New Imperium

A howling ghost, made of solar plasma and lethal radiation, screamed across the void with four of its lesser brothers in tow. Two angels of barely contained dreams and semi-solid emotion remained just outside their grasp. One was a thing of tangible honor, and the other was devious valor made manifest. They were as flies before eagles, but the eagles were hungry, and the flies were the most succulent meal in the galaxy.

They swirled towards a baleful blue supergiant, tongues of impossibly powerful plasma and ethereal warp energy flickering back and forth between the ancient creatures. Bellowed challenges and taunts carried through the void, despite the impossibility of such a thing when considered by rational minds. Down they tumbled, drawn in by the inexorable bulk of the bloated star, and it seemed that the warp-angels must be overtaken and consumed.

Space twisted and turned in on itself with such titanic powers at play. At the moment it was inevitable the angels would be devoured, a dazzling spray of light erupted from the devious angel. The largest star-ghost shuddered and hesitated, frozen by confusion. A heartbeat passed, and it turned on its kin and enveloped the nearest entity in its radioactive pinions. The smaller creature howled in betrayal and pain and lashed out with great tongues of nuclear fire, but it stood no chance. Its energy and bulk fed the already colossal monster, and one after the other, the star-ghost consumed its erstwhile brothers.

The angels had only bought themselves time, for the rampaging god slurped down the last of the plasma-blood twisting away through the void and dove at them once more. Its bellowing cries sent ripples through the blue giant's corona and scattered the angels away from it. Then, the crystallized honor, the great hunter, turned and cast a great spear of warp energy into the star-ghost's heart.

It reeled and twisted but still seized the hunter with its plasma-wings. The trickster-angel swooped close, slashing and searing with the Warp, but the star-ghost battered it casually aside. With a glittering sword of pure Warp, the hunter cut himself loose, and with his other hand, he cast a shimmering net of starlit web.

For a god's heartbeat, the net held the star-ghost's infinite wings and tentacles. But the monster began to bubble through gaps in the net, expanding and twisting through and around the sparkling trap until they were inextricably tangled. The hunter roared as the tentacles found him again, squeezing and siphoning the life from his unreal flesh.

He desperately cut open a gateway to the infinite labyrinth they'd used as a hiding place from the star-ghosts, and in that moment, all was lost.

The star ghost's maw yawned open and consumed the hunter just as it crossed into the Webway. Warp, web, and raw but mundane power combined and swirled together into an amalgam that never should have existed. The star shuddered before shredding into ribbons of plasma and dying gas. Space-time unraveled as the Warp came exploding out of the hunter's eviscerated body, and the infinite fractal madness of the hidden Webway arced through it all.

Before the bow wave of unreality could overtake it, a glittering portal into the madness of the Warp appeared beside the stunned trickster. A clawed and albino hand, covered in scrimshawed black brands, pulled the trickster away from the eruption at the last moment, but could not seal the portal in time. For the briefest of heartbeats, the Warp spilled out, and the corruption swirled back into the Immaterium, but then the branded thing slammed the door shut.

The suppurating gash in reality in space-time folded on itself, sealing itself off like a cyst in the flesh of an indifferent beast, and the galaxy continued on without it.

***

I wasn't supposed to be there.

I was supposed to be back on Chrysalis Primus, collecting the Inquisitor's commissary list from underhive 'slaught cookers, uphive information brokers, and every other dubious contact in between. My days should've been spent spending obscene sums, bargaining with a silver tongue or the implication of a laspistol to the forehead, and spending my healthy stipend on joy girls and hard-to-find contraband. The Inquisition may have employed me, but I was so far removed from those leashed psychopaths and their squads of goons that it was usually easy to forget.

I

wasn't

supposed to be chasing my Inquisitor through the nightmarish corridors of a cult base on Chrysalis Secundus.

Onka Lokai smashed another cultist's skull into paste with her artificer power armor against the mold-slimed wall. We all followed as best we could in her wake, though a dozen of the impressed Planetary Defense Force troopers would never leave that place. Somehow she was keeping ahead of Deldan, the lumbering superhuman Astartes in his scuffed and unpainted power armor. I suspect, though, that he was letting her lead the way towards our ultimate objective.

