I know you have your mercurial motives, Luciene, but I must recommend against involving ourselves—nay, yourself—in Inquisitorial operations.
The protests of her colleagues, starting with Nessa Myr, above, echoed in Luciene’s memory as the world of Merkalla came into view for the second time. It was as orange as it was a few days ago, when they were here last with the Demiurg mining fleet. The bones of the Tyranid fleet drifted in a sea of frozen flesh behind them; though the Demiurg had mined much of the minerals within the Hive vessels, the bones were not “licked clean”—as Ishmael put it—for much of the meat upon the Hive ships was of no value to the Demiurg.
For Zaer, her most trusted confidant and ally, the protests were much more recent than mere memory. “This is a bad idea, you know,” he said. He stood next to her, arms crossed, also looking over the dry orange sphere before them.
“You’ve said that to me time and again over the years,” Luciene noted, a gentle grin crossing her lips for a moment, though it faded just as swiftly as it arrived.
“Have I been wrong?” Zaer asked. Luciene did not answer. No, he had not been, not often. Due to her silence, Zaer shrugged and reminded her of his loyalty all the same. “If this is what you want, Lucy, I will follow.”
“Want,” she repeated, and shook her head. “To want this makes it seem so small. I feel as though I must go down there, that I am called to.”
“And this calling, is it to this world, or to the Imperial Inquisition?” Zaer asked. Luciene looked at him, at last breaking her gaze from Merkalla below. “If you are called to this world, nebulous though your predilections are, I am inclined to follow. Your calling is a path to which you have guided many of us, and it is a worthy journey. But if you just wish to discern more about the Imperial Inquisition, and its goings-on, I must confess to reticence. Even if I am wrong about Zet—which I do not think I am—the Inquisition is not something you can reason with, Lucy. They will see us as enemies, and they will kill us without hesitation. Do you understand?”
Luciene looked to the stygian ceiling of the Necron vessel above her. Green lights coursed down alleys of unknown technological hieroglyphs all throughout the structure of Zet’s ship. They were alien in nature and an opportunity for horror were one to set eyes upon them, but Luciene found them oddly calming, not terrifying. The repetitive, gentle cadence with which the innards of Katabasis pulsed was as unto a heartbeat. Indeed, it may have been just that.
After contemplating the liveliness of the unliving vessel housing them, Luciene returned her gaze to Merkalla. The planet was very definitively dead, and dusty at that. “Do you have personal experience with this Inquisition?” she asked Zaer at last.
Zaer sighed. “I do not,” he admitted. “But they are preceded by no small reputation.”
“Can there be Inquisitors that break the mold you describe?”
Zaer paused, sighed again, and then shook his head. “You and I both know that no body in the galaxy is uniform, Lucy,” he said before gesturing to the remnants of the Hive fleet. “Well, perhaps no body but theirs. But yes, I assume there are Inquisitors possessed of some patience and level-headedness. However, I also assume they are short-lived, as their ranks are cutthroat and the Imperium no stranger to infighting. Please hear my words, Lucy—Death is the only thing that follows the Inquisition. It is in their very nature. Now, I repeat my question: to what is your calling?”
Luciene stared at Merkalla for a few moments longer than she had looked to the Necron ceiling of Katabasis, and then at last revealed, “There is something down there that I am called to see. I have no calling to the Inquisition, just…an echo of something I cannot recall.”
“Then follow I shall,” Zaer agreed without further hesitation. “Let us depart.”
***
Luciene’s eyes were not open when she instructed Zet where to land Katabasis. The Necron frigate kicked up a small dust storm as it descended upon Merkalla below, and it was not until the dust had cleared that it was revealed Luciene’s instructions had guided the vessel to park adjoined to a ruined city. Pale stone megaliths reached upward from deserted streets, ascending to heights almost as tall as Katabasis’s peaks, gashed only by the erosion of wind and time. If there was life here once, it long predated both the Inquisition’s arrival and, before them, the Tyranid’s.
