“Why just the head?” I asked, rather carefully, I might add. I’d waited for him to come into a lull in his never-ending speech to ask my question, after all.

  “Why just the head?” Trazyn repeated my question. “Well, unfortunately, the ones standing vigil over the dead ecclesiarch objected rather violently to my quest to preserve the remains of such an important historical figure. They shot the poor corpse in the lower abdomen with a heavy bolter before I could store it within a Tesseract. The fools thought I was about to use the cadaver for some vile ritual or sorcery, so I can’t fault them overly much for their efforts to destroy it, as much as it hurt to lose such a specimen.”

  This tour has been going on for nearly a month now and shows no sign of ending. Necrons were ageless, and it showed most obviously in their total ck of care for the passage of time. They had theatre pys that sted decades, and I was beginning to somewhat fear that Trazyn intended my current tour of the Infinite Galleries to be of a simir length.

  Not that I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I kind of had shit to do. But for now, it could wait. I had two Avatars; one of them could be allowed to idle, and with the way my soul was growing, I felt like it wasn’t that far away that I’d be able to make a third Avatar. A few months, maybe a year or two at most.

  “I see,” I said thoughtfully. “Do you want me to recreate the corpse? Or clone him for you?”

  The dead man in question was Sebastian Thor, the 292nd Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum. He’d been the head of the Confederation of Light before that, and the chief architect of the rebellion against Goge Vandire that put an end to the tyrannical High Lord’s Reign of Blood. He was also considered one of the most important saints of the Imperial Creed, so Trazyn, having his preserved head, probably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

  Hell, it was way worse than that. One of the predominant Puritan factions of the Inquisition was the Thorian faction, named after the same man whose stasis-locked head I was currently looking at. There were no words to describe the depth of the loathing they must have felt toward Trazyn for how he had desecrated their founding saint's earthly remains.

  “Perhaps,” he said after a full minute of consideration. I’d gotten used to it, so I spent the lengthy lull in the conversation just observing the scenery. “You only need the most minor genetic sample, correct?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “A drop of blood or a single hair would do.”

  “Then I would very much like either a cloned, whole cadaver or an accurate lifelike clone,” Trazyn said. “Preferably both. What’s your price?”

  “It’s a gift,” I said, waving him off. “It’s just a pair of regur human bodies. I won’t even notice the energy expenditure, and it’s as simple a task as one can be when it comes to cloning.”

  He gave me a suspicious squint, a conscious decision on his part, but still nodded. “Much appreciated."

  He had a Canoptek Spyder poke the stasis-locked head with a syringe-like appendage, extracting a tiny amount of organic matter, which the construct then skittered over to deposit in my outstretched hand.

  A moment ter, two new bodies y on the ground, both unmoving, though one of them was breathing and quite obviously alive to my senses. Or at least it seemed so. The living clone was brain-dead, having just enough of his brain working to keep up the body’s regur activities. If Trazyn didn’t lock it in stasis in a few days, it’d die of dehydration.

  Trazyn waved an arm in a superfluous gesture, and a pair of Immortals carefully dragged the two bodies away.

  “You’ve been wanting to ask me something for weeks now,” Trazyn said. “Do it now. I’m not one to allow favours to linger.”

  “Well, if you insist,” I said. “I’ve recently been made aware that the region of space I’ve cimed as my own might be home to a Necron Dynasty. I wanted to ask you about it, to help me pin down whether it’s the one I am thinking about.”

  “I see,” he said, tapping his metallic fingers on his chin. “Which one?”

  “The Suhbekhar Dynasty,” I said, eyeing him carefully as he stilled. “Tell me, would I be right to suspect that the region of space they’d cimed so long ago would roughly be at or around the Jericho Reach?”

  “They’d always been one of the most paranoid dynasties,” Trazyn said. “Always hiding, always so secretive and insur. I’d need to run the simucrum to calcute the gactic drift to predict where they would have ended up in … give me a moment.”

  I nodded easily, turning to take in the grand scenery of the exhibit we were currently in. It was one Trazyn had called ‘The Fall of Goge Vandire’, and it stuck to that idea quite neatly. There was a Sister of Battle with pale white hair frozen in a moment of fury, chainsword raised high, while an older man in ostentatious robes cowered before her with arms upraised.

  Behind her were Custodians, and at her feet were the corpses of what I assumed were supposed to be stand-ins for the Frateris Tempr.

