‘The worms that walk,’ Khait of Prospero said, scholarly surprise tingeing his transhuman baritone.
‘We do no—’
A fist clad in ceramite the colour of dried blood smashed through the creature’s approximation of a head. Corpse-white maggots scattered across the ground, yet even decapitated, the writhing mound that was supposedly its body remained upright.
‘They also talk,’ Racka Utó observed. Shaking necrotic slime from his gauntlet, the Word Bearer looked at his bemused companion. ‘Not that it did them any good.’
‘As we were saying, we do not prefer that moniker,’ the nightmarish thing said. Every word was a phlegmatic slither, emitted without tongue or lung.
Racka Utó stepped back, as nimble as a Parcathian blade-dancer despite his heavy power armour and reached for his accursed crozius. Psychic energies distorted reality around Khait as the Thousand Sons sorcerer gathered his mystic might for an escalation in hostilities.
‘Negotiation,’ they said. A new head-like appendage emerged from the main body mass as the scattered maggots crawled back into their host. The new head possessed no eyes, ears, mouth or anything even remotely humanoid, yet both Astartes could feel the xenos’s gaze on them.
Above, black lightning skittered among heavy clouds, casting everything in negative relief. The peal of thunder sent waves of cracks across the obsidian plateau they stood upon. Toxic winds clawed at their power armour, razor-thin slivers of midnight rocks scything across anointed ceramite. The planet they’ve crashed upon was otherwise utterly inanimate, barely more than the darkness of the void cast into a solid orb.
‘We need your help,’ the xenos maggot-host admitted, although their sincerity was as solid as their body.
‘That’s certainly a change of pace,’ Racka Utó grinned beneath his helm. The First Acolyte spun his power weapon with deceptive nonchalance.
‘Let’s hear it out,’ Khait suggested, curiosity overriding centuries of indoctrination. Screaming faces bubbled up through the obsidian at his feet as his psychic powers distorted reality, thinning the veil between realms.
‘We saw your ship go down. So did ours many cycles ago. We – you and us – need to get off this forsaken rock before the Sleepless awaken in greater numbers,’ the maggot-man said. They had grown in stature, standing as tall and wide as the two Astartes.
Khait and Racka Utó exchanged glances. The scattered remains of their Stormbird were still burning in blazing heaps across the landscape behind them. As they had descended through the thick layer of clouds, the jagged tips of the onyx mountains surrounding them had flashed emerald. Even their transhuman comprehension hadn’t been fast enough to understand what was happening as their Stormbird was reduced into its component pieces. The armour, wings and engines of the ancient war machine had careened away like dead petals in the wind as the strange energies forcefully ripped apart molecular bonds. The decay had continued unabated towards the core, until the crew compartment had blossomed like a rotten flower. Akin to screaming pollen of flesh and fear, the serfs and slaves travelling in the Stormbird had spread across the black sky.
Plummeting among dissolving machinery and his mortally terrified entourage, Khait had calmly weighed his options. The machinistic spirit of his power armour had reported all systems nominal, all seals unbroken. He had a firm grip on his psystave, and his boltgun had been maglocked safely to his thigh plate. Still unsure of the nature of the deadly phenomena, he had kept his powers sealed until he knew what he was dealing with or until the ground became imminent.
Unlike the Thousand Sons sorcerer, Racka Utó never hesitated to flaunt his mastery of the dark arts. Breaking a talisman fashioned from hair and bones, the veil was pulled apart, and the First Acolyte had ripped a winged horror straight from the warp to ease their fall. And thus, they landed, hanging onto a kicking and shrieking nightmare of leathery wings, bronze chitin and a bawling infant’s face.
They had barely tracked a mile across the lifeless, obsidian landscape towards the debris that used to be their aircraft, when the xenos made their appearance. They had stepped from behind a jagged outcrop, arm-like appendages held out in a gesture of peace. It hadn’t prevented the First Acolyte from punching the head analogue from their shoulders.
‘Bold of you to assume that we’re stranded just because we lost our flight,’ Racka Utó said haughtily. Above, the winged nightmare cried feebly as it couldn’t hold on to its corporeal form without souls to sustain it. The Immaterium reclaimed its neverborn without mercy.
‘The Sleepless hold domain over the skies. Summoning more aircraft will doom them to the same fate as yours,’ the xenos explained. Khait immediately sent a psychic missive to the Mindful Scarab’s bridge, ordering Captain Salaar to remain on standby. Racka Utó used his armour’s voxcaster to blink-shunt the same order to his own vessel, the Absolutio Abnegatio.
‘Who are the Sleepless, and why did they shoot us down?’ Khait asked the questions that were more relevant to their situation.
