Denouement

Commorraugh

I’ll never get used to the screams. Each and every day the blood curdling sound never stopped in the Dark City. The stronghold of the Drukhari laid anchored in the deepest, darkest pit of the webway. The architecture and geometry of vast urban jungle would be impossible within the materium. It was a single city that spanned a dozen different pocket dimension, surrounded three suns, yet could be traversed in a single step. Spires like the fangs of the nightmarish beasts that prowled the streets stood taller than mountains. Perpetual twilight blanketed this realm as the Drukhari had bled away the potency of the dying stars that powered their handcrafted hell.

All manner of biological waste covered the streets. The stench was in comprehensible. Scourges, genetic monstrosities with vulture wings, cackled and hissed as they plucked unsuspecting victims off the street. Tortured and mutilated slaves were drug around like tired dogs by barbed wire. Women were snatched off the streets by men on speeding bikes to satiate wanton lust. Shambling monstrosities from the homunculi cults stormed down the streets and ate their victims alive. Gangs leapt from the shadows to slit the throats of their victims, then their comrades would stab them in the back in service to some convoluted scheme to their own benefit.

Their whole society was built upon a dark pact they made with Slaanesh during the Fall. She Who Thirsts will not claim their souls so long as they feed her the excesses of unspeakable pleasure and unfathomable pain. There are many who would phrase this interaction as, “they are forced to do such things”, but Odyn knew better. The dark pact was but permission to do every evil that already lurked in their hearts. Yet even among these terrors whose sadism, cruelty, and barbarism surpassed the demons themselves, there was one sight that could give them pause.

“Harlequin!” a genetic nightmare howled and all eyes turned towards the clown in the white coat with a red mohawk.

The horrors of the Dark City fell silent as the warrior poet of Cegorach strolled by them. The old saying still proved true, “only a Harlequin can walk the Dark City without fear.” In theory working for a kabal would provide you safety for fear of retaliation from the kabal but in practice it was a whole other beast. That did not nothing to defend you from the brutality within the kabal’s ranks and tradition of any sort holds little sway in a society that holds murder and treachery as its highest virtues. The only reason they don’t dare touch us is because they know who will slay the demons when they come for them.

Even though this remained the one persistent truth of Commoraugh, Odyn refused to allow Mĕilì to accompany him here. He trusted that she could handle herself within the terrifying expanse of the Warp itself but he did not dare tempt the Dark City. The troupe master of the Last Laugh didn’t want any more of his number than absolutely necessary to be in this place. Yet he also he couldn’t come alone to this place. Stride in stride with him walked his second-in-command: the shadowseer.

“Lau-kee,” he said to the shadowseer, “are we there yet?”

“It should be this one here,” Lau-kee said as he gestured to great spire towering before them.

“Let’s get this over with and go home.”

The two Harlequins used their flip belts to orient their gravity upward. They leapt and then fell up towards top of the spire that rested on a concave sphere reaching up towards a dying star. They reached terminal velocity as they raced past gruesome statues of overlords carved into the spire’s side. The further removed from the street you were, the more noble your blood was. They were going all the way to the top. Leagues of black stone sailed past them. So did millennia of the sordid, vile, and brutal history of slavers, torturers, and slaughterers. The shadows of the scourges kept pace theirs as they flew.

There it is. At the top of the spire was a balcony. The two Harlequins sailed past it, vanishing into a blue portal. In their secret paths through the webway, they reoriented their gravity downwards and allowed their momentum to burn off as they floated through the blue void. Then they popped back into the space they had exited and elegantly glided through the open doorway of the balcony.

As the pair of Harlequins tapped their feet across the cold stone of dimly lit throne room, incubi guards snapped to attention. They leered at the intruders through the thin slits in their mighty horned helmets. The flickering light of green torches shined off of their maroon armor. They seized their great swords and prepared to strike, but their leader stood up from her throne and balled her fist in the air to signal for them to hold. They obeyed their archon without a moment’s hesitation.

