star Trek. There was only one way I could reply once I got my giggling under control.
I raised my hand, fingers parted between the middle and ring fingers. “Live Long and Prosper.”
The Astartes gave me a strange look. He’d been giving me a strange look ever since I snorted, but it went up in intensity at my words. He shared a confused gnce with the Lord Inquisitor, who merely seemed to shrug, then he slowly, almost awkwardly, lowered his arm.
“I’m very interested in where you learned that greeting,” I said, then gestured at the seats opposite to mine. “Do take a seat, though; there is no rush.”
They did so, though with great care. As if they couldn’t quite believe that their strange, arcane ritual had managed to appease the great, terrible beast that I was. I did my best to suppress another fit of giggles that threatened to break out at that thought.
“Introductions first,” I said after a moment, seeing as no one was willing to speak up. “I’m Echidna. This-“
“Octavian Gaius, Adeptus Custodes,” the golden giant said.
“Amberley Veil, Ordo Xenos,” Amberley said right after him, taking her cue from the custodian. “It’s been a while, Lord Abraxas.”
“It has,” the Inquisitor Lord replied, looking warily between the two of them, like he was trying to — and failing to — compute the fact that I had a custodian in my corner. He probably would have written off Amberley as having gone rogue had it just been here, though. “But we didn’t come here for niceties and small talk. This is our st stop before we too retreat through the Warp Gate … given that our path will not be barred.”
“You are free to leave,” I said, smiling. “I will even give you a goodbye gift. I’ve collected quite a number of prisoners of war, which I’d be willing to relinquish into your custody. If whatever this meeting is supposed to be ends on a good note.”
“Prisoners of war?” The Astartes spoke up for the first time, and I turned to look at him.
“Three Grey Knights, a few hundred Sororitas, about four hundred Storm Warden Astartes, including their Chapter Master and a handful of Deathwatch Kill Squads.” I maintained eye contact as I spoke. “All of them made an honest attempt at killing me, failing so miserably that I don’t even hold a grudge.”
Mercy was the privilege of the strong, and I was strong enough to be merciful in this instance.
“Our greeting has been conducted according to written instructions,” the Astartes said after a moment, holding out a hand into which one of his retinue swiftly pced a small metal box. “As is this. A gift as a sign of our intentions.”
I raised an eyebrow, Atish hovering close to me in case it turned out to be the nasty kind of ‘gift’. I opened the box with telekinesis to find a humble dataste inside.
Grabbing it, I formed a suitable port for it on the back of my hand, along with the data-adapter I’d made to interface with simple technology like this directly. I jammed the pendrive-like device into the port, my eyes widening at the absolute shitload of storage space on it, every st byte of which was currently in use.
I skimmed through the files and couldn’t help but gasp in delight, then grin. It was a gene library, filled with DNA sequences and genetic samples, with more than enough information for me to use my Eldritch flesh to replicate them. None of the temptes were powerful or in any way useful at all in making me a more formidable fighter. They were as mundane as they could be, millions of pnt and animal genetic samples. In total, there were nearly a hundred million different animal and pnt species immortalised on the dataste, all of which I’d immediately copied over into my own mind once I realised what it really was.
What made all the difference in the world was that I recognised a majority of them, all of them having been part of the ecosystem of the Earth I knew. Regur apples, carrots, pears, corn, wheat, cows, dogs, cats, and everything else. Every st animal or pnt species I knew from my old life was there, waiting for me to make use of it.
It was a useless gift as far as power accumution went, but it meant so much more than just another new toy, weapon, or psychic trick.
“Who?” I asked, my voice coming out a bit harsher than I’d intended as I turned my intense stare on the Space Marine.
He slowly reached down, grabbed a rolled-up scroll of parchment from a bag at his waist and pced it on the table between us, unrolling it. My gaze was immediately captured by the signature at the bottom, which practically vibrated with psychic significance.
Revetion
My eyes widened. Shit. This was big, huge. I gnced back at the two men sitting opposite me, one Inquisitor Lord and one veteran Astartes. Both looked on with concealed curiosity. They didn’t know.
“Where did you find this?” Octavian rumbled, his thus-far concealed presence exploding forward like a tidal wave. He could do a statue impression so good you sometimes mistook him for one, and forgot he was even there until he'd made his presence known once more. Like now. Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who recognised the closest thing we had to the True Name of the Emperor of Mankind.
“The deepest vault of the Omega Vault, in Watch Fortress Erioch,” Commander Mordigael replied, looking tense. His Astartes Brothers had their hands on their weapons, and the Inquisitor’s pet assassins also looked ready to rumble.
“Octavian,” I said, my voice infused with just enough power to reach him and snap him out of whatever this was. “Calm down, they’ll tell us what they know about it. Won’t you?”
“There isn’t anything else to tell,” Mordigael said. “The vault opened, and inside were two altars. One held that parchment and the other the gift.”
“What was that gift?” Octavian asked.
