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Wayport Vandan was a bustling sprawl of commerce and life. The webway port served as not only the city’s, but the whole biodome’s gateway to the endless expanse of the universe. Merchants from a litany of other craftworlds ferried their wares to and from Attika. Among their most prized exports were saurian egg clutches. Attika had an impeccable reputation for animal breeding and husbandry.

All manner of domesticated raptors could be found in nearly every home on Attika or accompanying their owners during their day-to-day business. Effete women caried miniature breeds around in their bags. Midsized hunting/worker raptors were attached to leashes as they led their owners down the street. The closer you drew to the loading docks themselves, all manner of exotic fauna could be found. The mighty felines with eagle wings known as the byakko-washi roared as pterosaurs screeched from the cliffs hidden behind the majestic Tarlaen Falls. Merchants ferried tourists off their ships as corsairs stored illicit cargo on theirs. In one capacity or another, many saurian species could be found wandering the city, including the titanic brachiosaurs used for scenic transit. All save for one.

That’s why all eyes stood fixated on the mighty red monster lumbering down the streets. Atop its back rode a colorful menagerie of a Harlequin troupe.

Civilians stopped dead in their tracks and their pet raptors hissed and snarled at the powerful beast. Vehicles yielded to the stomping parade and the streaming tassels of performers that leapt up and down its great form. By psychic suggestion, Odyn guided the beast to the city’s center. The monster towered over the marble statue of an autarch and their trusty raptor. With all eyes captivated by their entrance, the Masque of the Last Laugh set to work.

They somersaulted and careened off of the mighty red monster as its blaring roar shook the wraith bone buildings. As the biodome’s artificial sun traveled its course throughout the day, every player in the troupe played their role perfectly.

In Odyn’s estimation, too often troupes would become singularly focused on the leaders of a place and forget its people. “The Final Act” needed players and that meant recruiting. Having people hear of your exploits isn’t enough. They must see you as tangible and real. We must be seen.

His players told the people of Attika of their adventures, glories, and follies. Young Aeldari who tired of the paths and who may have turned corsair or outcast suddenly find themselves a call to adventure with a higher purpose. Sympathetic hearts offer whatever financial assistance they can afford. But more important than all else, it keeps the cause spreading like wildfire. As it does, more people find a reason to hope and that burgeoning has a power all its own.

Odyn is very well aware that “hope” is part of Tzeentch’s domain, but because of the masque’s efforts; that power is being diverted to Cegorach. They’re grand scheme is to steal the might of the Great Schemer from under his very nose. He is certain that the fate of existence will hinge upon the final contest between Cegorach and Tzeentch, after the fall of Slaanesh. He was certain of She Who Thirst’s demise, but the denouement was anything but foretold. Above all else his role in the grand drama was to empower Cegorach for the fateful hour. Their duty was to win the war for hope.

That’s why we can’t forsake the stage.

The troupe zig-zagged through the streets. The players of Khorne and Khaine enthralled onlookers with daring displays of their swordsmanship. The shadowseer played his role as Tzeentch with a dazzling demonstration of magic that gently implied that Slaanesh is merely Tzeentch’s pawn. The death jester embodied the manifesting Ynnead, calling on all to do their part in manifesting “the end of She Who Thirsts”. Mĕilì played the role of a liberated Isha, free from the clutches of Nurgle. Ace served masterfully as an unignorable advert. All play their part in the downfall of the Ruinous Powers.

Together they’re sending a unified message: Rhana Dandra draws near and do not fear! The Harlequins are here!

Odyn wandered about; his role is perhaps the most sacred. He embodied Cegorach himself. The troupe master does not doubt either himself nor his god for even the briefest of moments, but something does weigh heavy on his thoughts. He strolled down the streets with all the commanding, playful confidence of a master trickster whose plan is coming to fruition. The awe they looked upon him with is not for him. He must remind himself of that regularly. Their hearts are for Cegorach. I am merely his mask.

Throughout his time serving the Laughing God, Odyn has noticed how little how many things change throughout the ages. People live their lives in cycles. The paths they follow follow a pattern. Yet there has been a cosmic shift. As said by the Tau Aun’O Vior’la Vel’Na Le’Nin:

“there are centuries when days pass and days where centuries happen.”