‘The Sleepless are an ancient race bearing enmity towards the living. Their singular purpose is to extinguish life in all its forms. Until they are done, they can never truly rest,’ the maggot-man explained, ignoring the First Acolyte’s barb. For an abominable xenos, they were repulsively communicative with the two Astartes. ‘The Sepulchre-World’s defence system cares not who trespasses, so long as they are thoroughly exterminated. Defensive protocols escalate exponentially over time, so our escape must be swift if we want to avoid getting overwhelmed by the Sleepless.’
Another bolt of black lightning skittered through the overcast heavens before grounding itself in a formation of jagged obsidian. Angular runes of alien design briefly glowed tesseract green beneath the planet’s glassy surface. Fresh cracks criss-crossed under their feet, and a deep thrum emanated from further below.
‘We must hurry,’ the maggot-man urged them, their dead worm-voice strangely excited. They beckoned for the Astartes to follow. ‘Come. We will show you the only way out.’
Trust was a currency none of them possessed. Not even Racka Utó was worthy of Khait’s complete trust, despite their centuries-long camaraderie.
Perhaps it would’ve been better to call it rivalry, as the Thousand Sons sorcerer and the Word Bearers warlock constantly engaged in academic debates over the nature of their arcane powers. Khait knew the First Acolyte was wrong in more ways than one and would eventually come around to seeing things Khait’s way. But the Word Bearer was extremely stubborn and arrogant, endlessly reasoning the superiority of his methods. Khait found the other Astartes insufferable at the best of times, yet even at his worst, Racka Utó was still preferable to the maggot-man.
The xenos moved like a faulty pict-record. All pretences of humanoid form were dropped as they alternated their number of limbs to best traverse the Sepulchre-World’s inhospitable terrain. Khait was impressed despite his guttural urge to annihilate the foul thing. He had seen many horrors during the Great Crusade and even beyond the veil of reality, yet this walking and talking mass of maggots defied definition even compared to nightmares made manifest.
Their psychic presence was as strange and inexplicable as their physical form. Each grub comprising their entity had its own meagre warp presence, but they never formed a coherent core. Instead, wisp-thin threads braided together and disappeared into the depths of the neversea, as if loosely linked to a distant hive mind.
‘We should’ve killed them,’ Racka Utó’s sibilant words whispered from the vox-speakers of Khait’s helm.
‘Perhaps,’ the sorcerer admitted. ‘But we came seeking entertainment. Are you not entertained?’
Racka Utó chuckled with dark mirth. Despite losing their slaves and transportation, visiting this forsaken, nameless planet beyond the Halo Stars had indeed been entertaining. However, this planet held value beyond just killing time until the End Days.
It had been Racka Utó’s turn to suggest a destination where they could pit their arcane skills against each other’s. Khait accepted gladly, confident he would prove to the First Acolyte once and for all that his mastery of the warp was superior to the warlock’s more time-consuming, ritualistic methods. Without psychic powers, Racka Utó was no match for Khait, yet frustratingly, the First Acolyte held his ground, and their contest had so far been even. Thus, they descended from their ships, eager to search for strange xenos and their malignant artefacts, hoping that by doing so, they would gain new knowledge and even more power.
‘How do you know they are not leading us into a trap?’ Racka Utó asked. Khait could imagine the Word Bearer’s lopsided smile, like a tutor asking his prized Scholam student a blatantly obvious question masquerading as a tricky one.
‘Because I suspect they could’ve killed, or at least seriously inconvenienced us already, and chose not to. They must lack something that we possess that can help them escape,’ the sorcerer replied, ignoring Racka Utó’s teasing.
‘You mean our attunement to the Immaterium,’ the First Acolyte said, patting the massive tome chain-bound to his waist. It was a treasure trove of secret arts Racka Utó uncovered down the dark path of undivided ruination.
‘Aye, cousin. That was also my conclusion. I’m still unsure how they know without the Gift, but they do.’
‘Most amusing!’ Racka Utó chuckled. ‘We must know more about them. I wonder if they can be dissected. How would they react if I sacrificed them to the Pantheon? Would it matter if I pledged the soul of a single worm, or would it require the whole host to make it a suitable offering? I have so many questions.’
‘So do I, cousin. And we shall have our answers in time. But for now, we observe,’ Khait said, then switched to his external vox-grille.
‘What do we call you, xenos? You said you did not prefer being called the worms that walk.’
The sorcerer felt, rather than saw, the shifting lump of squirming larvae turn its attention to him. The xenos’ amorphous nature had forgone the need for eyes as much as it did for a fixed set of limbs or other recognisable extremities.
‘We are Slaught,’ they replied. At first, Khait thought the sound was generated by its traversal of the terrain, before the word triggered his eidetic memory.
