CHAPTER ONE

Before the being called the Emperor revealed Himself, before the rise of the aeldari, before the necrontyr traded their flesh for immortal metal, the world was born in violence.
And despite everything that would happen, this violence was more terrible than any the world later witnessed. For sweeping battlefronts are nothing compared to the torture of geologic change, and no warhead – no matter how large – can equal a billion years of volcanic upheaval.
It was a nameless world, for no one yet lived there to name it.
Ice sheets tall as a battle cruiser expanded and retreated. Tectonic plates ground continents together, their collision pushing up mountain ridges like teeth in the gums of a child. In the world’s great ocean, an undersea volcano spewed white-hot magma into the darkness of the oceanic floor, gradually building an island. Then another. The oceanic plate moved across the hotspot, carrying the created islands north-west as the volcanic boil continued to vent itself into the cold, black water. A long archipelago formed, like the dot-dash of an ancient code running across the jewelled blue of the sea.
The first civilisations rose around these islands, in a manner of speaking.
Microorganisms ruled the warm waters, their battle for survival as worthy as any that would come after. But their struggles, their triumphs and their cannibalisms went unremarked – even by the organisms themselves. Sentience was an unneeded complication.
Then came the great city-builders. Colonies of coral polyps that erected great funnel towers, branching architectural lattices in green and magenta, cities full of life and activity.
And like every great civilisation, they built upon the skeletons of those that had come before. Layer upon layer, each generation withering and ossifying, so the living stood unthinking upon a vast necropolis of their predecessors.
Perhaps the fish that weaved through these great reefs were the first sentient beings on the world. They had little emotion other than fear, pain and hunger, yet their arrival presaged a new era – no longer was life there a march of unfeeling organisms that existed in order to exist. They could now perceive.
When the great lizards emerged from the water, the struggle became one of legs and muscle and hearts beating blood fast through strong chambers. And though these great lizards were little more intelligent than the fish, they felt. They felt the pleasure of hot blood on their tongues, the agony of a festering wound, and maternal protectiveness. They died in great numbers, rotting corpses ground and crushed by geological processes into the diamonds and crude oil that other beings would, in time, murder each other to possess.
And a few, just a few, would enter a state of deathless preservation. Trapped in silt and unable to fully decay, the calcium of their bones replaced atom by atom with rock until they were but stone skeletons. Immortal in form, yet with nothing of their bodies remaining. A mockery of the vital living creatures they once were.
Life on the nameless world continued this way for billions of years, unheeded by the rest of the galaxy.
Then one night, a saurian scavenger sniffed the wind, sensing something had changed. Pointing her long snout towards the sky, she took in a sight that had never been encountered there before.
New stars burned in the rainbow smear of the sky. Points of light that clustered together with unnatural regularity. Lights that glowed with balefires, green as the island canopies, and moved across the sky as clouds did.
To the scavenger’s rudimentary brain, strange visual information like this could only be a hallucination brought on by consuming one of the island’s poisonous plants. Her body triggered a purge reflex, vomiting egg yolk and root plants before she darted for the twisted labyrinth of ground trees.
As the scavenger watched, judging the threat, the lights descended. The creatures were large, with great sickle wings swept forward and bodies so black they barely stood out against the night.
Like any who survived on the island, the scavenger knew a predator when she saw one.
Cold emerald light spilled from the creatures’ bellies, and the scavenger detected the foreign scent of sand baked into glass.
Two-legged creatures stepped out of the emanation, feet shattering the plate of fused beach. Starlight glinted off their bodies like sun on the sea, and their eyes burned the same green as the lights on the flying predators.
The world would be nameless no longer.CHAPTER TWO

Aeldari World of Cepharil, Eastern Fringe
Ten Thousand Years Before the Great Awakening

Ancient stories, passed from the lips of spirit-singer to spirit-singer, held that anyone who touched the stone would burn.
Thy hand shall curl and turn black
Thy back-teeth glow white-hot
Thy bones crack like fire-logs
For I have drunk from elder suns
The songs held that the gemstone was a meteorite. Wandering, semi-sentient. Absorbing the energy of each star it passed. During the War in Heaven, it was said that warriors had used it to channel the gods themselves.
Trazyn, however, had learned long ago not to believe the absurdities of aeldari folklore. Ancient though their race was, they were still given to the follies of an organic brain.
Trazyn had travelled the galaxy for so long he’d forgotten what year he’d started. Collecting. Studying. Ordering the cultures of the cosmos.
