Disclaimer: The Deathstalker series, characters and elements belong to Simon R. Green. The Warhammer 40,000 series, characters and elements belong to Games Workshop.
* * *
It was not a ship.
There had never been a ship, despite the stories and the rumours. Most of them were nonsense whispered by half-mad survivors, but even those that had a grain of truth in them did not convey the truth of the dark shape, because they did not, could not understand it.
It was about sixteen hundred metres long, a mountain-like shape of cruel angles blacker than the void it sailed. Not as fast as light, and never faster, lest it lose the connection to its realm of origin: the place between places, the moment between instants, where nothing existed, because there was nothing there.
And, as many who proclaimed themselves fearless said, unknowingly honest, nothingcouldscare them.
The shape moved closer to the star. It was a wretched thing on the hem of the galaxy, turning red and bloated with age. If it had been able to think, perhaps it would have shrieked at the sight of the thing approaching it. Even as it was, a mindless sphere of plasma, the red giant seemed to recoil, its surface almost trembling.
Solar flares lashed out into space, as if trying to ward the false mountain off, while black spots faded under the face of the star, as close to fear as unliving matter could come.
The Terror's herald plunged into the star, and this time, there was no attempt to prevent it from reaching its destination. Unlike in the other systems it had helped bring to an end, nothing lived in this one. Nothing sentient, at any rate.
This meagre meal would have to do.
The herald ignored the heat and pressure around it, quickly crossing countless kilometres until it found itself in the red giant's core. There, it stopped, nestling like a worm at the centre of an apple. And, though the herald had no mind of its own, and no malice, it seemed to thrum with something like anticipation as it fed, and gave birth to something quite unlike life.
Just more evidence to quash the rumours. Even the vessel of the one the Terror had touched, and broken, and remade, the mad ship of the madman, had still been aship, in the end. Alive, in a way, filling itself with unknown and unknowable things beyond the ken of its captain-mirror, but a ship.
The herald had never been one. Like a fingertip being pushed through paper, the herald was cast from the realm of the Terror like the spear of a mad god, entering the universe that shrank before it. It was not a thing, in of itself, but part of something that, in a scientist's blackest nightmares, might be called an ecosystem.
As the herald gestated, the red giant shrunk, becoming colder and paler, until it was scarcely bigger than one of the larger planets. Would it ever reach the end of its life cycle, now that it had been scarred by this unnatural thing? Who knew? The herald would not have cared, if it could think.
And, because the herald could not think, it did not know that this system held the first world uninhabited world it would doom. There were nothing but plants on the rocky planet's surface, a verdant expanse of diversity that would forever be lost for little gain.
The truth was, the Terror had become a little desperate, if such a term could even be applied to the mad god-thing. It had been barred from its original time track by some unknown force or being and, instead of finding its way back with ease, it had been rebuffed with more ease at every attempt.
Then, the Terror had grown calculating. It knew that, though its endless well of power could never be exhausted, the might it wielded could very well decrease. That was why it drove worlds mad and fed on their inhabitants' sanity as it shattered. When it had moved between galaxies in its first universe, it had burned out some of the power it had gained by glutting itself on Andromeda. As a result, though still mighty beyond human comprehension, it had been lesser than it could've been when it had entered the Milky Way.
Had one entered the no-space that was the Terror's realm and held onto their sanity enough to listen, they might have noticed something under the eternal, bloodcurdling scream of a woman wailing for her demon lover, a demon shrieking for its human lover. In that darkness, without air, without light, without gravity, they might have heard something the human mind could have interpreted, for its own sake, as a a clicking, or a whirring. The movement of gears, as a boundless mind set itself to the task of returning to its choice hunting grounds.
All of time and space were the Terror's prey, but it wanted, needed to find someone first. It did not remember who, or why, but it knew it had to. It scoured every mind it broke, and those of the few who made its way into its realm, for any clue that they were its target. It had not found anything yet, but it knew this reality did not hold the person it sought.
The herald's spawn left their creator's body, a process that did not resemble birth except as a moment of entry into the world. They were as dark and angular as their maker, bleak and winged like demons and angels and everything in-between. Millions of them, as different as snowflakes, yet united in purpose.
The herald's spawn flew out of the shrunken star at impossible speeds, the beginning of their infamous, maddening screams filling the airless void. Had there been AI or similar constructs on the planet they descended upon, they would have been twisted beyond recognition, drowning in errors as their physical components buckled and broke. On this pristine world, however, there was nothing to give away the approach of the herald's spawn.
They formed a circle around the planet, and wherever their shadows fell, despite distance, trees and flowers seemed to wither and wilt. Then, they screamed, the sound that was not a sound reaching every spot on and inside the planet.
