Captain Lyra Hawke was dead. Her killer, Malachar Vex, sat in the hearing chamber. Physically, he was there, but the battle clung to him.
The smog stung Malachar’s nostrils. The stench of cordite, machine oil, and blood burned his throat. He felt the needle prick of blast-thrown sand on his skin.
‘Name, designation, and incident date?’ The stern woman nodded as Vex shifted in his seat, wiping sweat from his brow.
The Commissar was menacing, but it was the Pariah in the corner, statue-still in Vratine armour, that made him uncomfortable.
‘My designation is Primaris Psyker Malachar Vex, assigned to the 117th, Phantom Blades.’
‘Incident date?’
‘Vex! Answer the question!’ Hawke said, ‘How many hostiles are in that building? None, we blow it.
Captain Hawke stood untouched by the chaos around her, stormcoat snapping in the acrid breeze.
‘And if there are?’
‘Then we’re the breaching squad for the holy Sisters.’ She always addressed him directly, never through an intermediary. For that alone, she commanded his full loyalty.
‘Psyker Vex!’ The Astra Telepathica liaison continued, ‘The incident date!’
‘423.026.M41, according to our orders.’
‘Thank you. Can you describe your relationship with the 117th?’
Hawke led from the front. She always did. When the demolition experts blew the door, she was the first through, tucking an unruly coil of dark hair behind her ear and drawing her sabre and laspistol. ‘Vex, on me.’
Debris from the blast swirled around them as the squad moved in. Cultists surged, pulling them all into close quarters. The soldiers gave Hawke and her ‘pet psyker’ a wide berth.
Even in battle, gossamer-fine red traceries of hate and fear made an arachnid’s web that haloed each guardsman. It made Vex’s skin crawl.
‘I want their leaders.’ Hawke said, ripping her sabre from a cultist’s chest. ‘Give me something, Vex!’
Vex reached out, and the warp answered immediately. The skein of reality peeled back like wet parchment as his mind slipped beneath it. Smoke became shadow. Sound became light. Emotions blossomed in his other-sight. The squad burned in his mind, bright, jagged things, their thoughts sharp with fear and disgust.
A glowing silver thread of power snaked deeper into the building. He felt it wrapping around the squad, tying itself to the red webs of fear, hatred, and adrenaline. Vex followed the thread to a trapdoor in the far corner of the room.
Vex looked up at the liaison. ‘The soldiers… tolerated my presence.’
‘So, no adverse interactions with the Guardsmen?’
‘Witch!’ The burly soldier spat the word. Then he spat saliva. The gobbet splattering into the middle of the mess table. There was no chance it was meant for anyone else. Nobody else ever sat with Vex.
‘Thank you for volunteering to polish every table in my mess hall, Lieutenant Greaves.’ Captain Hawke said from behind the guardsman.
‘Captain, I-’ the soldier sputtered, stepping out of Hawke’s way as she took a closer look at the offending fluid on Vex’s table. She made brief eye contact with Vex. There was neither hatred nor fear in her gaze before she cast it back to the offending guardsman.
‘That mutant is as likely to kill us as any throne-damned cultist!” He spat again, this time on the floor.
‘Perhaps, if he were ordered to, but then we’d be wasting your potential. My job is to ensure my men fully realise their potential, Greaves. and your prolific capacity to salivate makes you the perfect candidate to spit-polish my equipment.’ She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and turned on her heel. The smile on her lips was worth all the daggers guardsmen around him stared his way.
‘Psyker Vex?’ the liaison said.
‘Occasionally.’
‘Noted. Please describe the events immediately surrounding the incident.’
The cellar floor was sticky with blood and bodies. Some were cultists, but many were civilians. They had all been tortured, flayed alive.
‘Warp manifestation!’
Vex’s warning was too late. Something materialised in front of Hawke. Smoke peeled away from growing claws as they closed around Hawk’s neck.
The remainder of the squad opened fire. Their rounds bounced off red flesh and shed sparks where they contacted the giant horns on either side of its elongated head.
Vex didn’t need his eyes to see it. In his mind, it was an amalgamation of shining immaterial thread, bound in knots of red. It was feeding off them.
Hawke opened her mouth to scream defiance, and the thing smiled, its too-sharp teeth glinted in the firelight from its blazing eyes, and it opened its maw. A geyser of red un-light lashed the Captain to the daemon.
Their conjoined bodies flickered for just a moment.