  But the exhibit itself was just one part of the grand hall, and there were other exhibits too. Sisters of Battle fighting Chaos or Tyranids. There was even one that was supposed to depict Saint Celestine on Cadia. Scattered between the exhibits stood lone figures, stasis-locked Sisters from every Order with neat little pques describing the Order’s history, and below it was that specific sister’s biography. One of those smaller exhibits that nonetheless held a pce of honour was the preserved head of Sebastian Thor.

  It was awesome. I’d always loved museums, especially historical ones, and this was that on steroids. Say what you will about Trazyn, he was very enthusiastic about his calling and also an excellent tour guide … if you weren’t bothered by the fact that he could go on talking for weeks on end if you let him. I didn’t have any bodily needs like sleep or sustenance, so I didn’t mind, but regur humans would have dropped dead long ago just from trying to follow along without interrupting his speech.

  “The Hollow Sun has always been hidden, but some of the Dynasty’s other Tomb Worlds were less well-concealed,” Trazyn said after a few minutes, probably having engaged the assistance of Solemnace’s World Mind to run his calcutions. With the Tomb World being a titanic Dyson Sphere for all intents and purposes, the AI that governed it might as well have been one of the most powerful supercomputers in existence. “It does indeed seem like their holdings would have ended up in the section of space known to the Imperium as the Jericho Reach.”

  “Thank you,” I said with a grateful nod. “Just my luck that I’d have a crazed God-Killer sleeping in my backyard.”

  “… ‘crazed’?” Trazyn asked carefully. “Why are you referring to Phareon Ahmontekh as ‘crazed’?”

  “His rage didn’t sleep with him; it festered, ate through his mind,” I said. “When he was awoken not so long ago, his all-devouring rage obliterated the World Mind and wreaked havoc across the entire Crown World. A Regent rules in his pce now, bereft of the command codes of the dynasty and sitting on a half-awake Ahmontekh just waiting to be fully free. I heard the primary Cryptek of the dynasty even suspected that the Phareon fell victim to the Fyer Virus.”

  “How accurate is that information?” Trazyn asked, eyes narrowing.

  “As accurate as what I told you about the Silent King, or the Stormlord.” I shrugged. “Did you have the time to verify those?”

  “Not beyond the bare minimum,” Trazyn grumbled. “I could only confirm that there is a concerted effort across multiple Tomb Worlds and Dynasties to assist with the Great Awakening, but that’s nothing new. If the Silent King is truly back, he hides his tracks well.”

  “I don’t know when he will reveal himself, but it won’t be long now,” I said. “Either way, does it change anything?”

  “Yes, yes, it very much does,” Trazyn said. “If the Crimson Scythe rises again as a Fyer King, at the head of his Dynasty … the rise of the Bone Kingdom of Drazak would become the second most shameful event in recent Necron history.”

  “I’d say the Twice-Dead King is going to seem like a cuddly puppy compared to the hated-fuelled Ahmontekh if he is ever allowed to fully rise again,” I said. “I don’t intend to let it come to that, and considering that the Charnovokh dynasty will side with Szarekh, it’s all but assured that the diminished Suhbekhar dynasty will fall in line behind Imotekh if the Regent somehow retains control of the Dynasty.”

  “The Charnovokh have always been prideful. What makes you think they’d join the Silent King’s cause?” Trazyn asked.

  “Hive Fleet Behemoth left them a pale shadow of their former self.” I shrugged. “They even sent a distress call to the Hollow Sun, begging for reinforcements. That was what kicked their awakening protocols into gear, in fact.”

  Considering that it was the seething hatred for his traitorous cousin, the then-Phareon of the Charnovokh dynasty, that drove Ahmontekh to madness, I couldn’t see how that was in any way a good idea.

  “Hastened awakening leaves even Overlords in a state of mind unsuited for strategic thinking or clear thoughts,” Trazyn said with a note of clear disdain. “Memories are jumbled, and leaps of logic that make little sense in retrospect are commonpce. When the call for reinforcements was sent out, I suspect the Phareon only remembered a time when he and Ahmontekh were true brothers in arms, unable to recall the tter years.”

  “I see,” I said. “Anything I should know before starting my hunt for the Hollow Sun?”

  “I would give much to have the Crimson Scythe in my collection,” Trazyn said, staring at me intently. “And by ‘Crimson Scythe’ I mean both Phareon Ahmontekh and his namesake Wargive. Which, you should be aware, once struck down an Old One and shattered a world, scattering it across the void as cooling debris. I don’t recommend getting hit by it. If he is as mad as you say, that will be the greatest danger you’ll face.”

