The Wayward Daughters of Morrigan - Chapter 26 - CB (PuonPuon) (2024)

Chapter Text

==Chapter XXI: Risen From Ashes==

Greetings.

I know it is an unusual request, given we have only just met, but would you kindly grant me the privilege of your ear?

There are many dances which our troupes put on. Some are for the benefit of our race, that we do not forget our mistakes. Some are for other, younger races, that they do not repeat ours. There are even those which are served to our enemies, to remind them of the glory of the Eldar. It may only be a fleeting phantasm of our brightest days that is visited upon them, but even the illusion of ancient glory casts long shadows of despair.

Do you know of our master?

Our god is the lord of laughter and sorrow, light and shadow, and that which lies between them. Our god is a subtle one, a clever one, whose works are imperceptible to those unacquainted with his ways. There are many who think he has no hand in their affairs, and they are fools indeed. There are few who have seen his mask with their own eyes, and none have glimpsed beneath it. There is only one woman in all the endless breadth of time who has won his heart, but that is another tale altogether.

Our god is a thief who wears many faces. Yet his prize is not wealth nor fame. The only jewel he steals is the pride of the arrogant. And even now, in the end of days, so many of our people have yet to truly let go of it, no matter how often he reaches into their hearts and tears it from them.

Thus you know Cegorach, the architect of our plays. The stage is set, and the players must make their introductions. You know of Eshairr, Druzna, Tulushi’ina, Azraenn, and Munesha. You have watched them rise like stars in Commorragh, and so too have you seen them fall so swiftly to its deepest depths of decadence and despair. You have learned much of Lynekai’s secrets, and witnessed her fury unleashed. And there are their enemies, the villains of the tale, though... perhaps they are but the heroes of their own tragedies. The wild princess, Renemarai, was humbled and enslaved. The vain widow, Nolaei, was humiliated and slaughtered. The schemes of Ironlord Kanlatos were unveiled, sabotaged, and undone. And Qa Vanada remains lofty and supreme in his malevolence, as is true of so many of his kind.

Who am I? I am known by many names, but you, my sweet listener, may call me by the one that matters most: Maeven Mistglass.

I am but a humble minstrel, she who plays the songs of Morrigan. Most of our Great Masques dance for sorrowful Iyanden or noble Biel-Tann or reclusive Alaitoc, or for decadent pirate princes, or for the Eternal City itself. No shortage of pride, that most brilliant and piquant of sins, to be found amongst the lot of them. Morrigan, though, is the stage I favor most. I have orchestrated and danced the Fall of the Eldar for its honorable citizens as many times as my myriad affairs permit. I have, of course, given them countless other performances as well, including the Sundering of Morrigan. It has yet to find much of an audience there, sadly. Too unpleasant a reminder for their tastes, I suppose.

I can only hope my efforts to reveal to them the dangers of their pride inspired at least a few chuckles from my lord Cegorach, given it amounted to naught in the end. Eros has come to Morrigan, and Eros has shown them the folly of their lonely ways more... viscerally... than I could ever dream. I could lie that it was my doing that they crossed paths, but truthfully only the Laughing God himself could dream of strumming the strings of the Great Dragon to a melody of his desire, and even that I would not gamble a halfpenny upon. After all, even his cleverest clowns can never truly be certain of what games he plays.

But such is our lot. We are merely actors and dancers, and we perform what roles we are given. If it is a tragedy that we are to realize within our theater, then it is not our doing.

This point I make because we are often accused of immorality, of bringing disaster down upon our own kin. Oh, we are very capable of that, and we have done it many times, and we will do it many more before the last song is finally sung. True to my part in the Masque’s performances, I do take a... small pleasure in the taste of Aeldari blood on my blade. They may not recognize where they went wrong, but I can assure you, my audience, that they made their choices and deserve what happens to them. We, on the other hand, do not have the luxury to select our roles. The mask we wear—wears us, chooses for us. That is the price of faith, of surrendering ourselves to something greater than a Path or the Thirst.

Oh, so much more that ought to be said, yet I see your patience wears thin. Let me speak no more of these mysteries; the preamble is complete enough. Now the time has come to perform. I shall sing of the Rise From Ashes, the Rebirth of the Phoenix. You who have watched over Morrigan from afar, I hope you enjoy it. Truly.

===

How can someone change so much, and yet remain the same?

How can someone die, and yet be reborn?

To the Haemonculi, these are meaningless questions. They have medicinal solutions to both quandaries. Oh, no, they would never take a philosophical query as something to be merely pondered in one’s spare time. No, to them these sorts of questions are thrilling challenges, undertakings that they shall relish triumphing over. In a way, they are the most dependable of all that draw breath. It is... admirable, in its own way. Even if their labors result only in greater suffering for us all.

So we come to Eshairr, who is not a Wrack. Not truly. I could quibble over the nuances of the name, but suffice to say such a discussion would last till you died of thirst. I see you do not truly care of the why, so I shall move on to the what. Eshairr is a student of Qa Vanada. A vessel for his knowledge, and for other substances of his, supping greedily at his font, so to speak. One cannot fault her taste; few, indeed, could ever brag to have been the lover of a Haemonculus. And yet though it may seem a contradiction, she is also a sister of Morrigan. It is precisely because of this that she was drawn to him, and he to her, a bizarre twist of Fate which I find most amusing.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

And though she has drowned herself in the teachings of pain, she always will be of Morrigan, no matter where her dismal road might take her. In this strange twilight of two different worlds, she is trapped. For a time Eshairr cannot find the way forwards, save that obviously she must defend her kinswomen from the Covenites, yet she must also purge them of their curse. She cannot do both. Slavery and salvation, or freedom and doom. Seminoth’s sad*stic game is continued even to this day amongst the worldship’s scions, two terrible choices, and no way out.

You have already guessed her desire to free her people. She dreams to unmake the curse they are tormented with, and she has turned to Vanada’s secrets to attempt it, but she does not tolerate her own crew, her family, being the dolls and puppets of the Malignancy. So Eshairr has, with utmost care and caution, lobbied within the Coven’s ranks for authority over these projects. Gradually, using wits, favors, lies, and even her body, she has won more and more influence. It was with the completion of her Violet Garden, her first independent experiment, that she was finally granted full jurisdiction over the Morriganites, every last one. And, holding their leashes like a sensual inversion of her duty as captain, she has proven a sweet mistress. She gave all of them, one by one, the most extravagant treatment for the Yearning, cultivating them like a harem of courtesans to serve man, beast, xenos, and even her.

Cloying as that power must be, Eshairr is anything but satisfied. She watches her crewwomen grovel at her knees, dancing in bare sensuality for her pleasure. They participate gladly in her dark experiments, for they know she is a loving master. And all the while that they gyrate in her lap or kiss her lips, her dark eyes stare distantly, her thoughts elsewhere, plotting, scheming. Eshairr smiles for them, and yet it is empty. They touch her, hoping to give her bliss, and she slaps them away. They grow too brazen. A mistress must, from time to time, tighten the collar of her pets. The women do not complain. They ask for another.

Yet again Eshairr grows distant to them, her mind a spiral of darkness they could never imagine. Free of the Path, free of the Yearning, infused with the sweet evils of a Coven’s arts, her potential is unleashed. She is more dangerous than her peers in the Coven realize. Her loyalty is not to the Malignancy, only to its promised cures. And that is a promise Qa Vanada has failed to uphold.

Eshairr has been up to more than building this Garden, and the Garden itself serves many purposes. Eshairr has stockpiled leftover materials for her own purposes, hidden within the gums of the Garden’s flesh pits. Materials, in this case, being weapons, armor, chems of use in combat. The Coven at large hardly noticed; this was not the Black Descent that made a lifestyle of bureaucracy and tallykeeping. The Extolled Malignancy persisted in an eternal chaos of inspiration and growth. If there was competition and rivalry and struggle, and the occasional rebellion by a disgruntled pupil, then all the better.

Eshairr has been wondering how Qa Vanada has maintained his singular grip upon this Coven, in light of that. It is no small task to slay a Haemonculus, but one of his age must have enemies beyond number. If not one of them has succeeded... No, perhaps stranger still, the Coven has, despite its size, heretofore failed to produce a single successor. None have been elevated to Haemonculus to stand beside Qa Vanada himself as a master. Some Covens limit the number that may rule over them, such as the Coven of Twelve, but there are no such founding traditions in the Malignancy. It is a mystery that continues to fascinate her, even in the depths of degeneracy enjoyed alongside her sisters, and she is right to worry.

But the time has come.

Her plot cannot wait another day. The war with the Valley of Fallen Lords has depleted the Coven’s resources and strength to the absolute tipping point, where rival Covens might begin to gaze upon its holdings and secrets with greed unbound by the fear of retaliation. Either the war would soon end in total victory of the Malignancy, or it would end with the hawks swooping in to tear it apart between ravenous beaks. Only now, in this most dangerous phase, could she attempt anything.

So she invites her lord to her Garden, her flowerbed. Eshairr awaits him, watching her womanly crops squirm and moan in the fleshy constraints that have buried them to the neck in crawling, slithering appendages and tongues and shafts all making use of them. Crossed legs, leather boots, she reclines upon her cancerous throne. An arm dangles, draped over the back, and a long, jagged saber is cradled across her bare, full breasts in a lazy hand. She drags a single finger along the monomolecular edge, and she feels her own blood drip upon her pale thighs like the pitter-patter of time, seconds falling away.

She hears his coming, whispers in the deep tumor from mouths long ago consumed and made a part of the Malignant realm. They speak in terror of the one, the only master of this place. It is he who nursed and shaped the Final Tumor, this unholy weaving of flesh and cancer that consumed an entire subrealm, and will one day devour the cosmos beyond.

He arrives surrounded by his attendants, his lumbering, arachnid mass of limbs and eyes and mouths a great madness that has long since ceased to be Eldar. Even now just to gaze upon the horror in the flesh sends Eshairr’s heart into palpitating dread, though not half as much as the pleasure-maddened pets that scream a beautiful cacophonous fanfare for his entrance.

“It is a bold student that deigns to summon her master,” declares Qa Vanada, speaking from many mouths.

“Forgive me. I am just so excited to share with you the fruits of my endeavors, my lord,” says Eshairr, lying as she breathes. He is not fooled by the hollow gesture of her hand in honoring welcome. Nor did she expect him to be.

“Your Garden is a crude artwork, but it shows some potential,” Qa states, his voice measured as he beholds it with his every eye and ear. “It was worth granting you these sows. Their curious progeny have been most useful in my own experiments.”