Ordinarily, the scream would've driven a planet's population into an insane, self-destructive war, so that the Terror could feed on every foul emotion it forced into their minds. But it knew there was no thinking being on this world, so it had adapted, altering something in the unfathomable composition of its herald and by extension, of the herald's spawn.
As the spawn's scream filled the very fabric of the planet and the space it occupied, the plants began to sway and bend, even in the windless regions. Then, they uprooted themselves, several of the frailer trees staying together even when they should have splintered. As false organs bloomed inside them and rudimentary sentience became sapience, the plants began to scream, too.
This, the Terror would have admitted if it could have, was a gamble. The power it had spent shaping the evolution of this world's biosphere would be regained as it fed, but would it gain more? The Terror was timeless, but it had become more than familiar with how reality moved and changed across moments and eternities, by necessity. It knew that, if its gambit failed, it would have lost time just to recycle its power, as far as the universe was concerned.
Luckily, the stratagem paid off. The changes its herald's spawn had forced the plants through had become self-sustaining, no longer relying upon its power. Instead, the plants fed upon each other, consumed by rage they should have never been able to know, and a deep hatred for everything but themselves. Any survivors would end their own lives in short order.
The herald's spawn continued to scream, the sound almost resembling a cackle, now. Under them, they could feel an ever-raising wave of anger, spite and loathing, there for their master to take.
And take it did. From inside the endless labyrinth of madness that was its corpus and lair at once, the stirring Terror rose, sending forth the eldritch face it presented to mundane existence - what fools had often mistaken for the entirely of its being. Reality unfolded, spacetime drawing back with something almost like revulsion, as something larger and viler than any world forced its way into the universe. It existed in far more than three dimensions, and nothing of its countenance could truly be captured by mind or machine. Above a maw that could swallow a moon, eyes bigger and deeper than oceans burned with hatred hotter than the hells of a thousand species' legends.
The Terror looked upon its work, and opened its maw. A world that had been roused to self-awareness by force died at the hands of its tormentor, in another failed attempt to sate its unending hunger. It was not the first planet to perish thus. It was unlikely to be the last.
Reality moved back in place as the Terror faded back into nothingness, while the herald's spawn began falling to the ruined world's surface like razor-edged, ebony meteors, bereft of whatever force had animated them now that their purpose had been fulfilled.
And the Terror's herald left the drained star behind, to continue its work.
* * *
There was, close to the edge of the Milky Way, something that had, for reasons yet unknown to the Imperium of Man, made Hive Fleet Leviathan change course. Few phenomena could force the Tyranids to alter their path, for the manifold bodies of the Hive Mind were resilient beyond what conventional biology deemed possible.
An Imperial scholar might have noticed that the location of this object or event, revealed by a deep scan, coincided with Lyriax, a site monitored by the Eldar.
This was no coincidence, and the Imperium rarely believed in such things, anyway.
If that scholar approached the anomaly, they might have noticed the strange way light behaved around it. To a human eye, unused to its shifting, alien angles, it would have appeared as a silvery, spherical construct, its size surpassing the distance between Sol and Holy Terra. No human artifice, this, for though the scientist-kings of the Dark Age of Technology might have built on this scale to shackle stars and harness their power, even they would have struggled to understand the construct's interior, much less replicate it. In truth, the Eldar themselves were baffled by the mechanisms, for all their arcane techno-sorcery. This megastructure was purely of the Materium, but a monument to insane science the Children of Isha would have had difficulty replicating by psychic means, even at the zenith of their Empire.
This illogical labyrinth housed a being of writhing, inverted geometries. A monster the Eldar had dreamed of for many of their long generations, for, alone among the Yngir, this being had never been shattered. Whatever cosmos-scarring, causality-shattering weapon the Silent King of the Necrons had unleashed to bring the Star Gods low, it had failed to topple this one. Or, perhaps, it had never been turned upon it.
Tsara'noga, known as the Outsider, was quite mad, and that was a terrifying thing, for a being as old as the universe, whose every thought could warp reality, was dangerous enough with an orderly mind. But the C'tan, despite being, if not in the fullness of its power, closer to it than the remnants of its brethren, was lost to insanity as deep as the madness its soulless gaze could induce.
Some, who knew of the first great war to scar the universe, whispered that Szarekh, last of the Silent Kings, had failed to defeat the Outsider as he and his subjects had felled the other C'tan. Perhaps it had grown too powerful by feeding on its kindred; perhaps it had always been the mightiest, or the hardiest. It mattered not. The C'tan had been imprisoned when it could not be split into Shards, and a structure that dwarfed most stars chosen as its dungeon.
And now, within its cage, bound by chains more inescapable than entropy, Tsara'noga awoke from its dreamless, fitful slumber.