  “We’ll see,” I said thoughtfully, already thinking about what I could get from Trazyn if I got my grabby little cws on them. Maybe I’d keep the Wargive, but the Phareon himself would be of little use to me. “If we’re lucky, the Regent won’t be desperate enough to release the Phareon … However, it’d probably be prudent of me to ask for a Tesseract Labyrinth to store him in. Just in case the opportunity actually presents itself.”

  “Done,” Trazyn said with an imperious gesture. “It’s a loan, given with the understanding that you make an honest attempt to capture him.”

  “Deal,” I said, grabbing his outstretched hand and shaking it. Much to the Necron’s bemusement. “Now that we got business out of the way, where were we?”

  “Ah, I believe I was just about to begin my introductory lecture on the next exhibition,” Trazyn said. “The theme is going to be Imperial Guard with the exhibit taking centre stage being ‘The Death of Lord Sor Macharius’.”

  *****

  Storm Ward prototype number five turned out to be the absolute winner, despite being, for all intents and purposes, overkill. It was made of a Soulbone base, holding a crystalline hexagrammatic weave inside and the original patterns on the surface.

  Barriers I anchored to it performed well beyond regur parameters, showing a near 20x increase in potency when I kept my imbued energy and willpower at roughly the same level.

  The Psilencer continued to be an excellent training aid. In essence, the thing was a massive and masterfully made focusing lens stuck on top of a mechanism that took care of channelling the Warp energies in the psyker’s stead. The energies were still channelled through the psyker, but it was the weapon’s firing mechanism drawing them in and reguting them.

  I didn’t care about that part, only focusing on the crystal structure that focused the raw psychic energy into a concentrated beam. It was inhumanly perfect in a way only a crystal that’s been precision-engineered down to the molecur level could be. Replicating its effects manually was a … work in progress. I’d considered just growing a focusing lens of my own out of Soulbone and sticking it on top of Atiesh, but that was quitter talk. I wasn’t ready to give up on doing it without a crutch just yet! I was getting close to reaching 60% of the Psilencer’s effectiveness at the moment, which was pretty good considering I’d only gotten 10% of it on the first try.

  I wanted to get that up as far as I could and get some actual training in with my expanded capabilities. Which included the more powerful Wards and telekinetic barriers, the enhanced and more condensed Eldritch Bsts, alongside, of course, the ridiculous physical enhancement that my Witchbde gave me. Then there was my ongoing project of making my toolkit of psyker abilities a bit more well-rounded and perhaps nuanced.

  With Technomancy and Biomancy also added into the fold, I wasn’t limited to cookie-cutter shields, energy bsts, telekinesis, telepathy and teleportation. So yeah, I had my job cut out for me trying to get used to fighting with my suddenly very much expanded set of tricks, especially since my only somewhat viable sparring partners were Octavian, Selene, the Swarmlord and my hapless pet Justicar.

  None of them could hold up for long if I stopped holding back. Hell, none of them could survive a blow from my Witchbde when I really let go of my vice-like grip on my soul energy. Which brought us to my newest unwitting, but extremely enthusiastic pymate.

  “That’s all you’ve got!?” I roared, unrestrained with my power for once. There was not a single living thing in the entire out-of-the-way star system I’ve chosen as the location of our bout. Soul energy thrummed around me, pulsing with the beat of my heart and hammering into reality around me.

  “I’LL TAKE YOUR SKULL!” Doombreed roared in response, dashing back at me with palpable rage approaching apocalyptic levels. The fabric of reality cried tears of blood around him, and I heard echoes of sughter through the gaps from innumerable battlefields spread across the vast cosmos. “BLOOOODD!”

  Doombreed wasn’t the most engaging conversationalist I’ve ever met, but he was really good at fighting and, better yet, he could take one of my full-powered blows without dying. Hell, even if I killed him, I could just summon him back again with his True Name and shove some soul energy into him to repair his material form. He was the perfect sparring partner.

  He kicked up dust and shattered the cracked, sandy ground of the grey wastend spreading out around us as far as the eye could see. He wore his very own Chaos Armour, a unique piece of war-gear that made him the perfect sparring partner. See, what it did was resist the effect of Force Weapons just enough so it acted like real armour even when I struck him with what should have been an entirely psychic blow that should have bypassed all means of physical protection.

  What turned that resistance into near-immunity was the Colr of Khorne worn around his neck, a piece of fancy gear that’s supposedly been forged from Khornes’ rage at the foot of his throne of brass. It sucked in the power of the Warp, fortifying the wearer and negating most of the direct effects of psychic attacks and Force weapons on the wearer.

  He also had a Rod of Khorne in his off-hand, which he could use to whack any warp-fuckery out of existence. That thing hated me. Like, it literally loathed my very existence; it’s been made of pure hatred for creatures like me. It was awesome.