And one thing he’d learned was that every society thought their mountain was special. That it was more sacred than the mountain worshipped by their neighbouring tribe. That it was the one true axis of the universe.
Even when informed that their sacred ridge was merely the random connection of tectonic plates, or their blessed sword a very old but relatively common alien relic – a revelation they universally did not appreciate, he found – they clung to their stories.
Which is not to say there were not gods in the firmament, of course. Trazyn knew there were, because he had helped kill them. But he’d also found that most of what societies took to be gods were inventions of their own, charmingly fanciful, imaginations.
But though he did not believe the gem channelled ancient gods, that did not mean it wasn’t worth having – or worth the aeldari protecting.
Indeed, the sounds of a siege echoed through the bone halls.
Trazyn allowed a portion of his consciousness to stray, if only to moni­tor the situation. Part of his mind worked the problem at hand, the other looked through the oculars of his lychguard captain.
Through the being’s eyes, Trazyn saw that his lychguard phalanx still held the gates of the temple. Those in the front rank had locked their dispersion shields in a wall, each raising their hyperphase sword like the hammer of a cocked pistol. Behind them, those in the second rank held their warscythes as spears, thrusting them over the shoulders of their comrades so the entire formation bristled with humming blades.
Perfectly uniform, Trazyn noticed. And perfectly still.
Exodite bodies littered the steps before them – feather-adorned mesh armour split with surgical-straight lines, limbs and heads detached. His olfactory sensors identified particles of cooked muscle in the air.
Another attack was massing. In the garden plaza before the temple, where five dirt streets converged, aeldari Exodites flitted between decorative plants and idols carved from massive bones.
In the distance, he could see the lumbering form of a great lizard, long necked and powerful, with twin prism cannons slung on its humped back. Trazyn marked it as a target for the two Doom Scythes flying a support pattern overhead.
Shuriken rounds swept in, rattling the necron shields like sleet on a windowpane. One disc sailed into the ocular cavity of a lychguard and lodged there, bisecting the grim fire of his eye. The warrior did not react. Did not break formation. With a shriek of protesting metal, the living alloy of his skull forced the monomolecular disc free and it fluttered to the steps like a falling leaf.
Trazyn looked at the pattern of it through the captain’s vision. Circular, with double spiral channels. A common aeldari design, not worth acquiring.
He sensed a change in the air and looked up to see the first Doom Scythe streaking down in an attack run. At the last moment the great lizard heard it, rotating around its serpentine head to stare at the incoming comet.
A beam of white-hot energy lanced from the Doom Scythe’s fuselage, tracing a line of flame through the lush undergrowth. It passed through the creature’s long neck and the top third of it fell like a cut tree branch. The great body staggered, heeled, stayed upright. Then the next Doom Scythe lanced it through the midsection and set off the payload on its prism cannons. Cascading detonations tore the creature apart, the purple energy blast throwing the weapons crew hundreds of cubits away.
Pity, Trazyn thought as he watched the carcass burn. I wanted one of those.
But he had no time for such side projects. Conch shell horns sounded across the rainforest-girdled spires of the city, and already he could see more great lizards lumbering towards the temple. One rotated a twin-barrelled shuriken cannon towards the sky and began spitting fire at the retreating Scythes. Though they were primitive, once the Exodites marshalled their numbers his small acquisition force would be overwhelmed.
Cepharil was awakening to defend its World Spirit.
Trazyn left the lychguard captain’s body, rejoined his consciousness, and focused on the task at hand.
Before him stretched a long wraithbone corridor, likely salvaged from whatever craftworld these fundamentalists had used to begin their self-imposed exile. Bas-relief carvings depicting the society’s exodus, fashioned from the bones of the great lizards, decorated the walls.
Trazyn had been scrying for traps, detecting pressure plates and a huge mechanical fulcrum hidden in the masonry. Beyond that waited the cyclopean gates of the inner chamber.
He finished his calculations and saw the way through.
Trazyn picked up his empathic obliterator and strode into the corridor.
Eyeholes in the bas-reliefs coughed, sending clouds of bone darts clattering off his necrodermis. Trazyn snatched one out of the air and analysed the tip: an exotic poison derived from a local marine invertebrate, unique to this world.
He slipped it into a dimensional pocket and continued forward, sensing a stone shift and sink beneath him.
A piece of masonry, hammer-shaped and weighing six tons, swept down at him like a pendulum. Trazyn waved at it without stopping, the stasis projection from his palm emitter halting its progress mid-swing. He passed it without a glance, its surface vibrating with potential energy.
