UC question: what's Jaghatai up to these days? Is he still rolling around the webway at Mach Fuck™ clapping Drukhari cheeks (in whichever way you choose to interpret that) or is he back in the imperium now?
ayoooo uncle jag!!!
Jaghatai is indeed still rolling around the webway at Mach Fuck hunting drukhari With Prejudice; he wasn't dead so whatever magnus touched didn't reset him, he's still just hanging out. a few of his brothers have run into him since, so they know he's around, but he's patently uninterested in the imperium as a whole. Some of his sons travel back and forth between realspace and the webway, and gman's work with the ynnari has opened the door for some negotiation with the aeldari in but it's tentative. he has made a few friends tho!
When he hears about juno he sends piles of gifts in celebration, but he doesn't actually meet her till she's living with the ynnari as a teenager. here's a sneak peek!
A hand on her elbow yanked her back.
“<Tyelko,>” she hissed, “<what the fuck?>”
“<Vaeyncaria, what the fuck!>” He echoed angrily, “<That’s a White Ghost.>”
The word he used was badly translated, she thought, leaning out to check the pauldrons on the bodies again. “<White Scars, actually.> Addanirwa,” she offered.
Her cousin shook his head. “No,” he insisted. “Addancairn,” he spat the word. “<Aeldari hunters.>”
“<They hunt Drukhari,>” she corrected.
Tyelkarel looked at her like she’d gone mad. “<Oh, and they can tell the difference?>” he asked sharply.
Juno stared at him.
“<There are always more of them, after the scouts,>” Tyelkarel said, glancing around nervously. “<We should go.>”
Juno took a breath through her nose, and took stock of the situation. They were lost, the Harlequin could not be counted on to help. Tyelkarel was a passable duelist for his age, but he wasn’t much older than she was, and she only had two bolter mags left. She relaxed her stance, waited for Tyelkarel’s grip to go slack as he assumed her acquiescence, and then swung herself out over their cover.
“<Juno!>”
The first body was dead. She listened, took the helm off carefully to check the slack face beneath. His eyes and mouth had deep claw marks scraping across his features like something had clawed its way out from the inside, bleeding sluggishly still. She made a face, but couldn’t sense any lingering Daemon in the air. He had six mags left on him, but she couldn’t carry that many in her scout’s armor. She took one, noted that the body was largely intact otherwise, and moved on.
The second body was alive. Missing most of the left side, but the Sus An had activated. His bike had been the one that exploded, she guessed. Maybe his brother had been compelled in his possession to shoot it. His face was full of old scars, and he had some impressively well-kept facial hair, but he seemed younger.
Juno stood. “<Tyelko, get out here,>” she called, loud as she dared in the open.
“<Are you fucking nuts?>” Tyelko popped his head above the wall, glaring.
She rolled her eyes and scoffed. “By the throne, <it’s fine. Get over here and help me get these guys onto the bike.>”
The Harlequin flipped over the wall and landed nimbly on her feet. She pranced over to the first body and leaned over it, head tilting like a curious bird’s.
She made no move to touch the bodies. Juno knew better than to ask.
Tyelkarel moved hesitantly from the ruined building, inching towards the open space like the inert marines might explode at any moment.
“<Come on,>” Juno grunted, already hauling the dead one over towards the vehicle. “<Give me a hand.>”
With some effort, she and Tyelko managed to strap both bodies to the bike, and then get it started. The engine coughed, sputtering dust and rubble out of the exhaust. Juno had not paid attention to machine spirit care outside of arms and armor, but it seemed to be cooperative for now. “Easy,” she patted the side paneling with an open palm, “we’ll bring ‘em home.”
“<Do you know how to drive this thing?>” her cousin called over the roar of the engine.
Juno shrugged and tested the throttle. The handlebars were a little high but she could manage. “<Theoretically.>”
“<Theoretically??>”
Practically Juno wasn’t allowed to drive anything, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. She only almost ran into walls twice on their way out of the city! She ran them off the road and into the vast empty desert as soon as she was free of the buildings, navigating around rocks and warp pools by instinct and the flicking of the Harlequin’s ears as she sat perched on the handlebars. Tyelko was hunched behind her, spear clutched in a white-knuckled grip across his lap.
She drove them out for a while. Long enough that they couldn’t see the buildings anymore. They came to a low valley between rising, ragged peaks, and she cut the engine.