It could feel a power nearby. Not one of its kind, for this darkness was unlike the star-bright animus of a C'tan. It might have been a match in scale and power, but it was too dark to be mistaken for a Star God. It was too jagged, as well, to be one of the sun-eaters intertwined with reality and its laws. No, even from many light years away, the Outsider could tell this force had little to do with the Materium. If anything, it resembled the witchery used by the puppets of the Mirror Realm, that soul-searing expanse that had never known place or moment.
But it was not one of the Powers of the Warp, either. Though the impression of power that preceded it, like a shadow, felt as alien to the C'tan as the poison that was psychic energy, it was not...harmful. As such. Not inherently. Itcouldbe, like its own power. Like when it had fallen upon the other Star Gods, tricked by the Great Fool into thinking it was devouringhimwhen, instead, it had been turned into an unwitting cannibal-
Tsara'noga snarled, an ur-sound that would have shaken stars, if it could have reached beyond the mad god's prison. It did not regret it, devouring its lesser kindred. If they'd wanted to survive, why hadn't they been stronger? But the memory, the way it had been fooled, bested in the arena of cunning? And by a make-believe god, at that? A caricature of a being, made from whole cloth by the Old Ones' witchling slaves? Its blood would have boiled, if it'd had any.
One day, it would return, and take revenge upon Cegorach. The only god worshipped by the degenerate descendants of its ancient foes' slaves to survive, without being imprisoned or broken into fragments. Once it put its memories in order, and gathered its wits, it would...
...What had it been thinking about? Ah, yes, the new power. It was a curious thing, to be sure. Maybe the Outsider could lure it to its prison and consume it, taking its power and using it to shatter its chains. Perhaps it would even be foolish enough, obliging enough, to come here by itself. The truth was, the C'tan's prison was as intricate as it was durable; to make matters worse, the Star God could not quite rememberwhohad shackled it here.
Had it been Szarekh? That close-mouthed traitorous slave and his lackeys? Or had it been another of the Eldar's gods? Tsara'noga remembered that it had become too powerful to stand against, its horror to great to face in battle. But that was it. There was a gap in its divine memory, something that should have been as impossible as the haze that muddled its thoughts. Another blow dealt to it by its enemies? It could not remember, which made it think it was so. After all, what better way to bring low someone capable of shaping the fabric of existence by thinking than by denying it a clear mind?
Maybe taking this strange new creature's power would bring back its own? There was only one way to find out.
The Outsider crouched at the heart of its prison like predator in waiting. It could cast its senses well beyond the sphere's walls, but that was usually more vexing than useful. After all, even in its moments of sanity, what did it help to see everything it couldbe devouring or rulingifit had been free? But now, its star-spanning perception was put to good use.
Tsara'noga peered beyond its cage, searching the edge of the galaxy and the near past. It saw a fraction of the stranger reach into reality, like the lure of an anglerfish, if its purpose had been to lure the fish towards its meal. Something as large as a mountain, and shaped like the sleek and dark ships of its hated turncoat thralls.
Just the memory of the Necrons was enough to make the C'tan seethe. It and its kind had given them the immortality they'd asked for, had stripped them of their flesh and souls and all the woes those brought with them, and this was how it was thanked? It had even taken most of the Necrontyr's minds, freeing them from the burdens of choice and conscience, and what had they done for it?
But it would take revenge on them, as well. Give them back their minds just so it could have something to break right before the Silent King, then stare into Szarekh's darkening eyes as the worm finally began to scream.
The Outsider saw that the fraction of the stranger fed on stars, just like the C'tan once had, in order to spawn legions of sanity-shattering constructs. The constructs' screams left worlds ripe for the taking as a greater portion of the stranger entered the universe. A pointlessly-complex feeding process, to be sure, but Tsara'noga could see that stars were what drew the stranger to a region of space. Something like a smile split the Star God's cold, alien face.
During its captivity (how many millions of years had it been since it had strode among the stars? Fifty? Sixty?), it had often sought ways to amuse itself. With nothing to feed on, it had tried to relive those glorious moments of stellar consumption, but it could only do so by creating stars from its own power, then devouring them, thus recycling energy.
And, though even a fraction of a C'tan was enough to keep a planet spinning forever, the Outsider had little interest in playing with its own power unto eternity instead of increasing it.
Stars. That was it. The reason, the catalyst, the lure. Stars...
It could work with stars.
* * *
The Terror's herald had never before encountered what the humans of yesteryear would have called a Dyson sphere. Oh, it had ravaged plenty of cultures advanced enough to build such a thing. The Light People, for example, or the Swart Alfair. But the former had never been interested in megastructures, warpers of reality as they were, while the latter had foolishly ensured their own extinction, something none of their marvellous devices would be able to avert.