“Yes, I am glad,” Eshairr lies.

“However, it is too soon for you to make an attempt on my life,” he adds. “And this configuration is ill-suited to taking it. So imprecise. I am disappointed. It would be far easier if you waited until I granted you access to the heart-vaults, where our greatest weapons lie.”

Eshairr allows her eyes to narrow in venomous glare, an admission of her intent, but it was always a futile hope that he would not notice the subtle aspects of a fleshcrafted machine. The precise craftsmanship of her invention was as useful for murder as it was for massed, accelerated breeding. So she rises from her comfortable seat of cushioned flesh as his attendants fan out, drawing blades and tools to defend their lord.

Eshairr replies with malice. She sweeps her saber out, and the Garden lashes its tumorous limbs out, roots of the forest of violation that quickly stab into the Wracks trying vainly to protect him. A machine which can inject genetic material to impregnate can inject cancerous solutions to kill. Every Wrack caught, injected with the lethal nectar of the tumor-stamens, perishes in mutating waves of cancer rippling beneath their flesh. It is a fate of exceptional torment. I am sure you can imagine.

The Garden spears him left and right, up and down, burrowing into his rippling corpus. It fights with inhuman determination to destroy him, death throbbing through its limbs, a terrible and horrifying orgy. And for all that effort, he laughs at the ticklish venom coursing through him. Instead it is the Garden that withers, for in touching the Lord of Cancer, it itself was poisoned, its fate sealed. The women trapped in slithering walls moan in despair, hateful that the sprawling chambers of pleasure perish around them. Where, now, will they receive treatment for their curse?

“Come, now. Fourth-order neoplasmic factors will not suffice to slay me,” Qa says, mocking as the Garden dies around them, blood bursting from the ceiling, crackles of bio-lightning crossing from wall to wall like spiderwebs of light. “Even the seventh order would only cause me mild irritation.”

Eshairr smiles. “This Garden was not made to end you. Only those who might stand in the way of our confrontation.”

“I see. Very good,” replies Qa.

Eshairr brandishes her sword, stepping down to stand before the Haemonculus on equal ground, throwing her cloak of Scourge plume back with arrogant assurance in herself. The serpentine shadowfield worn upon her arm hisses with the intake of her darkest dreams, and a glimpse of Aelindrach tears through the reality around her, bathing her in the shadow of the cursed subrealm. It is an unholy armor supreme upon any battlefield, the shield of will itself.

“Ahh, you have grown proficient in the use of my gift,” Qa comments, almost proud of her. He draws cleavers, scalpels, saws, and syringes from within his vast cancerous body, wielded by his endless limbs. “But there are so many lessons I have yet to teach you. Perhaps it is time I begin with the first which all others must learn: Dare not disobey me.”

“I was yours in body and mind, but never in heart,” Eshairr proclaims frigidly. This, too, is a lie.

“No matter. You will be, once your punishment is complete.”

Only a Haemonculus can be so sure of his own skills that he could torture as to twist defiance into romance. Unthinkable as it might seem, it is no boast. He will certainly find a way.

“I shall not be caged,” says Eshairr.

“These walls are your home,” says Qa.

“They are an ugliness, a blemish that ought be cleansed with fire.”

“Then reshape them to your liking,” he replies plainly. “That is the power I have given you.”

“I reject this place, and you!” Eshairr yells.

Qa falls silent. He has so many mouths, and yet not one of them has an answer. He is displeased. It is... an unusual sensation for a Haemonculus to endure.

He comes for her. What words could not say, his fists, blades, and chems will.

It is a grim, crude dance that the lovers meet in. There can be no beauty in a battle such as this. There is no art in their blows, no mercy in their strikes. One wishes the other dead, and the other has chosen the expediency of killing the woman he loves to resurrect her later, under conditions he can control to his preferences.

He wonders why this feels so familiar. The memory is so distant now, and yet every clash of steel shakes his spirit, dredging up the most deeply buried notes of past and regret. There was a woman he loved, once, truly loved. She was beautiful and omnipotent. He was young, a fool, blindly chasing after her. She took him into her bed, pleased by his folly as much as his exuberance. She taught him the nodes of agony in the flesh of others, showed him how to make a maiden scream in a bath of her own blood and flayed skin. She was a mistress of fleshcrafting in the days when it was such a new horizon, and he loved her more than poems could express, this queen of sadism and misery. As black as her heart was, she never harmed him.

Then one day, she asked him to harm her, to use all he had learned to make her scream, to cure her boredom with the most exquisite pleasures-in-pain, and so he did. He made a masterpiece of her torment, the likes of which even a Haemonculus would admire, despite its primitive methodology. Even when she begged him to stop, for mercy, calling upon the full weight of their bonded hearts, he continued his work. After all, they were Eldar. Immortality was their gift. She would be reborn, and the romance would continue in a new chapter, where he taught her what she had forgotten, and she would give him the same fate out of deepest adoration.

And as he completed her final torture, severing the last vestige of her anguished existence, as she breathed her last and her soul departed to the gods, as he stepped back to behold his work with the demeanor of an artist brought to his knees by the glory of his own creation... as he watched her blood drip from the walls, and the tarps, and from his own fingers, as he sipped at his tea of gloomsprit root, savoring the flavor that tasted richer than any other day... as the hours passed, and the clocks clicked endlessly, and he dwelled in the depths of a satisfaction that seemed without end... so came the Fall.

So shattered his heart.

He inherited her estate in the heart of the Eternal City, a fortune beyond fortunes. He survived the great calamity, the end of his race, and yet he had lost everything that he cared for. No time or money or life of the innocent was spared investigating resurrection, a long trail of corpses left in the wake of his ventures and experiments. This was still an unrefined field, much of the technology yet to be perfected, the conveniences of the Thirst yet to be discovered. But even as the lords of Commorragh learned to fear the path of violence he walked, it was too late. Even when he pieced her body back together, leaving no scars nor seams in even the smallest detail, and he forced her to live with the most powerful artifacts he could steal from the Solar Cults, there was no soul to inhabit it. Yet even this could not dissuade him from his task.

And so Qa Vanada pursued the impossible for ten thousand years. So much time passed that a natural Eldar would have died generations ago of age. His memories wrote and overwrote themselves, this and that forgotten or buried beneath the despair he fled from through his studies, amassing influence and respect as the new order arose under Vect’s leadership. A Coven sprung up around him before he realized. He forgot his original purpose. He became obsessed with the mass production of life, for some reason which he no longer recalled. Perhaps he thought to create a clone of her, but too much time had passed, her genetics degraded too much, and all that was born from the vat was a tumorous blob. Yet it no longer mattered why he had become obsessed with cancer or why he wanted to consume the universe with it. This was all that mattered now. Cancer. Life. Love. All one and the same.

The man who would have held back his blows upon this revelation, seeing in Eshairr a reflection of his first mate, is no longer here. Qa Vanada is not Eldar any longer. He has not been for millenia. He is a Haemonculus, and he will have his way. But this memory, this cancerous remnant of tragedy, does give him pause for a moment. This grants her ally the opening she has been waiting for.

The interloper, hidden away, fires. It is only a single dart that strikes him, subtle and swift, propelled by a great and powerful rifle. But he drops all his weapons and surgical tools, as though the strength has left him instantly. And the great rippling mass of cancer laughs.

“A tenth-order tumor-phage. How have you managed this, little girl?” Qa Vanada asks. “Even my most loyal students are only taught the secrets of the first eight orders.”

“Tyranid genetics,” Eshairr replies. Different species bred different cancers. The Tyranid physiology, especially of its more powerful beasts, was so unbelievably powerful that they were virtually immune to disease, and cancers potent enough to survive their immune systems were unheard of. But under lab conditions, with time-acceleration fields and enough carcinogens to slaughter a hab-block injected into a tissue sample... even the Tyranids would fall to it. It was inevitable.

That which emerged would be more dangerous than the Tyranids themselves, perfect in its imperfection, the predator to which the Great Dragon is prey. To this, all other life forms would be utterly powerless to survive. Even a Haemonculus might die.

Qa Vanada seems to smile, though it is difficult to tell. “Of course. If you do not know the way to generate such a weapon yourself, simply secure superior materials. Few gene-sequences are more virulent and dangerous than that of these aliens, and a cancer of it would therefore form a superior lethal vector. But how, precisely, did you get your hands on a sample of such a prized commodity? Mine are kept quite secure.”

An insect comes to land on Eshairr’s shoulder, a tiny Wrack.

“The Black Descent. Hah,” laughs Lord Qa, recognizing their signature work quite readily. “It seems you have been made into the instrument of their vengeance against me, Eshairr. One must wonder... how long they have been manipulating events...”

Qa’s words grow more sluggish, for the chaos of his unnatural being is unweaving to death in seconds. The pain would have driven anyone but a Haemonculus to insanity.

For the first time, Eshairr’s confidence wavers. She looks to the wasp-Wrack, who has played the part he needed to play, and sees his stinger bared an instant before it strikes her. But there is one who is faster.

The minion is eliminated in a blinding instant, a dart plunged through his abdomen. This is not the bane of before. It is something even worse, a new strain of the Glass Plague, a last resort should Qa have resisted the first poison. The mutated Wrack screams in horror, knowing his last moments have come as he turns to brittle glass, losing all sensation save for agony. Perhaps this is a kind of mercy, for if he had survived and escaped to his dark masters, they would have punished him to the fullest extent of their powers for failing to eliminate the final pawn in their gambit. Eshairr crushes his tiny form under her boot.

“I will return,” declares Qa Vanada, his voices trembling with exertion. This is questionable, given there may be nothing left to regenerate once the Tyrannocancer has run its course. But then again, one can never truly be certain with his ilk.

“I await you,” Eshairr replies, quietly.

He dissolves. The cancers that have become his very being fight a war of mutual annihilation with the invading cells trying to devour him, as if in a microscopic mimicry of the larger Tyranid hive organism’s rampage across the galaxy. Neither will win. Only death remains for the entire entity, and it manifests in the crumbling of his corpus to slime and blood, bubbling in final destruction.

“So, it is finally over,” says the shadow that was Eshairr’s first lover among Eldar, and now has become her most dangerous weapon. She steps forward, wearing the armor of a Commorite, long dark hair pulled back in a beautiful ponytail for battle. Bags under her eyes show her exhaustion, but the gaunt girl is more alive than she has ever been before, racking the slide of the hexrifle still smoking with heat from two lethal shots delivered with it. She is Tulushi’ina, Exile, student of the Dark Muses, and now slayer of Haemonculi.