“<Why are we stopping,>” Tyelkarel asked. “<What’s wrong?>”
“<Nothing,>” Juno said, shrugging as she disembarked. “<But this is the best place to call the others. They’ll circle up close as they can.>” She pointed to the rocky outcrops that carved themselves into canyons farther down. “<But if we need to make a break for it we have more options here than in the flat lands.>”
Tyelko sputtered. “<What do you mean? Vaeyncaria- >” He caught her arm again as she walked to the rear of the bike. “<I am serious, you can’t just call the hunters down on us! We just dragged,>” he flung his arms out, gesturing wildly, "<two of their corpses out into the middle of nowhere, for some gods-forsaken reason. At best they will think we are scavenging, and they will kill us for that.>”
She squinted up at him. Tyelkarel was taller, and the bike gave him almost a whole head and neck-length over her, but she was significantly bigger along the shoulders, solid muscle where her mother’s people were lithe and lean. It let her seem like she was crowding him, looming, even from the ground. “<Tyelko,>” she growled calmly, “<they will not kill us. My father would throw a fit.>” With a yank and a yelp, Tyelko was pulled off the bike. Juno hoisted herself up to where he’d been sitting so she could reach the dead marine’s armor. “<And we dragged their corpses out here as a favor. Let me handle it.>”
This armor was much older than she was used to, but she was still able to find the integrated comm system and open a long range channel. A few minutes of scanning got her a scratchy but distinctly gothic “Identify.”
She took a breath. “Juno Guilliman, Ultramarine Scout, scion of Ultramar.” She gave her priority codes. They were Ultramarine specific, though any loyalists should have them. Forces like these, trapped in the warp, might not have been updated, but they were close enough to her father’s idents that anyone heresy-era with half a brain should at least be prompted to investigate seriously. She gave the code for recovered bodies, and for Sus An protocol. “I have no idea where we are,” she added, “but I trust you have tracking capabilities on either the armor or this bike, or both. Over.”
It didn’t take too long for the rest of the White Scars to appear. Tyelkarel, who’d been pouting off in a corner kicking tumbleweeds and rocks, quickly put himself as close to their bike as possible.
The roar of a squad’s worth of engines was deafening. As she had predicted, they circled them in a cloud of dust and streaking color, but kept a healthy radius. Bolters and swords were drawn and readied, but the riders’ constant motion made them difficult to target in turn. Juno didn’t even try. Instead she smiled. “Cousins! The thirteenth send their regards.” She gestured behind her. “I apologize for bad tidings, but we have recovered your brothers.”
Some of the noise died down as a few in the back slowed to a rumbling roll. She could see them now. They were all firstborn, all ancient armor and weapons. She knew her uncle had taken a small force with him, when he’d gone into the warp. Collected stray, lost detachments when he ran into them. She wondered idly if they’d met their Primarch at all. The Captain pulled his bike around front, facing theirs, and idled. His helmeted face gave nothing away, but Juno didn’t pick up any true hostility from him. They’d taken the codes after a long pause and with appropriate wariness, but had given no other signs of either believing or not believing her.
She didn’t blame them. You couldn’t just trust whatever you heard in the warp.
“Ultramarine,” his voice rolled out of his vox grille tinny and heavily accented.
She stood at attention, saluting with a fist to her chest. “My lord.”
He looked at her for another long moment. “Away from the bike,” he ordered eventually.
Juno obeyed, then reached over and pulled Tyelkarel with her.
“<We’re just listening to them?>” He hissed.
Juno flattened her ears, frowning. “<Obviously. He outranks us both.>” These marines were likely pre-codex of course, but riders were highly regarded, and even if they weren’t the two of them were just scouts.
Well, she was just a scout. Tyelkarel was a xeno.
Behind them, two bikes broke formation and rolled close to theirs. While one cut them off from the vehicle, the other stopped and the marine clambered down. Peering around the front wheel of the closer bike, Juno saw a narthecium at work. Good. She nodded, and returned to attention, giving the marine guarding them a brief friendly acknowledgement.
He only stared.
Besides the engine noise, it was eerily quiet. She knew the marines must be conferring over vox, the apothecary confirming their finds, the brothers conferring on what to do. She’d never been on the other side of it, and knowing she was left out made her miss her brothers even more acutely. Were he the captain, Brother Cato would argue that they should take the bodies and be done with them, leave them behind in the warp to die. They had no business picking up strange children in the warp, he would say, and some other brother with a better sense of humor would have to talk him down, argue their usefulness perhaps.
Of course, if Brother Cato were here, he would know her, and would have swept her up so she might sit on his shoulder safe behind a pauldron, and her father would be there because they were rarely far from each other.
“You have brought us our dead,” the Captain’s declaration cut into her reverie.
She nodded. In the warp as they were, geneseed would be limited and precious. She wondered if they had a base, and the medical facilities to revive the younger marine.
“You have earned your audience. You will come with us.”
Juno blinked. Who did they have that was of greater rank than a Captain? Maybe she’d gotten her heraldry wrong, that would be embarrassing, but it wasn’t her fault if they were non-compliant!
Regardless, she nodded her assent and the marine on the bike held out a hand. She climbed up in front of him, relaxing at the familiar feeling of ceramite behind and around her as he reached for the controls. There was a quiet thunk as the Harlequin climbed up the side of the vehicle’s front chassis. The marine waited for her to balance herself, and then he reached for Tyelkarel.