“My, my, my!” the red haired woman in a dress made of dyed human skin said, “What a dramatic entrance. I would expect nothing less of your kind, my lord Maitar.”

“Odyn is more than sufficient, Lady Shay-Uh,” he replied tersely.

The Drukhari smiled as her icy blue eyes attempted to leer through Odyn’s mask. Her throne room was lined with grizzly trophies from her conquests. She slowly circled them, not unlike a predatory beast eyeing her prey. She found her way to a grotesque longue chair that seemed to moan when she sat on it.

“Please,” she held up her dagger tipped nails, then ran them across her seat, which made it seemingly faintly screech, “take a seat.”

“Huh uh,” Odyn sneered, “Please do not take this as offense. Us Harlequins have a preference to stay loose on our feet wherever possible.”

“Suit yourselves…,”

Lady Shay-Uh’s fangs glistened as she smiled sinisterly.

“…but before we begin, I must admit that some little birds told me that you and your lover are trying for a child of your own. Because of the multiple genetic deposits, it can be quite challenging. That’s why I keep a harem of incubi. Just so you’re aware, I could always send them to pay her a visit.”

Lady Shay-Uh leaned back in her seat as she gently whirled a goblet made of bone filled with blood. She smiled with a sinister, smug satisfaction. Her pathetic display made Odyn smile behind his mask. This bitch…

“Heeeheeehhuhhuhuhhuhu!” he cackled. All bravado fell away from the archon as her smile retreated behind pursed lips and raised her brow with a sidelong glance. Odyn reached into his pocket and pulled out a necklace made out of Aeldari eyes, tongues, and ears. He flicked it at her, managing to ring it around her goblet, wrapping around her hand. Lady Shay-Uh’s visage gave way to a frown as she beheld the gruesome object.

“I must refuse your generous offer,” Odyn said as he wagged his fingers about his face, “ buuuut perhaps YOU should come and pay us a visit. We’ve set ourselves up on this lovely little craftworld. I’m positive you’d absolutely adore it! Maybe you’ve heard of it: Attika?”

Lady Shay-Uh’s eyes went wide, her ears pinned back, and restrained her urge to spit out her drink by covering her mouth as she lurched forward. Her incubi bodyguards snapped to attention, their heads darting between one another as they instinctively gestured towards one another.

You definitely weren’t born in the darkness, were you dear autarch? Even with her mind shielded from his telepathy by her diminished psychic capacity, and even if he didn’t know it as incontrovertible fact before he came here, the archon’s actions in that moment all but confirmed it. Odyn drew his fingers over the smile on the Cegorach mask he wore. Then he pranced towards the reeling Drukhari.

“The funny thing is that they’ve got this princess, I believe her name was Nen, and she’s got eyes just like yours…,” Odyn’s voice rose as he spoke. Lady Shay-Uh’s grip was tightening on her goblet as was the gritting of her teeth. Odyn drew nearer and nearer to the archon, kneeling down to be at eye level with her, “Now it truly is fortunate that her title is purely ceremonial.”

“Why do you say that?” Lady Shay-Uh snarled.

“If I may be frank…it’s because she’s a drunken whore. She’s got to be careful in how she conducts herself. One of these days she could fall down, crack her head open, and nobody would think twice about it.”

At those words, the incubi guards growled and tightened their grips on their weapons. Lady Shay-Uh’s grip tightened as well on her goblet till the bones cracked and the blood therein washed over her fingers. Odyn lifted her chin with his thumb as he placed two fingers against her trachea.

“Our deal will not be altered and you’ll never be so stupid as to attempt to threaten a Harlequin ever again. Do you understand?” he instructed her.

Even as she trembled, uttered a low guttural growl between her teeth, and stared cold blooded murder with her eye; Lady Shay-Uh nodded in compliance.

“Good,” Odyn said as he withdrew his fingers from her throat. He stood up, placed his hands behind his back, and strutted towards the balcony. From there he gazed upon the gloomy monstrosity that was Commoraugh. “Now let’s conclude our business.”