His ship had come across a Rogue Trader’s vessel as the Mindful Scarab was making its way to the rendezvous point with the Absolutio Abnegatio. The Imperials had survived the unspeakable horrors that lay beyond the ravenous gravitic vortices and corrosive particle nebulae of the Halo Stars, but their luck had run out when they had dropped out of the warp right in the Mindful Scarab’s path. Khait welcomed the unexpected chance to resupply and the bountiful plunder that came with it.
Within a stasis chest, among a collection of ancient star charts from the Age of Darkness, Khait discovered a sliver of meticulously translated text describing the bygone glory of a xenos empire called the Slaught. That the worms that walk, only spoken of in fearful whispers along the galactic rim, were the remnants of the Slaught was new information even to Khait.
‘And what do we call you transhumans?’ Slaught asked back. ‘We can tell that the two of you are clearly from different sires.’
‘I’m Khait of the Thousand Sons, son of Prospero and a seeker of knowledge,’ the sorcerer replied stoically. He hid his surprise at how knowledgeable the xenos was.
‘And I am Racka Utó, First Acolyte of the 27th Host of the Word Bearers, master of the dark arts, summoner of Neverborn and bane of the Corpse Emperor’s faithless lackeys,’ Racka Utó announced proudly.
‘Impressive,’ Slaught said without a hint of sarcasm, yet neither Astartes believed for a moment that the xenos had spoken the truth.
‘Arrogant worms,’ Racka Utó hissed through the private vox-link connecting him to Khait’s powered armour. The sorcerer deactivated his external vox before replying to the First Acolyte.
‘Do not be surprised, cousin. Theirs is an ancient race with a history spanning beyond our own. Although their domain is nothing but a distant memory now, the Slaught are a hardy race if they had survived despite our systemic xenocides during the Great Crusade,’ Khait explained.
‘How do you know so much?’ It was Racka Utó’s turn to sound suspicious.
‘I have come across pre-Imperial texts describing the threat the maggot-men present. These were but fragments, but the core of it was clear. In their prime, the worms that walk could’ve given the Corpse Emperor a challenge to rival even the battle of Ullanor.’
The faint static of silence filled the vox channel as Racka Utó considered his cousin’s words. Khait smiled behind his helm, satisfied that his revelation managed to silence the verbose Word Bearer.
Around them, the landscape was slowly changing. The bleak and desolate obsidian planes subtly changed orientation from horizontal to vertical. Lower plateaus turned into ravines filled with rows of serrated onyx speartips. Immense black mountains pierced the dark clouds above, faint jade corposant playing around their barbed peaks.
Slaught led them along a path that headed straight to the nearest mountain. It was like walking towards the colossal maw of a void carcharodon. Fear had been banished from Khait when the Crimson King had accepted him among his brotherhoods, but his twin hearts still beat faster as they approached. Extended exposure to the realm of emotions had left its inevitable touch upon his scholastic soul.
‘I don’t like this,’ Racka Utó voxed. ‘Entertainment or not, my every instinct is screaming for me to stay away from this ominous demesne. We are fools for trusting this Slaught.’
‘But we don’t trust them, cousin,’ Khait replied. ‘Nor do they trust us. Nevertheless, I’m curious to see where this path leads us. Of what we might find there.’
The First Acolyte turned his baleful green eye lenses towards Khait and the sorcerer didn’t need to see the Word Bearer’s face to know his expression. Racka Utó was brimming with the same curiosity and excitement despite his misgivings.
‘You’ll be the death of us, Khait.’
‘Look who’s talking, Racka. You suggested this planet in the first place.’
They came to a sudden halt when their guide became stock still. Physical and psychic weapons were brought to the ready in a heartbeat in anticipation of imminent danger.
‘Beyond the twilight lies the domain of the Sleepless,’ Slaught warned as they gestured towards the entrance of a pitch-black cavern leading into the depths of the obsidian mountain ahead. ‘From here on, we must tread carefully, lest we invite their implacable wrath.’
Power comes in many shapes and forms. Some are obvious, like the beating heart of a star. Others are more subtle, like the true name of a daemon prince concealed as the eighth letter of the eighth word in the eighth paragraph on every eighth page in an Imperial Saint’s Psalms.
Yet whatever form power took, Khait could instinctively sense it. Its honeyed scent lured him in, and wherever he happened upon it, he drank deep from its well. Like all of his brothers, he was addicted to it from the first moment he could grasp its concept.
Although the full power of the Sea of Souls had been beyond his reach as a child, he could see its infinite energies through the keyhole of his spirit. The Crimson King had been the key that unlocked his potential. Khait had basked in the Primarch’s psychic might and boundless wisdom, soaking in it and making as much of it his own as possible. During the final hours of Horus’s failed gambit, a single psychic glance at the Emperor had burned an irreparable sunspot on his mind’s eye. No matter what he thought or felt about the Emperor, He had possessed power unrivalled on that fateful day.