Finally, the gate. Tall as a monolith, it was decorated with exquisite carvings of aeldari gods. A vertical strip of runes laid out a poem-riddle so fiendish, it would stop even the wisest if they did not know the obscure lore of the–
‘Tailliac sawein numm,’ intoned Trazyn, turning sideways so he could slip through the gates as they ground open.
Normally, he would have put some effort into it. Solved it by thought, then performed a textual analysis. Trazyn enjoyed riddles. They revealed so much about the cultures that shaped them. But a noemic notice from his lychguards suggested that the Exodites were pressing harder than anticipated. No time for amusing diversions.
He hadn’t paused to process the meaning of the runes, just fed them through his lexigraphic database and cross-referenced double meanings, inferences and mythological connotations. Even now, he could not have explained what the answer to the riddle was, or what it meant. It was merely a linguistic equation, a problem with an answer.
An answer that had brought him into the presence of the World Spirit.
The chamber swept up around him like a cavernous grotto, its upper reaches lost in the echoing vaults of the ceiling. His metal feet sounded off a causeway, its wraithbone marbled with veins of gold. Filigreed balu­strades on either side mimicked the corals of the ocean depths, for Cepharil was a world of warm seas and lush archipelagos. On either side of the walkway, pools of liquid platinum cast watery light across the walls.
‘Now,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Where are you, my lovely?’
Before him rose the World Spirit.
It curved ahead, inlayed into the vaulted surface of the far wall. It too was made of bone, but rather than the old, inert wraithbone of the walls and ceiling this sprouted alive from the floor, branching like a fan of tree roots that had grown up instead of down.
No, Trazyn corrected, that was not quite accurate. His oculars stripped away the outer layers of the World Spirit, refocusing on the veins of energy that ran through the psychoactive material. Arcane power pulsed to and fro in a circulatory system, racing through arteries and nerves as it travelled to the highest forks of the network and back to the floor. Not roots, then – antlers. Yes, that was it, a great set of antlers, large as a mountain, the points of its forks curving away from the wall. Here and there it sprouted buds, fuzzy with new growth.
Exquisite.
Stepping closer, Trazyn appraised the object. The substance was not wraithbone, he noted, at least not entirely. This was a hybrid, a substitute, grown from the skeletons of the great lizards and interwoven with the psycho-plastic wraithbone salvaged from their crashed ship. A gene-sequence scry failed to find where one substance began and the other ended, no points where the ancient craftsman had fused or grafted the two materials together. This was a seamless blend, nurtured and shaped over millions of years, wraithbone woven between the molecules of reactive, but lower quality, dinosaurid remains. A masterwork by one of the finest bonesingers in the galaxy, an act of artistry and devotion that was at once temple, mausoleum and metropolis. A place for the souls of his slain aeldari ancestors to be at rest, united and safeguarded from the hungry gods of the aether.
Trazyn carried towards it on tireless legs, craning his hunched neck to see where the highest forks disappeared in the darkness of the vault. Once, his own kind had been able to accomplish works such as this. But the process of biotransference, the blighted gift that had moved their consciousness to deathless metal bodies, had also burned away nearly all artistry. His kind were no longer artisans or poets. Those few that retained the knack found their powers diminished. Now they forged rather than created. A work that took this much care, this much love, was beyond them.
Such a shame he could not take the whole thing.
Given time he could extract it, perhaps even lock the entire temple in a stasis field and transplant it whole to his historical gallery on Solemn­ace. To have the gemstone in its original context would be a rare coup. But somehow these primitives had sensed the coming of his acquisition phalanx, and there was no time. In truth, he had broken protocol by waking even thirty of the lychguard before their time. Doing so had damaged their neural matrices, making them little more than auto­matons that followed tactical programs and explicit commands.
But if they could not remember this expedition, so much the better – Trazyn was not supposed to be here anyway.
He approached the base of the World Spirit – the chamber was a full league across – and beheld the true genius of its creation.
The structure sprouted from the skull of a predator lizard twice Trazyn’s height, its lower jaw removed and sickle-like upper teeth buried in the wraithbone floor. A glow, like the orange light cast by wind-stoked embers, emanated from the cavities of the creature’s eye sockets.
Trazyn’s vision stripped away layers of bone and he saw the gemstone embedded in the predator’s fist-sized brain cavity.