Tyelkarel shied back, clutching his weapon. “No,” he said in gothic, the word odd in his mouth. “<I don’t- I don’t want to- >”
Juno cocked her head. It was a completely illogical response from him, but it was one she’d seen before, on serfs and civilians sometimes, when her brothers were trying to order them out of an area. They dug their heels in sometimes, refusing to understand they’d be worse off if they stayed with what they knew. It was some kind of fear response. Juno wouldn’t know.
There was a click and a hiss, and the brother behind her lifted off his helmet. He had typical White Scar features: a short nose, long dark hair done up in a bun, brown eyes with deep laugh lines scored alongside old war wounds.
“<Come,>” he said, in passable aeldari. “<No harm.>”
So shocked at being addressed in his own language, Tyelkarel forgot to dodge away from the reaching hands, and was lifted up and tucked in front of Juno on the bike. She grinned at him.
“<Told you,>” she said, delighted. She turned to look up at their driver. “Secured for transport, my lord.”
Without his helmet, she could see him smile in return.
The marine’s camp was not far away by bike, though the landscape seemed to change as they rolled through it. Not that Juno could see much except for clouds of dust; their marine encouraged them both with one armored hand to keep their heads below the dashboard so the wind and rocks would not bite at their exposed faces. They were going much faster than Juno had been before, for certain. Juno had no idea how the Harlequin was faring.
When they slowed enough for her to peek out under their driver’s arms, Juno gasped. The camp was a series of tents, cloth and ceramite but mostly cloth. It was unusual to her, used to bunkers and marble, but it wasn’t overly unusual for White Scars.
The command tent was though. In splendid colors and patterns, the rounded structure was three times as big as the others, with massive painted doors and decorative mats along the outside. Smoke drifted cheerily through the hole in the center.
Space marines needed a lot of space. They did not need this much space. Something tugged at the back of Juno’s consciousness, and she had slipped off the bike before the marine had parked. He lifted Tyelkarel down and then joined them, waiting as the others motored in, serfs and other marines arriving to inspect them and the bikes. The bike with the bodies had been driven out with them, but must have peeled off the main convoy earlier; Juno couldn’t see it.
The marine put a hand on Juno’s shoulder. “Let us go.”
Inside the tent- well. To call it a tent was rude. It was fully furnished, dimly lit by braziers and the center fire, full of color and sweet-smelling smoke. Huge, decorated posts held up the canvas ceiling, and along the floor were intricately woven mats and cushions. Most were occupied by unarmored marines, who sat around the fire discussing in small groups or with their serfs. Most of them were quite old, as old or older than the ones who had gone to retrieve them. Chapter ancients, she thought. Then, no. Legion ancients.
At the opposite end of the circle, a massive man sat cross-legged. He had a long, thin mustache and beard, and dark hair done up in the same striking topknot the aeldari liked. He looked up when they entered and smiled, his white teeth almost luminous in the dark.
Juno had not met the Khan before, though she had received a series of gifts from him when she was little. She’d met his sons though, the younger ones in the materium, and her father had said they were pretty representative, so she was expecting it when the massive man hauled himself to his feet, threw his arms wide, and laughed.
“Niece!”
“Uncle Jaghatai!” She hugged him without hesitation, and was promptly engulfed in an enthusiastic embrace in return.
“My,” he said, pushing away to inspect her face, the tattoos on her shoulders, “you are magnificent, look at you! Nearly a warrior grown!”
Juno ducked her head, embarrassed. “Only a scout,” she muttered, “Father says I’ll get my plate after majority.”
“Last I heard you were a little worm!” He laughed again, “crawling around and causing trouble for your babysitters. Have those two that let you discover stairs been let out of their penitent crusade yet?”
“Uncle!” She flushed. “Maybe if you came out of the warp ever you would know I can cause much more trouble than that,” she huffed, “and Macragge would be honored to host you,” she added primly.
He laughed again. Slinging an arm around her shoulder he turned to address the others present. “My sons! My brother’s daughter, Juno of the Ultramarines!”
There were calls of acknowledgement from the seated councilmen. Juno lifted her chin, proud to represent her chapter here. Her uncle turned to her again.
“And your companions?”
“My Harlequin,” she said as her Harlequin gave a cheeky salute, “and my…” she hesitated, “my cousin,” she settled. “Tyelkarel, Scion of Prince Yriel, a great general of the Ynnead, of my mother’s people.”
The Khan nodded. He sat, pulled Juno down to sit with him, and patted the cushions there. “Come, come,” he said, “friends of Juno are friends of mine.”
Tyelkarel nervously lowered himself into the seat beside Juno. He’d been allowed his spear still, and he laid it awkwardly beside him. The Harlequin bounced around to the Khan’s other side, kneeling at his side with her mask grinning widely.
“Sit and eat,” Jaghatai continued, “and tell your uncle what cause his niece has to be out alone on a daemon world.”