Had the herald possessed a mind, it might have contemplated the best way to breach the silvery sphere surrounding the star it sensed. As it were, the herald simply flew forward, almost as fast as a laser. It impacted the sphere's surface with unimaginable force, but could not so much as dent it. Instead, it was the Terror that brought it - itself - to its target. Pulling back the herald into its realm of nothingness, the Terror moved it around the sphere's myriad defences, knowing full well it would need the stellar power it had sensed, and more, to repeat the process in order to return. It did not care.
The star was a hypergiant, scarlet and swollen, large enough to fill the better part of a star system. The herald began to move forward, uncaring of the various traps that sprung in place. Flashing forcefields that dwarfed stars suddenly loomed around it, before shrinking, attempting to compress the herald to nothing, Forces that would have snuffed out suns and deflected supernovas twisted around the herald, trying to hold it in place if they could not crush it, and failed. The forcefields burst apart, shattering like glass.
Arcs of sickly green energy, several times longer than solar flares and orders of magnitudes more energetic, lashed the herald's black body, bathing it in enough Gauss energy to atomise worlds. Conjured lightning crackled around the mountain-sized shape, trying to incinerate the smallest fraction of its substance, while kinetic drainers attempted to steal its energy, leaving it floating in place, helpless.
All failed. The Gauss beams eventually faded to nothing, after releasing enough energy to blast gas giants to atoms. The lightning broke down into sparks, while the kinetic drainers shut down, their machine minds perplexed. Scans suggested, impossibly, that the more energy the herald lost, the more it had.
The herald was halfway to the star when more esoteric defences were activated. Waves of despair and madness poured over the herald, but it had no mind to be drowned in hopelessness, and no memories to be haunted by. Where a mind would have been was only the hideous blankness that had once sent one of the most monstrous espers in existence running upon psionic contact.
Constructs teleported on the herald, crawling along its top, its edges, its underside. Canoptek Spyders tried to dig their claws into the smooth surface even as they bombarded it with volleys of antimatter - ineffectually so, for there were no particles to react with within the herald's makeup.
Wraiths tried to phase through the herald and tear it apart from the inside, but they could no more bypass its form than a mosquito could fly through a steel wall. The claws and stingers that should have slid through the matte-black surface and resolidified instead broke on contact. The Wraiths turned to their Transdimensional Beamers then, aiming to remove fractions of the herald and cast them into inescapable alternate realities until it fell apart.
This, too, failed, just like the attempts of the greater Canoptek constructs. The Swart Alfair had once turned their space-bending technology upon the herald, trying to push it out of the universe and into the Terror's realm, to no avail. Sinkholes in space had opened and singularities had bloomed into being, scarring the fabric of existence, but the herald had flown along in defiance of physics, moving beyond their gravitational pull at merely relativistic speeds.
Swarms of Scarabs darted to and fro across the herald, trying and failing to break it down, but this was no ordinary matter to convert into energy and reconstruct. The Scarabs waited for orders to create another weapon against this unstoppable intruder, all the while scrabbling at the herald in a frenzy.
The Canoptek constructs pulled back, teleporting to safety, as great engines turned their attention upon the herald, directing the power of Necron spatiotemporal engineering at it. Teleporters shone with green light as their energies sought to move the herald away, into the depths of space, into any of the alternate realities the Necrons used to dispose of waste and enemies. When that failed, they began scanning the herald's structure, in order to twist it into nothingness.
A similar principle had been used during the battle of Borsis, when Astartes Terminators had tried to teleport onto the World Engine, only to be sent back, twisted and dead, by the weaponised ecumenopolis' anti-teleportation defences. But no World Engine could have stopped the herald's flight or turned it from its path, though the Outsider's prison did not relent.
Larger, more powerful versions of the devices Crypteks used to take revenge upon their bested rivals radiated strange energies. Waves and particles that had been discovered millions of generations before man had evolved pulsed across the herald's form, seeking to transmute it into harmless matter, or to fill it with a thousand thousand star-splitting weapons delivered by teleporter. But the herald could not be altered, could not be phased out of existence and reduced to a phantom shape, unable to interact with the cosmos.
Nor could it be moved out of synch with time. The timestream sped up around it, in the hopes the herald would age to dust or expend its energies pointlessly in the accelerated area. Then, it slowed down, until only subatomic processes could have been used to mark its passage, before stopping, The herald flew through the bubble of frozen time like a starship through an ice comet, unmarked, its speed the same.
Once, a survivor of the Madness Maze had made his way into a stasis bubble, shortly before observing all timelines side by side as he learned time was only a direction. The Terror was one of the ends that path of accelerated evolution could lead someone to - the darker end - and its herald was as much a part of it as the root of its madness.
Time reversed, but the herald could not be de-aged into powerlessness, for it had never been weak, had never had anything like a childhood or a prototype stage. The Terror's will alone had brought it into being, and so it had begun, as inviolable as its greater self's purpose.
