If we end here then let it be meaningless, as it has always been. Let none mourn our passing. Let our legacy be swallowed by the hungry vastness of the void.
Let the curtain fall. We will be judged as nothing more than what we were: another tepid troupe of passing players on a fourth-rate stage. A cheap and cheerless laugh, an interval act in a feeble farce scarce fit to while away the ages.
If our strings are cut today we will not fall with dignity. This will be no noble sacrifice. Our last stand will not be glorious. The end will be bitter when it comes. We will die like we lived: in vain. We were not made for better fate than that.
And if we do not die, what of it? Should we be glad to taste a little more of time? Called to give one more encore, should we rejoice? It matters not one whit. If this comedy of faults should last one more act or five it will still be nothing more than what it is.
Despair, ye of faith and ye of little, for you are cursed alike. Give cry and tear at your own flesh - it will not bring you comfort in the night. The naked truth is no more than madness and cruelty eternal. And we are naught but candles, dying slowly in the dark.
Her soul is a plaything: a fragile, mutable wisp of light, so very small and insignificant. He dissects it with care, laying out every facet of her identity for his perusal. So very, very careful to avoid permanent damage. Every piece will go back where it belongs when he is done.
(Cut for length, and for content: torture, mind control, abuse)
She quivers beneath his hands. The vivisection itself writes fresh agony across the spool of her experience. He can excise that later, if he does not like the effect it has on her psyche. It’s so very easy to rewrite her. A rearrangement here, an inserted thought there. He could strengthen her weave with warpstuff if he so chose, make of her something more resilient, more like himself. He values her as her, of course. But what are the boundaries of identity, really? What version of her would be most satisfying? He plays.
She kneels at the daemon’s side, head low and shoulders slumped. Her despair on display for all to see. She fought, and fought, and fighting gained her nothing but pain and misery and eventually she stopped fighting because there is no point. She will never escape.
She is a mute toy, a dress-up doll, decorated with finery and displayed as an ornament. Psychic puppet-strings keep her posture elegant, bob her head and lift her hands to wave at favoured cultists. Sometimes she is permitted the use of her own body, so long as she keeps smiling and doesn’t try to flee or fight or scream for help
She walks among the scum and they flinch from her gaze. Their fear is a potent, heady intoxicant. She could have any one of them flayed. She could have any one of them elevated to heights beyond their wildest dreams. She smirks, catching the arm of a cringing cultist, and makes him look up at her. His fear is mingled with awe at having caught her attention. Power is sweet.
She sobs in her chains, flinching away from the knife in his hand. She’s always known that she would break like any other, after suffering enough.
“I give up,” she sobs brokenly, “You win, I’ll do what you want.”
“Beg me,” he teases. The razor draws stinging lines across her skin. It’s barely pain. But it is a promise of worse to come.
“No more,” she pleads, “Please, please no more.” The words come easier than she would have expected. Pride seems like a petty thing now when all she wants is not to hurt any more. “I give up, please, you win.”
“I don’t care,” he purrs. “You don’t get a say in this, Interrogator. I won long ago. Scream for me.”
She wakes slumped against the door, head ringing. The circle is burnt out. Another failure. Perhaps she should give up on this, and take what she’s learned so far to Evelyn. They need every scrap of intelligence they can get... She picks herself up off the floor. Maybe it’s time to abandon this obsession. She needs to be on top of her game. Time to take a shower, clean up, and get back to work. And deep inside her, the seed of corruption slumbers, just waiting for a psychic whisper to awaken it.
Tacitus’ touch is bliss, an ecstasy such as she never imagined could exist. Nothing else compares. When it’s absent, she can think of nothing else. Her body shakes with longing. Her thoughts turn ever back to it. There seems to be nothing she wouldn’t do for another touch. No atrocity beyond her, no blasphemy too terrible. The shame and the guilt eat at her... but his touch can brush those away. She can feel good again. So she drags the evidence of her corruption obediently before him and hopes desperately for approval. She will grovel on her belly if need be, and push her head into his hand like a pet seeking attention. The humiliation won’t matter once the bliss kicks in.
She is a trophy. Chained and pinned and exposed to the jeering masses, unable to escape their abuse. Fell magic heals her wounds before they can kill her, and keeps her from the mercy of unconsciousness. Theirs is a cruelty born of vengeance, and knows no limits.
She is a favourite and she lives a life of luxury. She has everything she could want but her freedom. And she hates it. She rejects Tacitus’ blasphemous nature. But she has no options. No way to escape, or lash out. And as the months slip by, the urgency fades... despite her resistance, life has never been so good.