‘A carnosaur. Astonishing.’
He brushed a metal hand over the skull’s cranium, an emitter in the palm casting electromagnetic radiation through its core.
It was old. Older than he had thought possible. Indeed, perhaps Trazyn should have tempered his dismissal of the aeldari tales, for it was indeed a meteorite, and one of extreme antiquity and unknown make-up. He reviewed the spectromantic divination results manually, to confirm its findings. Given the age of the components, their degradation, and the style on the beam-cut faces of the gem, it was entirely possible that it dated from the War in Heaven.
A delicious shiver passed through Trazyn’s circuitry.
‘Well met, my dear,’ he said, his cooing tone offset by the hollow echo of his vocal emitter. ‘It is not so often that I meet a thing as old as I am.’
He was so entranced, in fact, that he did not see the dragon riders coming.
Deep focus tended to dim his circumspection protocols, and the beasts’ footfalls had been masked via training and sorcery.
And for all his inputs, scryers, protocols and diviners, the movements of the empyrean were muffled in his senses. When it came to warp sorcery, he was like a deaf man at a dinner table, able to make out words through dampened sounds and lip-reading, but unable to even notice the voices behind his back.
An interstitial alert flashed in his vision and he wheeled, dialling back his chronosense to slow the world and give himself time to calculate a microsecond decision.
Scales, claws and sawtooth fangs were about to break down on him like a wave – twenty cavalry riding knee to knee in tight formation, wraithbone lances braced, tattooed swirls on arrowhead-sharp faces. Scrimshawed charms dangled from the halters of their raptor mounts, each leather harness crisscrossing a scaled snout that ended in flared nostrils and hooked teeth. The raptors – underwater slow in Trazyn’s enhanced vision – swung their avian frames low, shifting weight to their bunched haunches in preparation for a final lunge.
One lance came at him so directly, its tip looked like a circle in his vision.
Minimal options, none attractive. But his proximity to the World Spirit had at least given him a moment to act as they pulled their charge, afraid of smashing into their venerated ancestral tomb.
Trazyn slid left, past the first lance tip.
Before the warrior could swing the long weapon around, Trazyn gripped the haft and tore the tattooed Aspect Warrior from his saddle. He watched the rider’s face twist as he fell from the mount, long hair flying free and hands sheltering his face as he tumbled to the bone floor.
Trazyn, who is called Infinite, a voice said. It was not audible speech. Nor was it telepathy, to which he was immune. Instead, it was a wavelength of psychic pulses pushing on his auditory transducer to mimic language. One of these riders must be a farseer.
He ignored it.
The riderless raptor struck at him, jaws closing on the place where his ribcage met his hooded neck. Trazyn had overcommitted himself and could not dodge.
You will not keep what you seek.
Hooked teeth met the cold surface of his necrodermis – and shattered.
Trazyn channelled kinetic force into his fist and punched the dinosaur in the throat.
Vertebrae popped, cartilage tore. The raptor went down with the noise of a bugle player experiencing sudden and unbearable agony.
Listen to the song. This world sings for the blood of Trazyn.
And it was true – even through the syrupy haze of slowed time he could hear the keening chants of the knights. That he did not have blood was no matter, these aeldari wanted it anyway.
But their formation was not optimised to deal with a single opponent. It was jumbling, folding as the knights tried to get to him. And he had just created a gap.
As the unit tried to wheel on itself, Trazyn slipped through the hole in the line – making sure to step on the fallen warrior on his way through.
Behind him, riders collided and mixed.
‘Aeldari,’ he scoffed. ‘So old and wise. You are children to us.’
This World Spirit is our ancestry, Trazyn. Our culture. Our dead. And it will wither without the Solar Gem.
That’s when Trazyn saw the carnosaur. He’d missed it before now, his focus overwhelmed by the charging raptor riders and senses clouded by witchery. It reared above him, its well-muscled chest protected by a breastplate shaped from dinosaurid bone, twin-linked shuriken cannons emerging like tusks from its chin. Serrated blades fashioned from the teeth of aquatic predators studded the armour plates clamped to its feet and spine. A calcium scythe capped its lashing tail.
And on its back, the farseer – her willow-thin face half-covered by the mask of an unfamiliar god, graceful frame armoured in mother-of-pearl, and pink hair gathered into a topknot.
We have long known that you desire it, but if you take it, the World Spirit will die.
‘If you knew I was coming,’ Trazyn said. ‘You should have made a contingency plan.’