The timeline flickered, bent and bowed, like a river in a storm, as the chronokinetic engines' power opened windows to the beginning of time and its various potential ends, when all matter would fall apart, or be compressed into a singularity, or all energy would fade and nothing material would exist. The herald was hurled through all these moments of cosmic catastrophe, as well as that of the universal genesis, only to continue unscathed, protected by the Terror's power.
It reached the star, It was time to feed, and spawn.
The herald plunged through plasma like a shark parting water, quickly reaching the core that would serve as its short-lived nest. Over a span of time that would have seemed brief even to Terra's short-lived, scattered children, the hypergiant shrunk, losing brightness and mass, while the herald grew, bulging with noisome unlife. Its spawn broke free from its mass with a gleeful, soundless birth-cry, before leaving their cradle behind.
There was no world to drive mad here, but they knew what they were doing. The herald's spawn were guided by the distant hand of the Terror, along with something not unlike an animal's instincts to remove or evade threats.
The Canopteks began shuddering as the spawn's influence spread inside the Outsider's prison, twisting into new forms as they tried to keep track of the new arrivals in order to determine the best method to remove them. The Scarabs fell apart into piles of pieces the size of dust grains, while the Wraiths and Spyders ended up as immobile, shapeless mounds or turned themselves inside out in an attempt to analyse the herald's spawn.
Then, the heralds began to scream. There was no air within the cage-sphere, but what obstacle was that when the void of space could not silence the spawn's shriek? The sound that had driven worlds mad spread through the illogical labyrinth, and the Autonomous Spirits that managed the star-sized construct retreated inside themselves, raising walls of logic as the sound of madness battered the minds of cold intelligences crafted by Necron science.
This was new, and dangerous. Not a paradigm shift, perhaps, but a threat. A significant enough threat that the remnants of the Infinite Empire had to know of it. Their subroutines remained at work, mindlessly keeping the cage locked, lest the last true Star God escape, but the higher parts of their intellects were on the defensive, isolated, cutting themselves off from the whole lest they be destroyed or turned to this new foe's purposes.
The herald's spawn continued to scream, for their purpose was yet unfulfilled. They had never been in such a situation before, however, a situation that was about to worsen.
* * *
Tsara'noga gave the intruders it had lured into its cage a considering look. Appraising, weighing outcomes, its godlike mind working as fast as anything born of the Materium could - and there was little limit to that, when a C'tan's understanding of the cosmos and its laws was at work.
It understood the process now, it decided. The greater part of the new power hadn't showed itself yet, but it was bound to, especially when its striplings' yowling proved pointless.
The constructs its probing extension crafted were little to worry about, as far as the Star God was concerned. They could understand the heat and pressure of stellar cores, but that was nothing compared to what the Outsider could bring to bear. The warping effect they had on nearby technology was no threat to it, either, though it had broken some of the Necrons' puppets, and that was a welcome amusem*nt. Their scream might have been dangerous to beings with lesser minds, but Tsara'noga had been mad for longer than many species had existed. There was no sanity to crack.
The probing extension, the thing that resembled a starship but wasn't, was sturdy - peering back down its timeline, the Outsider saw a yellow star being compressed and fired as a beam at the mountain-sized thing, all the energy of that sun's lifespan being unleashed and focused without slowing the black thing down, much less damaging it - but seemed to have nothing in the way of armament or defences. Besides ramming into things and sheer durability, the Outsider thought with a scoff.
Finally, there was the new power itself, or rather, its greater extension into reality. There was something about its past and future that confounded the C'tan's subtler senses, like a veil of shadows that deepened the more it looked. It would need direct contact to glean any information about the thing, it seemed.
Now, when would it...ah, yes.
Tsara'noga's smile gave way to a sneer as the thing's greater extension entered its prison, channeling itself through its connection to its herald like a mortal pulling themselves along on a rope. Would its prison's defences have stopped the thing otherwise? Maybe it could leave it trapped here in its place, give the Necrons a surprise when the dullards came to check what had happened.
* * *
Tsara'noga lurched into action, for it had been ages since it had faced anything remotely close to a challenge, and its imprisonment had dulled its battle instincts just as it had fouled its mood. It was a silvery thing, humanoid, for its Necrodermis shell had been shaped by the Necrontyr in the image of one of their gods. But size and shape were things of the material, and so, for the C'tan to alter at its whim. It became something that resembled its natural state, if it could be called that, a star-spanning cloud of energy that had once wrapped itself around suns and drained them of mass and energy, its living metal body exchanging density for size.