“A genetic library,” I said, letting myself show my glee with a smile. “It contained every pnt and animal species that once made up the ecosystem of ancient Terra. Millions of genetic temptes condensed into that tiny form and primed for me to absorb, quite ingenious.”
Ingenious, yes, but also extremely worrying. This meant Emps foresaw me coming into existence, had the Eldritch abilities I had, and even pinpointed Jericho Reach as the site where I was going to settle down. And if he could foresee this all, then so could the Four Twats. I’m not some out-of-context problem that blindsided them, nor was my rebirth here a fate-breaking event like Guilliman’s rebirth.
Extremely concerning, however, hear me out: fried chicken. I could finally make fried chicken again. And French fries! And apples! Ohhhhh, I’m gonna cook, like, all the food recipes I know. I wonder whether Selene will like apple pies or curry. Hmm. What should I start with?
“We know not who penned the letter, but the contents of the Omega Vault had always been of great help to our efforts within the Jericho Reach,” Mordigael said, dragging my wandering mind back to the present. “So we decided that following the instructions id out in the final vault would be … prudent. Especially seeing as we are abandoning the Sector for all intents and purposes.”
I gnced down at the parchment, my gaze lingering on the bottom half, which was written not in High Gothic … but in pin English, though in old-school cursive. I ignored that for now, reading the instructions written in Gothic, then gnced back at Mordigael.
“Tell them of the enemy whose strength eclipses your capabilities? Tell them of the threat that eludes your efforts to solve?” I raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him.
“We’ve concluded that it is referring to the phenomena known as the Dark Pattern,” Mordigael said. “Since I doubt you need us to tell you of the existential threat that is the Cicatrix Maledictum.”
“The Dark Pattern,” I repeated aloud. It sounded familiar. I’d almost certainly read about it. Probably on one of my te-night wiki dives where I bounced from page to page, deep diving into Warhammer lore at 2 AM, instead of sleeping like a sane person. “What is it?”
“Entire systems, stars and rogue pnets all move in strange ways, outright ignoring the ws which usually bind the movements of celestial bodies,” Abraxas said. “They align themselves into a pattern, written across the entirety of the Reach, likely even beyond the reaches of explored space.”
That tickled my memory some more, and I let loose my mind-cores on gathering whatever fragments and echoes of memories remained. I tapped my fingers on the table, humming thoughtfully, and then it was done. It’s been ages since I’d read that page, so even the reconstituted memory of it was fragmented to say the least, but that was enough for me to get started.
“You suspect Necrons, right?” I asked, though it was more of a statement. I didn’t wait for them to confirm it. “You have a … something, a book, an old tale? Something that talks about it?”
“Are you … perhaps referring to the Derleth Lexicon?” Abraxas asked. The name felt ever so faintly familiar, so I nodded after a moment. “Yes. It is a strange book, filled with overlong, extremely flowery prose, but it speaks of the return of the ‘crippled-king’ and the cataclysm that will herald his rebirth. We believe that this Dark Pattern is a way for the Necron Tomb World to hide the massive fre of energy that accompanies its entering the final stages of its awakening.”
“The crippled-king,” I hummed. It clicked a moment ter. I remembered watching a video about neat Necron lore tidbits. “I believe you might be correct. I will have to cross-check this, however, if the ‘crippled-king’ is supposed to be who I think it is, then this is going to be an exceptionally annoying hunt.”
Abraxas looked interested and didn’t deign to rein in his curiosity either. “‘Who you think it is’? I would very much like to know who you think it refers to, even if this matter is no longer my concern. Consider it an … academic curiosity.”
“I didn’t, and still don’t know where the specific Dynasty is located,” I said. “But if I were to think of a Necron Phareon, then the only one the title ‘crippled-king’ would apply to would be Ahmontekh the Crimson Scythe, the Phareon of the Suhbekhar Dynasty.”
Was it in the Jericho Reach? It could be, though I didn’t know. I only heard the tale of the mad Phareon, whose apocalyptic rage crippled not only himself, but his entire dynasty, even though his awakening process had been halted midway through. It’d started with a sliver of resentment he held for a rival dynasty that betrayed him, a sliver that he held onto as he sank into his Great Slumber. That seed of hatred refused to rest with him, and distilled for sixty million sor years, that iota of resentment grew to consume the sleeping phaeron's entire consciousness so that, when the Tomb World’s control program attempted to awaken him in response to a transmission asking for assistance coming from the very rivals who he loathed so much, it burst forth like a tsunami breaking through a fatally breached dam.
All that Ahmontekh had once been was gone, consumed over the aeons by his own hatred even as the st residue of himself looked on helplessly. Perhaps had the Necrons not sold their souls to the C’tan, something of him might have survived to fight back against the raging bitterness within, but it was not to be.
Now, the Crimson Scythe of old is no more, and that distilled essence of his resentment of his own cousin dynasty is all that remains of his consciousness.