  All that meant he could not only survive getting struck by my Witchbde, but that he could even parry it with his Rod and hit back with the force of an avanche. But while he may have negated all the esoteric effects of my psychic powers and my Witchbde, the sword was still a rge piece of impossibly sharp Soulbone swung by my impossibly strong Avatar. And I meant ‘impossible’ quite literally, since my physical enhancements were left rgely unaffected by his war-gear, only getting dampened when he occasionally managed to whack me with his stick.

  He swung the Rod first, aiming to use it to sm the Witchbde out of my hand, or at least out of the way so he could cleave me in half with the Khornite Axe held in his other hand. I stepped back, letting the head of the rod depicting a skull sail by me, and then I swung my bde. It came up in an upward arc, aiming to rend through his arm at the shoulder-joint, but he met it with the haft of his axe.

  Unfortunately, out of his entire collection of war-gear, the axe alone held no Force Weapon nullifying effects, and the Witchbde tore through the brass haft with ease. I grinned, seeing the naked loathing in the Greater Daemon’s eyes as he fpped his wings, evading the edge of my bde by centimetres before bringing the Rod of Khorne — yes, it really was called that, I didn’t just make it up — about in a savage counter.

  I ducked under it, but it still caught the unwieldy long Witchbde before I could get it out of the way, and it was almost torn out of my grasp by the force of the blow. It was only the energy circuted back into my hands from the bde that gave me the strength to grip it hard enough. I was faster, more agile, even once he shrank down to be ‘only’ two metres tall, but he was still stronger than me. Not by all that much, but he was. Mostly because I couldn’t really use active Biomancy buffs on myself due to his stupid anti-psyker Colr.

  Trying to do so was good practice, though, almost more so than trying to push through a negative Bckstone’s effects or a Bnk’s Null-field. That Colr was actively fighting me, where those other two were passive effects. The hatred for anything even mildly looking like sorcery unceasingly tried to tear apart any psychic ‘spell’ that I made.

  We cshed again and again, our battle taking us across the wastend and leaving craters and ravines the size of buildings in our wake. He roared like a mad beast, driven by immense rage, and yet each blow came with a savage precision, guided by skill honed in a million battles. He was good, not just a mad beast, but a fighter forged in a war that may never end, having not stopped fighting since the first day he picked up a weapon as a young boy back in the vast grassnds of ancient Mongolia.

  I missed a step, messing up a parry, and my opponent pounced on that opening with glee. Despite my speed and reflexes, the Rod of Khorne crashed into my side with enough power to dent a starship’s hull. My physical enhancements stuttered at the direct contact, my body’s toughness snapping back to its original flesh and blood levels for just an instant. In that instant, half my organs in my chest were pulped, my spine cracked, and I folded around the stave. Then went sailing off of it like a rag-doll, skipping across the cracked earth.

  Bio-energy pulsed, and energy resumed circuting into the Witchbde and from it, back into me. I was fully healed even before I first hit the ground, but only came to a stop a hundred metres away, catching myself with a bit of telekinesis and then sling-shotting myself right back at the fucker with a snarl on my face.

  He was grinning, roaring in approval and glee as I came back. I doubted a Bloodthirster of his calibre had many foes who didn’t just run from him, and he was a Khornite daemon; only Orks loved fighting more than one of their ilk.

  A minute ter, I managed to catch him off guard, sending a bst of crackling psychic energy at him. It did little harm, but it cloaked him, blinded him and his senses for just a moment. Just enough so that he missed the small block of condensed energy that I twisted and turned physically.

  He tripped on the small but dense barrier, sending his parry just a bit off mark. I swept through his guard with serpentine grace, a wide grin on my lips as my Witchbde arced through the air and whistled as it cut through the air, and then his thick, crimson-skinned neck right between the Colr and the upper part of his Chaos Armour. His face morphed into a rictus of rage as his head rolled off his shoulders, but it never nded, bursting into a psychic explosion of bloodlust and rage. A neat little final ‘fuck-you’ from Khorne to anyone who managed to banish one of his Daemons.

  I shrugged it off, though I did tighten my mental defences and kept an eye out for any creeping effects. Then I huffed and straightened.

  “Temüjin. I summon thee.” I packed my words with just enough power to help him recover from his very recent banishment. In moments, the crackling Warp energy seeping through the fabric of reality started coalescing into a by-now familiar form around the seed of soul energy I’d given up. “Time for round … one hundred and fifty-seven.”

  Doombreed just roared. Typical.