The power Khait felt now was unlike anything he had experienced before. It was physical in every sense of the word, without ever invoking the underlying realm of the warp. On the contrary, the veil separating the material and the Immaterium seemed to grow thicker the deeper they trespassed, and a numbness crept around the edges of his consciousness. The influence of the Sea of Souls receded, leaving Khait with a feeling of emptiness that was as utterly alien as their Slaught guide.
An almost imperceptible jade glow emanated from the ink-black walls of the cave surrounding them, allowing their auto-senses to function despite the lack of obvious light sources. Seeing his surroundings failed to reassure Khait while his mind’s eye was blindfolded by the bizarre influence of this ancient dominion.
Wherever he looked, strange geometrical shapes emerged from seemingly random onyx formations. Jagged splinters of obsidian converged in focal points that oozed power, despite having no arcane meaning whatsoever. Each point was like the dormant heart of a star, just waiting for the spark that would ignite the roaring fusion of atoms.
As Khait struggled to make sense of what he was seeing, the walls of the tunnel receded into inky shadows. He felt, rather than saw, the space around him expand into a cavernous hall, his helm’s auto-senses labouring to adjust to the new dimensions.
Racka Utó came to a sudden halt, and his accursed crozius spat actinic lightning. Khait almost walked into him, distracted as he was by the unnatural soul malaise and the equally uncanny surroundings.
‘I knew this was a trap,’ the First Acolyte growled, raising his activated crozius high.
The power field’s light cast dancing shadows across terraced walls honeycombed with angular alcoves. Fashioned after coffins, the alcoves stood in rows along walkways that were connected by steep stairs. The steps began at each wall’s base and stretched into the Sepulchre’s darkness above.
The alcoves were occupied as far as Khait could see. Skeletons fashioned out of a strange black metal that seemed to swallow light stood motionless within each alcove. Empty eye sockets and rictus grins were not alien to iconography, both Imperial and heretical, yet something about this legion of ebon skeletons made Khait’s skin crawl with inexplicable dread.
‘The Sleepless slumber still. Silence is our ally,’ Slaught hissed, barely audible even to transhuman ears. The xenos had condensed their form, the maggots drawing closer together to minimise their physicality. Slaught cowered before the monuments of the Sleepless, Khait realised.
‘Sleepless? More like Sleepers,’ Racka Utó snorted derisively. The First Acolyte strode to a nearby alcove and inspected the deathly visage of the skeleton by his crozius’s light. The skull was too long and thin to be of human or even abhuman origin. The proportions of the eye sockets, cheekbones and jaws were all distinctly alien.
‘Careful, Bearer of the Word,’ Slaught whispered while its tendril slowly stretched towards the First Acolyte’s weapon. If Slaught thought they could restrict Racka Utó, they would be sorely mistaken. However, Khait knew such a contest of strength wouldn’t come to pass. The First Acolyte was smarter than that, and he stepped away from the alcove and turned around to find Slaught’s tendril snaking towards him.
‘Don’t get cocky, foul scum,’ Racka Utó warned the xenos, simultaneously backhanding the tendril with an armoured glove. The tendril stayed coherent despite the powerful slap, but quickly withdrew into the xenos’s main body mass.
‘You are the fool not to heed my warnings!’ Slaught raised its voice, and its timber changed. It was the first sign of an emotion mankind was intimately familiar with: anger. Khait’s second heart began beating, and his adrenal glands tightened, ready to propel him into battle at a moment’s notice.
‘You dare call me a fool?’ Racka Utó roared and sprang forward, spinning his accursed crozius high and bringing its defaced aquila down on the roiling mass of maggots. The power field surrounding the crozius’s head erupted in a deafening thunderclap when it made contact, reverberating from the terraced walls of the chamber. Atomised worms splattered across the smooth obsidian floor, but the xenos’s main mass moved out of the falling crozius’s arc.
Khait jumped into action with flickering psystave in hand, intent on aiding his cousin in this altercation. Despite his transhuman physiology and power armoured speed, he arrived too late. A maggot pillar the size of a Knight’s foot burst from Slaught’s amorphous body and hit Racka Utó’s crimson plastron with the velocity and force of a thunder hammer. The blow lifted the First Acolyte off his feet, and the Word Bearer flew a handful of metres backwards before impacting with a crunch against the lowest terrace.
There was no time for surprises. Khait’s mind rose sluggishly through the enumerations, impeded as he was by the Sepulchre’s hateful warp-curbing effect. Despite reaching the fifth enumeration, the warp barely trickled forth, and he almost missed the appendage slithering towards his ankle. He struck it with the tip of his psystave and used the weapon to vault above the other tendril, following in the first one’s shadow. Stomping hard on the second tendril, he brought his psystave around in a wide arc. The psycrystals inlaid into the stave flashed with ghostly fire as it bisected Slaught.