The thing had Lyra Hawke’s eyes.
She had its horns-
Malachar would not let it take her.
He pushed. His thoughts focused on the red unlight. It was hatred, thick, menacing, and powerful. He heard the thoughts fueling it, felt them.
‘Witch!’
‘Demon!’
‘He is just as liable to kill us as them. Greaves was right.’ That was the loudest voice of all.
‘Was a warp manifestation responsible for Captain Hawke’s death?’
Power erupted from his soul, raced down his arms, and arced from his fingertips. He forced it along the red threads, burning them to get at the silver source of the manifestation.
Lightning ripped forward in blinding bolts. Malachar Vex’s power tore through the voices, silencing them one by one. The sand in the air turned to glass, and nascent fulgurite tinkled across the floor.
Vex opened his eyes.
The daemon was gone.
The voices were gone.
The squad was gone.
Lyra Hawke stood in front of him for a single, impossible second.
Then warp-lightning ate through her flesh, turning her to ash, an impossible statue for one heartbeat. A pile of ashes in the next.
He had burned the hatred out of the warp. He just hadn’t known whose it was.
‘Psyker Vex?’
‘Yes,’ Vex said. ‘A warp entity killed Captain Hawke.’
Eli’amaur wrapped the aether around a pink horror and sent it flying. Before Kesaeal could be struck by a flamer daemon’s burning ichor, the horror intercepted. And melted. The flamer’s death followed.
Once again, Kesaeal was displeased with his salvation.
‘I do not require your aid!” he spat, only to notably stiffen.
Palm raised, energy flew from Eli’amaur, causing shards of agony across his mind. But Kesaeal was saved from a daemon striking from behind.
For a time unending, the mon-keigh refused to join forces with the aeldari, even going so far as to strike them down in a slew of ‘friendly fire’. They were not enemies this day, but unwilling allies. Or could have been. Pride unbending, the savages would rather die than fight alongside ‘xenos scum’.
After rescuing Kesaeal—thrice now, Eli’amaur cast the weight of judgment upon him, along with a faint, psyche push.
He sensed it, the captain’s volatile emotions, and subtly…manipulated them. No easy task. The mon-keigh’s natural defences interfered with psychic persuasion, along with the barbaric augmentations deforming Kesaeal’s mind.
Nevertheless, Eli’amaur was getting somewhere…
Purposefully, he turned his back on Kesaeal—and felt his burning rage.
‘How amusing. You offer deliverance to one who would see you dead. Do you seek your own end by his sword, believing it might deliver you from me? Foolish little hatchling.’
Within Eli’amaur’s psychic fortress, a crystalline spire shattered.
Immediately, psyche runes ignited, sealing off sections of his core from the Lord of Change, who sought to collapse his mind.
Resolute, Eli’amaur fought against the end.
The end was upon him.
A trio of changecasters surrounded Eli’amaur, along with a fluxmaster, hiding high above within a warp miasma. Battered—in body as well as spirit, Eli’amaur knew he would not survive another changebolt.
With his psyche defences near collapse, he felt the Lord of Change hold its breath. Waiting. Expectant.
Sensing another’s attention upon him, Eli’amaur gathered his reserves and flung a subtle persuasion.
The next moment, the fluxmaster fell, pierced by a spear. Followed by a battle cry as Kesaeal cut down a changecaster attacking Eli’amaur. The warlock took advantage of the other daemons’ confusion, killing them with a dance of his blade.
‘’No need to thank me, xenos,’ Kesaeal mocked.
‘Indeed not. This moment was preordained.’
‘What is this nonsense?’
‘My demise had been foreseen long ago. Yet by some cosmic error, the path to my salvation rested in your hands, Captain Daincaz Kesaeal. All you needed was a little…encouragement. It was not difficult. Mon-Keigh are such simple creatures, easily manipulated.’
Hearing this, Kesaeal exuded killing rage.
‘We are even, barbarian,’ Eli’amaur taunted further. Pushing, altering the steins of fate.
With a roar, the mon-keigh swung his eviscerator as Eli’amaur raised his charged palm.
Abruptly, time halted, before it began to flow in reverse. Faster and faster, until time rightened itself, resuming at the moment Eli’amaur had first saved Kesaeal from a fluxmaster.
Caught within the Changer of Way’s time vortex, Eli’amaur fought a seemingly unending battle, but with calculated manipulations that had been foreseen years before, the sequence of events subtly altered with each reversal.
