“Sergeant Hektad Theros to Shatterwrath bridge, package has been secured from the Finality but our extract was interdicted. We have made emergency landing on Ophelia, requesting secondary extraction or repair crew.”
Garbled, static vox was the only reply the Sergeant received. Theros waited a moment, then stomped a few paces to stand before Brother Alcandar. He pressed a fist into the boneweave adorning Alcandar’s ceramite chestplate. “Climb that ridge. Broadcast our request from its peak,” he ordered.
“It will be done, Brother,” Alcandar agreed, and set off from the group.
“And the rest of us?”
“We wait, and guard the package, Brother Caspio,” Theros said. There, their conversation ended, and the Tactical Squad separated in stoicism while awaiting further instructions.
Their vigil did not last long before further ‘interdiction’ arrived. Each of the Astartes Brothers sensed something amiss, given their psychic backgrounds. But none could place what or how without visible confirmation on some form of anomaly. I was that anomaly, and my first strike, while intended for Sergeant Theros, instead impaled Brother Demeus as he, on instinct, pushed his Sergeant aside. The jagged blue streak of light, like lightning, slid through Demeus’s body back-to-front, and he was, for a moment, rendered inert from its instantaneous arrival.
“Contact!” Brother Drakan shouted. “Where is Alcandar?”
“Gone,” I answered with some amusement. It was the only thing I had to say to these Damned, and they still had yet to lay eyes upon me.
“Demeus, are you alright?” Theros asked of him, getting to his own feet. Demeus did not reply with words, instead struggling against the bindings of his impalement as spectral orange flames slid over his stygian armor. Demeus’s hands tightened over the blue lightning emerging from his gut, perhaps attempting to break through my stabbing power. It was not enough, and after a surge of energy, the light that had pierced him exploded outward, erupting through Demeus and turning the Astartes into a column of dust and smoke.
For their part, Demeus’s brothers were not emotionally taken by their comrade’s obliteration. It was Brother Caspio that first laid eyes upon me at last, and pointed me out. “Abomination, above, at our thirty!” Before their helmets’ targeting apparatus picked me out, and before their genetically enhanced eyes had focused on my form, their Bolters trained on me in unison and opened fire. No projectiles reached my skin, of course, each one disintegrating into cobalt sparks when they neared. With a flick of one of my four wrists, a wave of the Empyrean washed over the scene. It consumed Caspio. Drakan and Theros, however, had by then engulfed themselves in their protective contagion, orange flames billowing out from the boney accoutrements of their ceramite armor. Not only that, but they ran forward, under the arc of Blue Fire as I unleashed it, escaping the brunt of the attack that had devoured Caspio.
It was a futile prolonging of the inevitable. I turned my gaze to Drakan, and for a moment he and I locked eyes. Seeing into my gaze sufficed to melt his mind in a single pulse of his twinned heartbeats. As Drakan collapsed to the ground in a deathly thud, I neglected the continuation of Sergeant Theros’s life, and landed to the ground a short distance from my quarry. She was stirring, soon to wake. I could feel His accursed involvement already coursing through her veins. She would be a child of Gold, that much was certain, lest Tchar involve itself directly with my plans, which did not seem likely at the time. But even a child of Gold could be swayed to corruption.
“Abomination!” Theros called, reminding me of his continued existence. I turned, casual, to face him. He was reloading his Bolt weapon. “How can one such as you set foot upon a Shrine world such as this?”
“Are you not Damned as well?” I asked, and whisked another hand his way. He attempted to dodge whatever attack he believed I had conjured, but there was no dodging the oceanic spillage of a raw tear in reality. Granted, I closed the rift as swiftly as it had opened, so as not to evidence my appearance on the world, but when it had gone, so, too, had Theros’s presence. I turned back to my quarry, and just in time to find her eyes fluttering. Indeed, their lids hid beneath them a pool of gold, and while it did burn to gaze upon, I saw in them that I had arrived in time. His power may have bled into her, but His will had not.