He's witnessed a growing number of aeldarlings among the crowds. Offspring are the byproduct of a people that want to live. Nearly all of them are frightened by his ghoulish mask and enigmatic manners, but an increasing number of them look upon him with reverence.

His thoughts returned to his spat with Mĕilì this morning. He was torn between conflicting desires. To be a good father he’d have to set aside the path of the Harlequin. The life of a nomadic demon slayer is no life fit for children. He tells himself; I have no right to walk away from my duty, but he knows in his bones that it’s truly because he enjoys dancing along this path too much to ever leave it.

As he strolled past a row of onlookers, a young boy no taller than Odyn’s knees stepped out to face him. He anxiously looked back towards his father who gently encouraged him. The sight can’t help but make Odyn smile underneath his mask. The aeldarling was dressed in all black with a white coat, his hair done up in a haphazard red mohawk, and he fumbled to keep a crudely made mask on his face. The boy is dressed up as Odyn.

Odyn leered down at the aeldarling, cocked his head, and pranced towards him in comedic exaggeration. As he drew near, the Harlequin bent down and snapped his head forward at the boy’s face. By reading his surface thought Odyn knows the boy is startled but he doesn’t flinch. He sinisterly chuckled to further test him and the boy laughed back as best as his wavering voice would allow. Odyn liked this boy. Time to make his millennia.

Odyn rested himself on one knee and gestured for the boy to notice something as he pulled open his jacket. The little one buys into the diversion without a second thought. He’s too preoccupied watching the left hand reaching at a nonexistent interior pocket to notice what is being done in Odyn’s right. Odyn snapped his fingers which sent an echo down an alley which caught the whole crowd’s attention. As they’re all distracted, he carefully slipped a golden Harlequin medallion into the boy’s pocket.

All eyes turned back on him. The boy was confounded. Odyn tapped the exterior of his jacket pocket to suggest for the boy to check his. The little one does so and his face lit up with joy as he finds the medallion. He jumped up and down with joy but this made his flimsy mask fall from his face. The boy desperately reached for it but Odyn seamlessly caught it between two fingers. Then he tied it tightly to the boy’s head so it will no longer slip. When he’s ready, he’ll come to us.

A faint flash of neon blue catches Odyn’s eye. He focused in on where it came from to find a peculiar hooded Aeldari man leaning on a staff. It can’t be!

Odyn desperately wishes his intuition is wrong. That the person whose smiling at him isn’t who he thinks it is. There’s too many. If a fight breaks out here there will be casualties. He won’t be able to help it.

All Aeldari had some level of psychic potential, but that meant all of them had some measure of psychic defense. It was etiquette that told you to only read emotional imprints. A little effort and poor decorum allowed most to read surface thoughts. But a highly trained and experienced warrior whose spent his life fighting demonic threats should be able to blow through the mental defenses of all but the most formidable and dedicated psykers if he put his mind to it.

The Harlequin remained as stoic as a statue, the intensity of his glare could cut stone, but he couldn’t even get a blip off of this guy. Odyn stood up and ushered the boy aside as he placed a hand on the fusion pistol holstered on his hip. If it’s him he won’t be able to help himself.

The crowd sensed the lethal tension mounting in the air and their eyes turned towards the peculiar person amongst them. None of them can read his thoughts either. The frightful chatter of their thoughts filled Odyn’s head as they begin to back away. The hooded figure doesn’t react to them at all. He kept his attention firmly trained on Odyn and he started to laugh. His insane cackling filled the air and the neon blue lightning of sorcerous power arked out of his right eye.

It's him! Odyn pulled the hidden knife on the back of his belt with his free hand and at the speed of thought, hurled it into his enemy’s face. The hooded figure stumbled back but he doesn’t fall. The dagger rests in a now visible eye-patch over his left eye and his glamour has fallen away. The human face of a sorcerer of Tzeentch, leader of his own chaos cult, and longtime nemesis of Odyn: Xavier Androssian stared back at him.

Xavier pulled the dagger out of his eye patch and tossed it aside.

“Can I have this dance?” he asked.

“Who am I to refuse your death wish, conjurer,” Odyn replied.