Yet not all features of the surface were so old. Colossal footprints darkened the main causeway before Katabasis’s bay, with Luciene only noticing the scale of one when she stood within it, her crimson cloak whipping in the wind and still failing to catch any edge of the footprint. “Knight,” Myr said, seeing Luciene’s shock. “Likely a Castellan, given the size of the imprint and separation of its stride,” she said, pointing ahead to other such depressions along the causeway.
“An operative of our Inquisitorial friends, no doubt,” Zaer offered, stepping ahead of the group with his Shuriken Rifle at the ready. “We shall hear it coming, at least, if it lurks here yet.”
“It would need to be a Freeblade,” Kane pointed out. He stuck by Myr’s side, despite the latter’s unnerving, blood-red Death Cult-attire. “Knights are tied to Houses, not the Inquisition, unless they embark on an independent path.”
“A path like ours,” Kor’Kassan noted, face buried in electronic scanners and sensory reports. A small drone hovered over his head, turning to and fro to assess the T’au’s surroundings. “Speaking of which, Luciene, what is our heading?”
“For now, we follow in this great beast’s footsteps,” Luciene declared, looking on down the causeway, where the great footsteps continued. “And we shall pray it has not stepped on that which I seek. Zet, are you to remain with Katabasis?” she asked, turning to face the Necron.
“I can if so desired. But unlike those of flesh, I am also capable of being in two places at once,” Zet answered.
“I know what my vote is,” Zaer said in a growl.
“That I remain upon my vessel and strand you here?” Zet offered.
“There are worse fates,” Zaer shrugged.
Luciene cleared her throat, and glanced—sharply—to Zaer before returning her gaze to Zet. “It is up to you, Zet. Join us if you wish.”
One of Zet’s unnerving and unnatural laughs followed, after which he said, “Then I shall, if only to further annoy the Aeldari.” Zet then stepped forward, joining the group properly, while Katabasis closed its bay doors behind him without any apparent interaction from the Necron. The group of six then ventured deeper into the abandoned city before them, with all but Kor’Kassan taking care to avoid the large footprints in the ground as though they were dangerous omens. The T’au, however, studied each one, gleaming some scientific insight from the sunken footfalls.
Luciene’s attention, meanwhile, was on the city’s unknown architecture. As her group proceeded onward, she gradually eased her pace until she was standing next to Zet. “You claimed to be possessed of some years, Zet,” she began. “Can you discern who might have once lived here?”
“I cannot,” Zet admitted, shaking his head with the slight whir of embedded metals in his spine. “I was not known to study ancient relics until only recently. There is an archivist among my kind who might, though he is quite mad, and I would not take you to him as I do not imagine he would ever let you leave his presence.”
“They are Aeldari,” Zaer chimed in, stepping closer to the pair with some reluctance. “Or, they were. The base foundation of many of these structures were made from the craftsmanship of my people. But it was later adapted, this city. By Human hands, I think, but not possessed of the gothic nature of Imperial design. I do not imagine this world has seen life since The Fall,” he explained, and then glanced upward, staring at the streak of shattered space that stretched across the skies. Zaer winced in pain at the sight of it, but did not shake his gaze for moments more.
“You’re saying your people owned this world, and then abandoned it, after which non-Imperial Humans colonized it?” Luciene asked. Zaer nodded, and in so doing, broke his staring contest with the Great Rift. “Where have they gone?” she wondered aloud.
“Can’t say. Worlds die, it is inevitable,” Zaer shrugged.
“For the living, that is,” Zet noted.
Zaer ignored the Necron. “This world, at least, was not claimed by war. There is no sign of struggle. Abandoned, likely, perhaps for whatever reason my people fled this realm.”
