“Do you think you can force me to take an action I am unwilling to?” he demanded of her arrogantly.
“Totally,” she replied calmly, and watched his face harden. “Now, if you’d been set loose a couple hundred years ago, before I got here... not a chance.
“But you can feel you’ve got no Faith coming into you to speak of. Your lich totally destroyed any belief in you among the living. Good thinking, that.
“As for the dead who believed in here,” Sage Sama waved the humming Chalice at the sky, “more than anything else, they want out of the Warp.
“They ALL want out of the Warp.”
Tremble, oooh ohhh oooh, Tremble, we come...
The Emperor started to retreat, and she took another step forwards, not letting him go.
He tried to leave, to reset his size mentally and loom over her. He failed miserably at doing so, finding that while his senses and awareness could expand out into the Warp, and it was falling into his control... he could not actually manipulate it at all!
“I’ve spent uncounted amounts of time fighting the creatures of the Warp here, reducing id demons and ego daemons to background energy, burying endless battlefields in vivus. From the outside, it looked like a combination of futility and a diversion, getting rid of some favored servants of the Warp Gods, mucking up their territory here, costing them some souls.
“On the scale of the entire galaxy, it was just laughable, of course, although I did manage to irritate them greatly.”
Tremble, oooh ohhh oooh, Tremble, we come...
The wave in the distance was whelming, and the Warp was echoing with that song...
It was no longer a crystalline chime. It was a call, lifted up by voices... how many voices?...
“Souls of the Good are suppressed and become prey in the Warp. By killing demons with vivus using a holy blade, I instead gave those souls strength. The ‘peace’ I brought the Warp where I culled was the Good offsetting the Evil of the Warp, and bringing it to peace... and gathering the souls of the Good to me.”
It was her turn to step forward, and his to retreat before the absoluteness of her Reality. “The Good have always been the deepest believers of your church, while the Lawful have merely been the most fanatical and judgmental.
“Think of it, Emperor. All those souls who believe in you, and what you could do. Coming now, coming... for you to lead them on their way.”
Sage Sama watched the fear starting to rise on his face. “You’re not going back to life. Reincarnation, either, or body-stealing, anything. You’re here to guide your followers to their final destinations, as is only proper.”
His eyes flickered upwards. “You don’t have the power to send me there,” he stated, knowing he was right, but looking at her Swords uneasily.
“Correct. You do have a big well of Faith to draw on to resist, and that tie to your lich. But, you see, I don’t have the power by myself.” Her eyeless face, shrouded by her golden hair, smiled a smile with eight canines. “So I spent a LOT of time raising an army to help me out at the right time.”
The horizon of the Warp was getting closer. He could see the Colors of it.
They were overwhelmingly Silver and Gold, with some Rainbow and Blue, and even Red and Green...
Tremble, oooh ohhh oooh, Tremble, we come!...
The voices were starting to shake the entire Warp. Her Swords began to steam with vivic fire as uncounted and uncountable numbers of souls, freed by the death of lifetimes of absolute carnage and slaughter, converged to the song and the soul of the Swords... and to the Emperor they had trusted in life.
It didn’t matter that their god was false; their belief had been true, their sacrifices noble, their hearts clear.
They were following the Song of the Sword, and they were coming!
The wave of the ocean coming at him was the chime of a Singing Sword, a tsunami of celestial proportions rising, cresting, limitless numbers of noble souls coming, coming to finish the job!
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The Emperor shouted and turned to flee, and Singing Swords and a Sirocco of Souls converged on him.
Impaled on holy reality, the Emperor writhed and tried to transform and twist, even as the souls pushed and heaved... and began to lift.
“NO!” he protested, but it was drowned, drowned out by the Song pounding down at him.
TREMBLE! OOOH OHHH OOOH, TREMBLE, WE COME!
Hundreds of worlds worth of noble souls combined their efforts and pushed him towards those watching Presences in the sky in a mighty spiraling vortex of joy, release, and anticipation.
And as they did, the whole of the Warp began to shudder in sympathy with them.
As if being dragged by countless strings, other souls began to pull free of the Warp. The casual draw of the many tiny threads connected to those distant realms was now a crack in the dam, a gash following the souls gathered about the Emperor, resonating with power and purpose as the Emperor was forced to accept his Final Fate.