“No. Now begins our rise from hell,” answers Eshairr. “Gather the crew. Arm them as we discussed. Tell them... tell them they fight and they run with us as Eldar, or they stay and perish as dolls. We will not come back for those that lack the courage to stand for themselves.”

Tulushi’ina smiles, delighted with the blood soon to pour. She moves to do as ordered, and the women of Morrigan are helped to remember who they are. When they touch the weapons of their homeland once again, they—

“Enough. I have heard enough of this tuneless song.”

===

Maeven Mistglass paused in her tale, a supernatural retelling that seemed to incorporate hypnotic suggestion as much as illusion. But as visceral as every moment was in the saga that unfolded before her, Syndratta was displeased.

“I was of the belief that you desired the Morriganites as a tool or sometimes a weapon, regardless a device for your plans. Was I wrong, milady?” Maeven asked, her body suspended mid-leap by a strange function of the flip-belt that made gravity more a suggestion than a reality for all who served the Laughing God. That or it was just another hallucinogenic vision, product of the colorful fumes that had somehow pumped through her great hall despite the countless vents filtering the oxygen of her palace.

Syndratta sighed. Were her subordinates present, she would have made a much greater showing of her annoyance, for such was politics. But she had dismissed every last one of them. Some would consider this folly, to go without defenses in the presence of Harlequins. But if it was her head they desired, the same flaw in her fortress that they had exploited to slip into her very throne room undetected would have allowed an instantaneous strike. Instead they had chosen to reveal themselves to her, to offer a performance. She was not so naïve as to believe they were therefore allies, but she knew there was a point they meant to make.

“Am I right in assuming that these events are transpiring as we speak?” Syndratta asked, folding one leg over the other, her long leather boots crinkling ominously. She sipped at verulus, a potent distillation, wishing for something even stronger.

“Clever, clever, a clever audience we have,” giggled the Shadowseer tucked away just behind Syndratta’s throne, reaching out to caress Syndratta’s bare arm with a hand clad in green and black checkerboard. The Archon grimaced at the intrusion upon her person, a tasteless gesture meant to do exactly what it accomplished: unsettle her.

“Yes,” Maeven replied politely from her place walking upon air itself.

“Then what need is there for this theater?” Syndratta snapped irritably. “Just tell me what is happening.”

The cluster of Harlequins pressed up and woven together, arms and legs splayed out in wild directions, stepped forward, limbs synchronized with disturbing precision. This was “Qa Vanada,” or their impersonation of him. Somehow, the way their bodies were contorted to ensure all four of their dark-eyed masks were displayed side by side facing their audience seemed to impart just a small fraction of the wrongness inherent to all Haemonculi to their performance.

“Words alone will not suffice,” said Qa Vanada. Their voices, joined together in discordant chorus, made the statement all too haunting.

“You are curious, are you not? You wish to know the events that you cannot see, that you cannot reach or interfere in,” Maeven whispered, her voice tinged with sinister amusem*nt. “Why complain now, when you were so rapt with attention to behold the demise of Lord Vanada?”

“Because the death of a Haemonculus is a rare and fascinating thing,” replied Syndratta, reclining in her throne and drumming her nails upon the stone arm that terminated in a clawed fist. Her feigned boredom, however, was wasted upon this troupe.

“Nay. You dread that the Black Descent has used you,” Maeven observed keenly.

Syndratta did her best not to flinch at the uncanny insight. She had heard many rumors of the eerie eyes of the Harlequins, that they saw beyond mere material flesh and blood, glimpsing at the very soul of their audience. Those secrets were not for outsiders to know, however.

“Yes, all who forge a pact with the Dark Masters must inevitably grow to fear their games, their conspiracies,” added the Shadowseer, once again touching Syndratta, this time her shoulder, forcing a shudder of disturbance through her.

“I am not easily manipulated,” Syndratta asserted. It was true, but also untrue. Again she thought of the Haemonculus whose head she had taken, the very same who had become her bondkeeper and life-guardian. That dark mistress had never called upon that bargain, not once, even though it was well within her power and the terms. Perhaps it was because there was no need; Syndratta, purely by existing and doing as she desired, was already serving more than adequately. Now to see the most distant echoes of her actions, the disposal of a hated rival not at Syndratta’s hand but the hand of her mercenary, illuminated much that she had suspected and feared for a long, long time.

Her bondkeeper used her as the tool of a tool of a tool, a pawn’s pawn, planting tricks and traps just by mending a meaningless wound Syndratta cut into a disrespectful ally at a chance visit caused by the fall of a Craftworld to Tyranid invasion. The echoes of actions both great and small fell upon all the foes of the Black Descent.

“’Tis a rare blessing to see the strings upon which one dances,” Maeven noted too loudly for it to be mere introspection.

“Fine, so it is. Here I stand, Forgemistress of the Obsidian Rose and yet no more than the puppet of the Black Descent, a piece in their games, and because of my folly the balance of Commorragh is thrown oblique. A Coven lies in ruins, the pacts it had forged no longer sustainable, the ramifications far, far wider than just one death,” Syndratta hissed.

The frozen picture of the dance suddenly turned fluid again, the performers each straightening up or landing from where they were suspended. They stood up straight, and they bowed.

“It is a pleasure to have such a sharp audience for once,” Maeven said, her jeering voice matching the half-smirk of her mask.

“Shut up,” snapped the Archon. “Get out.”

“Oh, but there is still much to be said, many steps of the dance left to prance…”

“What more is there? If you want any of this to matter, I need time to devise a suitable response to the woman who owns a piece of my very soul. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravitas of such a delicate rebuke,” said Syndratta, waving her hand dismissively.

Maeven, the Great Harlequin, laughed a single laugh, dry, mocking. “Ha. And what of the Hunter’s Howl, I wonder?”

“What about them? If that girl Eshairr has managed to slay a Haemonculus, I have no doubt to her ability to plan a competent flight, even from the depths of hell itself. And there is Lady Lynekai to handle the rest. If anything, I would be glad to watch that murderous witch perish should it all fail,” Syndratta growled, anger flaring in her heart.

“Indeed, your logic is sound…” Maeven said. “Save that you are yet to realize where this spiraling tale of conspiracies leads next.”

“What? What is it?” Syndratta snapped, sitting up in concern. “Their business is their own. I’m sure they can handle one little escape! It’s none of my—”

“Who is the vulture?” interrupted Maeven, co*cking her head as if in accusation.

Syndratta, who was as fair as snow, turned a peculiar shade of pearly white. She arose, hands clenching into fists.

Who benefits from the death of Qa Vanada and the vacuum of power? Who shall grow fat upon the collapse of the Extolled Malignancy and the chaos of its deepest secrets being plundered? Who is set to invade that very moment, conquering the Lordless Valley and the Malignancy in one fell swoop?

And there she was, the puppet dancing on strings, still so blind to it all. For all she knew, even the death of her husband was premeditated in this very way—how else would Shailuth have contacted a Mandrake than to go to a Coven, who were known to be close to the people of Aelindrach? His contract-holder was the Prophets of Flesh, but it would have been easier for him to use Syndratta’s own, more powerful connections to the Black Descent to arrange the hit. And then it would have been all too simple for them to align circ*mstances to their favor by staging such an assassination to fail. Perhaps it was their subtle suggestion for the Mandrake to violate Lynekai, as would be common to send a message, but in actuality they could very well have known it would spur her to action. All to ensure the Warlock would run off and pave the path for Eshairr’s escape. And she would naturally do so by coaxing the Malignancy into a grand battle, an irresistible prospect to draw their armies and fleets away from their own territory.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it all!” Syndratta yelled, pacing back and forth, fuming. Here she had been plotting to kill Lynekai, wasting precious days, precious hours on a meaningless vengeance against yet another bloody puppet. What could be done? The most powerful and yet risky weapon of any Archon was sailing to the forums of Corespur, joining the great games of Vect’s own court to lobby for a favorable response. It was not her own preference in solutions, but when the perpetrator was such a powerful, deeply-rooted Coven, there was little else that anyone in her position could hope to accomplish. Further compounding the complications was that her opponent, this time, was none other than the holder of her soul-bargain. Direct violence was simply not an option. But playing politics would take days, perhaps weeks. And the Black Descent would have their own agents seeded there, watching, preparing rhetoric to counterattack…

“There is still time,” said Maeven Mistglass, for the first time offering what seemed like genuine reassurance.

“Time is of no use now, I need a path!” Syndratta hissed. “I am ensnared in the great labyrinth, and it winds ever tighter around me. One step forwards and I perish. One step back and I perish. I can only remain still.”

“Yes, the halls of the Black Descent are most fearsome to navigate. Traps and pitfalls beyond number. The most sad*stic methods of slaughter. All senses are confused within them, and the walls close in upon all who walk them,” Maeven agreed. “Even I would not risk it. And who among us would? Who here is worthy of the title Covenslayer?”

“I will not hear such mockery from the likes of you!” Syndratta howled, throwing out a killing chop of her hand. But Maeven leaned just out of reach as though she were water flowing around the deadly strike. Syndratta almost expected her to then do a jig and laugh hideously, using it to belittle her. But the troupe mistress, to her surprise, straightened up and stared into her with a kind of somber solemnity, not a hint of ridicule in her body or her voice. The sorrowful, shadow-bound half of her mask seemed all the more prominent, overpowering the comedic green side.

“Yes, yes, the great lie you endure. I am the clown, yet they fear me! You are the great champion, yet you are shamed in the whispers of Commorragh!”

Syndratta scoffed and turned away, seething bitterly.

“Though… wouldn’t it be rather funny if that reversed?” Maeven added cryptically.

“Have you not laughed enough?” Syndratta sneered.

“Ah, but there is always a bigger laugh to be had, my dear. What greater punchline could there be than to make the insult come cannily true? Then all who laughed at you become the butt of the joke! Hah!” Maeven laughed, offering an elegant bow, the cheer returning to her demeanor.

“Enough of this foolishness. There is nothing to be done,” Syndratta snapped, turning and climbing the steps back to her spartan chair, collapsing into it with a sudden burden of weariness on her shoulders and her brow. She had already considered every possibility. None would secure the revenge she yearned for, and all of them would only endanger herself. Survival was always absolute. Those who forgot that did not remain an Archon for long.

But once more she underestimated the Harlequins, who knew her better than she knew herself.