“Isotropic analysis of atmospheric conditions suggests otherwise,” Kor’Kassan butted in, joining the trio from behind. His face was still buried in analyses of the world. “The only amounts of residual starship fuel in the atmosphere are recent, with none matching the approximate age of this city’s last inhabitation. Wherever the people here went, they did not leave this world by ship.”
“Meaning they died here,” Zaer noted. “Necron, you are confident your scans of this surface revealed no signs of life?”
“I am, Aeldari,” Zet said, mimicking Zaer’s unwillingness to refer to the other by their name.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Then whatever was here came and went without a ship, if you’re both to be believed,” Zaer surmised. “And if I’m correct, that happened around the time of The Fall. There were a great many things that invaded our galaxy around that period. This may be a daemon world, in the Imperial tongue, which would explain why the Inquisition brought a Knight. Stay alert, Luciene,” Zaer said, prepping his rifle ahead of himself.
“There are no daemons here,” Luciene said with a confidence that eased the stress Zaer had built up in himself and in Kor’Kassan. Zet was not too bothered by the prospect one way or another. “My quarry is just ahead. That structure,” she declared, and nodded toward a large pyramidal edifice that seemed to sit in the dead center of the city. It was minutes more before Luciene and her crew reached it, and minutes more still before they were able to ascend the great staircase that led from its base to an entryway.
“Our kind refuses to build small, don’t we?” Kane muttered about halfway up the stairs. Myr tossed an arm over his shoulders and pushed him along.
The Knight’s footsteps terminated at the base of the great stairway, but Kor’Kassan and Zet agreed that they were able to detect smaller, humanoid footprints that had left a forensic mark before Luciene’s crew’s arrival. The Inquisition had sought out this pyramid as she had, and gleamed of its secrets already. This, Luciene acknowledged, explained why the sealed stone doors at the apex of the stairwell had been blown apart, their remnants scattered in the entrance of the pyramid. Nevertheless, she ventured inside, still following in the Inquisition’s footsteps.
Luciene only advanced a few steps onward into the vast darkness within before pausing ahead of her group. She turned back to face them and said only, “Watch your step.” She then pointed to her sides, indicating that some danger lurked in the darkness next to her. From her crew’s perspective, she then turned and vanished deeper into the shadows of the pyramid.
“Allow me,” Zet suggested, and lifted another of his Tesseracts from his cloak. Light shone out from it—not Necron green, but pure, unadulterated, white light. Perhaps, Zaer and Kor’Kassan thought, the Necron had a star within this pocketed prison. Or it contained some other Necron contraption, as his first had. Both possibilities seemed equally probable to the T’au and Eldar alike. Regardless of the light’s source, it revealed two things: One, the source of the danger Luciene had hinted at, in the form of a sudden drop into a vast chasm below the walkway that led from the pyramid’s entrance; Two, where the population of the city had gone. “That much I was not expecting,” Zet admitted, scanning the interior walls of the pyramid.
Skeletons lined them. Thousands, millions. Bodies, desiccate like Zet’s and white like the light that shown from his Tesseract, formerly inured from the wear of time from the Inquisition-broken seal of this structure. Empty eyes stared down at the pyramid’s new occupants, jaws agape. Kane thought they looked hungry, though the sight of millions of dead, hungry maws left him devoid of any appetite himself. Even the once-cannibalistic Myr found herself none-too-thrilled with the sight around her.
“The…uh…the bodies line the walls eleven meters deep, without much gap,” Kor’Kassan reported worriedly, only his drone maintaining any even composure as it scanned the skeletal superstructure around him.
“No one needs to know that,” Zaer muttered. “How old are they?”
“Approximately eleven thousand years old, give or take,” the T’au answered.
“Right in time with The Fall,” Zaer nodded, and then he stated the obvious: “They did not put themselves there.”
“No, they did not,” Zet agreed with a nod. “Microfractures are found in most skeletal remains. They were put there by force, and kept pressed against one another for the rest of their lives—and, evidently, beyond. I believe I now share your suspicion, Zaer. This is the work of that infernal violation of reality.”
