I arrived back to our shared room with Selene, still in a bit of a sour mood. I learned, advanced, and became better today. That wasn’t a question. But I also lost, which was grating to a primal part of me.
Better to lose against allies in spars and training than against enemies. I reassured myself, but the sour taste in my mouth remained.
I opened the door with a bit of TK and stopped. Selene sat with her legs crossed on the bed, dressed only in her night clothes and with her eyes only now cracking open. She blinked at me.
“Comfort me!” I threw myself at her and she fell back onto the bed with a yelp as I snuggled into the hug.
“You are …” a sigh reverberated through her chest, then her arms wrapped around me comfortingly. “Did Val beat you up again?”
“He did not!” I protested, though not too strongly. Then whispered. “Maybe a little.”
“You poor thing,” she said, her melodic voice tinged with affectionate sarcasm. “How will you recover from this?”
Her fingers slowly started playing with my hair and running along my scalp, sending nice little tingles down my spine. I rolled away, then placed my head on her lap to let her work her magic on my nerves, which she did with a smile as I settled in.
“I don’t think I ever will,” I hummed. “Though this certainly helps.”
“I can imagine,” she smirked. I did not know where she learned it, but I suspected she was using space magic with her fingers despite me not feeling even a hint of energy from them. They were just divine. “Anything interesting happened today?”
“With our blue friends, you mean?” I asked as I closed my eyes to enjoy the scalp massage.
“And the rest,” she said. “Things have been in a bit of a lull lately.”
“Yeeeeeeah,” I agreed. “Not that I mind. Guilliman is playing cat and mouse with the remaining Tyranids and the reverse with whatever’s down in the tunnels. I heard scouts have a fifty-fifty chance of returning from the depths. Nothing too interesting. Things have been rather hectic ever since you arrived on that hive-world, so this bit of peace is nice.”
“Right.” I could practically hear her eyes roll. “And you lived peacefully and in harmony with nature right up to the moment I arrived on Follax IV.”
“If you count the occasional mutant nature … along with a Lictor … “
“And you murdering them and eating their corpses as harmony.”
“Nature is savage.” I gave a little shrug. “They should have been stronger if they didn’t want to get eaten.”
“That is …” she started, her fingers stopping. “How do humans measure into that philosophy?”
“I mean,” I said. “The same applies, but I won’t get anything from eating humans aside from some bio-energy. So if they aren’t being a pain in my ass, I’m not going to eat or kill them.”
“You know that's a very … ambiguous rule to live by.”
“It isn’t really a rule, per se. I just do what I like.”
“Rules,” she whispered. Her fingers resumed their work. “Would you be opposed to establishing some ground rules for yourself? I think that could help with your … problem.”
“Huh.” Meaning my stupidly malleable soul and personality. “I guess it would. Any ideas?”
“No eating civilians?” She asked though I could tell she didn’t expect me to accept it. She was treating this like haggling, starting with a price far above what she wanted.
“If they don’t have any powers or traits, I want and they aren’t in the way of murdering soldiers or other people I want to kill,” I said. “I refuse to limit myself to avoiding collateral damage. That would be crippling in this galaxy, especially since the Imperium would be more than willing to use its own civilians as hostages if they figured out I wouldn’t kill them.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “And I don’t expect you to limit yourself. Killing with a goal can be … understandable. But I think senseless slaughter and the sort would be dangerous for you. That taints even the most virtuous humans.”
“Even normal killing does,” I murmured, trying to imagine how being in the Imperial Guard would change the average 21st-century teen.
They would either break or bend, adding to the suicide rates of the guard or becoming like them, desensitized, broken tools to be wielded by their commanders. I suspected my earth self would have been among the first. I wasn’t good with pressure back then, at all.
“You know what I mean,” she huffed. “Killing for the goal of killing, or for pleasure. That’s the sort of twisted thing I’d imagine a Drukhari doing.”
Yeeeaahh. With the strength of my soul being as it is, becoming as depraved as those Slaaneshi degenerates would probably have rather disastrous consequences.
