The first memory she had was looking up into the light from a place of darkness. It was bright beyond imagination and seemed to be observing her from the highest point in the heavens.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, her inner voice seemingly echoing in the endless space. The light seemed to flicker by the merest degree at her question but did not answer. She, in turn, understood she was being observed and continued to gaze into the light. It continued to shine on her for a long time before it finally communicated with her.
‘I am your creator, the Master of Mankind…’ that was the first time she spoke with her creator.
Little was directly communicated to her from the Emperor, but she knew she had a lot of brothers and that her creation benefited from the accumulated experiences He gained from their creation. Consequently, while her creation was a lot less resource-intensive than any of her brothers, the Master of Mankind utilized some of the most advanced arcane techniques known to Him. A proud little side project done with leftover resources, so to speak.
She was given the name Syrine by her creator and she was to become an imperial heiress, with the term “heiress” used loosely to represent her status as a direct creation of the Master of Mankind. Such notions were hammered into her even while she was but a faint consciousness in her incubator. Vast collections of knowledge were imprinted into her very being so that she would help her creator and her brothers run the empire when the time came.
The empire itself was on the verge of a brand new phase that promised eternal glory to mankind and her help was needed. She was to aid Him on administrative tasks and be an anchor to the empire's internal affairs where brute force and legions of super-soldiers were poor tools. This much was communicated to her by her creator, the shining figure who called himself the Master of Mankind, better known, as she eventually found out, simply as the Emperor.
Syrine for her part was ready for a lifetime of service to her creator, to work tirelessly behind the scenes or in front of the masses as the situation required. Be it to follow one of the brothers to further expand the empire or devote herself to further illuminate the galaxy with her creator's light, she was prepared for any task assigned to her.
But somehow she was kept in the incubator for maybe too long a time, a deliberate action that was done without her understanding. Syrine felt she had spent an eternity basking in the Emperor's light while growing inside her incubator. During this period, she learned about the world outside her incubator through a direct knowledge feed via an arcane datalink.
Syrine had the impression her creator was always extremely busy, she could feel His attention on her from time to time but it always went by in a flash, a sudden brief supernova out of nowhere and gone before she could react. Inside the darkness, she continued to accumulate vast amounts of information and could rightly be considered a super sage before she even drew breath. She could recall an endless stream of information and perform hyper-complex mathematics inside her mind. But knowledge without context was sorely lacking and she grew restless, yearning for more.
Once, on a rare occasion when she felt the light’s attention lingered on her for more than a second, she took the courage to ask: ‘Are you my father? And what am I?’ Both natural questions after she had reviewed her imbued knowledge countless times about humanity. The light stayed and decided to answer her question.
‘You can call me father.’ He said and contemplated the second question for a while. ‘Your brothers are primarchs, and as for you, you are lesser than your brothers but greater than the rest of mankind.’
‘Primarch, but lesser, so lesser primarch… a primarch minoris?’ She asked, the terms came naturally to her. The light did not disagree and left it at that.
Another rare time when she felt His attention on her during the long dormancy she asked, ‘Father, when will you let me out?’ Again the light flickered by the merest of degrees before answering. ‘Not now, now is the time for might and brute force. Your talents will be needed later.’
Again, Syrine was left in the black void for an indeterminate amount of time.
‘We are almost done.’ One day, out of the blue the Emperor communicated to her. ‘Your skills will be put to use after this colossal mess is sorted.’ He said, sounding tired. That very notion brought great discomfort to her, for she could not fathom how someone as powerful as her creator could be under severe duress.
‘What happened, father?’ She asked. The Emperor didn't reply, but she felt a hint of melancholy from her creator. ‘I hope the next time we speak it will be a happier occasion.’ It sounded so promising, Syrine did not know that this was the last time she would be having a proper conversation with her creator.
Much later, when she finally escaped the enclosure of her incubator, the empire was in shambles, unceremoniously gutted by the most brutal war known to humanity. All her brothers were missing after they turned on one another waging wars across the stars. Her creator, the entity who she had called her father, was technically both insane and eternally on the verge of true death, confined to the Golden Throne.