“Once, there was a woman who walked the streets of Commorragh,” Maeven said, and the theatrical aura returned to the room. The performers took their places, even though it seemed an impromptu production, no script taught to anyone. How did they know where to stand, what to do, what to say?

Syndratta raised her gaze, looking upon the mistress of the troupe without expression, only silence. The lights of her throne room swirled in many colors, and a strange melody began to play, the minstrels and their flutes and drums dancing in the shadowy edges surrounding the spotlit stage.

“She did what must be done.”

She saw a silhouette, herself, leaping across the vast gulf between slum spires, blade flashing as lightning in the twilit skies. A head rolled, that of a crime baron, and then she tilted back to simply drop from the balcony into the abyss. No guard arrived in time to see the culprit.

“Her sword drank deeply of many lives.”

An entire chamber of recidivists counting shards of plague glass, one of the few currencies respected throughout Commorragh. They were using a homebrew strain of the sickness to turn their enemies and anyone that displeased them into more, more, more wealth for the gang’s coffers. They should have been far more careful about their work; the greed to expand their plague-dealing into broad daylight, targeting even the commoners on the streets, was their undoing.

Charges detonated, the door blown off its hinges, killing the doorman instantly. And then she leapt in, riding the maelstrom of the explosion, long blue hair whipping in a gorgeous crescent as she crossed the room faster than even the Eldar eye could see. Every single thug collapsed, cut to pieces, their blood on the edge of her sword the only proof that it had been her doing. She claimed their glass, shoving it into a satchel, and left with her prize.

“She was the last of her people, the last of her house. A house that burned when the Supreme Overlord cast his gaze unfavorably upon it. The legacy of her name gone. Nothing mattered to her.”

Stumbling through endless alleys, acid rain drenching her cloak. More wounds on her flesh than she could count, bandaged, tattered, starved, worn to the bone. Butchers came and surrounded her, and she lifted her wide-brimmed hat, revealing the eyes not of prey, but wolf, thumb pushing up the crossguard of her long blade from the lip of the scabbard.

“And in nihilism, in debauchery and slaughter, she was tempered and honed.”

A companion joined her, a shadow at her side. It was fur and steel, stolen from mon’keigh and yet so innocent and quick to take an Eldar as its master. The mastiff followed without thought of betrayal, the only one she could trust, eating the scraps of the meals she bought, stole, or hunted herself. When night was cold, he warmed her body. When threats came, he growled. They were together for only the blink of an eye. But it was a single, ineffable joy in a desert of pain and sorrow.

“Then she was given a cause. A purpose. An ambition.”

A Wrack’s blade cut down the hound.

Her blade cut down the Wrack.

So began a war.

“And hell was let loose.”

The play ended, but Syndratta saw the rest behind her eyes, as clearly as though she were reliving the nightmare in the flesh.

“Do you not yet recall it? You, who walked that labyrinth without fear?”

Syndratta looked down at herself.

She charged through the maze of the Black Descent for vengeance. Only the mad or the foolish would trespass here. Then she was both. Her secret trick was nothing special. Anyone could do it. They just needed the courage to try. To defy the Dark Masters. To defy the labyrinth, and the pull of gravity down into the abyssal shadows. To bring enough explosives to topple a spire, and to tear down every wall that stood in her path with thunderbolts of plasma. In a domain where all fell, circling down the great fissure of damnation, she alone rose.

Syndratta held up her hands, seeing what Maeven had placed in them. It was the very same bandolier of bombs she had brought into the fortress of the Black Descent, in an age long, long ago. The impossibility of it was furthest from her mind—for she realized the true gift given to her. Not these crude, jury-rigged explosives packed together by a woman who had nothing left. She owned much more frightful weapons now, and far more to lose. No, the gift was to remember that once she was one who dared.

“Dare you now?” asked the Great Harlequin, laughing, always laughing.

Like a great and terrible card had been revealed in the Laughing God’s hand, the sweet allure, the terrible amusem*nt, the wondrous irony of a lie twisting into truth.

===

Eshairr pants, the agony weaving up into her arm truly unspeakable. But this is the only way to control the Malignancy’s raider barges, by offering up oneself to the parasitic pilot array. It is something she was never taught, and the chems she dosed herself with to dull the pain are wearing off swiftly. She can see and hear and smell through the senses of the barge itself, their nerves linked by the gnawing fangs of the control maw clamped around her limb. She can feel every single Morriganite clinging to the railings of the raider barge as they rocket upwards, pursued by three more skiffs of the Coven desperate to stop her. By the Goddesses, her plan is actually succeeding. And yet she knows they may not make it much further.

Bursting free from the tumor into the Feeding Trough is a poignant, tonic moment. Gone are the rippling walls of muscle and flesh, red, red, red everywhere. Gone is the stench of blood. Gone is the madness of another realm. Freedom flows through her. She is flying again.

Memories of when last she was here, riding a jetbike up to the top, pour through her mind. Reflexively, she attempts to pilot the barge the way she did her windrider, but it is far slower and more ponderous, such maneuvers are impossible. Even so she rides the gravitic currents sweeping up through the great shaft, jockeying for every last scrap of speed.

“Eshairr needs relief,” observes Tulushi’ina, the dark Exile.

“One of us must take her place,” declares Kanbani, the Kabalite.

“Who among us could endure such a torment?” asks Munesha, the Exodite.

“And who could steer us as swiftly? Lest the foe strike us down,” wonders Leraxi, the ronin.

Only one is worthy to stand forward. She is the least of all who ride that barge. And she is the most.

It is Renemarai, who is nothing now, that tears off the sleeve of her dark bodyglove. She throws Eshairr out of the pilot node, and without hesitation, the fallen Princess drives her fist deep into the squelching mouth of the living barge. When its teeth dig into her flesh, she realizes the folly of taking her place. And yet, with no chems to sustain her will, though it should drive an Eldar insane, she rejects the pain of her nervous system being violated, fused with the screaming nerves of the tortured raider. Without hesitation, she flies the barge in even more impressive maneuvers than Eshairr could. It is the difference of experience, and the inspiration of desperation.

Eshairr faints into Munesha’s arms, taxed to the limit of her strength. But she has brought them thus far. She has fought and suffered and planned beyond what anyone could imagine, and now, if they are to be free, the remaining burden is theirs to carry.

“Be strong,” says Eltaena, the Void Dreamer, who touches Renemarai’s shoulder to encourage her.

“This… is… nothing!” growls Renemarai. She refuses the madness of the tortured barge. She denies it the thirst for her agony. She commands it, for all vessels are hers to command.

But they cannot flee the streaking beams of disintegrators and howling missiles forever, and the flickering shadowfield of the skiff cannot lead every attack astray. Even Ren’s masterful flying is not enough. One bolt strikes the rear, and one of the women outside is thrown from the deck, screaming to her end far, far below. The damage is not superficial; there is no such fortune with them this day. The barge loses most of its motive power, and they are so close to the end of the Trough, had they only a few more minutes.

Something blinding bright swoops down past them, a streak of violet and white. Two lethal blows fall like the guillotine of the righteous, lances erupting in vast columns of baleful light that annihilate two of the pursuers in a hideous flash of fury. The magnificent eagle pivots with preternatural grace, sweeping back up behind the escapees. It is an interceptor of Morrigan, a Nightshade, one of the last vessels left in the hangars of the Hunter’s Howl. Alone it could have done little in any of the battles up to now. But now the apex predator of the skies is unleashed, and the transports of Commorragh are but prey to its screaming speed and deadly talons.

“Druzna!” Eshairr moans weakly, stirring from her exhaustion, awoken by the unforgettable screech of those engines. She gazes ahead, eyes wet with tears of joy. Their sisters stand tall, even now. And on wings of crystal, they soar defiant of the darkness.

They cannot exchange greetings, their voices cannot reach, but they know each other by their works.

Druzna lines up with the last of the Malignancy’s retrieval group. The others do not see the savage sneer on her lips, the fire in her eyes, the sheer satisfaction of her hatred unleashed. This is vengeance for her fallen and imprisoned kin. This is revenge for Kuron, who is among the many victims of the Coven. This is justice for all who have known the tortures of their scalpels, and she the bearer of the blade of execution.

The Wracks scream. Then they perish in a blaze of hellfire. Their anguish slakes her Thirst, one final time, a farewell to the City Eternal and its ways. Once, she bathed in the death throes of the man she loved. Now, she bathes in the dying despair of true monsters. And as the moment passes, she leaves the curse behind. She is true Asuryani, beyond all doubt. Never shall her Path waver again.

The escaped prisoners limp onwards in their wounded raider, following the hypersonic soar of their guardian angel. At last they emerge from the throat of the Trough, escaping into the open skies of Commorragh. There is pollution and squalor that chokes and drowns the city from spire to spire and depth to depth, and the suns above are poisoned and dying. Yet in that twilight nightmare, they are free.

Free to die.

For a legion of black, thorned warships looms above, locusts descending upon a ripe domain. First in their path is the withered fleet of the Extolled Malignancy, which turns to face the challenge, but it is scattered, leaderless, unworthy. The lords that once directed it fell at the hand of Lynekai. It shall present little threat without them. And next in the path of the Dark Masters is the Hunter’s Howl.

===

Lynekai rises, forcing a step forward. Her wounds are worse than she had hoped. It will be difficult to return to the Howl. The smoking corpses of the Haemoxcytes, each and every one of them Qa Vanada, surround her. They could not endure the agony. Their minds were melted to slag, leaving twitching bodies behind that will simply expire. She would be pleased, but she is dying. She would have liked to see Eshairr one last time.

She leaves the fortress. She expects an army of abominations to greet her, but it has departed, reacting to some new threat. Lynekai does not think on that. She sees the ruins of the wraith constructs, her sisters. But these are merely artificial vessels, and their souls still remain. She plucks the waystones from the war-machines one by one, gathering them as blood trickles down her robes. She senses that some of the spirits are wounded, the demented torments of the Coven having driven them mad. The Spiritseers of Morrigan shall have to mend them. Another regret.

“You’ll hand over those stones,” says Armscar, limping out from the fortress, surrounded by a small troop of his most hardened killers. Somehow, they survived the Coven’s assault. Then again, the specialty of scum like this was in proving difficult to root out.

“Our alliance is complete. We have no further business,” Lynekai replies dismissively.

“You promised me victory!” Armscar hisses, drawing his pistol and pointing it at her. His leg is bleeding, but his wounds are nothing compared to hers. He stomps towards her. “You used me, used all of us, just to throw us to our deaths!”

