Melisanth is but one world floating in the Sea of Souls. One amongst millions. Let me show it to you.
And then, no more than a heartbeat later – Open your eyes, Argel Tal.
He’d always treasured sunrise.
This one, an ocherous orb painting fierce light over a city of spires and minarets, was one to remember. Even with pain tolerance and resistance to light saturation written into his genetic code, the rising sun was bright enough to make his eyes ache. And that was beautiful too, for it had never happened before.
Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. They stood on a cliff’s edge, above an alien city turned golden by the dawn. Argel Tal turned to see his brothers: Xaphen, watching the xenos colony; Malnor and Torgal with him; Dagotal, staring up into the blue sky.
This was Melisanth, came the creature’s burbling voice in his mind. See the city made of bone and gemstones. See the spires too delicate for mortal physics to support them, standing only because of eldar witchcraft.
Now see the Fall.
In the sky above, the clouds raced in a cyclical dance – day and night flashing past in a blur of flickering grey. Tendrils of violet clawed across the heavens, thickening, linking, coiling, staining the air with red mist. Sweat broke out on Argel Tal’s face and neck in the savage heat. It warmed even the aqueous moisture that lubricated his eyes.
As he watched, the city below began to tumble, its spires and walkways falling to shatter on the ground, crushing crowds of slender alien figures and demolishing lesser buildings beneath.
Their sorceries are fading. This is on the edge of the Great Eye. The destruction took days to unfold on these lesser colonies. At the core of their empire, all life was ended in mere moments.
Argel Tal could hear the city dying, the sounds of thunder, sorrow and lamentation carried up to him on the wind.
‘Aliens,’ Xaphen smiled at the toppling towers. ‘May they all burn, soulless and forgotten.’
None of the others disagreed. ‘Why did this happen?’ asked Argel Tal.
The eldar were close to seeing the truth of the universe. Their civilisation spanned the galaxy, evolving for millennia under the guidance and worship of their gods. And then, at the last step... they faltered.
‘How?’
Look to the sky.
The storm clouds gathered in a threatening spiral, darkening the land to every horizon. From the very first raindrops – hot on the skin and rich in their metallic reek – it was clear what was in store for the city below. With a single peal of thunder, loud enough to vibrate the air itself, the blackened clouds ground together and signalled the opening of the heavens.
Sheets of scarlet rained from the sky, showering the broken city in blood so thick it stained the bone structures that still remained standing. Xaphen closed his eyes, lifting his face to the downpour.
‘This is not human blood. It’s too sweet.’
Argel Tal wiped his face clear of the raining gore. In the city below, creatures were melting from the shadows of fallen monuments, rising from the lakes of blood that were forming in the streets. They staggered and sprinted, each one uneven and unnatural in its own half-formed way. Some crawled on a multitude of boneless limbs. Others wailed as they dashed on spindly legs, reaching out with curling claws.
My kin, taking physical form. They hunt souls, and flesh, and blood and bone.
‘Why is this happening?’
The malformed beasts ran in packs, dragging down any of the slender, weeping survivors they found. The sight left him cold. Genocide should be a purification, and there was nothing of purity in this insane unleashing of unknowable powers.
‘Answer me,’ Argel Tal said softly. No answer came, beyond the blood running down his cheeks and over his lips. He could smell nothing else, taste nothing else, beyond the sanguine rain.
New towers rose from the tumbling city below – slender spires formed from pulsing walls of still-living flesh, decorated by voiceless faces and flayed arms stretching from the architecture. The rising towers reached for the panicking eldar in the streets, using their lives as raw material, their alien flesh as living mortar.
Watch them die. You would die the same way.
‘I told you to answer me,’ said the Word Bearer.
Watch and learn, Word Bearer.
‘We have records of the eldar and their histories.’ He spat the foul blood that kept running onto his tongue. ‘They speak of the Fall, when decadence and sin bred corruption throughout their culture. A spiritual cataclysm annihilated them centuries ago. That devastation is this? This... divine wrath?’
This is their judgement. In their ignorance, they see only the death of an empire as countless worlds drown in blood and fire. In this moment of ascension, the eldar choose terror over power, and damn their kingdom to ashes because the Primordial Truth frightens them all.
They have given birth to a god. A god of pleasure and promise. Yet they feel no joy.
‘Enough!’ Argel Tal threw back his head and drew breath into his three lungs. The storm intensified, its tortured skies bleeding onto the world below.
‘Answer me!’ he screamed at the sky.
This is the Fall they speak of in whispered tones. The eldar were blind. They could have lived in harmonic union with the Powers, as humanity must soon learn themselves. Instead, they are dying. Unable to accept the Primordial Truth, they are being destroyed by it.
You ask why? Can you not see why? This is not how empires die, Word Bearer. This is how gods are born. The eldar faith has given the galaxy a new deity. She Who Thirsts. Slaa Neth. It has a thousand names.
These are its first moments of life, and it wakes to find its own worshippers are abandoning it, out of ignorance and fear.
This endless storm, this Eye of Terror, is the echo of its birth-cries.
‘I have seen enough,’ Argel Tal watched the city below, now silent, flooded, reaped clean of all life. ‘Blood of the gods, I have seen enough.’
Then open your eyes.
Ingethel was watching them, its mismatched eyes unblinking as they reflected the sick light from beyond the dome. The stench of blood lingered in Argel Tal’s nostrils, despite the warriors’ pristine armour and clean skin.
‘That was unpleasant,’ said Torgal.
‘Sir,’ Dagotal reached for Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘I think we should leave this place.’
It was Xaphen, not the daemon, that quelled such discussion. ‘You overstep your authority, sergeant. We will not flee from the truths we’ve travelled so far to find.’
Argel Tal ignored their bickering. His vox-network was alive with squads checking in, retinal runes flickering as each sergeant linked to him.
‘Sir, we just saw...’
‘Captain, there was a voice and... and a vision...’
‘This is Vadox Squad, reporting...’
The Word Bearer turned to the daemon. ‘Every one of my warriors on the ship saw what we saw.’
They hear my voice, the same as you. That is why they are here: to bear witness. To learn. The eldar failed, and the price paid for their sin was slow extinction. Humanity must not follow the same path. Mankind must accept the Primordial Truth.