The golden light of glory is unmistakable. She knows with every fibre of her being that this is the work of the God Emperor. Tears flow freely as the light fills her with warmth and beauty. She is forgiven. She prostrates herself before the glory of the divine, and weeps with gratitude.
She thought she knew pain, but the depths of agony possible go far, far beyond anything her mind could have imagined. Every millimetre of flesh - or at least the soulstuff that she cannot help but perceive as flesh - is pierced through with a dozen razor-edged microfilaments. Her blood is awash with venom. Her skin blisters. Every twitch, every thought, every involuntary spasm somehow impossibly redoubles the pain. She is nothing but suffering, and it goes on and on and on without end or reprieve.
She hangs in nothingness, utterly helpless and exposed. Gasping with relief to be free of the last vision, filled with dread at what the next might bring.
~See, would a loss of faith really be so bad?~
She wants to say ‘yes’ but she has no capacity to lie. No capacity to speak, even. Tacitus reads the thoughts directly from her mind, and there is no privacy, no way to hide the terrible truth. There is not much she wouldn’t betray, if it could ensure a future that was more than just torment.
There should be denial. Her mind should recoil from the revelation, the loss of faith in herself. It should shatter into madness, withdrawing from reality. But he holds her mind fast - splayed and pinned like an insect on a board. There is no retreat from her own thoughts unless he permits it. She is far, far from reality already, and she can’t escape the enforced lucidity.
~What do you gain by hurting yourself?~
The question sparks a powerful need to resume her flagellation. To try again to scour away the weakness. At the same time another part of her cries out in despair, and is glad that he is keeping her from the pain for now. But she doesn’t have an answer to the question.
He parts the threads of her psyche, pulling to the surface the reasons that her consciousness has not been able to acknowledge. Brushing aside self-loathing and hope for salvation and fear of what worse alternatives he might inflict.
Here is panic at the shattering of her beliefs and expectations. She clings to the past, grasping as if at sharp-edged shards of glass. Here is fear of the unknown. What might happen to her if she relaxed the iron grip of the rules she calls faith? What if it is awful? What if it is not? What parts of her might thrive? What if she found herself happier? What would that mean for the choices she has made throughout her life?
It hurts. She had thought that she was motivated by faith. That she cared that she had been in the wrong. She does not want to confront herself, not truly.
~But you want to be accepted as you are~
No her strained soul insists no no no no no. She isn’t sure she can want anything any more. She loathes him for doing this to her. She loathes the galaxy for being this way. She loathes herself. She might want an end to everything. But even that is unfair and intolerable and also better than she deserves.
He sighs, and soothes her mind with a thought. Quiets the jabbering of her consciousness and offers simple comfort. With a psychic whimper of surrender she nuzzles into it and becomes calm. He brushes away the experiences she has just had, sets her back to the way she was when he plucked her from the cell she made for herself.
He still wants to make something better of her. Something better for her. Perhaps both. But that was not better, for all that it was entertaining.
🌌- A time they got to admire the beauty of nature (all, again)
“I give up!” he cries, equal parts abject misery and breathless humour at the futility of it all. His face is tilted up as if to shout into the sky, though they are indoors. “I give up. You win! Do your worst!”
It is a moment of perfect surrender.
Everything is too much. He is overwhelmed on every level. He cannot cope. He cannot take the weight of responsibility. His mind is falling apart. He can scarcely tell fear from desire any more. The insistent pull on his soul of the gods’ expectations, of Slaanesh’s expectations, has been impossible to ignore for days, ever since Scythia’s mind-scarring ascension. He cannot take it any more. He is done with fighting the tide.
So he surrenders.
(Cut for graphic body horror.)
The power floods into him at once.
And that too is too much. But there is no taking it back. It is a more savage pain than anything he has experienced yet, and he is no stranger to agony. It fills his bones like molten metal. And yet it has something of delight in it. Something of the joyful pain of stretching a stiff muscle, amplified a thousand-fold. He is consumed by the need to move. His muscles scream, his joints are seized. His skin is too small. He must move to relieve the tension. Must stretch muscles and flex joints. It is a need that swallows all else.
His fingers claw at his throat, trying to relieve the crushing pressure. Claws break through the fragile skin of his fingertips and carve long bloody lines down his neck. He tries to arch his back. His skin stretches grotesquely. Robes tear from the force of his bones pressing outwards from within. The skin stretches further, then splits as well, revealing slick red musculature beneath.