Many floors below the archon’s grim spire they found their way to the chambers of one of her true born kabalite warriors. Lady Shay-Uh flung entered the room alone, with the pair of Harlequin’s waiting just outside the door and her loyal incubi standing at the ready behind them. Inside the withered, ghastly figure of the warrior was being rejuvenated as the last spark of life faded from the now lifeless corpse of a poor half-born.

“Lady Shay-Uh!” he exclaimed as he fell to his knees and lovingly kissed her cold hand, “How may I serve you?”

The archon snapped her fingers and the Harlequins slid into the blackstone room. As was horrifically common for their kind, the kabalite warrior’s chamber were decorated with the mangled, mutilated trophies of his prior conquests. Perhaps the cruelest fate in all the galaxy was to be denied death and be twisted by the Dark City’s haemonculi into a still breathing token. Among such deranged treasures was precisely what Odyn had come to find.

The desiccated torso of a human woman jutted out of the wall. The lower half of her body had been removed and what was left of her mounted to the stones. Out of her spins jutted tubes of gurgling toxins that accentuated the senses. Her eyes had been sewn shut and teeth removed. Despite all the horrors he had seen across the galaxy in his dance with the demonic powers, the Drukhari could still find a way to make him shudder. His stomach dropped. I’m so glad you’ll never have to see this, Tom.

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“Dh’kar, my esteemed guests require a copy of this one be made,” Lady Shay-Uh proclaimed as she pointed towards the ruined not-quite corpse of Fuckin’ Tom’s long lost daughter, “provide us a sample.

“At once my dark lady,” Dh’kar eargerly replied.

He picked up a cruel blade and carved a chunk of flesh out of her arm. As he did so, tears began to roll down her cheek as she faintly whined. The incensed kabalite warrior seized her by the jaw and viciously snarled at her.

“Silence, my prize! You know what your mouth is for.”

Odyn gritted his teeth behind his mask. His red eyes blazed with a fiery rage. He flicked his thumb over handle of his fusion pistol. He tensed his hand and released it. Eyes on the prize Harlequin. Why are you bothered by this one monkeigh? There are millions just like her in this wretched city.

“Because when it’s gone this far, even you can’t make a joke out of it,” a voiced said in his head. Odyn turned towards his shadowseer, Lau-Kee.

What? Should I not?

“No, I’m not saying that. Just keep it hidden behind the mask till we have what we need firmly in hand.”

Heh! How did you get this good Lau-Kee?

“I had an excellent teacher.”

The shadowseer turned his head towards his troupe master and nodded, who in turn returned the gesture. The warrior handed the hunk of human flesh to his archon who presented it the shadowseer. He examined it over and nodded in what the present Drukhari presumed was a quality inspection. Odyn chuckled at the dark irony of the action he was about to take.

With the speed of thought, the troupe master had drawn his pistol and trained his sights squarely on the face of Tom’s daughter. Before any of the present company could even react, a “pew” rang out followed by a flicker of orange light. Orange cracks raced across the human woman’s skin before she liquified into a molten pile of goo that singed the stone floor.

Sorry Tom, but to save your little girl I first had to kill her.

“No!” Dh’kar roared, “Die you fucking clown!”

With his fully rejuvenated lean musculature, the Drukhari was more than a match against the Harlequin in terms of raw strength; but nothing rivaled the quickness of a Harlequin. With a single precise chop, Dh’kar’s lower jaw was dislocated. Before the warrior could even reach for his wound, Odyn smashed his head into his foe’s face. Then he seized the reeling Drukhari and ran his face against the length of the stone wall till ashen skin had been ground down to exposed bone.

“Now why don’t you use that mouth of yours for what it’s good for: begging for the graces of your superiors,” Odyn snipped. The Drukhari warrior desperately clasped at his ruined face without any reply. “So be it.”

Within a flash Odyn had drawn his blade and effortlessly decapitated his foe, avenging the horrors inflicted upon the offspring of his human friend. As the warrior’s severed head bounced of the walls of the chamber, Lady Shay-Uh reached out and caught it. She held up the head by its long, greasy black hair and grimaced at it.