“Yes,” Lynekai answers flatly. She lacks the strength to concoct a lie. He also is not worthy of the effort. The callousness does not win her any friends among the survivors.

“Those stones are ours by right. We died for them!” Armscar yowls, almost feral, his hoarse voice strained to its limits.

“You deserve nothing. You are nothing but scum,” Lynekai says, entirely honest. “Thousands died here. Do I grant them funerary rites? Nay. I would sacrifice millions of your kind without hesitation to save just one of my kinswomen. You are not extraordinary. You are just a convenient tool in a convenient place, to be raised by my will and to fall by my will.”

Armscar, so quick to blades at the slightest insult before, is rendered speechless. He had expected disdain, he had expected prejudice, even outright hatred. He would have relished it; it is the way of things for the righteous to despise those like him. Yet of all things to hear from the lips of a Craftworlder, true dispassion to the lives of so many is unthinkable. Armscar had seen the great warship standing against the Malignancy. Why would they do so if not for justice? Belief in something greater than selfish gain?

“Hypocrite!” Armscar shouts, distraught. For all that he was a manipulative bastard amassing an army with lies and propaganda, he had in truth been the first to place his faith in the White Spear that hunted above the Valley. Now he is as broken in spirit as he is in body, scarred within and without. When he raises his weapon, it is in despair. When he kills her, he will finally complete his evolution into the ruthless warlord that he is destined to be. The Valley of Fallen Lords shall at last be reborn as the domain of a new Kabal, led by him: the Lords of Scars.

Lynekai has no power to defend herself. The pain is too great to feel sorrow at this ending. She thinks briefly of Auriel, who could have averted all this strife. No, that is a lie Lynekai has told herself for too long. Auriel could not even escape the downfall of Morrigan. It was Auriel’s failures that had led them here to Commorragh in the first place.

Lynekai thinks instead of Eshairr, and she is content to die here.

Armscar fires, the spray of venom that will end the Warlock cutting through the air, a meaningless revenge that must be had.

But he will not abide.

I have no power to direct him. He is not of our troupe; he merely lurks at the edges of our performances, appearing upon the stage at cues that none but he is privy to. He goes where he pleases, recites lines that are not in our scripts, and dances solely to his own songs. After the Fall of Morrigan, I asked him to destroy the Hunter’s Howl, and he refused. I asked him to slay Syndratta, then, before the Howl reached her. Again he rejected me. I asked him to kill Eshairr, when the Malignancy was hunting her, and he denied my request with the cruelest of laughs. Perhaps he is closer to understanding Cegorach’s will than even I. I can only wonder if that is the singular reward for the terrible curse he has taken upon his soul.

Because of that curse, he is alone. Yet he has no need of a stage, nor minstrels, nor dance partners. The ground he walks is his stage. The screams that surround him are his music. And his dance partners? They are his victims. So many, many victims.

He is Solitaire. He has followed the Hunter’s Howl for longer than you would ever believe. How could he have gone so unnoticed, you ask? Because if he does not wish to be seen, he will not be seen, not even by us. And so he has followed Lynekai to this place that would be her grave, and he has denied that, too. He has chosen at last to reveal himself, and his entrance to the stage is as beautiful as it is terrible.

With grace, with rhythm, with the whimsy of a boy catching leaves floating on the wind, he has snatched every single spine of venom Armscar fired between his fingers, which I need not explain the impossibility of. The hellions are beyond awestruck; they are horrified, for they have never seen his work before. I would have warned them to flee, if I were there.

It is too late for them. He throws out his arm with a dancer’s flair, and the poison shards are buried in the vitals of the guerillas before they can take a single step. All except Armscar, the last survivor of his grand alliance. He is the only one wise enough not to flee. Not to present a target. He knows there is nothing he can do, and he accepts it. That is the only reason he is permitted to live. He stands tall, lowers his smoking pistol, and spits on the ground.

“Fine.”

He has nothing left. But this is not the first time. As he stalks away, shoulders sagging with exhaustion, it is clear that despite this setback, his ambitions have only grown more clear. He will rule this realm. He will claw his way to power, no matter what it takes. Destiny is merely delayed.

But that is another tale, one which is not mine to tell.

Lynekai collapses, but the hand of the clown catches her. He holds her up, a single arm of support. She stares into the mask of She-Who-Thirsts, the eyes of the goddess glaring into her soul like a fine meal to be devoured.

“Who…?” asks Lynekai, weary, so weary, and yet she cannot close her eyes to take her final rest.

“I am the Child of the Eldar. I am the gift-bearer, the secret-keeper, the tempter of souls,” answers the Solitaire, his voice a perfect, musical mimicry of the dark god he impersonates. Yet she knows it, no matter how it has changed since they last met.

“Don’t you dare lie to me!” Lynekai yells.

He pauses. There is no line in his script that can satisfy her demand. They are all lies.

“I know you!”

He listens to her outrage in silence. She reaches out to his mask. He is bound by honor to slay any who would take it from him. Yet his hand does not take up the blade tucked within his longcoat. Only she may violate his oaths and pay no price.

She tears it away. She sobs. Tears rain. She touches his face, his true face. Nothing has changed since the day they parted. Only his eyes are different, now. There is the burden of even greater sorrow within them than she remembers.

There is too much that he must say, and no poetry could ever capture it. Silence is the only song he can sing to her.

“Throw away that mask,” Lynekai whispers to him, lips quivering, unable to smile or sob, only barely speak. “I will throw away Morrigan.”

He stares into her eyes. She knows he cannot. His course was chosen long ago, the curse which now binds him irreversible. Just as her own curse has shaped her, set her on the path to damnation. He selected this because he could not leave her to fall into the maw of Slaanesh alone. She knows that without a word spoken from his lips.

He touches her face. His hand is gloved. Cold. Even so she grabs it, presses it to her cheek, weeping softly into his cloak as he holds her close. Her wounds go forgotten, for he heals them with his presence alone. That is Isha’s Gift.

I admit, I am disgusted. This sentimentality, if unchecked, would hasten our race to its doom. But I am too busy to punish their hubris, their selfish love. For now, I am riding to the climax of this war, great in the eyes of the Craftworlders, insignificant to Commorragh. I know the ending already, thrilling and wonderful. Are you interested to know it already, my sweet audience?

Eshairr dies.

===

The hunter is hunted, and this time, there can be no escape.

The end has come for the wayward voidship and all its crew.

The Black Descent falls upon them from all directions, weapons locked, malice peaked. The Asuryani ship that strayed so foolishly into Commorragh has played out its part in their labyrinthine schemes, and they have no further use for it.

Even so, the Dark Master that commands this conquering fleet strokes her pale chin with the scalpel-blades that extend beyond her metal fingers, thinking, contemplating. Would it not be wasteful to destroy it outright? The crystal core filled with souls could be ever-so-useful in her studies. The living women aboard would be worth a vast sum in the Underworld beneath Commorragh, where all the Covens mingle. And they could rip the ship itself apart to harvest all that pure, rare Wraithbone.

“Yes, send them a… message,” says Mistress Malxos, contemplating carefully, every single word chosen to be as precise as her plans required. “If they surrender, they will… hmm… they will be promised no death shall befall them.”

Only fools would ever agree. Yet she actually expects them to, given they have no other options. Annihilation or the most twisted of tortures for eternity is something she, in her alien calculus of pain and profit, would find an easy choice. For what is service to a Coven, what is the life of a Haemonculus, but the embracing of torment to fulfill oneself?

Upon the Hunter’s Howl, there is reunion. Eshairr sets foot upon its decks, and it is as if she never left it. It was a part of her, and that had been stolen away, but now it is returned. As she marches to the bridge, the trappings of the Malignancy fall away from her stride. By the time she walks beneath the great statues of its captains staring down over the command pods, Eshairr is its captain once more.

However, there is nothing she can do. She has returned only to doom, not the freedom she had dreamed to feel again. The officers of her crew gather and kneel before her, pledging their loyalty. Eshairr looks upon them all, smiling bitterly. If they are to perish, then at least they do so together.

The response they give is read out by a quivering pain-slave. He is certain he will die for bearing bad news. Yet the Haemonculus does not rip him in half with her many blades and mechanical strength, to be pieced back together by her students, as she does so often. She simply gestures for him to leave. She must be in exceptional mood.

“They are fools,” declares Malxos, grinning. She hardly cares; her prize is the subrealm that now lacks its ruler, its defenses shattered. The dark knowledge and relics envied by nearly all Haemonculi, the secrets of Qa Vanada the Parasite, lingers within the deepest vaults. It will all be hers, and with it, she can descend the ranks of the Black Descent ever deeper. Perhaps this will finally be enough to earn her descension to the office of Patriarch Noctis. Or even beyond. Two thousand years of tireless work and planning, rewarded at last. “Offered life, and they choose death? So be it. Destroy them.”

“Silence.”

This interruption is not spoken to us, the clowns telling the tale. It is said to Malxos, within her very own bridge. The Haemonculus pauses, for the word she hears is not part of her calculations. She processes this new information, twisting her head, the unnatural lengthening of her neck allowing an almost serpentine coil of her sinewy flesh as she scans her command chamber for clarification. Then she notices an unexpected guest.

“Oh, it’s you. How have you come here?” asks Malxos of Syndratta, who stands in her most resplendent rosethorn plate. The Archon carries two swords on her belt, hung side by side—one that is sheathed in purest ivory, and one that is sheathed in purest ebony. Even a long, conical helm rises from her brow, plumed with crimson feathers like the petals of a rose. It is her war dress, and she has come here for bloodshed.

Syndratta smiles. She could tell the truth, that the chariots of the Harlequins delivered her here with the swiftness of lightning, and the illusions of the Shadowseer allowed her to simply stroll right aboard, taking her place beneath the spotlight. But the mystery will make this moment all the more infamous throughout Commorragh for what she is about to do.

“The Hunter’s Howl serves as the hand of my will. If you would harm them, you shall be my enemy,” Syndratta declares with greater volume and boldness than Malxos has ever heard a threat spoken in her presence.

Malxos co*cks her head, surprised and confused. It is indeed the case that Syndratta is their patron, but she never imagined the Archon would have the gall to come here and argue her claim. It is an annoying miscalculation, but otherwise minimal to her plans.