The herald's spawn turned to face it, before taking flight to encircle the cloud, screaming all the while. The Outsider let out a cruel chuckle that would have felled cities and shaken planets, which grew into a laugh that drowned out the creatures' shriek. Undeterred, the herald's spawn flew at it, their bladed wings tearing the cloud open, leaving rents in the energy that had to be refilled with an effort of will. They impacted the Outsider with enough force to level towns, while their unnatural composition tore at its very being, but they were like microbes trying to grind down a planet.
The C'tan's cloudlike form spread around the herald's spawn, coiling like a snake, becoming smaller and smaller until each of the spawn was being crushed by barbed, shimmering tendrils. It could have done this with a glance, but that would have been a quicker cruelty - where was the pleasure in that?
If the herald noticed its spawn's destruction, it gave no sign, instead turning towards the Star God only a hair slower than light. It flew at the Outsider almost as fast as a photon, and Tsara'noga met it with an indulgent smirk, even as it directed a burning glare at the herald.
That look would have unmade any celestial body into its base particles, and the herald's form shook under the pressure of the C'tan's power. But the Terror saw this, and reached out, directing its monstrous might to protect this fraction of itself. The herald passed into the Terror's realm and returned to baseline reality in an instant, at the centre of the Outsider's thinly-stretched form. It made contact with the mist-like Necrodermis, and Tsara'noga grunted despite itself, though more in surprise than pain. It had been a long, long time since anything but its pride had been injured.
The herald did not seem to hold any regard for density, as, instead of harmlessly passing through the shapeshifted Star God, it pierced the sun-eater's very being, like a thorn drawing blood from a mortal. With an insulted growl, the Outsider shifted into a more solid, smaller shape, hovering above the herald on arcs of blinding energy. It would destroy the Terror, it decided, the name leaping unbidden to the forefront of its thoughts. But first, it would destroy this fingerhold it had on the Materium,itsMaterium. How dare it blunder into here out of nowhere and act as if the Outsider's universe was its hunting ground?
Not bothering with an elaborate attack - it had seen how the Necrons' petty conjurings had fared against the herald, and it hadn't been directly protected by its master then - the Outsider simply directed its will tomovingthe herald, having glimpsed the link between it and the Terror.
For some reason, the herald could not surpass lightspeed without losing contact with its realm of origin. The Outsider did not know what would actually happen once that happened, half-sane as it was, only that it would gain an advantage against its enemy.
The C'tan reached out with invisible bands of force, seeking to simply throw the herald away. Star Gods could surpass the speed of most starships within realspace, and it was child's play to extend that ability to other beings and objects. But the herald did not change speed or direction, still flying at the Outsider almost as fast as light. The Terror's hand at work, obviously - those force blasts would have sent a neutron star hurtling across the cosmos at lightspeed.
Physically moving the thing was out of the question: aside from being crude beyond belief, it would also have meant making contact with the Terror's construct, thus exposing itself to it. Tsara'noga would not risk this when the Terror itself was present, watching and waiting. Instead, it bent space around the herald, mimicking the mechanism through which many young species sought to bypass the lightspeed limit. Behind the herald, a tunnel in spacetime opened to the dawn of the universe, and the Outsider formed a funnel, channeling a fraction of the energy that began expanding in that first instant, hitting the herald with a mountain-sized lance of power in an attempt to speed it along, pushing as the C'tan pulled.
Perhaps taken off-guard, perhaps having grown weary of the game, the Terror's will cracked through reality like a thunderbolt through wood, even as it began feeling its herald slipping out of its grasp.
* * *
The Herald forgotten, Tsara'noga floated forward, towards the ever-shifting, planet-sized creature that was the Terror's main extension into reality. The Terror returned its glare, glowering, like the antlered beasts of Old Earth would have while lowering their heads to meet their rivals. Eyes like hellfire bore into a vertical slit shining with deathless power as it split a featureless face, and neither blinked.
With an unimpressed cross of its arms, the Outsider grew in size, until it matched the Terror, clawed hands opening and closing. Space rippled as the Terror moved closer, something like tendrils flicking out, sending waves of disruption that would have obliterated battlefleets. It had never been confronted like this, not outside of its realm - but it would not falter.
The C'tan began with an exaggerated recreation of the onslaught the Terror's herald had endured earlier. Several stars' worth of antimatter flew at the Terror at speeds that would have made tachyons look sluggish, crushing the creature between several solar masses of antiparticles. The Terror dispersed the blinding result of the crash with a pulse of will, its eyes darkening with hunger and hatred.
More projectiles followed: Gauss blasts like chains of hypernovas, lightning matching the output of a trillion trillion Tesla Destructors, spheres of spacetime that should have scattered the Terror across an unending chain of cosmoses upon contact. All of them faded into nothing as the galaxy-scouring monstrosity gathered its focus.