Those of us who were closer to mere humans struggled our way after them. Hacri, the apostate techno-mage. Inasta and Refent, the remaining white-haired Sororitas warriors. And the rest of us, three dozen Emperor-cursed mercenaries, criminals, hangers-on, and Guardsmen who'd already blasted our way through the unprepared mob guarding the entrance to their base.

Onka and Deldan blasted into another chamber, slugs and lasbolts pattering down around them. I could see, then, just why Onka had brought us here. Three figures -- two mortals and a corrupted Astartes -- stood on a raised dais, filth dripping down from the distant ceiling. Their raised hands swirled with energy that twisted the air and tore at our sanity. And, between them, a space churned with unlight, with wrongness, that I couldn't truly see but felt in my twisted little soul.

"Mekdonas! The heavy stubber!" Deldan roared at me over the sudden din, pointing with one hand while hosing down a mob of cultists with bolter fire from the other.

I huddled behind a fallen chunk of the distant ceiling and switched my lasrifle to full auto. The heavy stubber in question was ensconced in an alcove above the filthy floor of the chamber and had already knocked down two more press-ganged PDF troopers. I pulled the rifle tight against my shoulder and sprayed the team of crazed and tattooed cultists with laser fire. It mostly kept their heads down, but at least one bolt found corrupted flesh and sent a screaming body tumbling to the floor.

"Frak this," I mumbled, flinching away from a far-too-near miss. "Frak the Inquisition, Frak this Emperor-damned planet," I wasn't supposed to be there, and I certainly wasn't supposed to die there.

Everyone else, it seemed, thought differently. Sergeant Giado hauled me up from cover by my combat webbing, "Keep moving! We've got to get to --"a stubber round punched through his helmet and blew the back of his head across the merc storming up behind him. I blinked blood out of my eyes before turning back to my tiny patch of cover.

Every ounce of my consciousness wanted to duck behind the rockcrete and take potshots until the heavy hitters like Deldan and Onka finished clearing the room. But, instead, something else drew me, forced me to stop and turn to look at the raised platform and its three corrupting occupants. The mass of bubbling, twisting air between them was expanding, threatening to swirl past their outstretched arms and spill over the stone dais. Voices hissed and whispered in my ears, and I could've sworn to the Emperor that I saw claws and leering eyes swirling in the chaotic mess.

"Move! Saints and Emperor damn you, move!" Inasta bellowed, her ornate Celestian helmet torn away by a las bolt, and her white hair singed and wild. She smashed a mutant cultist down with her glowing power sword before squeezing off a burst of rounds from her bolt pistol at the ritual. The streaking orange lines of the rocket-propelled shells seemed to waver and evaporate a meter or so from the ceremony.

"Stop them! Whatever you must do, stop them!" Onka roared over the growing cacophony of desperate battle. She grappled with a freakish brute nearly the size of Deldan with a bony, spike studded growth in place of an arm.

The stubber that had killed Giado, the merc, and half a dozen others decided the power-armored members of our band were the greater threat. Bullets danced at my still-immobile feet, but I was spared. A sour wind filled the subterranean space, swirling in towards the ritual. The air stank with an unknowable foulness that made my insides churn. The dying screamed. Hacri wailed in his strange mechanical language as a lasbolt punched into his leg, and something screamed from inside the boiling air. The noise pierced my skull, twisted its way around my soul.

I wasn't supposed to be there, but I certainly knew then that, one way or another, I was going to die there.

Better to die than be subjected to whatever soul-shredding nightmare half of the Imperium had already suffered, I supposed. My booted feet leaped towards the ramp leading up to the dais of their own accord. The others roared in defiance as the stubbers above and around us poured fire onto them and a fresh wave of horrific mutants clawed at their power armor. I figured I was probably the only mere human left alive, and that bought me precious moments as I drew ever closer to the ritual.

Time slowed -- from Warpcraft or adrenaline, I didn't know -- and my hands slapped a new powerpack into the trusty lasrifle. A lasbolt seared close to my right cheek, and a bullet whined somewhere nearby. I barely heard either over the unholy warp-scream. My skin tingled and itched, assailed by searing heat and bone-numbing cold all at once. Only a few steps to go now, I remember thinking.

Every cultist in the galaxy, it seemed, finally noticed my one-man assault. Whatever corruption protected the three ritualists blocked most of the bolts headed my way, though, even as it felt like my skin was being peeled back by a million razors. A thousand clawed hands tugged at my skin, teeth shredded my flesh, and I absolutely wished I'd just run as fast as I could have in the opposite direction and lived a few minutes longer.