The xenos shriek-hissed in what Khait assumed was pain. The maggot-man fell apart, but only temporarily. Their component worms swiftly reassembled into a bipedal form that stood as tall as a Dreadnought. Freshly secreted mucus covered their body, each swollen maggot pulsating with a sudden vigour beneath the iridescent sheen.
‘You’ll regret this,’ Slaught promised as the barrels of disturbingly organic cannons emerged from the ends of their arms. Bioluminescent fire gathered in the cannons’ bowels and Khait had no doubt that even his psychically reinforced armour would prove to be little protection against their power. Falling back to the fourth enumeration, Khait summoned a flickering psychic wall between them. He was unsure if it could withstand the blast as the warp remained distant and barely responsive to his calls, but it would only need to hold against the first salvo.
Khait and Slaught were suddenly thrown from their feet as the whole planet shuddered. Racka Utó only remained upright because he held onto the cracked terrace he’d been kicked against. The quaking stopped as abruptly as it had started, replaced by a deep thrum that vibrated every bone in Khait’s body. It was nothing his Astartes conditioning couldn’t handle, and Khait sprang to his feet, ready to continue.
Slaught, however, still struggled to bring themselves upright. As menacing as their bipedal form was, it was a mimicry. Lacking true familiarity with standing and fighting upright, they were now at a disadvantage. The hardened combat mucus across the maggots also seemed to prevent transformation, Khait observed.
‘The price of betrayal is death,’ Racka Utó said gleefully, relishing the irony of words spilling from his treacherous lips. He strode forth and spun his accursed crozius overhead, ready to deliver the final blow.
‘The Sleepless awaken,’ Slaught said, the words barely intelligible. ‘We must go. Now!’
‘Where exactly? You’ve led us right into their ruins,’ Khait replied, holding up a palm to stop the First Acolyte.
‘Deeper still we must go,’ the maggot-man explained, remaining deceptively still as its component worms slurped back the mucus they’d secreted. ‘For there lies a marker of the aeldari. A portal to their twilight domain, where the Sleepless cannot pursue us. Only those touched by Ruin may attempt to wrench it open, but without us, you won’t find it before the Sleepless overwhelm and exterminate you.’
‘Should we take our chances, cousin?’ Racka Utó asked Khait. The sorcerer weighed their options carefully, his gene-enhanced mind calculating the variables as he sought the optimal outcome. The enumerations still lingered, faint as they were, nevertheless helping give clarity and focus to his thoughts.
The conclusion was simple: a dead xenos was preferable to a living one when it was such a dangerous specimen. They could still examine the remains after they made their way off this barren orb. Khait opened his mouth to give his verdict, but he was rudely interrupted.
‘An’arkath Sau’tekh!’ a soulless mechanical voice boomed from all around them. The faint glow of the walls grew in intensity. Jade lines of energy sprang from hidden wells and flowed along angular runes that connected like complex circuitry. Each line of emerald energy inevitably terminated at an alcove, casting the ebon skeletons in tesseract green.
‘An’arkath Sau’tekh!’ the emotionless voice boomed again, malice permeating every alien syllable.
The Thousand Sons sorcerer looked at his Word Bearer cousin and shook his head, staying the execution.
‘I find it ironic that these Sleepless are the ones who saved your abominable hide, Slaught,’ Khait said. Unclamping his maglocked bolter from his thigh-plate, he gestured for the xenos to rise. ‘Show us the way to this portal.’
‘As you wish, Son of a Thousand,’ Slaught replied, crawling from beneath the arc of Racka Utó’s crozius, towards a doorway large enough for ten Space Marines to march through abreast.
All around and above them, poison green light filled empty eye sockets and cadaverous rib cages as the undead machines came to halting life.
The Sepulchre-World’s subterranean complex was as grand and awe-inspiring as the Imperial Palace at the height of its glory. Khait had only caught glimpses of the Palace’s splendour as he fought to bring enlightenment to its deceived population. He had no hope of personally besting the Emperor, but he could demonstrate His fallacy through warp-wrought facts. Those who denied the existence of the Sea of Souls perished by its very touch, extinguishing the lies of the Imperial Truth one mind at a time.
The Sleepless’s domain was the dark reflection of the Imperial Palace. In place of light, there was darkness. In place of breathtaking art, there were perfectly symmetrical runes of unknown meaning. In place of billions of souls burning brightly, unfeeling metal shambled in a perverse mimicry of life.
