The Ringing of a Forge of Stars [Warhammer 40k/ Celestial forge V3||OC...ish]

Omake:

Alaya looked at Atham’s corpse, it’s jaw wide as if screaming out in agony. She sighed, such wasted potential he had. Before she left she sensed a child, glowing gold in the rafters jump down behind her

”hello there”

the two custodies acted on instinct to defend her- a worthless gesture but a kind one

”Ah Star Child… you are a bold one. I’ve been expecting you”

a moment of silence was pierced by the two chuckling

Sighing, the Star Child’s face harden and looked at Atham’s corpse

”he was a tired, broken and old man… all of us perpetuals who lived through the Old Night broke, he out of all of them the most. Hearing and seeing the fates that awaited untold trillions without the ability to lift a finger… will we be punished for our inaction during the Old Night as well?”

we? Ah in the rafters hundreds, maybe a thousand total translucent figures stood eyeing her, in shadows countless glowing pairs of eyes looked curiously, and Celestine appeared behind the Star Child holding up a halo- much to the Star Child chagrin.

”Was the theatrics really necessary?”

”no”

”It seems you still have some of his pride then.”

”less my pride and more that of what my faithful attribute to me. But back to the question, before we where cast out or dislodged throughout the millennia we where- and still are him” The glowing child turned towards the golden throne, running a hand over a cable, lost in nostalgia for the briefest of moments

”You are no longer him, made by him, parts of him… but you have changed be it from survival or kindness. A living ship of Theseus how… peculiar.”

”you speak yet you do not say, are we to be punished or are we innocent of crimes he- we committed?”

”Fool, think if you where to be punished then you wouldn’t be here”

”I didn’t know if you cared for theatrics as much as we did, traveling to each of us one by one and laying us to rest for good”

”So you all gathered here together- not the brightest move. Ironic as your a walking lightbulb”

a light chuckle came from the Star Child who looked up to the ceiling, a beautiful fresco painted. Closing his eyes he turned his head down and looked at Alaya

”we could run, but it would do us no good.”

sighing Alaya looked the child in the eyes

”If you desire to be punished so much for crimes you have repented for… then this will be your punishment: I will grab every shard of Atham and you shall be reborn, remember his sins and strive to always be better, to not break again.”

after a moment of silence the Star Child spoke.

”very well… we accept this geas.”

sticking out her hand, the various translucent turned to golden dust followed by the countless pairs of glowing eyes.

Celestine glanced at her wings as they faded, expecting to go with them

”fear not Celestine, you are still needed” the Star Child spoke to her a smile crossing his face as he faded to golden dust “as much as I hated religion, I can’t help but feel it’s ironic we’re going to pull a Virgin Mary”

Alaya holding a glowing orb in the palm of her hand looked at it and gently pushed it into Celestine’s Womb.

”I don’t know how to feel about being a mother” spoke Celestine bewildered and now with a hand above her womb. “I also don’t know how to react to losing my wings…”

”worry not child you’ll find raising him easy, I can guarantee it”

”yeah- oh she left already” she turned to a custodian, “announce my pregnancy and the emperor’s reincarnation, I’m sure chaos has- pun intended spread across Sol with The Emperor’s dying scream”

Alone Celestine looked at her stomach and though, her child, the emperor… needed a new name. How about Seth?

 

Time twisted.

Time shifted.

Time was, and was not.

An eerie silver power flowed through Jaq, as though he had invoked it by those words. The power used his mind as its conductor. He sensed how the time stream itself was being negated and annulled.

Some psykers of the highest level could distort time thus. Not Jaq, hitherto.

Never Jaq.

Yet now...

Was he possessed?

By no daemon, certainly. But by the shining path itself. To his senses that path now appeared to be the track of a phosphorescent arrow through twisted geometries. The arrow had accumulated a charge at its point until that point could transfix the fabric of time itself, pinning time temporarily like a moth with a needle through its spine...

‘Run, now!’ cried Jaq.

Did he and his abnormal family flit like hummingbirds which seem to flicker directly from one point in space to another, passing in and out of existence? Afterwards Jaq believed they must have darted thus – across the static, time-stopped Chamber of Glory, past the frozen Companions, and through the Titan Archway between the motionless menacing colossi. And still the lustrous arrow impaled the tissue of time.