Instead, my bayonet somehow managed to plunge through the nightmare and into the spine of the nearest ritualist. The mutant with pitted, pus-caked skin shrieked in pain, his foul magicks so powerful I felt blood pour from my ears. Every mundane sound in that cursed place suddenly fell away, but the unholy shrieking in my head only grew louder.

By reflex, I hauled back on the trigger of my rifle, blasting the dying...thing into smoldering ruin. Being inside the tainted cloud of magicks already, the lasbolts flew more or less true. A few curved and twisted away on uncertain and impossible trajectories, and one of those few seared through the throat of the other mortal cultist.

His body convulsed, not with the expected death throes but with a fickle surge of warp-energy. I was shoved back by a wall of unseen force before a howling gale of nightmares drew me back towards the center of the dais. The Chaos Astartes trembled with fury, his voice like a thousand howitzer shells in my skull.

"You filth! Insect! Your Imperium is already doomed," the pain boiled white-hot in my senses, and nauseating

wrongness

made my guts twist, "You only delay our plans. Misdirect my target. A world...will fall." The foul wind blew harder, and my view of the demon Astartes and his baroque, black armor was obscured by a blinding and scintillating light.

"A world will fall!"

A flash. A crack. A short moment to regret a life wasted -- or enjoyed -- in fleeting vice.

Then, motion. Infinitely fast, wrapped in infinite sensation. I died a million times but was born again just once more. The Warp turned me inside out, filled me with coruscating light before compressing me into a single point, a moment, of indescribable pain.

I hurtled towards and smashed through a perfect sphere of brilliant iridescence. Filaments of unreality snapped before me, barely slowing me. Worlds built from gleaming bone and boiling ichor flashed past me. Cold, unblinking eyes scrutinized me, calculating, and titanic figures moved in mist and shadows.

I wasn't supposed to be there.

***

On a world slowly drowning in monsters and despair, an arc of red lightning split the sky. A woman clad in armor made of bone and shadow shielded her eyes and looked skyward. No matter what fresh hell was on its way, she would face it.

On a world already shattered by the power of nightmares and daemons, the sky shuddered. Multi-colored lights pulsed like veins amongst the cold, hard stars, and huddled masses of refugees stared upwards in resigned despair. They had lived through enough anarchy and terror for a dozen lifetimes. Whatever this was, they would live through it as well.

On a world already bathed in the foul energies of the Warp, the blistering winds of magic suddenly whipped into a gale. Hundreds screamed in pain or ecstasy, or both, as visions of impossible realities took over their minds. Some died, some were changed forever. Everyone else barely batted an eye: Chaos was already a part of their short, miserable lives.

On a world with a god slumbering at its heart, that had already thrown off two deluges of monsters, a column of sickly green magic impaled the seas. The fabric between worlds frayed and unraveled, and monsters sunk their claws into the wound and tore it into a gangrenous sore. Scattered nations took their weapons from each other's throats and turned towards this third violation with grim determination.

***

Another sharp crack, the stink of ozone in my nose, and I was tumbling down with air whipping past me. Finally, I crashed into something that resisted my fall for a moment before yielding amongst a rustling and snapping crash. Each time I bounced off of a new obstruction, a fresh wave of pain shot through me. At the very least, I thought, that told me that I was, quite possibly, still alive.

I crashed through another branch and felt the sickening lurch of freefall before the unforgiving ground welcomed me into its embrace. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I didn't feel movement. I was still.

And I was in unholy pain that filled every unaugmented fiber of my body.

Vomit churned in my gut, and, with a supreme effort, I rolled onto my side to heave acrid bile into the loamy dirt. Web-like strands clung to my lips and caught in my throat, setting off another round of gasping heaves. Steam curled off of me and the pack I'd never had the time to take off. I blinked something thick and foul from my eyes and preferred not to think too long about what it was.

Leaves fluttered down gently from the ragged hole in the canopy my fall had made. I'd only seen trees -- real trees, anyways -- on a handful of the worlds Onka had visited, and I knew there weren't any on the blasted rock of Chrysalis Secundus. At least, I thought I knew that; I hadn't exactly paid an abundance of attention to the briefings before the frenzied assault on the cult.