The Outsider bent time every way it had already been abused at once, and in a dozen new ways besides, creating chronal configurations yet undreamt of by the most insane Chronomancers. None of it could tear the Terror away from the now, nor alter its present state, for its being was as timeless as its madness.
Tsara'noga raised its hands, and its will tore at the Terror in an attempt to unmake it at the most fundamental level possible, erase it from existence so thoroughly it would never have been in the first place, deleted from the timeline beyond the possibility of even being remembered. The Terror bucked like a maddened beast as it felt its very existence being assailed, channeling its power into itself lest it be wounded.
But the Terror was no thing of the material universe, to be changed and unmade at the Star God's whim. The Light People had built a galactic empire by changing the basic nature of worlds, creating planets where physics did not hold sway, making hostile civilisations friendly, just like they had tried to do to the Terror. But it was too real for that, more real than any world, and it could not be altered so easily.
The Terror's power filled the C'tan's prison as it opened its moon-swallowing jaws, tentacles lashing out to wrap around the Outsider even as its mind assaulted the Star God's core.
* * *
A woman wailing for her demon lover...a demon shrieking for its human lover...
Tsara'noga righted itself with a start as it found itself surrounded by nothingness. Those thoughts weren't its own. It had never understood the lie mortals called love except in the abstract, enough to see how useless it was. Was...had its enemy once been mortal? For it surely was not, anymore. Still, the thought alone was enough to remind the C'tan of its self-evident superiority.Ithad never been weak.
There was nothing of the natural world it had once lorded over around, but the Star God forged onward, and silhouettes began to appear, before resolving into objects, or something like them.
There was no light to see, no air to breathe, no gravity to bind anything together in the intricate dance of celestial mechanics. Instead, there was only a maze of grimy stone walls, stretching into infinity, existing in the Past, Present and Future at once.
The C'tan's gaze moved across the labyrinth, to understand its structure and purpose. It quickly understood it had neither. The maze did not reach anywhere, nor was it meant to hold anything, like its own prison. And the shapes it formed held no pattern the Outsider could understand. It was like staring into the Warp, though Tsara'noga detected this realm wasn't psychic as it understood the term.
Now, the Terror's past, present and future became clear to its unblinking gaze, for they were here. The labyrinth existed in all of them at once, and so did the Terror, for this was its body.
The stone corridors were like veins, like neural pathways. The power of the Terror aping the aspect of rock...to what end?
Except...tch. It saw. There was no end, only ends and beginnings. Time was looping in on itself wherever the Terror trod, and its destiny was its to mould like clay.
Tsara'nogasaw, and understood.
It saw a woman, a mortal, being driven halfway to insanity by the disappearance of the man she hadn't realised was the one she loved until that very moment. It saw the woman go to an artificial world, a tesseract the size of a gas giant, built by thinking machines, to find an answer, a solution.
It saw the monster she birthed, and became.
It saw the Terror scour time and space, looking for the one it had forgotten, and failing, for even if it had remembered him, there would not have been anyone to find: his destiny laid elsewhere, and the confines of something like time had no bearing on the one who would come to confront the Terror, at the end of an era.
It saw the Terror reach backwards through time even as it moved through space. The realm the Light People had raised fell before it, as did they, reaching Old Earth not long after man made his first forays onto Sol's worlds. It saw the Light People wait, despondent and lost, until the Terror's fated enemy found them, running backwards through time as well. With his assistance and the glimpses of the future he remembered, they built the Madness Maze, that structure of infinite walls and endless mysteries, that would, well over a thousand years in the future, empower him, enabling him to start his journey backwards through the ages.
The Madness Maze was a teaching device, at its core. It tested those who entered, and broke everyone, but only the worthy were reforged. The rest could not bear what they could become, and were cast outside or turned into wretches. It accelerated evolution, and those who survived it became like gods, limited only by their knowledge and imagination. Mankind's creation of the espers? A lie, for they did not know themselves, what they would become. The Maze survivors were the future, brought into the present by the power of the Maze and their own fortitude.
The woman who would become-had been the root of the Terror was one such survivor of the Madness Maze as well. What else but such an evolved mind could have brought forth a nightmare like the Terror when pushed to the brink?
The Outsider shook its head as it drew its mind back to itself. Human meddling, aided by the craft of pitiful alien survivors. The loops in time themselves would have been as easy to untangle for the Outsider as ribbons, if not for the beings that were present within them. The Terror would not be pleased by its interfere-
Tsara'noga hissed as it felt the Terror's power pierce it, splitting the living metal of its body even as it tried to smother its mind. Here, it was everything, and the C'tan was an intruder, as out of place as if it had been within the domain of one of the Warp's false gods.
