And then he was gone; lost at the heart of a light-bloom, a malignant supernova that writhed and took form around him. Kais would have staggered back, quailing at the shape that rose up from the blossoming energy, but the instinct to flee was drowned by the rage and fury. Gripped by anger, filled only by an image of the crumpled ethereal and his own wasted efforts, Kais was surging forwards with a bellow before the daemon’s shape had fully resolved.
It was a cloud, briefly. A thing of tendrils and pseudopodia that shook with internal spasms and dissolved, rarefied features contracting and warping. Severus’s glowing form remained aloft, burning through the translucency of the flexing vision like a luminous heart, bisected by the energy spike at the pit’s centre.
It was a cloud and a serpent and a devil, all at once. A tree without roots, an ocean of blood, a starfield seen in negative, a prowling t’pel predator, a rotten fruit.
Endlessly shifting, the riot of shapes and forms still somehow contrived to form a whole, like the teardrop of shadow in an endlessly-flickering flame. It was a wraith, rising up in some ethereal parody of a figure, its robes billowing and snatching in an invisible gale, three times as tall as Kais and striated by pennants and spines and lights. Clad in a writhing ensemble of blue and gold, the daemon-aspect clutched at a staff of pure night and thundered with a bellow that shook the abyss, carrion features splitting along a vulturelike beak. Vast wings of blue and yellow, as insubstantial as paper but beating with the force of a hurricane, encircled the flexing shape and rustled, sparks and smoke coiling from each feathertip.
Kais didn’t care. He fired and reloaded, shouting and spitting and cursing, and when lightning poured from the staff, a river of sparks and ionised air that clawed at the ground and charred the sludge wet floor glassy and smooth, he dived and rolled without thought, lurching upright in a single movement to fire again. Smoke coiled, ozone wafted across his senses, the daemon loomed over, and he didn’t care.
“Die!” he howled, all control gone, “Get back! Die!” The words themselves had little significance beyond the need to emote; to roar and bellow his fury at the world. Any target would do, even one as horrific as this.
He was blind to the reality, uncaring that his shots had no effect, that the daemon merely laughed at his rage, that his fury was inconsequential, a termite’s temper tantrum in the face of an anteater.
Abruptly the words of the dead admiral, spoken before the man’s transformation mere raik’ors ago, ghosted through Kais’s mind.
“It draws its strength from the... the Dark Gods...” he’d said, clutching at his face, as if the very knowledge revolted him. “I saw... I saw it. In its prison. Oh God-Emperor, it’s almost free! But it... it needs their strength... It needs their patronage to restore its powers...”
Kais hadn’t understood and said so, but the man was oblivious, perhaps aware of his impending alteration, and had rushed to complete his cryptic pronouncement.
“You can’t kill something like that.” he’d hissed, “Not really. Y-you... you can only stunt it... starve it of power before it’s fully formed... take away its sustenance... You have to send it back to where it came from!
The shrines! It takes its strength from there! Y-you understand? The shrines! Remember!”
Kais had kept his word: he had remembered. He’d remembered although he hadn’t understood. Only now, his blood screaming for violence and death and destruction, his mind shrouded behind the veil of Mon-t’au imbalance, now he understood.
Four daemon aspects. Four Dark Gods, bestowing their gifts upon a cherished child. Four shrines.
Leaping over a vengeful bolt of lightning with a cry, he rolled and dived for the nearest antechamber, where a cord of yellow light hung aloft and snaked between the bellowing Daemonlord and the writhing altar.
Looking back, he saw that the fluttering monstrosity was tethered somehow, as if unable to stray far beyond the energy-spike at the centre of the pit. Finding its prey beyond its grasp it turned its back on Kais, robes pulsing like half-melted liquid, and faced the next of the shrines. The human body, glowing at the thing’s centre, was speaking and gesticulating grandly. Paying homage, Kais realised, to the next of its evil masters. Inviting more power into itself.
Kais, thoughts racing, turned the muzzle of his gun upon the altar beside him.
Across the pit the daemon stiffened as if stung, inexplicable senses clearly aware of this new threat. Robes drifting, shadow-wings flexing it turned its feathered skull, radiating white heat, and hissed in warning.
The railgun fired with a flare of light and gurgled a smoky column of ozone.
The altar shuddered, shot ricocheting with an ugly whine and a fountain of sparks, impacting dustily against the shrine wall. Glowing, as if with some arcane shield, the altar’s shimmering defence briefly severed the glowing cord that connected it to the daemonlord.
The brute seemed to sag minutely, aware that, even temporarily, the power source it suckled upon greedily was gone. Its fury sent serpents of gauss lightning thrashing along the pit walls and inchoate plasma storms raging and battering at the ground around Kais’s feet, blistering his underhooves and gashing at his legs. Tumbling and rolling through the maelstrom, ignoring the burns tattering his flesh, Kais took aim upon the daemonlord with clenched teeth and fired.
And fired.
And fired.
And this time each shot thudded into and through its armour with a brassy clang and a wet slap of parting flesh. Its screams were like music.
Tarkh’ax, through the haze that passed for its mind, felt the warp construct pulse and crumble. The sustenance it drew from its master, Tzeentch — a comforting flow of warmth and power — stuttered and failed.
The Lord of Change, ever-watchful gaze staring bale-fully through the warp, turned its cheek dismissively and cast its disciple aside.
The daemonlord’s fury at the defeat was a white-hot torch. Unable to vent its madness fully, it turned to the next shrine and dipped the host-body’s head in greeting, hands forming complex shapes in the air.
“Bless me, mighty Slaanesh. Bless me!”
Kais staggered back from the squealing monstrosity, howling in triumph.
The fragments of its robes rained like broken glass, dissolving and writhing even as they fell. The flickering images that haloed and oozed throughout the collapsing shape coiled upon themselves and aborted, slurping away into the ether, leaving only the hunched Changer of Ways and, glowing at its translucent centre, the fiery body that had once been Severus.
The second shrine illuminated with a vile purple glow, snatching out a cord of light to intersect the energy spike. Ethereal shapes began to form around the daemon, smokelike appendages that bent the light and cast a new aspect across the daemon’s horrific form.
Kais sighed, reloaded the gun wearily and prepared himself for more.
“La’Kais, come in! Kais? Are you getting this?”
Silence on the comm.
“Ui’Gorty’l? Are you still there?”
“Yes El’Lusha. I’m listening in.”
“The signal boost isn’t working. Try something else!”
“Fio’el Boran says he’s running out of ideas, Shas’el. There’s just too much interference.”
“That’s an excuse, Kor’ui. Tell him I’m not interested. Tell him I want a comm-link. Tell him there’s something going on down there and I want to know what. Results! Now! El’Lusha out.”