The Harlequin drew his pistol and power blade in either hand of outstretched arms. The Chaos sorcerer twirled his staff about his head, bringing it to rest across his shoulders as he sauntered towards his old foe. If there was one thing Odyn could not fault Xavier for, it was his flair for the dramatic. A cold electric thrill raced up his spine. Today he’d have his first “good” fight in a long, long time.

As Odyn stared down his enemy, the human’s face broke into a mass of brightly colored diamonds that blew away on the wind.

“Illusion!” he shouted.

His keen sylvan eyes followed the fast-flying mass of geometric shapes. They manifested within the crowd. Odyn trained his pistol but hesitated as Androssian was standing behind the boy he had interacted with. That brief moment was all the time the sorcerer needed. He plunged his staff through the chest of the boy’s father. The man screeched in agonizing pain as his little boy watched on in horror as it was not fleshy entrails that fell out of his father’s body.

A whirling black vortex filled with hellish maroon clouds echoed the giggling of high pitched, otherworldly voices. Androssian had opened a portal to the warp inside the body of a psyker. From within the infinite gaseous cavern that had once been a person’s body, came beady yellow eyes, gnarled teeth, flailing bulbous tentacles, and crackling sorcerous power between their claws.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The first of the Chaos spawn reached their blue, sinewy arm out into the materium when a terse ‘pew’ rang through the air. The poor Aeldari father’s skin around the wound on his face instantly swelled with a fiery orange glow before his body liquified into a primordial slush. This however did collapse the warp gate and the upper torso of the gibbering demon was sliced in two by the vanishing portal between dimension.

The boy looked at Odyn, stricken with disgust and grief. However much he did or didn’t want to injure the boy’s heart was irrelevant. Now was a time for killing. The stage was set and the troupe master would not miss his marks.

With superhuman speed, Androssian buried his staff, subsumed with blue warp energies, in the chest of three more onlookers and with a mighty swing decapitated a fourth. All of this had transpired in less than several seconds. Before anyone could scream at the original horror, four more made themselves known. The vicious beak of a bird demon poked its head through the open neck of the decapitated fellow.

But before any of them could either breath or usher a cry, the fusion pistol rang four times. Four times Odyn fired it. Four times his shots found their mark with next to no effort. The victims’ bodies erupted from the heat of his weapon’s shots before gruesomely liquidating the flesh, collapsing the warp portals.

Gibbering pools of fused demon and Aeldari flesh jibber and seize as the last signs of life leave them. The crowd screams in terror and stampeded away. In the cacophony of their mental terror, Odyn found it difficult to project his thoughts to his troupe but he managed to get one clear message through.

He's here.

Odyn could instantly sense the cold panic and fiery rage of Mĕilì’s thoughts. She was undoubtedly racing towards his location as he thought. The rest of the troupe weren’t far behind her.

As fast as things were occurring, Odyn never lost step with his own thoughts. He knew he had to engage Androssian in melee if for no other reason than to preoccupy him from opening up more warp holes inside people. The edge of his power sword pulsated red and orange as he raced towards his foe with a speed nearly beyond the physical limits of his species.

In a searing blur of bright light, he slashed at his nemesis only to find his attack parried with Androssian’s own preternatural speed. Neon blue flames engulfed his staff as sparks shot forth from his eye. In a death-defying blitz, the two combatants whirled around one another in an intricate dance of pirouettes and epees. The two were as lightning dancing across the sky during a thunderstorm.

All the while, as all others fled, the boy stood strong and watched with unblinking eyes.

With a perfectly timed lunged, Odyn threw himself head first into the air; the searing, crackling energies of the warp staff barely singing his mask as he summersaulted over his foe. Upside down as he’s perfectly vertical, his mind activated his anti-grav flip belt. He floated upward with pistol in outstretched arm. His sights are trained on the human sorcerer. But a neon prismatic blur obfuscates his vision. The bastard’s mimicking my holo-field.

Androssian meets Odyn’s challenge by raising up his staff as it swirls with the heinous might of the Ruinous Powers. The skies grow dark and blue lightning erupted forth from his eyes as the energies of the warp pulsated off of his staff with such force that the sorcerer could hardly maintain his grip on it. Their gazes locked into one another’s. Wait for it.