“I’ve killed one of your true-borns. What will that cost us?” Odyn asked.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“Nothing?”

“The only currency that counts in Commoraugh is strength. He had little while you have much.”

Odyn snickered with heinous delight. He told himself it was because he’d “brought a potential enemy to heel and made them an asset”, but deep in his bones her knew it was because he loved hurting Drukhari.

“Then have your haemonculi see the task through and you’ll never have to be the fool who though they could best the Harlequins.”

Attika, deep in the Wilded Woods

The craftworld’s saurian fauna filled the forest with their shrieks, cries, roars, and bellows. In a ramshackle bungalow high in a mighty tree, one old human has been granted the most obscene of privileges in the eyes of the Asuryani. A lifelong soldier of the corpse emperor is permitted to live out his final days among them. By all rights the high council was furious at the thought; any human, let alone an Imperial, aboard their world ship could very well represent an existential threat to their safety.

The Imperium of Man was not averse to using some of the most heinous and brutal mind molding in the galaxy. One could be a spy and never even know it, relaying their location to the astropaths aboard an imperial warship bringing a genocidal crusade against the “xenos” to their doorstep. Despite the Aeldari’s mastery of the psychic arts, you could never be absolutely certain no matter how deeply a human’s mind was probed. This was true of every craftworld, who kept their incredibly small populations safe from the rampaging hordes of the galaxy by maintaining utter anonymity, but doubly so for Attika.

They had an ongoing conflict with the zealotous Adepta Sororitas, the bloody hungry Sisters of Battle. So there were resolute and highly capable Imperium personnel dedicated explicitly to the task of discovering them. Despite it all, it was the Harlequins asking them for this favor and as such, would not be denied. The Masque of the Last Laugh had kept them alive through the centuries during “the Fog of Infinity”, the era they spent trapped in a warp storm. The beat back numerous demonic incursions by both Dread Infinity and his dance partner. Cegorach the Laughing God had spared them with his heralds of hope and dealers of death. There was no request they would be refused.

Mĕilì tended to the dying monkeigh as he laid wrapped in blankets, propped up in a longue chair overlooking the emerald expanse. Many Asuryani would have been insulted that such a lowly animal as a human was being given such care and attention by the vaunted Harlequins. Of the bad jokes, this was the worst, but that’s not how Mĕilì saw it. Most of them would do the same for their pet raptors at the end of their lives. There’s no shame in letting an abused old dog die in comfort and care.

She handed Fuckin’ Tom a cup of tea to his preference and patted him on the head. His breathing was becoming increasingly pained and he was losing his eye sight. The old human didn’t have long, and while she was happy to let him pass on in comfort, no Aeldari with a shred of sanity would waste proper medical care on a monkeigh. Where are you Odyn?

By this point it had been weeks and she was beginning to grow concerned. In his absence she took the lead role for the troupe. They went about their business as usual, performing “the Birth of Ynnead” and “the Last Laugh” for all sylvan eyes to behold. In her lover’s place, she took on the role of Cegorach and in place of the shadowseer, the death jester took on the role of Tzeentch…but it wasn’t the same. They all had their part in the drama. Hers was Isha and she desperately wanted to get back to it. She understood her lover’s aversion to letting her join him in the Dark City but that did not mean she also didn’t resent his decision to exclude her.

I’ve been to the warp! He thinks I can’t handle some fetishists? Was it not me that that eviscerated that spy?

“Nah, it was big red dinosaur,” Tom answered her thoughts.

“Wha?” she stammered.

“My apologies Ms. Mĕilì, but your thoughts are little loud.”

She gasped, “No, no, no! I’m sorry Tom. You were trying to rest and I was-you rest your eyes.”

The old man chuckled.

“You’re such a good girl. Nothin’ like what the propos told me about the xenos. Don’t you be frettin’ over me and not you be holdin’ any grudges against him. The ‘lord clown’ is just doin’ what any man worth his salt would do. There’s two of you he’s got to worry about now.”

