6 561 937.M41
I'm..!
Burning!
Every part of my…
AGH! Skin is… I can see welts-. No, that's… That's my
armour, my armour has
blisters and I can feel the blood draining and the fat dripping and the pus oozing! The pain in my eye sockets is
incredible but I can still see…
RING!
AH!
Ah!
I'm not better, I'm not healed, but the pain is reduced to manageable levels. My injuries are
glowing-.
"Advena."
Then the daemon
hurls me away, and for a moment I foolishly assume that I'm heading back into reality. Instead, I hit-.
OW!
Hit a solid metal surface, my blisters tearing open again. Uh, the first version I read of the death of Horus described his armour as bleeding wherever Sanguinius cut it with his sword. And now I know how that felt. My armour's
bruised, despite the ceramite being solid plates… Until a few moments ago. Now it and I are one and the same, and I need to-.
A piston
screams towards me and I
fly-.
Doesn't work!
I
frantically scramble out of the way, the metal plate clipping my right leg-
CRACK!
-and
agh! I grab a nearby support pillar and pull myself to my feet, avoiding putting any weight onto my newly broken leg. And I'm painfully aware that while I can charge myself with warp energy I
can't just punch a hole back into reality myself.
The huge metal daemon is looking down at my form… From a hole in the roof and far wall of some sort of hellish manufacturing plant. Its face… The skin is like peeling… Metal? As if a coating was partially rubbed off. Around the joints I can see leaking lubricant fluid, and its mechanical eyes judder as they track me. Some parts of its body look like they're missing, as if whoever was making it gave up before they finished, cables and tubing left hanging free. I can actually see through it in a few places.
"What do you
want?"
"We have known dark times. We have known strife."
Scr
eech!
I glance up and
hobblehobblehobble!
The industrial crucible
crashes down and overturns, spilling molten metal across the floor towards me! Spotting a ladder on the side of a giant machine of some kind I hop at it and
lunge, grabbing the furthest rung I can manage with both hands and
hauling myself up just ahead of the glutinous slag!
"To live in these times is to have expendable life."
"Yeah, it's not called the-" Up,
up. "-grim dark future because it's all puppies and rainbows."
The ladder's heating up and burning my hands, but it's nothing compared to what I got hit with when I first arrived.
"Where progress and humanity are replaced with brutality."
"Look, if you're trying to tailor a corruption narrative to fit me, you're going to have to try harder than that. I've got the orange light and the tau. I don't need-."
And that's when I spot that the rungs of the ladder are made of metal-coated human arms, reaching out from a machine whose outer surface is made of layers of metalised human skin.
Even for the Mechanicus…
"-Chaos or Chaos worshippers."
What god is it from? The decaying metal and comparatively laid back manner suggests Nurgle. But Nurgle daemons are usually a
lot more overt about their decay, and this thing is more… Like damage from long term lack of maintenance rather than an infection or fungal growth. Its form is relatively stationary and rather… Bland, which implies that it's not Tzeentch. It's talking and there aren't skulls everywhere so Khorne's out, and while Slaanesh loves pain as much as everything else this is all a bit
mundane.
I doubt that it's Malal given that we're in the warp, but since there aren't any other daemons around I suppose it's a 'maybe'. Which leaves other lesser chaos powers like Mo'rcck, Phraz-Etar or An'sl and I've got no idea what their daemons look like, or this could be a daemon of Chaos Undivided. If it's a regular daemon, it would have grown from a patch of undifferentiated energy not associated with the four. Or if it's an actual Daemon Prince, a being marked equally by each of the four, or a creature that absorbed and internalised enough warp energy to transcend its mortal origins without the four.
None of which helps me.
"Where the will of the few dictate the lives of the many."
"That's just human culture, I'm afraid."
"But a secret promise is made to those who are dauntless."
Oh. He
came from that planet. Did the Inquisitor find a cultist by
accident? I know that the princedom threshold is a bit lower for demagogues than it is for astartes, but there wasn't a cult
here. They still have to do
something, and getting tortured while someone else kills the Inquisitor wouldn't be enough.
I pull myself up on top of whatever this is a moment before the hands unclasp and the sheets of metal skin begin peeling off. Grabbing a control lectern for stability I look up at the daemon.
"Bit surprised it bothers
you, though. Who
are you?"
Its many robotic eyes move independently, taking in the whole of the factory. Some rotate further, and through the warp-stuff around it I can dimly make out more factories behind and above it.
"For at the end of days, they shall be found..."
Man-shaped metal sheets fly through the air towards the daemon as it spreads its arms wide to welcome them.
"Faultless."
They hit the daemon and flatten themselves against its skin, covering its metal plates and cables. To start with it just looks odd, but as more and more build up it changes the misshapen metal into a near-smooth humanoid.
What am I seeing?
I don't know.
I grab a metal person-sheet as it tugs against its mooring and
try using my ring to learn something about it.
Damn this wretched world that I call my home.
And I
feel it, feel the years, decades, centuries of the same cycles of suffering and misery. But they don't hope or despair, because it's all they know. They can't imagine anything else-. Or couldn't, until they were murdered by an Inquisitor and their souls were set loose into the warp.
Where they formed a bridge. Centred around-.
I let the flapping sheet go, and it flies around to cover the daemon's back. Or if I guess right, the newly ascendant daemon prince's back. That last prisoner, drawing the fragments of the souls of those who shared his misery into itself to fuel its ascension. And as far as I can tell, they're entirely willing to be consumed in that way, to get revenge at those who made their lives what they were.
The daemon above me flexes its limbs as the flayed metal skin finishes coating its new body, and I can see the edges smooth out as they fully integrate into its being.
And then it looks up, at the still open hole back to reality.
Oh, shit... For reference, he's a Fire Warrior who proved so badass that he supposedly steam-rolled Astartes both Loyalist and Heretical, daemons and even beat down a Greater Demon of Tzeentch.