Androssian got his smite off first. A rainbow ray of blinding white light shot forth like a finely focused laser beam. As it whizzed towards him, Odyn used his mind to direct his flip belt to center his gravity towards the high rise overlooking the street. His momentum was suddenly shifted towards the building, allowing him to narrowly dodge the beam. Arm still straight and sight trained, Odyn fired his gun as he fell sideways towards the building.

The shot pierced through the oscillating veil of prismatic colors that was the mimicking spell. It found its mark in the medallion around Androssian’s neck. With a “ting” it fell from its string and the illusion was broken.

As the sorcerer pawed at the shattered fragments of his talisman, Odyn landed on his feet on the side of the building. He crouched down as he retrained his gravity in a straight line towards his foe. Then with all the power his legs could muster, the Harlequin leapt from the side of the building. His holosuit turned his accelerating outline into a streaking comet of red, orange, black, and white diamonds. He sped face first till he was within striking distance. Then he flipped forward to throw both of his feet squarely into the chest of his foe.

The monumental force slamming into his chest sent the human sorcerer careening head over ass across the street, whilst the Harlequin cartwheeled and flipped in tandem with his momentum as he reoriented his gravity to the ground.

As Androssian laid wincing upon the stones. Odyn dusted off his jacket and proceeded to prance towards his nemesis. He stood over this broken human, chuckling. He reached down, pulled back the sorcerer’s hood, seized him by his brown hair, and yanked his head upward with as little gentleness as he could. The sorcerer grunted and growled in pain and blood poured over his teeth.

“You missed me,” Odyn taunted him in a childish tone, but to his chagrin Androssian smiled back and said, “I wasn’t aiming for you.”

There came the sounds of screaming followed by the booming cry of a mighty saurian. Odyn turned his head back to find a transit brachiosaur reared up on its hind legs. A foul ghostly light illuminated in its veins. Its flesh began to rapidly mutate into a gelatinous glaze as spikes erupted along its back. People onboard the beast’s viewing platform screeched in horror as an extended vertebrae dislodged their station. The poor animal slammed its front feet into the ground with a thunderous force that shook the surrounding area.

Then Odyn noticed its face. Its eyes had withdrawn to mere beady yellow orbs. Jagged asymmetrical fangs grew out of its molars. Its face bore a wicked smile as the Chaos corruption overtook it completely. The monster whipped its head around like a striking serpent and proceed to bury its head within the ruined viewing platform to consume what flesh it could from the horrified tourists. It seized the platform in its jaws, rent it free from its supports and threw it into the crowd street, crushing dozens of onlookers.

The panicked masses fled for their lives as the foul mutated beast thundered towards Odyn and Androssian. The sorcerer let out a hollowing cackle that constantly rose in pitch. All the while the boy remained exactly where he stood, though he no longer did so in brave defiance. No, he was frozen in dumbfounded terror.

I’ve got Xavier in my hands, but if I don’t…he had no more time to think.

“Damn it!” he snarled under his breath.

Odyn released Androssian and sprinted towards the boy. As the drooling, gaping maw of the mutated saurian monster drew closer and closer, Odyn slid across the stone, seized the boy in his arms as he prepared to leap. But the monster’s long neck hung above them, ready to strike. Then another set of thundering steps was heard.

Galloping down the street, Ace the mighty red carnosaur roared with such a force it shattered the windows of the surrounding buildings. The serpentine neck of the mutant brachiosaur went to strike but it was too late. Ace slammed his dagger sized teeth down with his powerful jaws and crashed the mutant through the building opposite of his entrance.

The boy screamed as the massive monsters hurdled their feet above him. The only thing sparing him was the unparalleled skill and agility of the man dancing through the falling debris that held him in his arms. Odyn moved with an effortless grace through the bloody cacophony and hail of rubble crashing around him. High above them the rest of the troupe had leapt off of Ace’s back and they guided themselves in the air through the warring bodies of those monsters.