But the Star God would not be so easily undone. As it felt the Terror's probe its consciousness, sifting through ancient memories, its body shook with the energies it brought to bear. It could escape the Terror's realm - the trick was easy, for a god; the un-space might have been far farther from the universe than the hyperspatial oubliettes used by Deathmarks, but it was not inescapable -, but to what end? It would still have been chained in its prison, with the Terror's other extensions still there, for its cage's builders had possessed cunning surpassed only by their treacherousness.
But...it could dothis-
* * *
Szarekh of the Szarekhan Dynasty, last of the Silent Kings, Breaker of Star Gods, whose spear had pierced the immolating heart of Nyadra'zatha the Burning One and laid it low, was displeased.
Though the Silent King's unvoiced words were crushing, the Triarch Praetorian approaching him did not falter. She had already delivered the news, and knew the Necrons' last master craved elaboration as much as he desired the obliteration of whoever was responsible for this failure.
At Szarekh's side stood his Triarch. Haphtatra the Radiant was the first to speak, his voice as fiery as it was controlled. 'And you say it is not sabotage?'
The Praetorian shook her head. There was no bowing, no scraping, and, for some absurd reason, Haphtatra felt offended. He hadn't been a Triarch for long - mere centuries had passed since the Silent King's return to the Milky Way - but not seeing the customs obeyed rankled, though he hadn't been entitle to such obeisance for long.
Some whispered he never would be, the traitors, but he'd deal with them in due time. Szarekh, as far as the stirring, diminished Infinite Empire was concerned, was no longer King of the Necrons, but merely the leader of a single, if powerful, faction. The Triarch Praetorians, however, had pledged themselves to him, as was only proper, so why wasn't she kneeling?
'It is a dire moment,' whispered Haphtatra's counterpart, Mesophet of the Shadowed Hand, in a sepulchral voice. 'And the time is growing short.' Ah, that explained it. The Phaeron of the Stars supposed they couldn't concern themselves with protocol too much in such times. After all, Szarekh had already made an one-time alliance with a gaggle of upjumped, genhanced Unclean brutes, and that still felt surreal.
The Triarch stiffened, as if listening to something only they could hear. Perhaps it was so, for Szarekh made no move or gesture, but they understood full well what he desired.
When they spoke, they did so in a single voice, carried across every channel of communication available to the Necrons, the words carved into the mind of every Triarch Praetorian as the command was given. The wise would listen, and the foolish would die.
Such it always was, when the Silent King spoke through his Triarch.
'Attention, scions of the Infinite Empire. Your King is urging you to put aside your petty squabbles and turn to the defence of our realm. Our divisions matter not in the face of this impending cataclysm, for naught will be left but echoes and stardust unless our ancestral foe is stopped.
Tsara'noga the Outsider is free, its insane gaze turned upon the stars once more. Its prison lays shattered in a godlike struggle unlike any seen since the War in Heaven. The creature that entered its cage, a monster not of the material realm, nor of its twisted reflection, is gone.'
The Triarch stopped at that, as if hesitant. Or had Szarekh changed his mind as he gathered his thoughts?
'We must do everything within our power to stop the mad Star God from running rampant, or all shall fall to its endless hunger. In this very moment, every warrior and sage loyal to their King has turned to the task of imprisoning the Outsider once more, if destroying it shall prove impossible once again. A whole C'tan cannot be allowed to roam free, diminished and mad or not. As for its foe...'
Did the Silent King's eyes flicker with rage, or was it a trick of the light? Szarekh had always been the master of his humours, for how else could have one undertook everything he had done? But such failure...the disruption of his Empire's ancient configuration, the unleashing of one of, if not its greatest monster...
'Our Crypteks confirm it: the creature, tentatively named the Terror, has returned to its cosmos of origin. It is a being of mad hunger, like the Outsider it unwittingly released when their powers clashed, and just as dangerous. But its quarrel is not with us!'Yet. 'The patterns of its spatiotemporal trail suggest it is hunting something, reaching ever deeper into the past of its universe. We say, let it hunt! For the stars are ours, as they have always been. As they will remain, even if it turns aside from its path and seeks to tear down our realm.' An unsubtle insinuation aimed at Szarekh's opponents, but you had to be blunt with some fools. Unity was the key, and the turncoats could still serve, by choice or by force, knowingly or not.
'Until then - should the Terror choose to haunt our galaxy - we shall dedicate our efforts to bringing Tsara'noga low, as we once have. The loyal will heed the call to serve, and stand victorious over a fallen Star God. The traitorous...'
The air vibrated, and the layered double-voice of the Triarch seemed to deepen, as if a third voice had been added.
'Willdie, weeping, surrounded by the ruins of their former glory, languishing in a wasteland of their own making. Such has always been the fate of those who have spat on the order devised by Szarekh, last of the Silent Kings, Breaker of Star Gods...'
* * *
AN: Might write a sequel to this, with the Terror in 40K and several factions making a temporary alliance against it.