I had ‘interdicted’ the Corpse God in that manner as well as I had His servants.
“Welcome, sweet child. I have long awaited your arrival. Take my hand; there is much for you to learn and to see,” I greeted her as her eyes more wholly opened. I had, for her, assumed the human visage I once possessed, and had likewise extended a pale palm toward her. A hand of blackened flesh fell into my grasp as she reached up to me. “I am Veralith, and you mean so much to me. More than you shall ever know.”
***
“Well? You wanted to see me?”
Veralith nodded, and spun to face her addressor while the continents of Cthcaris melted into a slurry of crimson in the background. Another world sacrificed into the fathomless depths of the Undivided Cataclysm’s depravities. “Brother,” she greeted him.
“Sister,” Lunacius replied, unamused. “What do you want of me?”
“All these millennia together, and you still aren’t one for small talk,” she said, amused. “You continue to duel your blood-brother.”
“And I continue to best him,” he added. Veralith nodded, aware of his unending victory streak. But she, unlike Lunacius, was well aware that if Kharnath wanted Lunacius’s skull for his throne, Mordefir was more than capable of providing it. Lunacius was the duelist of their quartet, perfect in all things, including battle. But Mordefir was a slaughterer, and though it may bloody them both, it would be he, undoubtedly, that would stand victorious in a bout to the death. This was good; Veralith always preferred his company over Lunacius’s, anyways.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Your duels must stop,” she declared, similarly aware that this would be displeasing.
Lunacius was taken aback for a moment, then sneered and walked closer to his sister-of-bond. “Our duels have been daily since the days of Vaktez. We have not ceased our betterment in this regard for literal eons. We will not stop at the demands of a winged harpy like—”
By then, Lunacius had stepped up to Veralith, towering over her smaller, more fragile-looking form. But looks, she knew, could be deceiving, and despite his frustration, Lunacius froze in his objections from a single glance into his sister’s unconcerned, confident eyes. “Perhaps you’d like to duel this harpy, serpent?” she offered with a wicked grin.
“I…no, I…you…,” Lunacius stammered, and backed away a step, then another.
“No?” she faked a frown. “Have you ever seen a serpent caught in the talons of a raven? Have you seen one’s skin pulled back by a beak? I think, given your sudden paling complexion, you must have, brother mine,” Veralith said, and then horrified him further with a chilling laugh. She took a step toward him, and he took another step back. “Do you know that Tchar once ruled the Empyrean, and that it took the combined might of the Great Game’s other participants to even the playing field? Know, my serpentine brother, that I am not keen to repeat that mistake, and that I do not fear you nor any coalition you could amass, so skip any attempt at intimidation with me and do as I say, would you?”
Lunacius’s lips tensed, then trembled, then pursed again. The serpent had caught its tongue, for once. After a pause, he managed, “May I ask why our duels must end?”
“Because I expect you two are soon to fight a being of our caliber, and I would not have you bloodying yourselves the day before such a bout,” she answered, and turned away from him, to look back upon the gored remains of Cthcaris.
Lunacius, now no longer being menaced by his bond-sister, rebuilt his composure, sliding thin, daggerlike fingers through the coiled tendrils he called ‘hair’ atop his angled head. In every microcosm, he was a serpent, simply not at the macroscopic level where he still appeared vaguely humanoid, save for possessing a slithering tail that had, during the stare down with his sister, sheepishly hid between his legs. Now it slid beyond and stretched out, long, viperlike, waiting to lash upon his prey. Alas, no such prey existed in the room with him. Instead, with a sigh, he re-engaged his sister. “Who with?”
“Come again?” she asked, showing him some mercy by not turning to face him.
“With who am I to have this bout of which you speak?”
“Cronos,” she said, voice flat and emotionless.
Lunacius, however, took another step back, then scoffed. And in a moment of uncharacteristic humility, admitted, “That is not a battle I believe I could win on my own.”