The promising world that was shown to her was no more, in its place laid a grotesque shell of a fallen galactic empire where the dreams of eternal glory died.
* * *
Consciousness slowly returned to me. I became aware of the sensation of lying in my bed and feeling mentally tired.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The first thought that came to my mind: Has that overly long and convoluted lucid dream session finally ended? In the said dream session I apparently took the place of the hidden true daughter of The Emperor, who is in no way canon, and had adventures dealing with armed militias led by renegade space marines and later helped an astropath to make contact with multiple planets.
In the dream, I had psychic powers and met with a lot of interesting people of the grimdark universe, from a squad of battle sisters, an arch tech-priest dominus, an inquisitor and even an imperial assassin. The unduly lengthy dream session even concluded with an origin brief of her story of how she was kept in an incubator the whole time during the whole great crusade and Horus heresy era.
Well, as interesting and realistic as it felt, it was time to get back to my mundane and uneventful life, perhaps the whole thing was a hint for me to finally start working again on some of the eternally work in progress projects from my huge pile of shame; that was my thought as I sighed and reluctantly opened my eyes, only to be greeted by an unfamiliar ceiling.
Alarmingly, it was not the ceiling of my own room, this ceiling had a luxury suite feeling to it and had intricate designs filigreed onto it. Mixed within the intricate patterns were the distinctive shape of human skulls. Human skulls on luxury ceiling designs, to my knowledge there could be only one universe that would go down that path.
Startled, I bolted upright and looked around. A room of suffocating luxury surrounded me. On one of the walls was a huge mirror. On it, I saw the reflection of a bewitching white-robed girl with straight platinum hair sitting on top of a huge bed. Oh! The things I would do to get a girl like that into my bed, but... with a numbed mind I raised my right hand and waved, the girl in the mirror did the same.
A surge of indescribable feelings reached me, in my state of confusion and panic I grabbed the closest thing my hand could reach and flung it with all my strength.
Next thing I knew the said object flew with an absolutely mind-boggling speed and hit the wall with a thunderous thud. Watching bewilderedly as paintings fell off the wall and a flower vase tipped over from the impact, I was rudely reminded of the fact this girl was supposed to be a mini primarch with a transhuman body.
Or was it? I looked down at my hands, instead of my usual pair of old large hands I was greeted by a pair of delicate appendages covered with flawless porcelain skin. But I… I had to be sure.
[Analytica] Activated-
Name: Syrine, primarch minoris, psyker-passive mode, abnormal existence. I looked and looked again, the words didn’t go away. I wanted to scream and cry, but no sound came out and a familiar line of message appeared in my vision: [Regalis] Action override-
On the verge of a mental breakdown and seethed with an infuriating amount of frustration, I screamed internally, ‘just what the hell is this [Regalis] thing?!’
[Analytica] Activated-
Huh? I can analyse my powers? I watched in astonishment as lines and lines of messages appeared in my vision, giving me detailed descriptions of the ability.
In a nutshell, [Regalis] was a complex, self-invented psychic discipline refined over time by Syrine herself. The ability consisted of a myriad of passive traits focusing on etiquette, vanity and glamour.
A self-imposed subconsciousness-controlled mental lock was in constant self-policing on my etiquette, hence the reason why I could not scream like a sissy on more than a few occasions; another major feature it had was the incorporation of user’s psychic flow to maintain peak physical appearance.
Looking deeper, it even had a more sinister-looking side effect of diverting a small portion of the psychic flow to subtly emphasise the most appealing aspects of appearance onto the viewers. The final effect differs from individual viewers with the same objective of endearment.
As I focused on the details of each passive trait, options after options popped up one after another. Take the vanity trait for example, upon closer inspection it was revealed none of Syrine’s appearance was left to chance, from the length of hair and nails to her skin condition, her - or rather my - natural psychic flow had kept everything in constant check and control.
This… this is the ultimate glamour spell all the female celebrities back in my old world would kill for. No wonder I still look like a supermodel even after just waking up from my sleep.
At the very end of the long descriptions was a line of what seemed like a flavour text from the creator of the spell, it read: ‘For the day when I serve my father in the open.’
Well, that definitely did not happen for the last 10,000 years, whatever happened between her and the Emperor?