“His Crownworld was called the Hollow Sun, and it was hidden inside one of the stars in a star cluster,” I said, frowning as I recounted what little I remembered. It was a super awesome Crownworld, literally hidden inside the fusion core of a star, which was probably why it stuck in my memory so clearly. “The … Sa- S-something Drift. I can’t remember.”
“The Slinnar Drift star cluster sits in the distant reaches of the Sector,” Abraxas said after a moment, looking thoughtful. “It is rather inaccessible, being all but cradled by the curve of the Cicatrics Maledictum, and being at the distant edges of the Orpheus Salient.”
I pulled up my mental map, and sure enough, the ‘Slinnar Drift’ sat opposite Vallia on the other side of the long Warp Storm linking the Great Rift to the Hadex Anomaly. Beyond the dozens of worlds and systems beset by the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Dagon. Joy. I’d have to go right through all that, and sail right along the length of the Great Rift as I did. Surely Chaos wouldn’t throw anything nasty through the Rift to fuck with me. Surely.
On the other hand: super secret base inside the heart of a star. There were no words to describe how impossibly cool that was. Soooo … dibs.
“I’ll need to verify the information first, but it seems that we now have a likely candidate,” I said, rather pleased with myself and the results. Sure, having a dynasty of Necrons in my backyard was bad, and fixing that little issue was going to be a pain in the ass, but it’d be worth it.
I was pretty sure Trazyn wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about it, either. He was persona non grata in the Sautekh Dynasty and was not allowed inside a handful more unless under strict guard due to his kleptomaniac tendencies. I doubted he’d be especially hard to convince to part with everything he knew about the Suhbekhar Dynasty.
Why was I so worried about a smaller Necron Dynasty with a crippled-king at its head? Well, you see, I recalled that the Crimson Scythe had once killed an Eldar God, according to the legends. The wiki page even mentioned that his Warscythe was so potent that it’d once shattered a pnet with a single blow. Whether that was an exaggeration or the truth, the fact remained that the Phareon was probably one of the most dangerous entities alive, even blinded by his rage and cking his military genius.
“How would you verify such a thing without going there and seeing for yourself?” Mordigael asked, frowning.
“When you want information about Necrons, you ask a Necron.” I shrugged. “It just so happens that I have a good working retionship with an Overlord. With how Necron dynastic rivalries can get, I wouldn’t need to offer much in the way of bribes to get information on a rival Dynasty.”
I avoided naming Trazyn directly; the asshole had a reputation even among the Imperium, and if I remembered correctly, more than one Astartes Chapter swore eternal vengeance upon him. The Space Wolves and the Samanders, among them, just to name a few. I was sure an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor would recognise his name.
“Dialogue with Necrons is a futile endeavour," Abraxas said with a mild hint of disdain.
“Dialogue begins by putting yourself into the shoes of the one you are talking to, Inquisitor,” I said, my own voice mirroring his disdain. “You try to understand who you are talking to, so you aren’t just talking at them.”
“There is no understanding those mercurial creatures,” he replied, clearly offended by my tone. “They are all some kind of mad, their minds rotting in those soulless bodies.”
“Yes,” I said. “All of them suffer from the effects of being more than 65 million years old; that’s no wonder. But if you figure out the specific Necrons’ peculiarities and py into them, they can be dealt with … well, some of them. Destroyers and most of the Sautekh Dynasty’s Necrons are a lost cause, as you well know. With how aggressive and numerous that dynasty is, they are the ones you meet most often. The majority of dynasties are happy sitting inside their tomb worlds and twiddling their thumbs until an overzealous tech priest starts poking them with a stick.”
I didn’t know why I was even trying to convince him, or even what I was trying to convince him of. I knew that their stance was objectively the optimal one to have if you wanted an all-purpose code of conduct for how to engage a random Necron Overlord whom you know nothing about. It was a one-size-fits-all answer, which meant it wasn’t optimal for every specific instance, but it worked much more often than not. It was practical for people who didn’t, or couldn’t, care about nuance.
Still, it annoyed me. But what was I going to do? Brainwash them into agreeing with me? No. They were plenty indoctrinated already, so no amount of logic or convincing would get through to them, anyway. I could feel it in both of their auras, that hatred for the alien that was so fundamentally important to a core part of both of them.
Maybe it was another privilege of being powerful that I could care about the nuance of such things. That not reacting to anything that looked like it wanted to murder me, trying to murder it back before it could get me.
I shrugged, then shook my head, continuing to talk before they could reply. “No matter. I might as well be talking to a brick wall. You will not be harassed if you make straight for the Warp Gate from here. If there wasn’t anything else you wished to talk about, I believe that concludes our meeting, yes?”
“What about the ‘prisoners of war’ you mentioned?” The Inquisitor Lord questioned.
I waved him off. “I will catch up with you at the Warp Gate. If not, I pnned to take at least a single trip through it to check what it’s like. I suspect you will have a blockade fleet stationed there to prevent me from ciming territory. I will offload my prisoners to someone amenable to the idea there if I can’t catch up.”
P3t1