"Frak me," I groaned and tried to rise to my knees. My voice sounded strange, and my ears were still ringing. Random other steaming detritus had plunged through the trees all around me: a broken stubber, warp-scorched rockcrete, a seared arm clutching a laspistol, and the smoldering torso of the cultist I'd bayoneted.

Light filtered down through the tree beside me and the innumerable others that spread in every direction. It was pale and sickly, just like the bark of the half-dead trees. Dark fog clung to the spaces above the leaves and between the thick trunks, like the constant and Emperor-blessed smog that spilled from every hive in the Imperium. I didn't smell any burning or chemical stink, though, just a damp rot that seeped from the spongy loam and the mushrooms sprouting from every tree.

Where the Frak was I?

Scrabbling to my feet amidst a bout of vertigo, I looked around and still saw nothing that reminded me of Chrysalis Secundus. I hated how quiet it was, used to the constant thrum and clamor of hives and Imperial vessels. A faint breeze rustled sickly leaves, and some sort of creature chirped in the distance.

"Well, let's make sure of one thing," I muttered and stabbed the smoldering hunk of flesh one more time with my bayonet. "Frakking warp scum," I coughed, stooping to pry the pistol from some poor bastard's fingers. Then, picking a random direction, I unsteadily and wearily ventured into this strange place.

The vertigo and nausea slowly faded, and my pace increased, but I still kept my weapon raised slightly and glanced around every sickly trunk. There were still no clues, no landmarks other than the endless wood. I caught a few glimpses of whatever star burned over this place through the trees, but it was still shrouded by the shadowed veil.

The ground sloped downwards slightly, and the trees began to thin. I could see a moldering wooden fence and an empty field beyond and hurtled forward, hoping some living soul lived beyond the edge of this cursed wood. What I didn't notice, though, were the claw marks in the trees all along the edge of the forest.

It came at me as I was awkwardly clambering over the fence, a bolt of fur and teeth launched from the shadowed spaces between the trees. Its first swipe with six-inch claws, thank the Emperor, hit my bulging pack instead of my warp-abused flesh, but the sheer force of it launched me forward and into the fallow field.

I popped the pack loose with the quick release, rolling over and bringing up my battered but trustworthy lasgun. It snarled and smashed through the rotten timbers, leaping towards me. In one heartbeat, I saw a horribly twisted abhuman, a mutant with gray-black fur sprouting from its muscled body, a wolf-like face, and hateful red eyes. In the next heartbeat, I skewered it with laser fire.

The mutant beast howled, flesh and fur burning and blood flashing to steam. Its momentum carried it within a meter of me, even as its organs were blasted into smoldering ruin. I aimed between my boots, right down that slavering maw, and sent another bolt into whatever brain it possessed. It slumped, ravaged by the Imperium's trustiest weapon, smoke curling off of it as flesh sizzled. Finally, I clambered up to my feet and tried to calm my ragged breathing.

That was when the other three loped on all fours out of the fog-shrouded woods, baying angrily at the loss of their apparent packmate.

"Emperor's bloody shits!" I blasphemed easily and bitterly before switching my rifle to full auto. Black claws and yellowed teeth flashed in the dim light, and I was suddenly sure that I'd been cast from the underhive and into the fusion furnace, so to speak. That unholy ritual must've thrown me into the Warp or some new hellish daemonworld. What fresh nightmares awaited me?

For the moment, though, lasbolts seemed to be working just fine.

The compressor in the breech kicked painfully against my shoulder as I fired on full auto at the three mutants. One immediately went down, left arm and right leg blown away by focused light. Filth-encrusted trees caught fire behind the beasts, ignited by my wild burst, and the air keened with whining lasbolts and vicious snarls.

A second mutant, unholy intelligence in its red-glowing eyes, deftly sidestepped my main arc of fire and galloped forward on its four twisted limbs. I shifted my fire towards it, blasting half a dozen smoldering craters in the rotten ground before nearly sawing the beast in half with fire. Still, it struggled forward until shock and pain overwhelmed warp-born madness, and it tumbled down in two messy pieces.

The second had distracted me from the third, and I viciously cursed myself as I tried to bring my rifle back to bear. My shots split the air, my finger desperately clenched on the trigger while I swung the weapon, and dirt smoked and wood burned. But none of them struck home, and my power pack clicked dry.