“Very well,” Malxos sighs, waving her scissor-fingers to settle the matter, but also to keep her vicious underlings from simply attacking the Archon for her intrusion. “Send a message that they are free to depart. And advise them that if they are to hide under the skirt of their mistress once again, perhaps they should service her while they are down there so that she stops bothering me.”

Syndratta smirks. “How crass of you, my dear Malxos.”

“Forgive me, I forgot that you wear the mask of the prim and proper warrior,” Malxos smiles, a grin that stretches uncannily from ear to ear of razor sharp, sawing teeth. She is so impatient that she does not care what she is saying. She simply wants Syndratta and that annoying ship gone.

“No one goes entirely maskless, save perhaps for your kind,” Syndratta replies with a warm smile. “The honesty to be entirely what you are, and nothing less or more… such a courage you must possess.”

“Yes, yes, most brave, surely. Now fly away with your little minions! We can continue this most thrilling conversation at another time, my dear,” Malxos hisses, eyes glittering with frustration. She does not despise Syndratta. If anything, she is almost fond of her, like a pet. But the woman is a simple creature, largely uninteresting save for the lethality of her skills. There was a time when Syndratta was far more fascinating, an anomaly amongst Commorragh’s populace, but those days were gone now. Life as an Archon, secure in her power, has tamed her. It has broken her. She is so boring now.

“Of course,” Syndratta smiled, bowing low with elegant grace. “I will not waste another second of your time. Enjoy the spoils of your triumph, my lady Malxos. But the rush of victory can be poisonous, indeed. Be careful not to lose your head, hmm?”

Syndratta draws the white blade, faster than thought. The head of the Dark Mistress rolls away, and blood from her stump rains, baptising the Knightess Obsidian. Malxos’s guards fire upon her, tearing through her power armor and defense field with rays of sunfire, destroying the Archon utterly in retaliation for her crime.

But this never happened.

Syndratta only thinks to draw the white sword for a moment, and the head of Malxos falls from her shoulders, quite truly dead. The silver thread of her existence is severed. Her soul, all that she is, is flung screaming into the tides of the Warp. There is only one destination for her. Syndratta opens her mouth, drinking the pouring spout, the falling storm of Haemonculus blood, stinging her tongue, more co*cktails of chems in it than natural cells. And She-Who-Thirsts opens her mouth, savoring the taste of the prey she has awaited for so long, like a fine, aged vintage.

The white blade is no ordinary sword but the very gift which Lynekai granted her, the last masterpiece of she who was High Bonesinger. It is a blade so sharp that it can cut even the Warp itself, and its wounds echo through time to before it is ever unsheathed. The one sealed in Morrigan’s vaults is named the Sunderer of Storms, its most forbidden weapon, for only one woman ever tamed its malicious will, and in the hands of all others, the blood of kin was shed. That which Lynekai forged for Syndratta is no less than its twin, yet more savage and brutal in its crimson-edged beauty: the Tearer of Tides.

And it has tasted its first life. It has awoken. Woe betide any who dare draw it, for if their will is lacking, if they entertain even the slightest notion of inferiority or doubt, the sword shall turn its echoing cuts upon them.

Above the bridge, a face formed of green energy erupts from thin air, channeled through the metals of the battleship itself. He is beautiful, eternally young, and yet his eyes blaze with an unyielding disdain for all who are unworthy of his sight. The hologram is one which many have witnessed, a face dreaded by all that dwell in Commorragh from its lowest depths to its highest peaks.

He is the Supreme Overlord, the Tyrant of Commorragh, the Living Muse, Asdrubael Vect.

“Oh, she’s already dead?” Vect asks nonchalantly, his expression neither surprised nor particularly annoyed. It is simply an observation. “What a shame.” The sinful sarcasm in his tone is nearly as lethal as his edicts of execution. He might as well have consigned Lady Malxos to oblivion himself.

Syndratta kneels before his apparition, drunk on the potent chems of her prey’s essence, grinning like a she-wolf. She is perhaps the only one present who is used to Vect’s seemingly random appearances, and she is assuredly the only one present who understands there is nothing random about it.

“You. Syndratta. Come to me at once. I shall tolerate no delays,” Vect declares, an order which is as absolute as the gods themselves. At least, as far as the denizens of Commorragh are concerned, he is the closest thing that passes for divine in all the universe. Perhaps they are right.

Syndratta salutes with a fist pressed to her breastplate. She rises and turns to depart, and the acothysts and haemoxcytes stare in utter bewilderment. Had the Archon so much as moved her hand to a weapon, they would assume her guilt and obliterate her. It seems so obvious she must have had a hand in this. But they cannot prove she is the one responsible, and the sudden appearance of Vect throws all their suspicions completely into doubt. Is it not far more likely that this was one of his doings, one of his games? No, as they reckon even more thoroughly, there are far too many suspects: Every single one of Qa Vanada’s contract holders among the Cults and Kabals would have both cause and means to do this, just to secure their immortality at threat.

What could Syndratta have possibly done to slay a Haemonculus, anyhow? No, why would Syndratta endanger herself by killing the one sworn to regenerate her? It would be unbelievably foolish; only the mightiest of Archons could shop around for flesh-artists at their leisure. The notion is ridiculous. And if they were to assault her without evidence, they would be risking the wrath of the Supreme Overlord, to say nothing of the lords of the Black Descent.

With wordless confusion, they stare at their fallen mistress, none daring to touch her cold corpse or even step in her pooling blood lest the same mysterious fate befall them, too. It is like the wound which the Archoness cut into their mistress centuries ago has suddenly reopened, a judgment from the gods themselves, but unlike before, the Dark Master is not laughing.

The laughter belongs to Cegorach, of course. It is an excellent joke.

===

The true hero of our tale has finally taken her place upon the stage and cut down the final villain. But as I carry Syndratta to Corespur on my chariot, I must admit I am excited to see her squirm under Vect’s baleful stare as he probes her for weakness over and over, searching for cause to discard her from his regime. I wonder if it is Vect’s intention that by interrogating Syndratta regarding the suspicious circ*mstances of the death of Malxos, as Commorragh’s Archons watch and gossip from the gallery, inevitably rumor will spread that Syndratta is indeed the perpetrator. If she were confirmed to be guilty, it would mean—among other things—a swift and ignoble ejection, if not execution. And quite the fallout between the Black Descent and the Obsidian Rose, at that. But if she is suspected responsible and yet stands too clean to be caught, then she will indeed be worthy of the name Covenslayer. Thus Lord Vect retains a useful pawn in his games, perhaps even more useful with a swollen reputation to her name. That is the trouble with pawns, and puppets on strings—more than one hand can move them to their own ends.

More importantly, the death of Lord Vanada has pleased him, for the scholar of pain’s dark ambitions and murderous projects were beginning to threaten the tenuous balance of his garden. As he had planned, the Black Descent has retreated and abandoned its goals of cannibalizing the Extolled Malignancy, seeing in the mirrored demise of Malxos a clear point which they would be fools not to heed, even if they cannot begin to fathom who has arranged it. The wounded Coven is off-limits. For now. Tomorrow I suspect Vect will finally invade, finish off the Malignancy now that other fools have done all the labor for him, and claim the subrealm for himself, even if it is ruined by the cancer that ate it whole, just to boast to hold one more domain of the webway under his dominion.

Another jewel in the crown of the Living Muse.

T’was the height of hubris on the Black Descent’s part to assume that the Supreme Overlord would not also covet that place they sought to conquer. Or perhaps there is another motive at work behind his dark, cruel eyes. Even I cannot perceive the Tyrant’s true aims, or his true heart. Some wills are beyond our kenning, and some minds orchestrate scripts that even Cegorach would applaud the ingenuity of.

Yet our tale is not yet over. There is one final scene that must be played out. It is not the intrigue and politics of Vect’s draconian court. It is not the melodrama of Lady Lynekai’s reunion with her lost love. No, the last stage to be set, the last players to dance, the last lines to be spoken before I depart are of just two.

Eshairr and Azraenn.

===

Eshairr gives the command to sail for Syndratta’s keep, the Pike of Vaul. She looks to the faces of the officers of the bridge. They are strong. They are beautiful. They are proud. The women who had been taken by the Malignancy have already slipped back into the duties they held before their imprisonment. They, too, missed this ship, the soothing aura of the souls in its Infinity Circuit humming to them in their dreamy slumber. It may take some time for them to fully recover and reintegrate, but their wounded hearts will heal. Fighting their way out of the Coven did much to reawaken their warrior spirits. She smiles, and motions for Druzna to take the captain’s throne. Druzna does so with a nod, for by the schedule of the ship, it is the First Spear’s shift in command.

Eshairr walks the halls of the Hunter’s Howl. It is a calm, comfortable stroll. There is a peace in the ship now, its crew whole, or almost whole. There are few who are not nursing injuries. But there are also those that were lost, slain either in the initial fight to save Eshairr, during captivity at the hands of malign experiments, or just now, during the chaos of the escape. Most that perished have had their waystones brought back, at least. A few are gone forever, even their souls. That is a scar they will have to bear.

She is astonished to hear that Lynekai has returned to the Path of the Warlock, which she never imagined the matron had ever been on. And to think she went to the Valley to take part in the great war at the head of a wraith host. The white-haired maiden is relieved to find out that in spite of the earth-shattering battle, Lynekai was returned to the ship by a strange jetbike with a strange man piloting it, who departed as soon as she was aboard. Her wounds were savage, incredible she was still walking. The Healers have her now. They assure Eshairr that she will recover fully, once she is provided with a prosthetic to replace her lost limb.

It is all so much better than she had dared to hope. It is difficult to take pride in herself anymore. But she is proud of them. Without them, none of this could have been possible.

Eshairr’s path terminates in the rear of the Howl, staring into a crystal bulkhead. It is the entrance to a salvation pod.

“Will you say nothing to them? I ask of you,” says Eshairr to the souls that have followed her through the spirit-veins in these passageways, so overjoyed at her return. “Please, stay silent.”

She can feel their assent, whispers in the walls. They are saddened, but they also understand her feelings. It is not their place to stop her. None of Morrigan have the right to do so.

Eshairr touches the control node, and the bulkhead opens.

“You cannot go,” says the one who has followed her. It is no plea. It is a command.

Eshairr shivers. She knows the voice that speaks. It is one that has always clashed with her own.

Slowly, she turns to face Azraenn, only frost in her gaze, no warmth to give the Warrior.

“You have no right to make demands of me,” Eshairr says, her tone measured to cause no offense.

“You have no right to abandon us,” Azraenn answers. She has chosen the words that insult and incense Eshairr the most.