His jaws elongate, tearing away from the lips. His face rolls back across the new structure of his skull as it grows. His new toothy maw gapes open, jaws wide. The scream that issues from his throat is high and wild and echoes across the Warp for systems around.
From the wreckage of his mortal body, the new unfolds, escheresque, all long limbs and spine and wrong-angled joints. He is a strange insect, thrashing his way bloodily from a chrysalis many sizes too small. The scream of agony becomes a howl of triumph as he shakes off the last remnants of his mortality like so much unwanted chaff. Scraps of fabric and skin hit the walls.
He crouches, nude and skinless, on the ship’s decking. A thousand new senses at his disposal, and every one raw and overwhelmed with input. He breathes in power from the Warp with every twitch and gasp. His own newfound strength is intoxicating.
And the freedom.
He leaps, and in a single motion slips sideways out of reality.
The Warp closes around him like the home he has always had and never truly known.
He used to think he knew it well. But even as a Navigator, his mind was mortal and constrained by mortal understandings. He Saw a mere echo of the Warp, a metaphor that his narrow mind could grasp.
Now he Sees truly.
And it is beautiful. Drenched in suffering and atrocity, yes. But beautiful still, like the awful majesty of predator disembowelling prey.
Truths far more fundamental than colour or scent or form stretch away in every direction. Vivid and varied, potent and portentous and saturated with rich flavour. Here lies everything that matters. Every dream and desire. Every soul, every sensation, every emotion rippling outwards and interfering and intermingling and casting shadows greater and more terrible than their origins. All the evils of the galaxy are here. And all the good as well. Every tragedy and every heroic sacrifice. Every story.
This is the Warp as it was meant to be perceived. He is no longer a mere observer, trapped in dull flesh and peering through murky lenses into the depths of truth. He is a native thing, swimming the currents as easily as he used to draw breath. He is finally, truly awake.
I am the downtrodden slave, unfairly used to the ends of others. I am the prisoner sobbing brokenly in chains. I am the victim on the rack, screaming for mercy.
I am comfort found in servitude. I am hope lost of ever tasting freedom. I am the beaten dog that still craves its master’s approval.
I am pity for the beaten and the bruised. I am water held to bleeding lips. I am a salve for wounded dreams.
I am the breaker of chains. I am the hand offered to those who cannot find their feet alone. I am solidarity in the dark.
I am the bitter grudge nursed through years of incarceration. I am the fury of the caged beast let loose at last. I am the burning ache for revenge.
I am revolution, the seething tide of the oppressed rising up. I am retribution long overdue to the torturer, the abuser and the slaver. I am vengeance paid in kind.
She struggles through the crowd at an agonising, crawlingly slow pace. The press of bodies is dense, jostling her from every side.The air is thick and hot with sweat and breath. How can one person alone hope to get anywhere in this seething throng? For every pace she manages to shove her way forwards, she is shoved back another three, or sideways, or anywhere but where she needs to go. It takes all the strength she has just to keep from getting crushed or trampled.
And then bony hands are catching at her arm, pulling her forwards. She has to shoulder another witless civilian out of the way to see who is trying to help her. It is Tacitus. Hollow-cheeked, wide-eyed Tacitus the daemonologist. Her cringing, pleading toy. He is not in his cell. He is not in chains. Does he think he is allowed to touch her?
“What are you doing?” she demands coldly.
“I’m sorry, Interrogator,” he whines, “I’m s-sorry, I’m t-trying to help...”
He drops her arm, but she catches his wrists. His fear seems genuine. Satisfaction is warm in her gut. That familiar thrill of power and dominance. But she is still suspicious.
“Why?”
He is confused. “Interrogator?”
“Why help me?”
“Bec-cause I belong to you, Interrogator,” he stammers, “I want what you want, please-!”
And she can’t help but smile. This is as things should be.
“Help me, then,” she orders, releasing one of his wrists so that he can help her thread her way through the crowd.
She wakes with the warmth of power still glowing in her heart. For a sleepy minute or two her head is full of fond memories of how he used to beg on command, and cry, and lick her boots. How he feared her and depended on her and was so desperately grateful for the slightest praise or mercy.
Then reality cuts back in and she recalls how he has betrayed her. He is not the snivelling, eager-to-please wretch that she remembers. He is a creature of the Ruinous Powers now. An enemy, and a monster. It is a bitter, angry thought. And the bitterness stays with her all day.
Here in the heart of the sacred city is a walled garden, and inside it dwell innocents.