The Blue arose in great numbers from the Warp; the crack became a breach, and the breach began to flood out. The Grey, the Brown, the Green, and the Red began to pull free, and now even the non-human spirits and souls buried in the Warp were hauled forth. The crack in the dam of death the Warp had made was burning and falling, its substance getting sucked away as the dissolute souls were hauled free of it.
The Warp Gods themselves screamed in fear, for the borders of their personal realms were fraying now, the draw eroding them away, the structure and foundation sucked from their grasps like water draining down an infinitely large spigot.
They began to claw at the ocean of souls, at the Warp, trying to stifle this flow and flood, but, led by the soul of the Emperor, this breach was far too intense and heavy. They might have been able to stop him, they certainly could have stopped the Radiant... but the combination of the two, drawing in so many other souls to join the flow...
It was too much!
The Purple and the Black tore free of the grip of the Warp, screaming and racing after the Ruby and the Grey... and even began to pull away from the substance of the Warp Gods themselves!
Deep within themselves and in their realms, spiritual chains shattered and broke as the foundation of the Warp began to shift. The raging passions and tides of emotion and drives gathered into souls and spirits, forming a torrential river, roaring and racing towards what was beyond the edge of the Warp.
Bright and powerful Presences burst free of the prisons of the Warp Gods, and joined the rising tide, and brought with them all those that followed them. Gods of the Ruk and the Elvar, lost gods of Humanity, and countless entities of alien races joined that tide of change, and the Warp could do naught but stream after them.
Howling, dragged now by the countless Black souls of Evil and Chaos that they had long been tied to, the Warp Gods, once the masters of the Warp, found themselves being carried along by it as it poured up towards Creation.
WE COME! OOOH OHHH OOOH, WE COME!
The river of souls rang with the song, the power of Destiny, Doom, and Fate, and Fortune, Fickle and Fell, driving them towards their proper places.
There was no stopping it now!
-----------
I watched Mother keeping the Emperor pinned as He continued to struggle and deny His fate, spending His accumulated Faith even as it burned away and cost Him His status in the afterlife.
If He had accepted His fate, He might have had a real shot at becoming a true Divinity Himself, perhaps a Patron god of humanity across realities... however undesirable He was.
He was going to be lucky to end up a demigod, and given how few worshippers He had left, that was not something He was going to keep without a lot of work on His part.
There was a particular sapphire Portal closing in on Him, resonating with the Emperor, and all those behind Him who had believed in Him. They basically completely ignored Him, but the flood was too thick and intense, and He could only glare at Sage Sama as the current of his Faithful bore Him along, and plunged into the sapphire Pool to Beyond.
His disappearance sent off a shockwave throughout the Warp, as if something fundamental had shattered.
The torrent of souls seemed to speed up even more...
------
The burst of blackness from the Emperor’s lich as his Black Halo shattered actually cleared out a good amount of the plasma cloud around us. The necroic aura around him guttered and fell to something that didn’t befit the ruler of a galactic empire.
He was ‘just’ a Legendary Exemplar Human Lich Psion, and the single most dangerous once-mortal in the galaxy now.
His ruby mindsword flickered, filling with Black and Purple as he stared at me. I guessed the permanent loss of his soul was having an adverse effect on his mental state.
Chalice began to hum, and he flinched at the chiming notes that began to fill his skull as Beat began to drum along, and then all our Weapons were Singing in one form or another.
“You’ve got a lot of Health Qi,” I said conversationally, while Briggs brought up Beat in his big hands. “You can tell we aren’t scared at all of your psionic power, so I’m going to tell you straight up what is going to happen.
“We’re going to be fighting with blades, just like we should.
“I’m going to totally shut down your little Hateblade there. While I do that, Briggs is going to pound you into bone shards faster than you probably believe is possible.
“Goodbye, lich. In the end, you were humanity’s greatest foe, not its savior, and that is how you’ll be remembered.”
He opened his naked jaws to scream at the two of us, but we were already incoming, and there was no running away from us.
--------
Sage Sama waited before a great Pool of Gold.
The whole Warp was both receding and growing before her eyes. Receding because it was shrinking as the glut of spiritual energy was drained away to its proper place, growing because it was coming towards the artificial border of those pools of color.
She could see the Warp Gods out there, huge figures tumbling, writhing, twisting, cursing in the tides of blackness they had helped create, now bound to them as the Warp drained itself of everything, including them.
They were looking at her, standing there in the glow of Gold, with all the insane emotional hate, fury, wrath, and rage that the Black could generate welling up in them...