They were blurs of their own standards and black and white as their holosuits obfuscated their outlines. The legs of the mutant swelled with a fiery orange light before exploding into person sized holes as the players fired their fusion guns into it. Its bubbling, jabbering blood sizzled on the streets. The shadowseer disoriented the monster with whirling illusions of Ace as the carnosaur went in to seize the beast in its mighty jaws. Even with the red carnosaur’s considerable power, the towering monstrosity still had strength enough to drag him along. As it screeched its wretched demonic cry, the death jester trained his shrieker cannon on the open mouth of the beast. A single shot of virulent acid pierced through the roof of its mouth, finding its mark inside the monster’s brain. There it violently expanded the blood vessels of the brain, causing it to explode inside the beast’s skull. With the lethal blow struck, the mutant’s towering neck came crashing down onto the street, kicking a wall of dust that flooded the streets and alleys.

Odyn held the boy tightly in his arms, holding the makeshift mask in place on his face as the dust cloud engulfed them. The Harlequin set the aeldarling down and looked upward. He saw the silhouette of Mĕilì descending ever so gracefully towards him. She had used her flip belt to slow her descent. Odyn turned to the boy and told him, “Live to fight another day.”

The boy was too traumatized to respond but Odyn knew that in time the boy would find his way to Cegorach. The White Raptors, the standing army made of Attika’s citizenry, had arrived on the scene. Too late to win the battle but just in time to secure the peace. A female soldier came up and took him away to safety.

At last, like a feather on the wind, Mĕilì drifted down into Odyn’s arms. She breathed heavily, trembling as they held each other. No words were exchanged, but a hundred thoughts raced through their minds in a blink of an eye. Once satisfied that her lover was in fact, alright, Mĕilì removed her mask and Odyn responded in kind. His red eyes gazed into her magenta. With one hand he pulled her in close to him as he massaged the base of neck. She clasped both hands on either side of his face and they kissed as passionately as any other moment in their lives. Once their lips parted, they closed their eyes as they pressed their foreheads against one another’s.

Odyn could sense her red-hot adrenaline give way to cold terror which gave way to sweet relief.

“Don’t you die on me,” she whispered to him with a quivering lip.

“My end is not this day,” he whispered tenderly into her ear.

“Eh hem!” a man cleared his throat.

The Harlequin lovers turned to face their foe. He was not in good shape. Androssian could barely keep himself upright as he wheezed through what Odyn could only assume was broken ribs.

“We’re not done here,” he snarled.

“It’s over X. You’re in no condition to continue,” Odyn told him as he put on his mask and raised up his pistol, “let me put you down, dog.”

“Oh you sweet simple fool,” Androssian chuckled between bouts of coughing up blood, “it’ll never be over between us.”

“You sure that’s what you want your final words to be? Come on X, give us a last laugh.”

“As you wish,” the sorcerer whispered menacingly.

He took his hand a and buried it into his own chest. Blue tendril of Tzeentch’s power flailed forth from his flesh. Androssian hunched forward, heaving out a whirling black vortex filled with hellish maroon clouds from within his body. He had turned himself into a warp portal. The cloud of demonic power billowed forward. Rather than dodging it, Odyn grabbed Mĕilì and threw her aside.

“Elen nĩn!” she screamed as he was engulfed in the sorcerous cloud, which retracted into Androssian’s chest. In a flash of blue light, both had vanished into the terror of the warp.

“No!” Mĕilì howled as she fell to her knees. The rest of the troupe arrived a moment too late to help but soon enough to have witnessed what happened.

“Mĕilì,” the shadowseer tried to comfort her, “it’s alright. If anybody knows how to handle themselves its Odyn. We just got to keep our minds clear and focused, and he’ll contact us.”

Mĕilì’s cold horror gave way to roaring, fiery rage which she tempered into a smoldering coal. Raw, rabid emotionality wasn’t going to help anything. Get it together Mĕilì. Odyn needs you.

“Fan out!” she barked an order.

“What are we looking for?” the player of Khaine asked.

“Xavier Androssian is never parted from his better half. If he was here, so was she. Find Bella Hex.”

Unnoticed by any of the troupe, a shadow extended itself till it had joined Mĕilì’s. From out of it emerged a human woman with blue eyes and pointed black bangs that overhang half of her slender face.

“Aww! Toots, ya don’t know how right you are!” Bella Hex crowed.

She engulfed Mĕilì in sorcerous shadow and her mad laugh faded as the shadow vanished and neither woman could be found in the materium.