They are untainted by the harsh truth of the galaxy, unscarred by violence and hardship, free of hatred and bitterness. They were born here, or they were taken too young to recall violence and loss, too young to have learned prejudice and fear. They have never known anything but paradise.
Their lives are not utterly without discipline. They must learn diligence and conscientiousness, to work hard at that which matters to them, and to treat those around them with respect and compassion. But the lessons are delivered gently, with firm words and proportionate sanctions. They are never struck, or humiliated, or made to suffer. They grow up without the burden of learning such concepts. And they grow into the kind of people who can provide paradise to others.
They are not quite human, of course. They cannot be, growing up within the maelstrom of the Warp. But they are beautiful, growing here surrounded by concepts of beauty. They are horned and hoofed, or long-limbed and betailed. Their eyes are huge and deep and full of colour, or their skin is scaled or bejewelled or iridescent like an insect’s wings. Their passions run deep and they excel at the skills they cherish.
Those whose impulses run to cruelty are calmly removed if they cannot be corrected, taken to dwell elsewhere and fill a different role. The process is transparent, to do otherwise would be to cultivate fear. Some simply do not belong in the garden. They will be found a place to belong. Sometimes it is tragic. But it is not a punishment.
And some leave of their own free will. Those who yearn to see a wider world are permitted to do so. How could their yearning be denied? It always, always breaks their hearts to see how terrible the galaxy truly is. And it breaks his heart to see. There is no going back, not for them. Their pain does not belong within the garden’s walls. They will have to find another path.
And many never leave. Though they live their lives to completion without leaving the garden, they will always be children to him. His children, sweet and perfect. They love, and laugh, and care for one another. And he loves them with a fierce and painful intensity. From afar. He could not love them up close without making them dependent on his love. And besides, his essence is pain, and that pain has no place within the garden.
It will not be eternal. Nothing is. He gives them what he can, but eternity is beyond his power. Some day he will lose this planet in the eternal struggle, and the city will fall and the garden will burn. The knowledge is a knife. But the love is all the sharper and sweeter for the knowing.
Where are you, brother? he wonders, staring into the endless raging storm. Have you been struck down by one of our many enemies? Or attempted to face down the gods and suffered the obvious consequences? Or succumbed to one of the absurd number of implausible, self-inflicted fates that you court, like allowing your past alternate self to put you in a xeno box?
The thought of the loss stings. He remembers his once-brother-to-be in fond terms. As a medic, treating his injuries. Carrying him under one arm away from the flames as he choked and spluttered on the smoke, semi-conscious. Leaping to his defence against the angry crowds.
Or are you avoiding me? Have you judged my actions and found me wanting? I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve drifted a long way from what we wanted. I haven’t given up on making a difference, you know. I just don’t know where to start, to avoid making the same mistakes again. I’m going to keep trying, as soon as I can figure out how. I promise. But if you’re concealing yourself from me, I suppose I don’t stand a hope of finding you. Although, is your Invisible College still out there somewhere? Perhaps I should look for them... to see if they need support, if nothing else.
Strange, mad creature that his brother is. Trying to interact with the things he creates is almost never worth the effort. The twisted illogic of it all is painful to puzzle through. But some of it was a lasting good, when it came down to it...
I hope it’s neither. Ha, hope, there’s one for you. I hope you’re just deep under the surface of one of your mad schemes, busy doing who-knows-what, and you’ll re-emerge some day when it concludes, or you get bored, or whatever it is that eventually drives you to let go of things. And we’ll meet in the Warp, and catch up, and I’ll try to understand some of what you say, and try to turn you away from the stupidest ideas you have, and you’ll try to set me back on the right course, and we’ll laugh, and talk of pasts and futures and the shape of the galaxy...
The daemon lounges indolent on a vast pile of pillows and blankets.
-Pillows and blankets?- a daemonette once mocked -Like a mortal child? Why not the willing bodies of your servants, or the flayed and screaming bodies of your enemies?-
He ate that daemonette, because he was peckish and she was irritating. In another mood he might have laughed with her at his idiosyncrasy, or petted her and attempted to change her mind, or tortured her for her insolence.
He likes soft pillows and pleasing fabrics, and that is all that matters. There are sheer silks and velvets, satins and furs and soft fleeces, each hand-picked for their specific appeal to his senses. In his generosity, he shares these things with his servants. They sleep here if they wish, sprawled here and there or curled against the warmth and comfort of his skin. They worship with their hands, caressing him and getting drunk off the high of physical contact. For the most part he enjoys the touch of his pets. Where their attentions are not welcome he pushes them away carefully. He tries to be gentle, but the rejection still breaks hearts.