Veralith glanced over her shoulder at him, a smile creasing her lips in acknowledgement of the rarity with which she heard such modesty from his mouth, and then turned back to the molting world beyond their vessel. “You will not fight that battle alone; you will fight it with your brother. And victory is a matter of perspective.”
“Whose perspective, mine or yours?”
That got a laugh out of her, though Lunacius could not parse whether his sister was laughing at him or at his question. After her cackling, she turned to him again, four arms crossed twice. “It is all a game, brother mine. You have your part to play in it, as I have mine. But games end. When this one finishes, when the cosmos close up and all the stars burn out, I assure you that it will be us who lay eyes upon the last the universe has to offer. That, or, if nothing else, my fate will be far worse than any you can meet. Does that sound like victory to you?”
“It does, actually, yes,” Lunacius said, eyes narrowing while his lips pointed into a grin.
“I thought it might,” Veralith said, nodding, and was going to turn back toward Cthcaris when a third joined the scene. “Mordefir,” she greeted him with a subtle nod.
The crimson goliath nodded in return, then glanced to his blood-brother with envious disdain. It was mirrored in return; the two were alike in many ways, and hating the fortuitousness of the other was no exception. Just as they envied each other’s origins, Lunacius would have rather been sent to speak to Veralith rather than summoned by her, and Morderfir would have rather her guard dog as opposed to being a carrier pigeon.
“You two are cute,” Veralith teased, breaking the tension between them. “That is all, Lunacius, if you wish to leave.”
“I have wished as such since arriving,” he snorted, and departed down the same corridor his brother had arrived from. Veralith rose her head up toward her new guest, inviting him to speak.
“A two-headed bird-daemon has emerged from the Empyrean, and seeks consul and military support from you. Something about a Primarch?” Mordefir explained.
Veralith sighed, shook her head, and waved half her hands dismissively. “Kairos Fateweaver intends to kidnap the newly-resurrected Guilliman. I know this, because he has already attempted it from our temporal perspective—but not his—, and failed. We will not support his upcoming failure, but I will speak with the dual-birdbrains, if that is what he wishes,” she said, voice light and lacking any significant motivation.
Noting her lack of investment in the situation, Mordefir offered, “I could just as well break its beaks and offer its skulls to my patron, if you’d rather not get involved.”
“I’m sure that would please Kharnath greatly, but no. I would be wise not to ignore the presence of other servants of my patron, as would behoove you likewise. I will hear the wicked words of my daemonic compatriot, and I will attempt, in futility, to explain the folly of its plans. Just so, I will invite it instead to assist us with ours, which Kairos, and the Scintillating Legion behind him, will of course decline. And then we, thankfully, will go our separate ways,” Veralith explained with an uncaring shrug. “If nothing else, at least Lords of Change are more conversable than, say, a Bloodthirster.”
The Finality are Astartes of the Legion of the Damned, a rare but powerful force that arrives only when it is needed. The Damned are cursed with a Warp-contagion that allows them to incinerate their life essence in return for heightened psychic prowess on the battlefield, displaying as spectral flames emerging from their night-black armor.
Veralith tells of Tzeentch's once-supremacy is...true? As true as anything can be where it concerns the Ruinous Powers. Legend goes that the other three Ruinous Powers once focused their efforts together to dethrone Tzeentch, and as a show of good will (to prevent from being annihilated), Tzeentch shattered his staff to bring his power down to more reasonable levels. The Great Game returned to being a four-way contest rather than a two-way war. Two shards of Tzeentch's staff, however, became the Blue Scribes, which now seek to put Tzeentch's staff back together (unknown to anyone else) so that the Changer of Ways may rule supreme once more.
last Volume already took place during 999.M41. Veralith offers confirmation of this temporal discrepancy, but the Warp being what it is, obviously these events have not transpired yet for the Kairos Fateweaver that seeks an audience with his fellow Tzeentchian servant.
Veralith and Kairos, but in truth, I've never read Kairos before. I just know about him. But I didn't feel confident enough with the character to attempt to write an accurate portrayal of the twin-headed Lord of Change. So, here we are.