Zaer muttered something to himself and walked further past Zet, saying only, “Glad we’re in agreement.”
“In here,” Luciene called from deeper inside the pyramid. The brutalist skeletal surroundings had been so eye-catching to everyone else that they had forgotten Luciene ventured deeper in on her own, and they had neglected to observe the elevated, isolated room that rested at the end of the pyramid’s sole walkway, from which Luciene then called. It, too, was of a smaller pyramidal shape, and its exterior walls, at least, were not covered in bones. It then occurred to the group that Luciene, evidently capable of seeing in the dark with those gleaming golden eyes, had likely borne witness to the skeletal walls of the main pyramid immediately, and had not chosen to inform her crew of such horrors.
Perhaps that’s her idea of a prank, Kane thought to himself as the group nevertheless pushed deeper into the pyramid together.
The proximal walls of the inner pyramid were, like their distal opposites, also not covered in skeletons, but they were covered in something equally eye-catching. Flat and raised to the ceiling of the smaller, enclosed room, murals stretched across every last inch of the inner chamber, depicting imagery as yet unsourced to Luciene’s crew. Luciene herself, however, stood transfixed in front of the mural opposite the inner chamber’s entrance, her back to her allies. It was clear to them she something in the mural had caught her eye.
Zaer stepped beside his partner and skimmed across the wall. “A battle,” he surmised, quietly. Luciene nodded.
“The language of these hieroglyphs follow patterns of mankind’s Low Gothic, as master Zaer suggested may be the case. I am working on translations,” Kor’Kassan declared, thumbing through further dataslates on his person.
Luciene rose and pressed a hand against the mural before her. “The Warrior,” she translated, knowingly, her fingers touching a humanoid shape in the mural. It stood atop a circular world, leftmost amongst a similar group of figures, and was colored in black. A small green blade extended out from its right arm. Luciene then moved her hand a bit to the right, to the next figure. “The Leader,” she said. This one was clad in pale blue, and held two longswords on its back, though neither was drawn. Luciene moved on to the next figure, clad in red, and with a number of additional, snakelike appendages emerging from its backside. “The Scientist,” she translated.
Luciene hesitated to move her hand ahead to the final, rightmost figure, as she recognized it at once—as did Zaer. “The Machine,” she muttered, hand passing gently over the spitting image of Zet, a pale skeleton wielding a greatscythe, with a gentle green aura about its form. Her hand then began to crawl up the mural, though she paused with even greater hesitation at the winged figure above the four landlocked entities. Nevertheless, after Zaer gently helped her hand to the gold-encrusted being on the mural, she translated, “The Angel.” Higher above The Angel, greater in distance than that between The Angel and the four landlocked figures, rested a four-armed, four-winged entity painted in gentle, sky-blue. “The Star,” Luciene translated, though that was a lie, and she knew it.
Luciene knew, in no uncertain terms, who was depicted at the mural’s apex, and that the words below described the figure by name, rather than some nebulous title. Veralith, Luciene thought to herself. Why are you here? You never struck me as a direct combatant.
“This all helps!” Kor’Kassan shouted happily, beginning to take scans of the murals around himself with his drone.
However, Zaer and Luciene paid his enthusiasm no mind. “What are they fighting?” Zaer asked her. Every figure on the mural had their backs toward observers such as Luciene and her crew, standing instead to face down the largest, greatest, and most horrific entity of them all. A mass of shadow, larger than the world on which they stood, with hands grasping at the planet and maw ready to devour it whole. Ships—vaguely Imperial and Aeldari—were carved into a resting position over the shadow, harmlessly firing into it.
“Cronos,” Luciene muttered, and backed away from the mural slowly.
“Is that its name? There are no hieroglyphs for it,” Zaer noted, looking to his left and right for any indication as to the being’s title.
“Its name seeps from the walls,” Luciene declared warily, still backing up. “It was here. It was…worshipped…by those outside.”