The Sleepless came in ones and twos at first, fleshless fingers grasping at ceramite in a pitiful attempt to halt the interlopers. Racka Utó smashed them apart with crackling sweeps of his accursed crozius, but he was strangely silent. Khait could understand him. There was no challenge, no fun to be had by slaying these machine puppets.
Chittering insectoid constructs swarmed the destroyed Sleepless, gorging themselves on the remaining components. Khait could only guess at the nature of their weird symbiotic relationship. He wished he had more time to study this animatronic ecosystem, but as more and more Sleepless lurched from pitch-black corridors and eerily silent tomb-chambers, it was evident there would be no time for such academic pursuits.
‘We are almost there,’ Slaught promised between salvos of their bio-cannons. Orbs of energy impacted among a throng of shambling mechanical cadavers, coring the ebon skeletons with little resistance. Devoid of motive force, the Sleepless folded like marionette puppets with their cords cut.
‘We had best be,’ Racka Utó growled, bisecting a Sleepless with a wide sweep of his weapon of station. Another undead machine clawed at the First Acolyte’s power pack until a precisely placed bolt shell exploded its skull into tiny fragments of alien metal.
‘I can faintly feel the portal’s presence,’ Khait mused, scoring another headshot with his bolter. He had been an accomplished marksman in his Brotherhood, but his psychic powers vastly overshadowed such mundane skills, mostly negating his need to resort to the weapon. Khait had to concede that his appreciation for the bolter’s powerful kick had not diminished over the centuries.
‘Down this way,’ Slaught pointed with a tentacle of coiled corpse-white worms towards a rent in the otherwise flawless obsidian walls. Khait had looked in that direction before, but his eyes skipped over the rent, as if it shied away from being perceived, until its existence was revealed.
Beyond the rent lay a natural cave of the same black material that made up the planet. The xenos made its way to the rent and slithered through without hesitation. Khait made to follow when a jade lightning illuminated the walls, and Racka Utó cursed.
‘Damnation!’
The lightning earthed in one of the spiralling horns adorning Racka Utó’s helm. The magickally infused ceramite blackened and disintegrated layer by layer down to the horn’s stub.
‘That was my favourite horn!’ The First Acolyte swore and drew his bolter. He emptied the clip in a single torrent of explosive destruction. A whole throng of shambling Sleepless were reduced to shredded and mangled pieces of inert machinery.
‘I do believe we have more pressing matters to attend to,’ Khait said evenly. Sleepless automatons were rounding the corners carrying long rifles glowing with eldritch energies and affixed with executioner’s blades. In the distance, the sorcerer could hear other skeletons marching, hundreds of metal feet stomping the onyx floor in perfect lockstep.
‘Such as?’ Racka Utó asked, ejecting the empty clip and slamming a fresh one into the bolter’s receiver. The Word Bearer racked the slide and chambered the first round, always inscribed with his favourite line from the Book of Lorgar.
Look Upon Thyne Glory!
‘I will need protection while I open the portal,’ Khait replied. ‘And I don’t know how long it’ll take. These aeldar artefacts can be, let’s say, difficult.’
‘Uncertainty doesn’t suit you, cousin,’ Racka Utó said with a lopsided smile hidden behind his fanged helm-grill. His suit’s thermometer blinked as it detected a sudden drop in temperature. Hoarfrost ran up the obsidian walls and crept onto his power armour. An otherworldly glow emanated from Khait’s direction, overshadowing the Sepulchre-World’s own jade glow.
His barb had triggered the Prosperan just as he hoped it would. Locked behind adamantite gates of willpower and a lifetime of rigorous indoctrination, enormous psychic power dwelled. Racka Utó was slowly mastering how to tease that untapped potential forth from his unimaginative cousin. And when he did, no Sleepless tech-sorcery would hold back the rising tide of power pouring through Khait, a true conduit of the Empyrean.
‘Do not dare to doubt me, First Acolyte,’ Khait of Prospero said in a thousand voices, each once sending a psychic shockwave down the tunnels. The approaching Sleepless were thrown from their feet, clattering in disoriented heaps of tangled limbs and rifles.
Khait turned from the chaos he had caused and marched purposefully after Slaught. Racka Utó unclipped a frag grenade and tossed it among the Sleepless as they tried to right themselves. As the fresh detonation threw them back down, the Word Bearer spun around and sprinted after Khait through the rent.
Beyond the rent lay darkness so absolute that Racka Utó felt as if he had stepped into the void itself. The momentary disorientation quickly dissipated as his auto-senses adjusted to his surroundings, overlaying the pitch-black rocks with a wire frame layout calculated based on ultrasound reverberations. Now that he could see where he was going, Racka Utó made his way down the cavern. He could feel the portal’s presence grate against his soul, abhorrent and repulsive.