I know you will return, the farseer said. But I will still enjoy this.
The carnosaur bit down on him at the waist, his whole upper half trapped inside the wet darkness of its mouth. Nine-inch fangs – even now, he could not stop analysing, cataloguing – sank into the tough tubes and pelvic ambulation structures of his torso. Vital systems tore and failed. Emerald sparks erupted from the wound, lighting the interior of the carnosaur’s mouth with baleful flashes. He felt his legs separate.Trazyn channelled his diminishing reserves into a fist and reshaped it into a brutal spike. He stabbed at the carnosaur’s lashing tongue, hot reptilian blood spurting over his oculars. To his annoyance, his systems autonomously ran an analysis of the genetic make-up.He marked it to read later.
The muscular tongue flipped and rolled him to the side. He sprawled, saw a sawtooth strip of light as the jaws opened.
He regretted slowing his chronosense as he watched the row of jagged teeth close on him, puncturing his oculars, driving through his neural fibre spools and crushing his skull.CHAPTER THREE

The World Song moves us. Speaks to us. Touch the rocks, young warrior, and you will feel it vibrate the very stone. When the metal glutton comes, you will know it is time to fight for this world.
– Prophecies of Awlunica of Cepharil,
Tablet Seven, Inscription XII

Trazyn did not, on the whole, enjoy being dead.
Which is why – unlike the aeldari sorceress – he’d made contingencies.
His consciousness rushed into the lychguard captain’s mind, over­riding the native personality and banishing it to the depths of the captain’s engrammatic databanks. Depending on the host, this could be a struggle. But the captain had awoken from stasis damaged and simple, an easy takeover. It was a state Trazyn preferred in his companions, to be honest, since it made them less likely to speak of what they’d witnessed. The Awakened Council knew of Trazyn’s project and his galleries, but not everything he collected would meet with their approval.
And they would particularly disapprove of awakening their kin early, and getting them destroyed, for a personal venture like this.
Within a second, he reshaped the captain’s malleable necrodermis, the living metal flowing and changing to take on Trazyn’s familiar shape. His hood sprang up segment by segment, rising over his head as the lychguard’s death mask rearranged into his own features. A cloak grew out from his shoulders, each scale popping into existence with a little ping.
When he gained vocal control, the first thing he said was, ‘Damn.’
His newly hijacked oculars told him that things were no longer running to plan.
Four lychguard lay on the steps, sparking green, their metal flesh attempting to knit together despite horrendous wounds. The shuriken fire was a torrent now, coming from every angle. Skirmishers fired and moved in blurs so fast Trazyn could barely see their troop type. One Doom Scythe wobbled by, its exterior choked by pterosaurs that had hooked on to its superstructure, digging into its wires and its exposed cockpit. As he watched, one took the pilot’s head in its beak and, with a twist of its long neck, snapped it away. The Doom Scythe lost control and tumbled into the rainforest like a tossed coin. It struck the plaza and ploughed through a bone god-column before detonating in a superheated blast of smoke and emerald lightning.
He had brought a team of only thirty lychguard, a Night Scythe for transport and two Doom Scythes for aerial cover – the sort of force that would not raise any alarms among the Council upon its awakening. Even for the aeldari – whose speed made them dangerous – that was generally enough. A shock assault force to secure the target or create a diversion while Trazyn recovered the specimen. On a normal acquisition, they were on the ground for no longer than an hour, often half that. They usually withdrew just as the locals mounted a response.
But the counter-attack had been almost instantaneous, as if the aeldari had detected the necron air assets, or sensed the distortion of the Night Scythe’s transport wormhole.
Or they foresaw me coming, Trazyn thought. Cursed witches.
A pterosaur, its hide painted ochre with handprints, dived into the formation and snatched up a lychguard like a bird of prey taking a rodent. It flew the struggling warrior up into the air, its rider leaning out of the saddle almost upside down to riddle the necron with dual shuriken pistols. Then, the beast dropped him three hundred cubits to the plaza flagstones.
Trazyn saw more pterosaur riders incoming, a ‘V’ in the sky preparing to heel over and dive.
‘Fall back!’ he called. ‘Fall back inside the temple, defend the sanctum. Beware aerial attacks.’
The force retreated in lockstep, without a glance backward to place their feet.
