Please read Lord of the Night by Simon Spurrier, love these two terrible people who are each other's mirror owlcat games pls pls pls let these two appear in dark heresy
Spoilers on the ending and extra stuff under the cut:
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Please read Lord of the Night by Simon Spurrier, love these two terrible people who are each other's mirror owlcat games pls pls pls let these two appear in dark heresy
Spoilers on the ending and extra stuff under the cut:
Just finished "Lord of the Night"! and my question is: Why are not all of you reading it rn? If you're a Konrad Curze/Night Lord fan in particular - damn you can't imagine the Night Lord fanservice, or the Curze insight. Zso Sahaal is Goodest Daddy's Boy, Mita is BAMF, and Krieg Acerbus is a major, major, MAJOR SOB. Also, really good fast-paced, pleasantly emotive in parts writing.
Do yourselves the favor and Ave Dominus Nox.
"The warp was a pool of oil, now - at least, that was how her mind had chosen to rationalise it. The astropath's death had struck it hard, concentric ripples bulging outwards from its centre. Drawing close, Mita saw clearly the process the Night Lord had tapped into, and found herself morbidly impressed by its cunning: with secret fractal symmetry - each tiny component a replica of the whole - every concentric ripple bore along its bow-wave the shadow, the echo, of the event that had caused it. And through it, as it faded with each diminishing ring, Mita found herself able to explore, to taste the ghost of the Night Lord's mind where before she was unable even to approach him. It was as if she had been presented with a pictoslate of her enemy: a transcendent snapshot that had dazzled her at first but that now, now that its brightness had faded, now that she was accustomed to its flare, she could use to study his aspect. And oh, what rage he held in his soul! There was loss, beneath it all. A wisp of colour haunting the midnight whole, like a deep sea kraken swimming an ocean of rage.
He has lost something. Something he loves. Something he cares for with holy pride. He has lost it, and it angers him. And he is alone. With a precision that she struggled to maintain, she peeled back the layers of this echo-enemy - a perfect but fading replica of the Night Lord's mind - and found a forest of emotion, buried deep beneath layers of time and denial, that shocked her. Ambition. Uncertainty. Frustration. Loneliness. Suspicion. Paranoia. Power.
She drew back from it with an inward gasp, surfacing from the trance and into Cog's burly arms, wrapped around her in a desperate embrace: the one thing his simple mind had presented as a solution to his mistress's distress.
And as she prized herself away and thanked him, and caught her bearings, and wiped the blood from her lip, her mind lingered on what it had found, and pulsed with a shock that she could barely contain.
Staring at the Night Lord's mind - even through the haze of shadow and echo - had been like staring at a mental map of herself."
- Lord of The Night by Simon Spurrier
Whatever Zso and Mita are doing now, I hope at least that they got matching best friend cyborg arms.
post-epilogue zso sahaal and mita ashyn because they still live in my head rent free...
"She bit her lip and bled, and frothed at the corner of her mouth, and in the punctured atria of her psychic mind she suffocated beneath an avalanche of sights and sounds.
'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'
The voice was a foghorn, aching her ears (though it had no true sound), announcing in a blaze of light and a chorus of dark alarms the identity of her enemy. Beyond the mind's eye, in the haze of telepathy, senses became occluded and intangible: sounds became visible, images bore taste and scent, the cold touch of flesh rode a piggyback upon a musical discord. A synaesthetic whirlwind. An arco-mental maze. She stumbled through its corridors and clung to a shred of chattering lightning, holding it fast.
Zso Sahaal. A name.
And his image - an incandescent pictogram, brighter and more terrible than any auspex, sharper than the greatest sensoria - was scratched upon the raw flesh of her flayed brain and scarred it forever: like an electoo within her eyelids, impossible to escape, even in sleep.
It was him. The Night Lord. Her enemy.
She recognised him, despite the confusion and the whirling tumult of conflicting senses. His face was rendered in music and the soft scents of ash and incense, his midnight blue body a medley of bitter flavours, and his claws… his claws were the touch of an artist's brush upon canvas, the gentle caress of a lover's fingers. All this he was, beyond mere vision, but she recognised him nonetheless. The sallow eyes, with pupils so swollen they were black from edge to edge, the furrowed brow, the hollow cheeks, the pallid pate of a hairless skull. All of it encased in ceramite and steel, flexing plates hung with chains and barbs, marked all over with Legion sigils and dark scriptures.
Zso Sahaal. Night Lord."
Mita might not go around flaying people for fun like a certain night-cloaked menace but she certainly didn't become Interrogator for the Inquisition by being nice and wholesome either.
She's not a good person, rather falling in with the banality of living in the worst regime known to mankind. And yet. She still has those moments of extreme empathy.
What a complicated woman.
BRUH. BRUH WHAT.
DUDE. NO.
I CAN ONLY TAKE SO MUCH PSYCHIC DAMAGE.