“Alright,” I said. “Rule 1: Always ask myself whether killing a person has any reasonable goal behind it and never go through with it if it doesn’t.”
“Would getting more bio-energy be a ‘reasonable goal’?”
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“Not if I’m not starving,” I shrugged. I believed I would have acted according to this rule already without stating it out loud … but putting it into words might make that more permanent.
“I suppose that’s good,” Selene said. Then added softly. “Yes. That is already better than the rules most commissars and generals live by.”
“Not much of a challenge,” I said.
“It really isn’t,” she said regretfully, then shook her head. “Any other ideas for rules? That was about all I had in mind.”
“I suppose I should extend Rule 1 into other things aside from killing. I am more than capable of making people regret ever being born without killing them.”
“So you want to include pointless cruelty?”
“Something of the sort would probably be worthwhile to establish … though I can’t say where I’d draw the line,” I said. “I … might have enjoyed seeing those cultists I experimented on screaming in agony a bit more than I was supposed to.”
“… if you need an outlet, better them than someone unworthy of that agony.”
“I suppose,” I said thoughtfully. “Though these things tend to spiral out of control.”
“Do they?”
“Where I come from there had been studies,” I said. “Like, people exhibiting cruelty in childhood — as in killing and torturing pets and animals — are more likely to act with cruelty against their fellow men later in life.”
“I … can’t say I would feel sorry for cultists and the sort even if you tortured them for days,” she said, once again showcasing the inherent difference between 21st-century people and someone accustomed to the Imperium’s way of life. “But I see your point. Do you want some threshold or some such? So you don’t sink into excess?”
“Yep,” I said. “Excess of anything is a dangerous thing in this galaxy.”
“That it is,” she murmured. “If you put any sort of limit on indulging, that should be enough. Right?”
“Maybe?” I said. “There aren’t any studies around there looking into what counts as ‘excess’ when it comes to that horny daemon, but I assume it's always relative to the person themselves.”
“That does make sense,” she agreed. “That limit should be something for you to decide on.”
“Hmmmm.” I frowned in thought. “Well, let’s say … If there is no goal to torturing someone … I have to put them out of their misery after an hour at most?”
“Without a goal?” She raised an eyebrow, judging.
“I mean … for information and stuff?”
“You can read minds, dear,” she admonished. “There is no use torturing anyone for information for you.”
“I think the way I do it counts as torture,” I said, though I agreed with her. Thinking on it … was there anything I could gain by just inflicting pain on anyone aside from maybe some sick sense of satisfaction at giving pain back to the ones who usually spread it? I couldn’t think of anything.
“So?” Selene asked.
“I suppose … I shouldn’t torture them?” I said uncertainly.
“If what you said about what happens to souls after death is true,” she said. “Everyone you kill has a fate far worse ahead of them than you torturing them for a few weeks.”
“Trueeee,” I murmured, blinking sleepily. I didn’t need sleep, sure, but massages had a way of relaxing my mind along with my body. Especially when done by the cutie I had for a lover. “That’s Rule 2 then: No torturing people.”
The sigh Selene let out was filled with relief. She gently slid one palm down and caressed my cheek with her fingers. “Thank you. I … “
I leaned into her hand, much like a cat asking for scratches. “I know, and thank you.”
I gave her an affectionate smile. She was worried, I could feel it clearly, worried for me. There might have been personal preferences involved in her wanting me to establish these rules, especially in the no senseless murdering of civilians part, but she was mostly worried about me turning into something she couldn’t recognize as ‘me’.
It was nice, to feel someone cared. And I cared just as much about remaining myself, if not more, than her. I was just … weak? I don’t know how to describe it, but I doubt I would have ever given myself iron-hard rules to operate under if I didn’t have her pushing me to do it.
This would be good for me.
With that thought, I felt two obelisks form in my mindscape and settle on a close orbit around the central pyramid of my mind. Two obelisks, with the two rules inscribed onto them to forever remind me of the promises I’d made today and would hold myself to.