His helm’s display glitched, and the wireframe tangled up. The First Acolyte came to a halt. The Sleepless were not yet on their heels, so he could afford to linger and examine the cause of the glitch. His auto-senses kept trying to untangle something etched into the obsidian rock. Reaching out, Racka Utó ran armoured fingers down the rock’s surface, picking up the artfully concealed notches through haptic feedback.
An aeldari glyph, Racka Utó realised. He looked around and found the wireframe overlay distorted in multiple locations along the length of the lightless passage. The longer he looked, the more glyphs he detected.
‘Cheeky knife-ears,’ Racka Utó grunted in amusement. The aeldari had managed to conceal their hidden backdoor into the Sleepless’ Sepulchre-World by using the very powers the undead automatons tried to suppress with their technology. And now he would exploit their cunning for his own designs. With a grin plastered over his face, the First Acolyte ran after his cousin and the maggot-man.
When he caught up to them, the sorcerer was standing in front of the aeldari artefact. Slaught pressed themselves against the cold rock of the cavern, setting the barrel of their bio-cannons atop a rock formation to cover the only entrance to the cave. Racka Utó suppressed the urge to draw as he stepped into the xenos’s line of fire.
‘Cousin, how is it? Can you do it?’ Racka Utó asked. The Thousand Sons sorcerer didn’t bother to turn, but the psychic halo surrounding him blazed with renewed intensity.
‘I have already started. Now stop bothering me. This is more complex than you could ever imagine,’ Khait replied, focusing exclusively on the aeldari portal. His scarab-topped psystave was planted firmly, and witch-light coruscated around both the sorcerer and his weapon. Tendrils of luminescence caressed the portal’s slender, curving frame, only to be met with angry sparks of denial.
‘Cover me while I prepare our defences, Slaught,’ he ordered the xenos, which did not reply or react, but kept its bio-cannons trained on the cave’s single entrance. Taking the creature’s silence as a yes, the First Acolyte drew his ritual knife. The warp-infused blade leapt from its scabbard with enthusiasm, eager to part flesh and cut threads of fate.
Looking around carefully, Racka Utó used his auto-senses to detect more of the hidden aeldari glyphs. Just as he suspected, a dozen were arranged in a precise order around the cave’s entrance. Had there been more time, he would have examined them all and chosen the most antithetical Chaos runes at his disposal. The Sleepless gave him no such luxury.
Racka Utó took the skin-bound tome chained to his waist and opened it. The blood-soaked pages turned on their own, syphoning the First Acolyte’s intent directly from his soul. The tome settled, offering the Word Bearer a page laden with arcane sigils and runes that keened painfully, yearning to escape their prison.
The ritual knife whispered insanity as it sliced into the volcanic stone. The aeldari glyph beneath the cold blade cracked and smoked as new meaning was forced upon it, twisting its original purpose to one that now suited the First Acolyte. Racka Utó, satisfied with his handiwork, went to work on the other glyphs, perverting them through the arcane knowledge he had gathered over the centuries.
Beams of rancid green suddenly flashed from the dark passage, licking the walls of the obsidian cave surrounding them. As the volcanic glass turned to dust, hunched skeletal forms lurched from the darkness, brandishing weapons of total annihilation.
‘The Sleepless are almost upon us! Hurry!’ Slaught cried as a patch of their maggot-flesh ceased to exist when a jade lightning earthed itself in its abominable form. They fired back migraine-coloured balls of bioenergy from their cannons, but the Sleepless ignored the withering barrage and advanced relentlessly.
‘Silence,’ Khait hissed. Even a momentary lapse of focus could lead to disaster as he wrestled with the dead aeldari souls trapped in the webway portal’s arcane mechanism. He never tried opening one before, but if his sire had done it, so could he.
‘Barrier’s complete,’ Racka Utó reported, and a shimmering field emerged from sacrilegious runes etched across aeldari glyphs that had hidden the cavern from discovery. Screaming faces oozed across the barrier’s oily surface, swallowing the incoming emerald beams. Switching his ritual knife for his bolter, the First Acolyte took up position on the opposite side from Slaught.
Khait closed his eyes and completely tuned out the Materium’s distractions. Rising through the enumerations, his soul became a lens that focused the roiling forces of the warp into a las-scalpel’s intensity. With surgical precision, the trapped aeldari spirits were cut loose from the portal’s frame and reabsorbed by the ravenous wraithbone. Enigmatic symbols flared to life as the portal began to feed on itself. With the wet gasp of a dagger being pulled from a lung, the gateway opened onto a strange hallway of shifting proportions.
‘It’s done,’ Khait groaned through gritted teeth. The webway portal tugged hungrily at his soul as it rapidly consumed the trapped aeldari spirits and wanted more. ‘But we need to hurry!’