THROBBING PIPES RIBBED the walls of the vast throne room beyond. The muscles of the room were thick power cables feeding stegosaurian engines. The air was spiked with crisp ozone and bitter myrrh, and ointmented with balmy, somewhat greasy fragrances. The holiest battle banners, icons and golden fetishes flanked the arena of dedication where psykers were soul-bound. Squads of Emperor’s Companions who guarded that vast hall, a mob of tech-priests ministering to the machinery, a gaudy Cardinal Palatinate and his entourage, a red-robed High Lord of Terra and his staff – not to mention great clusters of astropaths, chirurgeons, scholastics, battlemasters: all were motionless.

The immense, soaring, tube-ridged throne resembled some fossilised, metastasised sloth crafted by some mad master of the Adeptus Titanicus. And it seemed to Jaq, though he did not know whether what he saw was true, or mere delusion instilled by that same psyker-dream, that this enormous, sacred prosthetic device, more precious by far than any gold, framed the wizened, mummified face of the God-Emperor.

Who looked not; though he saw through eyes of the mind, saw far beyond his throne room and his palace and the solar system. Who breathed not; yet he lived more fiercely than any mortal, enduring a psychically supercharged life-in-death.

‘WE ARE CURIOUS,’ came a mighty, anguished thought which itself transcended time.

‘WE HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR INTRUSION INTO OUR SANCTUARY, OUR ANTRUM AND ADYTUM.’

‘My lord.’ Jaq sank to his knees. ‘I beg to report to you before I am destroyed. I may have uncovered a major conspiracy—’

‘THEN WE WILL STRIP YOUR SOUL BARE. RELAX, MORTAL MAN, OR YOU WILL SURELY DIE IN SUCH PAIN AS WE ALWAYS ENDURE.’

Jaq breathed deeply, slowly, stilling the panic that fluttered under his ribs like a trapped bird. He surrendered himself. A hurricane roared through his mind.

If the story that he had thought to relate were a tangled forest – and if each event in that story were a tree – then within moments all the leaves were stripped away from all of the trees, denuding them to bare wintry twigs, to a raw basic life without the foliage of memories.

He was drained of his story; that was sucked from him in a trice, all of those leaves whirling into the mind-maw of the Master. Jaq gagged. Jaq drooled.

He was an imbecile, less than an imbecile.

He was less than a new-born baby.

He neither knew where he was, nor who he was – nor what it even meant to be a someone.

The inquisitor sprawled. All that was known to his body was distress, the gurglings of the guts, breath and light. Light from afar.

ABRUPTLY, ALL MEMORY flooded back. On that instant, each leaf sprouted anew to recloak the forest of his life. ‘WE HAVE PUT BACK WHAT WE TOOK AND TASTED, INQUISITOR’

Trembling, Jaq regained his kneeling posture and wiped his lips and chin. The previous moments were a hideous limbo, unknowable, immeasurable. He was Jaq Draco again.

‘WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR.’ The voice boomed in his mind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomed village, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare aching bones. ‘HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM—’

‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP—’

‘HOW ELSE?’

The Emperor’s mind-voice, if that truly was what it was, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soul co-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEER HUMANITY?’

‘DID WE OURSELVES DEVISE THE HYDRA?’

‘PERHAPS IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES A PATH?’

‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVER FREE ITSELF?’

‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLED OUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATED BY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.'

Beside Jaq, the squat twitched as if he had heard himself named. At that moment did the voice resonate within the abhuman? Jaq felt that he was listening to a mighty mind-machine argue with itself in a way that no Imperial courtier had perhaps ever heard, and that no High Lord of Terra even suspected could occur. Were Meh’Lindi and Googol aware of the voices in the way that Jaq was? Or was he imagining it all, caught up in some warp-spawned delusion, yet another twist in this labyrinthine conspiracy? He sensed the fabric of time attempting to tear free, and guessed that not much longer of this strange stasis remained.

‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOT EVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILED FOREVER.’

Maybe Jaq was too young by hundreds, by thousands of years, and his intellect too puny to comprehend the multiplex mind of the master who was forever on overview, whose thoughts battered in his mind. Or maybe the master’s mind had become chaotic. Not warped by the Ruinous Powers it surveyed, oh no, but divided amongst itself as its heroic grasp on existence ever so slowly weakened...

'WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHO ONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVED FAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOT COMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUST NOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERCE REDEEMER OF MAN, YET WHAT WILL REDEEM US?’

‘Great lord of all,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’

‘NO, AND WE SHALL SURELY ACT IN DUE TIME—’

‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

‘ONCE WE HAVE ANALYSED THE INFORMATION WITHIN THIS SUB-MIND OF OURS.’

‘HEAR THIS, JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEED YOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTER FOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HALT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN. INDEED TIME ONLY HALTS FOR YOU.’

‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD, ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPE TO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THE WARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICAN BEACON AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION AND GRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE MANY?’

‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH AS THAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESS WHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE AND DRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’

Contradictions! These warred in Jaq’s mind just as they seemed to coexist in the Emperor’s own multimind. Was another power for salvation present in the galaxy, unknown to the suffering Emperor – concealed from him, though somehow partaking of his essence? How could that be?

And what of the hydra? Did the Emperor truly know of it or not – even now? Might he refuse to acknowledge what Jaq had reported to him?

The Emperor’s voices faded from Jaq’s mind as time tried to stretch back into shape. Grimm tugged at Jaq’s sleeve.

 

In a long forgotten sector of the Segmentum Obscurus there lies Planet Wide Nexus of the Darkside of the Force.

On this planet lays ancient ruins destroyed not solely by time but also war. Only the hardiest of plant life has barely eeked out an existence, but a singular bad season could kill even the most lively of plants.

in a cave on this dead world, two small brilliant suns shown in defiance, upon closer inspection one would realize these where not suns, but eyes.

gleaming a malevolent yellow even though the cracked lenses of a Venerable Dreadnaught stood Rylanor the Ancient of Rites. Rage and Hate wafts around him, only held back by unyielding Pride and Honor.

for the first time in Ten Millennia they spoke.

“I’M COMING FOR YOU FULGRIM” it whispered, and the world shook with power. Rylanor’s Rage and Pain granting his newfound powers near endless strength.

—

“Log GFX-1 the average human has around 2500 of these microscopic life-forms per cell, attempts to artificially induce a increase has resulted in extreme rejection and even death”

“Log GFX-6 further research indicates that these M-IDIs may posses Sentients, and are not Symbiotic as first theorized”

”Log GFX-8 Examination of Epsilon and Delta Psykers indicate that M-IDI Count increase dependent on Psychic potential. Unknown if Rubric Marines gained M-IDIs”

“Log GFX-9 Examination of Blanks… it’s hard to describe what I saw. To put it in summary, the M-IDIs where “inside out”, beyond that none of my current understanding of biological and alchemy can explain what I saw. Further Research needed”

“Log GFX-15 The M-IDIs are fighting back, it has Manipulated Clones into destroying important work for the New Man project. But I am hopeful as during the chaos a sample of M-IDIs fell into a Sample of The Blight and seems to counteract it”

”Log GFX-19 I was wrong. It seems I was manipulated by the M-IDIs they seem to have some sort of probability manipulation, not absolute but can “nudge” things into playing out however it Wants”

—

Ahriman sat in meditation, thinking over all his current knowledge of the black library, that is before he felt a all powerful force wrap around him before he could even defend against it.

quickly casting dozens of spells to analyze what happened came up with worrying knowledge, and perhaps more importantly what seemed to Be a path of being his own master free from Tzeentch’s clutches for for nothing in return except to fight against his slaver’s rule.

It was a Deal too good to be true, yet in the pit of his stomach he knew it was the best choice? Or was it? But the last time he didn’t think logically and acted on emotions… he need to research this before he accepted the power, yet he must not let his slaver know that he knows that they know- spiraling that’s what it wants you to do, to get lost in schemes like the Alpha Legion.

carefully ever so carefully he touched this new pool of power and slowly ever so slowly tested the waters as the saying goes… and it’s promising, he’s free of the slaver’s gifts- no it’s still another master, one that may not be malevolent and scheming like a hydra mimicking an ouroboros eating it’s infinite tails with its infinite heads, but this new master if he accepts is subtle, quite and all encompassing… yet not absolute it’s chains are far easier to break then Tzeentch’s… good so very good.