Maybe more would join these two in the future, but the baseline had been established. With time, the rules would become a part of who I was. Intellectually, I understood becoming someone who lived by these rules and not just obeyed them would be a … positive change. Even if some primal, beastly side of me felt revolted by the mere idea of conforming to rules and not indulging my base nature.
Stupid instincts. They mostly worked well and in my favour. Other times, they were a weakness.
No matter how much that braindead, murderhobo instinct felt shackled by these rules, the pragmatic part of me could tell these instincts would be a much more dangerous thing to indulge than some rules, making me show some basic human decency.
Or whatever-I-am-now decency. I should tease what the actual name of what I am is from that stone-faced Custodian.
“What are you thinking about?” Selene asked curiously, probably feeling my need to end the previous topic. Small steps.
“How I still don’t have a name for what I am,” I said. “I could maybe get the official name the Imperium had for the thing that makes up my body … but I am not just my body. It’s like calling you a chunk of coal because you are made of mostly carbon.”
“You are unique, aren’t you?” she asked. “That means you have to come up with your own name.”
“Name,” I snorted. “I guess I am just ‘Echidna’, then. That fits.”
“Does it mean something?”
“Echidna was a monster in an ancient mythology on Earth. A half-snake, half-woman born to two deities. They called her ‘The mother of monsters’ for she birthed some of the most dangerous monstrosities of the ancient mythology.”
“That fits,” she said with an amused lilt. “You chose it because of that, didn’t you?”
“Yep,” I nodded. “Though it was funny at the time. How I proclaimed myself to be a maker of monsters right in front of an Imperial captain and she couldn’t tell because her own imperium buried history.”
“I can see the irony in there,” she huffed. “Though I don’t appreciate being the captain in question.”
“Did I mention how beautiful the captain was?” I batted my eyes up at her. “How her sweet voice tamed the vicious alien from the distant past?”
She rolled her eyes, then flicked my forehead playfully. “Silly alien.”
“I need more taming now,” I whined. “Get back to work, please.”
“Truly the terror of the Milky Way,” she sighed, but her fingers went back to playing along my scalp. “I can’t believe how the Imperium isn’t trembling in fear already.”
“Me neither,” I mumbled, mouth quirking into a smirk. “I’m terrifying.”
“That you are,” she said fondly. “I can’t help but tremble in fear in your presence.”
“As it should be,” I huffed in faux arrogance, pulling on my inner ‘young mistress.’ “Only your divine massages save you from my wrath, human.”
“Oh, I know more thorough massages your alienness,” she purred. “A full body experience. It will refresh you both inside and out.”
I opened my mouth to reply, her husky voice doing all the things to my body she wished them to do and more, but I froze.
Selene noticed immediately, her fingers stopping as she looked down at me with a serious frown. “Something happened? Is everything alright?”
I worked my jaw, then gave a slow nod as I reinforced my connection to the avatar. “Yes, everything is fine.”
“But?”
Slowly, my mouth stretched into a wide grin.
I’d controlled dozens of drones at once, having experienced splitting my attention between multiple bodies. But avatars were different. They connected right into my soul, while drones only connected to the avatar.
So when my one avatar suddenly became two, it threw me for a loop.
“More than fine,” I jumped up, giggling. “Oh, this is going to be interesting.”
While one avatar picked Selene up and spun her around in glee on Baal, the other avatar was halfway across the galaxy, deep underground on a planet of metal and machinery from before time.
Solemnace.
My eyes cracked open as I reinforced the connection that had just been re-established after weeks of inactivity. Sickly green serpents of energy coiled around my body, locking my limbs in place, coiling around every inch of my body, and suppressing even my supernatural strength with ease.
My gaze landed on the sole form aside from me in the dark underground room, illuminated only by the faint light of my techno-magical shackles.
He was a man of metal, large staff held in hand, with a hood behind a face covered by a smirking death-mask. Even if I didn’t know who he was from the place I found myself in or didn’t suspect him already of running off with my avatar, I would have recognised him in a moment.
Soul energy surged in my body, unable to escape it, but easily sinking into my flesh and lacing my vocal cords with unnatural power.
“Trazyn, the one they call the Infinite. What an unexpected surprise.”