“Kais,” a voice said. “Kais, look up.”
He obeyed and there, hanging suspended far above him in the air, spread-eagled and glowing with purity and peace, radiant and glorious and unified and balanced and perfect, was Aun’el T’au Ko’vash.
“Kais,” he called out, voice full of exhaustion and effort. “Even when broken, a sword may still cut.”
The Aun closed his eyes and serenity enveloped Kais like a warm cloud, filling his mind with peace and purity and the glowing features of the ethereal. Was there a taste, he wondered? A faint scent taste that rushed through his body like warm j’hal nectar, cleansing and purifying.
The ethereal smiled from on high and Kais was free. Invisible bonds fell away, the Mont’au shrivelled and died. He could move again. He could raise his gun again.
“For the Greater Good,” he said, and shot the thing that had once been Severus in its heart.
For a second, but little more, Severus was free.
The daemon fled from his mind with a shriek, clearing his senses and opening his eyes fully for the first time in twenty-one years.
He was bleeding. He was bleeding and he’d—
Oh, by the throne, he’d...
“What have I done?” he gurgled, memories lancing through his mind, panic gripping his soul in the icy cold certainty that it was far, far too late for absolution.
As the colour went out of his vision and his ears roared with the sound of his own blood, he glanced once at the face of the timepiece on his wrist.
“Emperor have mercy...” he said, and died.
IX
19.19
The sun set.
Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance), had it possessed the ability to emote, might have remarked upon the particularly fine display of colour painting the planetary ionosphere blood-red.
It might have been intrigued or perplexed by the momentary burst of blue-white light that dappled its sensors over a particular point of land several kilometres east of the war torn capital city.
It might, conceivably, have given a damn. Instead it drifted by, blanketed by the thick silence of voidspace, recording and analysing; unable to judge.
The governor coughed and went still.
Kais watched smoke ebb from the gun barrel for long moments, wondering what would come next. The supposition that there were more trials to face was instinctive; for him to believe otherwise was ludicrous.
Silence spread through the cavern: an emptiness that felt like it could go on forever. Like a veil drawing across the world, the last spectral traces of sunlight died from above, leaving only the unnatural malefic glow of the walls themselves.
Kais closed his eyes and allowed himself, tentatively, to wonder whether it could really be finished. Done with. Over.
He heard: Drip.
A droplet at a time, parting from Severus’s corpse with slow gravity, thin strands of blood ran together in a long rivulet that curled and twisted in its course towards the depression at the pit’s centre.
Kais watched it with morbid fascination, frowning as the blood touched the base of the energy spike, pooling softly and dragging reflected light across its meniscus. It crackled, a silverfire glow racing back along the bloodstream to consume the corpse, stretching out tentacles of light into the floor and walls, snapping and hissing and spitting sparks.
And then the storm hit.
The ground shook. The room flashed white and red and green; Kais tumbled and fell onto his hands and knees with a strangled cry and Ko’vash, high above, lips moving soundlessly in some impervious litany of calm, was released from whatever sorcery held him in place.
Kais watched his fall almost all the way. There was a crack of bone at the end, and perhaps the merest hint of a cry.
And suddenly everything — everything he’d achieved this rotaa, everything he’d faced and overcome, every horror he’d defeated, every fear he’d banished, every flaw he’d accepted — was worthless. The ethereal was dead.
And this time the rage couldn’t be restrained. This time the cloak of serenity was cast off with a scream, the false mask of unity and equilibrium shattered on his face and his blood seemed to boil behind his eyes.
The madness came down, his muscles bunched like cords of fio’tak and in his memories he slaughtered every friend, butchered every ally and exploded his father’s glaring eyes into a billion damp fragments.
The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax shrugged off the hated warp prison like some awful infant clawing its way, snarling and spitting, from the womb.
The sun had set. The rituals were completed.
A blood sacrifice had been offered, dragging his essence thirstily into the shell of an empty host vessel.
The walls came crumbling down.
Eldar dreamweaves coiled away into dry nothingness, webway intricacies collapsing upon themselves in whirligig storms of empyrean haze. Tarkh’ax oozed into reality with a shriek and a ghostly halo of warplight, flexing its ethereal extremities in triumph. The daemonlord focused upon the hollow tube of light and fire that stretched between dimensions and surged into the physical realm.
It had been too long. Oh, powers-in-the-warp, too long!
The host body was hardly perfect, of course. The tattered morsel that had once been Governor Severus was far from ideal but...
Yes... Yes, it was adequate. Needs must, in such circumstances.
The malefic consciousness had waited three thousand years to taste physicality again: manifesting into substandard flesh was, it supposed, better than nothing. It would not take long to secure a superior vessel.
Draining the last of its ectopic being into the meat host, Tarkh’ax opened its eyes — its real eyes — for the first time in three millennia.
Tarkh’ax Faalk’raztiil Koorlagh Thrasz, Changer of Ways, disciple of Tzeentch, agent of transience and modification, hissed its pleasure to the world. It rejoiced. It gloried. It exulted in the carnage that would follow.
It would butcher humanity and slaughter tau-kind; it would rampage across the void dragging behind it a veil of shadows; it would burn the galaxy to a cinder in the name of the Changer of Ways and eventually, with none to stop its ascension-It would murder reality itself.
A maelstrom of light and heat danced across its human body, returning its thoughts to the present. It turned its attention to offering obeisance to the dark pantheon that would sustain it, knowing that all its power was derived from their arcane gifts and favours. Tzeentch was a doting patron, filling Tarkh’ax with strength and vitality, but only by pleasing each of the Lord of Change’s brother-gods could it hope to regain the full strength it had enjoyed before its imprisonment. It had been an avatar of Chaos Undivided in that black time; lofty heights of malignancy and power that it would re-ascend!
It took a breath, ignoring the mundane details of the temple abyss, hardly even glancing at the snarling tau that had released it, and turned to face the pulsing shrine of its master.
“Oh, great Tzeentch...” it rasped, feeling some transient corner of the warp shifting and sliding in response. It seemed that the monstrous attention of the Lord of Change, mystic gaze wrapping around like tentacles, fell upon Tarkh’ax’s existence and gave it form.
Blessed be! the daemonlord shrieked, gaseous shapes ossifying around the host-vessel. Blessed be!
Kais gnashed his teeth like an animal and didn’t care.
The governor creaked to his feet, oblivious of the chasmic wound in his chest. He stared at his hand for a moment, as if fascinated by the simple physicality of his digits. His face creased into a necrotic smile and he said: “Yes!”