Mĕilì smiled as she touched her stomach. It wasn’t quite that simple. Aeldari pregnancy was a much longer and complicated ordeal that what humans go through in their reproduction cycle. The “spark” still required multiple genetic donations before she could even begin the years long process of carrying it to term…but she appreciated the sentiment none-the-less.

The old man coughed viciously. Mĕilì rushed to his side to discover the hand he had covered his mouth with covered in blood. Please Cegorach, no. That joke is too cruel.

Almost as if in answer to her prayer, a blue portal opened up and outstepped two Harlequin players she had sorely missed and a young human woman with auburn hair. Odyn peeled off his mask and smirked at his lover. The rushed towards one another, embracing one another as their lips met in a passionate kiss. They rubbed their foreheads together and opened their full minds to one another. Odyn looked down and placed his hand on Mĕilì’s stomach and she laid her hand over his. Mĕilì then turned her head towards the old man.

“He doesn’t have long,” she whispered.

Odyn nodded as he took the human woman by the hand and led her to her dying father’s side.

“Audsey!” Tom croaked as tears of joy rolled down his face.

“Daddy!” she cried as they held one another.

The Harlequin players took a step back and allowed the humans their moment. Lau-Kee the shadowseer saluted his leader who nodded in silent reply. In a puff of prismatic smoke, he vanished. Mĕilì laid a hand on Odyn’s chest as he wrapped an arm around her waist.

What kept you?

“Sorry meleth nĩn. There was extensive psychic washing we had to do after her clone had finished developing. She basically had to be taken back all the way to the day before she was captured. And as you can imagine, clearing a lifetime as Drukhari pleasure slave is quite the task. Lau-Kee really had his work cut for him.”

“Lord-,” Tom coughed violently before he could finish calling out, “Lor-Lord Clown!”

Odyn walked over to the human on the side of his chair opposite his daughter’s clone.

“How is this possible?” Tom asked.

Odyn smirked. He new better than to answer that, especially in this moment.

“I think the better question to ask is, ‘why?’”

“Fuckin’ smug xeno prick,” Tom chuckled, “Fine. Why did you help an old human like me?”

“Because it is my holy mission to make people smile. In the cruel darkness there burns a light called hope, and we kindle that flame with laughter. So long as you laugh in the face of darkness, it holds no sway over you. It is by these antics that we are freed from the ruins of Chaos.”

So Tom did paint his face with a smile as he laughed heartily. He gasped for breath and his body seized. With his last breath he spoke to his daughter.

“Audrey, heed those words well. Find the humor, find your joy. In its extremes evil is utterly absurd. Laugh in its stupid face till your dying days.”

And with that the light faded from his eyes and Tom fell still and silent. The clone of his daughter, utterly oblivious of the true nature of her existence, wept at his side. The cold rai of her sorrow filled the room. Odyn walked back to Mĕilì’s side. She sighed heavily.

Now what are you going to do with her?

“Well she served her purpose. Her role was to give the old man closure and that task is now done. Good script writing dictates that once a plot device has served its function it is removed from the story.”

You can’t do that.

“I know…but then what do we do with her?”

Can we just set her free among her own kind?

“No. Look at her. Those Imperium bastards will use her for protein paste.”

Can we keep her?

Odyn shook his head “no.”

“We already have a dinosaur.”

As he projected those thoughts, Ace’s roar shook the bungalow. Mĕilì locked eyes with Odyn and touched her stomach.

Think about the baby. Humans can be very caring mothers. She’d make an excellent nanny. Just think it through: when things get real, like they always do, we’ll need somebody to stay with the baby. You don’t want to pull a player out of the troupe for that…and we can’t exactly them with Ace. It’s a blessing. Cegorach is providing for us.

“Okay, fine. We can keep her,” Odyn grumbled. Mĕilì squealed with delight. So the pieces of their little family fell into place.

End