“Abandon?” Eshairr asks, hackles rising, heart beating with the rage that always fills her when they argue. All the times they argue. “You understand nothing. You have never understood anything.”

“I understand you,” Azraenn replies, her long hair hanging down in long, beautiful waves of gold over her shoulders and breasts.

“Liar!” Eshairr growls. “You could never even guess! What he did to me!”

“Which one? The winged prince, who violated you in the gutter? The lord of pain, who raped your body and soul?” Azraenn asks callously. “Do you think you are the only one to be ravaged? On this ship, you are in good company.”

“Ha! You think this is about that? No, what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, at his behest, at his goading! What I’ve learned from him! I will never be clean. You have your warmask to wear, to forget all the sins you cannot live with.”

“No. A warmask does not erase the memories, nor the sins. It merely hides them deep in the recesses of our minds,” Azraenn explains. “And it cannot make me forget my greatest sin. The murder, the slaughter, the innocents I have slain, their corpses I have laughed at—these are nothing compared to the reason I became an Avenger. I am sure you can live with the bloodshed too. Torturing and slaying a few Commorites is to be praised in our broken home. They’ll call you a hero.”

“Still you insist on your stupidity! Your stubborn delusions!” Eshairr hisses, laughing hideously at the woman she despised more than any other.

Azraenn raises an eyebrow, dismissive. “What is it? What misdeed is so terrible to break you?”

“I murdered a child for no purpose, and I enjoyed it,” Eshairr admits bitterly.

“I have slain forty-three children. Humans and other lesser species. We purge colonies often; they breed like rats. We cannot tolerate our sacred lands being disturbed by apes who had no choice, shipped in by the thousands to suffer in a miserable frontier so they can be whipped to death in hopeless labor. Just more sacrifices to the altar of their carrion-god, discarded by the uncaring hand of some inbred noble who desires yet another personal estate on some rock that he could never have guessed belongs to us. And yet we care not what malign folly brought them there. Their sin is the same as vermin: existing where we do not want them.”

“That you equate a necessary evil with what I have done is laughable,” Eshairr chuckles grimly.

“Necessary? To defend our territory and our legacy, perhaps. But have you never seen the throngs of filthy children packed into whatever hole passes for a sanctuary, sticky with snot and tears? How eagerly we step over the corpses of their parents to unleash our weapons upon the powerless, the pure. Oh, how we relish firing our hails of blades, cutting their crawling infants to bloody chunks. Bellowing our flames, burning them alive like pests, the smell of roasted mon’keigh ripe in the air. I’ve even done it with my bare hands, purely to enjoy snapping their soft, frail bones till there are no more screams left in them. It is an ecstasy that no other can match. Do you truly believe you alone have felt the thrill to take the most innocent of life, and enjoy it? It is one that Warriors of Khaine know well. And Morrigan breeds many of us.”

Eshairr recoils. “You dare think we are alike!?”

“No. Nothing like me,” Azraenn answers coldly. “I actually struggle with the weight of what I have done. That is all I do when I meditate, searching for meaning in a meaningless Path. But I know you. You would never regret anything like this. Not truly. You are far too selfish and arrogant. You spit lies at me because you think our sisters would swallow the idea that you are plagued by guilt more easily than the truth.”

Eshairr falls silent. She is astonished. She can think of no other misdirection.

“You tried to blame the anguish of violation. Then you tried to blame the burden of sins. Neither are true. It is far simpler than that,” Azraenn observes. “You hate us.”

Eshairr smiles. It is an unhinged grin, one she quickly covers with a hand. She knows it is unnatural, to feel so amused at such an accusation. The pain of being caught out, the agony of the truth unveiled, of this presumptuous weakling, this hound-bitch and Ur-Ghul whor*, this prize flower of her Violet Garden that could never have enough of Eshairr’s most sensuous inventions, being so inarguably right. Most shameful of all, this was a Warrior who could not even save her from the Coven in the first place, a failure in every conceivable way. Eshairr’s pride is wounded. Yet she is aroused. She feels the desire to shed blood. To violate. To torture and maim.

The mask has fallen away. She managed to hold it together just long enough to escape, scrape together enough of the old Eshairr to convince even herself that she was glad to be back here among her wretched kin. But now, just before she could flee the vessel, before she could be free, truly free, she is exposed. And she loves it. Such perfect chaos and madness.

“Ehehehehee,” Eshairr cackles. “I really did try, you know. But there is no freedom here. There is no family. There are only these walls, these suffocating walls I have been trapped in ever since the Fleetmistress took me aboard. I don’t know how I managed to convince myself I liked being a prisoner. Aydona didn’t save me, she just transferred me from one prison to another.”

“It must be so sweet,” Azraenn replies coldly. “To be unable to lie to yourself any longer. To indulge in the bitter truth. To admit you hated Morrigan more than anything. No matter how hard you worked to earn its respect, to win a place for yourself, to be given just a scrap of appreciation. And yet, our home was never going to accept you for who you really are. You just pretended to be someone they could like.”

Eshairr is struck with giggles, but they sound almost more like sobs. “I told you, you could never understand.”

“I understand,” Azraenn insists.

“The Malignancy welcomed me without a word!”

“The Malignancy used you.”

“No. Morrigan used me. I was just a piece in their war machine. I thought I was happy that way,” Eshairr corrects. “I was wrong. So very, very wrong!”

“The Malignancy just wanted to explore the curse,” Azraenn states flatly. “Your acceptance of their teachings just made you a convenient device.”

“No, you’re wrong! You’re a fool! Idiot! Buffoon!” Eshairr snaps, crowing out every insult in a rapid staccato. “There, only there, could I be what I truly am! You think they taught me this evil? That the shadows reflected from this crystal of Aelindrach were given to me? Ha! I am this darkness! It has always been me! My lust, my greed, my hatred, everything Morrigan feared and shackled me for!”

“So you were so tired of being the hero of a Craftworld that you embraced being the whor* of scum,” Azraenn states, smirking venomously. “And you actually thought they cared about you?”

Eshairr grinds her teeth, outrage coiling up her fingers, boiling through her chest. “Yes! I was not a failure or a threat to them! I was their equal! No matter how wicked, no matter how perverse or immoral, I was one of them! That is the difference! On Morrigan, I was abandoned! I had to crawl, scrape, bow, and lie to myself just to be accepted! Were you ever discarded by your own mother? Ha! You coddled, spoiled princess! You’re just like all of them, served a cushy life on a platter and complaining regardless!”

“You babble and babble, and all you have are insults to defend your delusions,” Azraenn scoffs disdainfully.

“Oh? But you misunderstand me yet again. I know you better than you think. Lynekai told me of your past long ago, you see, hoping to inspire unity and trust between us,” Eshairr growls, grinning sad*stically. “What a mistake she made. Now I see why you are here. Why you have been my shadow all this time, challenging me at every opportunity. You are so pathetic, so desperate for redemption, that you see me like your sister! The priestess of whor*s, the slave of men! Preacher of degeneracy and damnation!”
Azraenn clenches her fists. “Be silent.”

“The greatest failure Morrigan has ever known. A Priestess with a flock of none! Ha! Unlike your coward of a sister, though, I would never turn my blade upon myself! I have found my own family, and Morrigan can burn in hellfire for all I care!” Eshairr jeers vengefully. “They deserve worse than Eros. I hope Seminoth crushes them once and for all! That’s what they all deserve, isn’t it? For killing your harlot of a sister!?”

“Silence!”

“You wanted to save me, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here right now, thinking you can fix me, as if it would ever atone for leaving your sister to suffer in solitude! Leaving her to die of loneliness! Ha!” Eshairr laughs. “Your worthless sister is dead! You can’t undo your mistakes!”

“If you speak ill of Eallari again, I will kill you,” Azraenn hisses, eyes fierce, body tensing to strike.

“Eallari… was… weak,” Eshairr spits, word by word.

Azraenn flinches, struck as though by a fist. If it were the Azraenn that had first come to Commorragh, she would have killed Eshairr then and there, and then walked away. But she stops herself. She relaxes her body. And seeing this, Eshairr laughs.

“Hahahah! Look at you, tamed by the whips of the Malignancy! Mock me for being their pupil, but at least I wasn’t their pet!” Eshairr howls, cruel and vicious.

Azraenn closes her eyes, shaking her head. “You can say what you will. You are not the one who tormented my sister. Your insults are empty to me.”

This response is the only one that Eshairr cannot accept. To hurl her most hurtful words, poetry of harm, and for it leave no mark is infuriating. Azraenn, the fool who was always wrong, is somehow winning this argument. She realizes it now, and in a spasm of hatred at—herself—she snarls and slaps Azraenn across the face. Azraenn takes it, head turning briefly from the impact. But she twists back to stare into Eshairr once more without even a sound of annoyance. The blow is an error, for the fleeting sting of her palm has only clarified the argument to the Warrior.

“I will not let you leave us,” says Azraenn. “You do not belong there. Your home is here. Your family is here.”

Eshairr turns, done with this pointless argument, her goal the salvation pod. But the gateway closes itself, the spirits denying her. They have heard Azraenn, and they agree now.

“I am your captain. Open, now!” Eshairr shouts, unable to even process the notion that the Howl would ever disobey her. But even her authority is revoked. Fury, an incomprehensible flare of red-hot blood through her skull, tips her shaky scales of reason beyond the limit. She whirls, a blur of manic strength. Hands wrap around Azraenn’s throat, squeezing, throttling. Azraenn tries to gasp for air, but Eshairr grants her none. Her eyes are wild, furious, murdering the only woman who knew her well enough to realize she would try to run back to the Coven.

A certain clarity, a recognition, dawns in Azraenn’s confusion. Before Eshairr can realize the depth of her mistake, a fist crashes into her temple, and she is knocked senseless into the wall where her head slams brutally. Azraenn gathers wind into her lungs again, scoffing.

“Did you think killing me would give you the excuse you’re looking for to skitter into the shadows and never return?” asks the Warrior coldly. “You are too weak to manage that.”

“Weak? Weak?!” Eshairr screeches, clutching to the ribbed corridor with a hiss through her teeth. For all the insults and curses she had poured upon Azraenn, this one word drives her to a rage worthy of the Bloody Handed God. She returns the strike, delivered squarely between Azraenn’s ribs, doubling her over, almost lifting her off the ground with the force she puts behind her fist.