‘Slaught, you first,’ Racka Utó barked, each word in rhythm with the reports of his bolter. The mass-reactive shells turned the steadily advancing Sleepless into inert pieces of metal. Mechanical insectoids swarmed the fallen limbs and torn torses, devouring them in a frenzy of clockwork chittering.
The maggot-man hesitated, but only for a moment. Letting loose one last shot, they lunged through the open portal. Beyond the boundary of their natural realm, the physical cohesion of their form abruptly ceased. With a surprised susurration, Slaught unceremoniously fell apart into their component pieces. Corpse-white maggots littered the webway’s floor, crawling manically as if looking for something.
‘Interesting,’ Khait managed despite the excruciating pain. He turned to the Word Bearer to send him through just as the protective barrier exploded around them in a shower of unreality. Expending the last bolt round from his weapon, the First Acolyte turned and sprinted for the Thousand Sons sorcerer as jade beams of disintegration snapped at his heels.
Racka Utó barrelled into Khait, and they gracelessly tumbled through the portal. Without Khait’s soul as sustenance, the entrance to the webway shut with an angry roar.
‘May He rot on Terra!’ The First Acolyte cursed suddenly. The chains at his waist hung loosely, the torn links at their ends ceasing to exist as entropy claimed the adamantium. His precious tome, the collection of his most prized secrets and dark arts, was now trapped on the other side of the portal with the Sleepless. He turned to Khait with a Khorne Champion’s intensity. ‘We have to go back for the Liber Infernum!”
Khait chuckled at the Word Bearer’s absurdity and pushed himself upright. His power armour was smeared with flattened maggots, after their power armoured tumble turned the tiny creatures into necrotic mush across ceramite and plasteel. Those still alive moved frantically, lacking the conjoined mind that had held Slaught together.
‘That is not happening today, cousin. The portal is closed, and it’s closed for good. The aeldari souls sustaining it are now gone. However, we have only exchanged one predicament for another,’ Khait answered cheerfully.
‘Damn you, Prosperan! A life’s work was within those pages!’ The First Acolyte seethed, anger building with each moment.
Khait wasn’t intimidated by the Word Bearer. He tapped Racka Utó’s helm where the Sleepless energy beam had destroyed his horn.
‘The true knowledge is within you,’ the sorcerer said, before turning from his crimson-clad cousin and looking around. He entered the aeldari’s sacred webway, survived the awakening Sleepless and now had Slaught at the mercy of his inquisitive mind. With his precious tome lost, Racka Utó had clearly lost the challenge, but Khait knew the First Acolyte would never admit it.
Racka Utó fumed regardless of Khait’s placatory words, brushing off maggot corpses from his pauldron. Taking his anger out on the maggots, he kicked aside a pile of squirming, segmented bodies. Beneath them, the bio-cannons the xenos had used were revealed. Racka Utó picked them up, curiosity overriding his rage.
‘Slaught had vastly overestimated their capacity to endure the Immaterium. Were they that desperate to escape?’ The First Acolyte mused as he examined the xenos weapon.
‘You’ve seen the Sleepless and felt the touch of their weapons. You tell me,’ Khait said as he pulled open a pouch hanging from his belt. The sorcerer produced a vial chiselled from crimson crystal. Its eight sides were each inscribed with Prosperan glyphs of power.
‘They lack everything that we possess, which makes them weak despite the strength of their weapons or the vast legions still slumbering. Without faith, without true conviction, they will never stand a chance in the war raging across the galaxy,’ Racka Utó said. Khait knew what was coming and subtly turned off the aural receptors of his helm as the Word Bearer launched into a passionate tirade about their cause.
Lowering himself to a knee, Khait carefully scooped up a handful of disoriented maggots and deposited them in his crystal vial. Sealing it with a stopper and an incantation, he slipped the vial back into the pouch at his belt. In time, he would know more about Slaught and their species. Racka Utó tapped his shoulder, and Khait re-activated his aural receptors.
‘Did you hear that?’ Racka Utó asked, mag-locking his empty bolter and drawing his accursed crozius.
‘Hear what, cousin?’ Khait returned the question and stood, ready for more enemies.
The webway twisted and turned, rearranging itself in accordance with the ever-shifting threads of fate. Powers beyond even that of the Dark Pantheon weaved the strands of time to force unto the present a future it was not meant to possess.
And in the distance, thunder pealed, and a wolf howled.
About the Author
Daniel was born on a sunny, peaceful spring morning in Budapest, Hungary. He preferred watching television over reading books. That changed when his school took him to the public library and everyone was forced to pick a book to read. He chose The Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Despite his initial disdain, our hero devoured the book in a few days and hasn’t stopped reading since. If you got this far, please send help, his budget (and shelves) can’t handle more books! Oh, and he occasionally entertains the idea of being a writer. The fool.