“The skeletons, you mean?” Kane suggested from some distance behind Luciene, never stepping deeply into the room.
Luciene nodded. “I do. They worshipped it, and it did that to them in return,” she explained. “I was called to lay eyes upon this darkness,” Luciene understood, and then thought to herself, And now that I have, I wish you had left me blind.
Zaer turned from the mural to face Luciene again, and when he did, his stern expression shattered. For the first time in his life, he saw in Luciene’s face the very fear she had always sought to squash. Whatever it was her golden gaze was gleaming from these walls, it was eating away at her from within, antithetical to the very core of her being, all confidence destroyed.
Zaer opened his mouth to speak, but Zet beat him to the punch with even greater urgency. “A fleet of vessels has just entered the system in orbit over this world,” Zet announced, head and body pitching away from the murals toward the exit. “Imperial.”
“The Inquisition,” Myr understood, and earned a nod from Zet.
“We need to leave. Now,” Zaer ordered, and rushed through the group to all but shove Luciene away from her fears. Her body put up no resistance, and as she and Zaer hurried from the pyramidal burial temple, the rest of her crew did not hesitate to follow. Only Zet paused in leaving, empty eyes focusing, briefly, on The Machine in the mural Luciene had read from before giving chase to his newfound allies.
They made it about eighty-percent down the great staircase leading into—and out of—the pyramid before columns of red lasfire descended from the heavens above. The first, thankfully, was not on their position, but countless miles to their East. It nevertheless darkened the horizon into a bloodred hue, and the skies crackled and growled with the sparking rasp of continent-shattering energy. Someone, male, shouted, “Go! Run!” though even its speaker was unsure of who, and all were running from the burial crypt as it was.
Zaer noted, briefly, that he was impressed with the speed at which Zet and Kor’Kassan could carry themselves. While not possessed of Eldar—or Luciene’s—agility, they were both at least capable of keeping up with the pair of humans despite their unathletic appearances. It was around this thought that the second las-bombardment began, far to their West, albeit nearer to their position than the first. The ground shook beneath their feet despite the distance, and the winds whipped every which way around them with force strong enough to topple the more-eroded peaks of the abandoned city. Kor’Kassan’s drone was struggling to keep from being blown away at times, as the waves of force rushed into the group from each subsequent bombardment.
As they neared Katabasis, Zaer observed that the vessel had already been powering up for takeoff and that its bays had already opened to accept its passengers. I’ll give credit to Zet for that preparation, at least, Zaer thought to himself. They were going to make it out of here by the skin of their teeth, it seemed. As Zet neared the vessel, he phased out from sight, likely teleporting himself aboard. That was just as well; Zaer did not want to have to wait for the Necron to board manually. Zaer, for his litheness, crested the bay doors first, but waited at their peak to ensure Luciene made it aboard.
Luciene, however, was more preoccupied with ensuring the rest of her crew made it to safety, helping them maintain their balance amidst the las-fueled sandstorm that was forced upon the city around them. Zaer was none too pleased about it, but he also was not going to waste time arguing with his obstinate partner. The humans made it aboard next, then Kor’Kassan, after which Zaer reached a hand out to Luciene to help her up. She took it, but just as their hands met, the third and final bombardment began, striking the pyramidal burial chamber directly far ahead. In a frozen moment of time, as Zaer helped Luciene aboard Katabasis, he almost failed to see the thin, fragmented shrapnel that shot out from the column of crimson that singed his vision from whence they came. But seeing it did not imply being able to act on account of it, and Zaer could do not but watch, helplessly, as it sailed through Luciene’s backside, out her front, and into the landing bay doors of Katabasis, where it all but liquified upon impact.
In the next instant, the doors closed behind them, and Zaer had tossed himself and Luciene inside the ship, onto its cold, black floors, now beginning to stain red. And he watched with horror as the gold light faded from Luciene’s eyes.