“Do you know what I’ve sacrificed? What burdens I’ve borne?! I have slain a Haemonculus to free our people! Can you even imagine what it took?! And you won’t even let me have my peace in darkness for that?!” Eshairr screams, beating Azraenn bloody with blow after blow.

“Morrigan is a broken, hateful place. They would—” Azraenn spits, punched across the face before she continues, with a flare of anger in her emerald eyes, “—I won’t.”

“You’re insane!”

Azraenn grabs Eshairr and hurls her into the bulkhead, pinning her with an arm against her throat, glaring into her eyes with calm, firm focus. “Give me one sane reason to let you go down there. To let you run off and join with the Coven you just left leaderless, that will want nothing from you but vengeance! That we just saw vultures swoop down to devour! You tell me who’s sane!”

“I will become Qa Vanada!” Eshairr hisses, barely able to whisper.

Azraenn releases her, stepping back, shaken, staring at the coughing maiden of bone-white locks and weary eyes. Eshairr slides down the wall. Her legs slowly kick out, arms limp, trying to catch her breath. She raises her head, staring up at Azraenn, the darkest of truths finally spoken.

“What?”

“Do you know why he’s called the Parasite? Why only one rules the Extolled Malignancy?” Eshairr asks, hoarse. “I wondered myself. It was the one question I could find no answer to in my plans to slay him. I only realized it when he gave me his last words. At first I thought it an empty boast. Then I remembered. He put his seed in me. Not just sem*n, his seed. And it all, finally, made sense. Why he favored me so much. Why I wasn’t trained the same way as the rest. It’s because I’m one of his flowers yet to bloom.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you know what happens when you insert a tumor from one person into another? It spreads even more virulently,” Eshairr explains. “It destroys them. All that’s left is the cancer. Ideas are the same. Memories. Personality. He gave me pieces of his. Enough for it to take root. Did you really think I just suddenly joined a Coven and acquired its arts in a matter of hours? No one is born with such a talent.”

Azraenn reels, unable to process what she was hearing. Eshairr was right; she truly does not understand. And who could hope to?

Eshairr grins darkly. “I’m not the first special interest he’s taken. I browsed the ledgers in his archives, I just did not grasp it at the time. There have been many taken in his raids, and of them, a small crop released back out into the galaxy to return to their lives. I’m sure his ‘seed’ is germinating slowly inside them all. Some Covens do similarly just to watch their victims become torturers. But he does it because it’s his method of survival. No, his way of life. I’m certain the original Qa Vanada is long dead by now. But the cancer born from his corpse—the idea of Qa Vanada—is very much alive, sprouting here, and there, all over the galaxy. You can’t kill cancer. It is a part of you. You can only put it into remission. The Malignancy can be burned down to its foundations, but it will always grow back. He’ll always return to continue the work he left behind. I will return.”

“No matter. The Seers will excise the taint and purify your soul,” Azraenn says, feigning faith in those she herself doubted most.

“Have you heard nothing I said? It is a cancer! To cleanse it, they must gaze into it, touch it with their own minds! How many, then, will carry his seeds?! Hahahaha!” Eshairr laughs, grabbing her hair and pulling upon it. “Let me go! I can never return to Morrigan. You know this!”

Azraenn stares down at the weeping paradox, the girl pulled between light and darkness. She was doomed from birth to never be accepted by her home, to be drawn to shadows, and tortured by it. She never had a chance. She was born to die, one way or another—in the name of Morrigan’s cold, rotten glory, or in the embrace of nightmares in the pits of Commorragh. Never to live for her own purposes, to simply be Eshairr—no, to be Numinai, her true name, her true self that she has tried so hard to forget.

So let it be death.

Azraenn seizes Eshairr by the hair, and she drags the distraught damsel of darkness down the halls as she shrieks and struggles. The spirit-veins pulse an ominous red, the soul of the ship itself alarmed and frightened by the act as much as the fae resolve emanating from Azraenn’s soul. The crew is alerted. They are coming, and they are bringing arms.

Azraenn knows they will all try to stop her. She cannot allow it. The communal madness of the Craftworld is fully flush within the hearts and minds of the crew, and the other survivors of the Coven’s tortures would lash out in terror to imagine what Eshairr will become. Even Druzna is irrationally afraid of the Haemonculi. She cannot guess, either, what Tulushi’ina would say or do with her recent transformations. Munesha, perhaps, might be trustworthy, or her primitive superstitions may overwhelm her reason. Only Lynekai would look upon Eshairr and see the daughter that she has become, but her voice, no matter how influential, cannot overpower the dread of the rest. And even Lynekai would refuse what Azraenn intends.

She does not have far to go. The ship tries to stall her with bulkheads thrown up in her path, but many are still destroyed by Renemarai’s boarders. The Howl cannot halt her. And the crew is yet staggered, struggling to understand, sluggish in its response. Azraenn drags her prey onwards. Not a soul arrives in time to waylay the Warrior before she reaches it, the arboretum. And the Shrine lies in wait ahead, lonely and cold.

No, cold no longer. Lonely no longer. As Azraenn wrestles with the clawing tigress attempting vainly to gouge out her arteries with her nails, she sees the curtains flow with the artificial wind of the simulated woodland. She sees two standing within, armored in the panoply of Khaine.

She knows them, though they are concealed in ornate armor. They are Ynnatta the Striking Scorpion and Loreyi the Dire Avenger. However, they are dead. Death befell them the moment they donned these ancient armors. They must have come here the moment they returned to the ship, driven by the madness of being lost upon the Path. All too natural, given the torment they suffered in those depths. Now they are Behelesth, Exarch of the Shrine of the Sundering Claw, and Axorai, Exarch of the Shrine of the Turned Blade. The Priestesses of Khaine, they that had fallen, arise again. But the comrades Azraenn had known, they were sacrificed upon the pyre of Khaine’s will.

Her eyes narrow as she walks into the temple, bearing the yowling Eshairr in her grasp. They await her, for they have felt the pulses of battle through the flow of the spirits. Now they stand in judgment over her, the lenses of their helms flaring with ancestral fury.

“What madness comes, over you now, student of Axorai?” asks Behelesth in her ritual metre of poetic expression, shaded in green camouflage.

“Morrigan has no place for feral hounds,” observes Axorai beside her, radiant in noble blue and white.

“Get out of my way,” says Azraenn. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Bold she is, much too proud, a lesson required,” Behelesth whispers.

“By coming here, you invoke us. You are banished from this shrine, till humility is learned. Release the captain. Your crimes will be judged by tribunal of this crew,” Axorai declares firmly.

“Step aside,” Azraenn repeats, her voice a low, primal hiss, searching for what she had come to take. “Now.”

Axorai draws the Diresword from its sheath on her back, brandishing it under the light. “This is what you seek. Yet you are not worthy. It is not yours to wield.”

“Give it to me.”

Axorai takes a ritual blade from the shrine and hurls it to her feet, clattering loudly.

“Take it, if you can. If you cannot, you will die. Thus is the way of Khaine,” Axorai says primly.

Azraenn releases Eshairr, taking the sword from the floor and rising slowly. She faces the Exarch of her shrine, standing bold and tall, driven by conviction that even they cannot understand.

“If you challenge me, you will die.”

Axorai delivers the final pronouncement, spinning the Diresword of Deivalaga left and right, the true master of this blade. None could stand against her.

Azraenn raises her sword. She gives a bladed salute, and then she charges her master. Yet she never raises her guard, she never even moves to strike. She simply closes her eyes. Axorai runs her through in a single blow. A thunderstrike of agony. But in meditative focus, Azraenn grabs the sword that has impaled her nearly through the heart. It is a Diresword. The spirit inhabiting it should slay her very soul. Yet it does not. Deivalaga knows the worthy.

“There. I have taken it, have I not? Kffk. Hggk. Yet I still live. So I will borrow this, one final time,” coughs Azraenn, her crimson life force running along the blade of purest white.

Axorai stares into her student. Her expression, her reaction, it is unknowable. Yet she releases the hilt of the sword, and that alone is enough.

“Azraenn Valarien, there is nothing more I can teach you.”

Her graduation from the Shrine is far more painful and far less glorious than she hoped it to be. Every breath is a fresh agony, and her limbs feel number and heavier with every step she takes. Azraenn turns, stumbling down the stairs of the altar towards her captain. Her friend. Her sister.

A hand braces her, supporting her on her descent. It is Axorai. Dozens of the crew have already arrived—how long have they been watching? They are stunned to silence, confused, and overcome. Even if they had tried to interfere, Behelesth would have prevented it. But they do not even know what to think, let alone do.

Eshairr is curled up in a ball, her eyes wild. Her sanity has fled her in her terror, her fear of chains, already reduced to something disturbingly close to the Haemonculus that had twisted her soul. She can only mutter dark secrets of life and death under her breath, curses of cancer and pain that no mortal should ever know. Her shadowfield has awoken as a matter of course, a natural barrier of darkness that repels all who attempt to approach her. Even Druzna is pushed back and stung by the shadows of malice, despite her desperate efforts to fight through the mists of Aelindrach to comfort her friend. She draws her pistol on Azraenn’s approach, but lowers it in the end. Threats of death no longer matter. Azraenn has already paid a price that is beyond reproach.

Azraenn grasps the handle of the Diresword, shaking with the pain of drawing it forth from her own flesh. The edge is so sharp she deepens the wound with unsteady hands, spasming in anguish as her blood runs down her midriff, down her legs, trickling to her toes.

“By Isha, stop!” someone exclaims, weeping with despair.

She pays it no heed. This is the only remuneration for her guilt. To join Eallari in the same pain: This is her redemption.

No. There is no redemption in death. Only in life.

The spirit of the sword answers her folly with the wisdom of the ancients. Suddenly the blade slips free without further injury, so light in her hand.

With the last gasp of her strength, Azraenn raises the Diresword high, gazing down into the swamp of shadows that has engulfed Eshairr completely, drowning her in despair.

“Only in life,” repeats Azraenn, hearing the soothing whisper of a great goddess, a great light, in her ears.

The blade of execution falls. The light of Deivalaga carves into the wall of darkness, splitting it apart. Someone screams, and blood splatters across the stone pillar of the shrine. The spirit bites deep into the writhing soul, and the flames of judgment burn through her, reducing dark nightmares to ash.

The darkness fades away, the arm that bore the dark jewel of Aelindrach severed at the shoulder. Azraenn collapses into the snow-haired maiden, feeling her arm wrap about her gently. Blood runs, mixing between them both.

Sisters hold one another, slain together. Reborn together.

And the curtain falls.