He summoned his empathic obliterator, the long haft of the weapon starting in his palm and building itself one atom at a time until it stood eight feet tall from pointed base to the glowing jade wings of its head. Trazyn swept it over his formation, doubling their marching speed, and then pointed the obliterator’s inbuilt resurrection orb at the fallen lychguard, watching as their shattered bodies glowed with arcane energies, spines snapping and joints popping as bent limbs straightened and dismembered pieces flew together as if magnetised.
As the tide of aeldari surged up the steps, a lychguard sprang back to its feet among them. One arm still missing, its hyperphase sword carved bloody crescents in the Exodites. The aeldari skirmishers fell upon him and the other rising dead, piercing their metal bodies with knives.
‘That should stall them,’ Trazyn said, and turned back into the temple.
He passed the outer sanctum of coral statuary, tramped through the rain of poison darts in the corridor and pushed the hammer column – still locked in stasis – contemptuously aside.
This time, he uttered no riddle. He simply took his obliterator in both hands and brought it down on the join. Legend held that the weapon contained a relic from a long-vanished species, a talisman of power designed to break the minds and souls of lesser races.
That seemed, as far as Trazyn was concerned, accurate.
The great winged staff head connected with a lightning flash and the acrid smell of disintegrated stone. An energy discharge rocked the huge gates on their hinges, blowing them backward and spreading cracks for five cubits down the wraithbone floor.
Trazyn strode out on the causeway and saw what he’d expected: the knights in formation, already urging their slavering beasts on towards him, and the farseer behind, her carnosaur’s footfalls shaking the chamber, roaring its defiance through teeth stained with its own blood and blacked by the fire of Trazyn’s last death.
As much as he hated them, they were exquisite. Burnished wraithbone helms, millions of years old, shining in the watery light of the platinum pools. Lance pennants woven from void-silk, insubstantial as smoke, streaming. The terrible majesty of the mutated carnosaur and the regality of its rider, her shoulders burdened with a cloak fashioned from the plumage of native birds.
They made the causeway, bore down on him.
He, in turn, held up a cube darker than the emptiness of space. Prismatic light speared out in a beam, danced on the lead rider, then spread in an arc. Questing, analysing, measuring the dimensions of each rippling muscle and strand of perfumed hair.
A keening whine emanated from the box. It shook in Trazyn’s mechanical grip. He triggered the lock.
The charge stopped. It did not falter, or pull back, it merely ceased movement. Raptors froze mid-leap. The carnosaur’s bellow was cut off. All was still, save for the void-silk banners, which due to their unusual physical properties, continued to slowly ripple in a non-existent wind.
And then it was gone, all of it. Not even a scent remained.
Trazyn walked through the empty air and approached the World Spirit. He so disliked to run, but the shortness of time hastened his footsteps.
‘Do not worry,’ he said to the cube, which burned so cold that none but a necron would be able to hold it. ‘You will not be separated from your beloved gem.’
Trazyn plunged a fist through the ancient carnosaur skull. Its brittle structure cracked and sundered under the blow. Aeldari souls rushed up from the fractured calcium like embers, drifting out of whatever wraithbone had been woven around and through it.
He closed his hand around the gem and pulled it free.
His hand did not curl and blacken. His back teeth did not go white-hot. His bones did not crack.
And he had no regrets.
Until, at least, he received the security alert: something had broken loose on Solemnace.
It was easier if he focused on small things.
The whorl of the cosmos was too vast, too chaotic. There was no order of operation. Like a neurocircuit full of tangled wires, it was impossible to know where each led until you took it between your fingers and followed it.
Knowing where to start, that was the hard part.
So he started from the beginning, when all matter lay in the same place. Orderly. Satisfying. Nothing but oneness and potential energy. The last moment when the universe was truly at peace.
He savoured it, aware that it was not real. Indeed, there was no guarantee the universe began this way at all. It was merely an engram-simulation of a theorem, a meditative aid authentic enough to trick his own mind into emptying so he could feel the flows of time and matter. During powerful rituals, whole solar cycles would pass with him in this state.
He let it happen.
An explosion. He screened out the noise and clutter, focusing on what he wanted to find. Saw it, followed it.
A single particle tumbled through the dark – then light was born, and he saw the little mote whisked away on the eddies of the void, collecting with other particles of its type. Watched ages pass as it built from a speck, to a rock, to a meteorite. Watched it, haloed by flame, enter the atmosphere and bury itself in a nameless continent. Watched as a necron extractor-wraith bored the meteorite free.
Necrodermis can be reused an infinite number of times. The particle was first imbedded in the hip joint of a warrior. Then, a monolith’s hull. A piece of jewellery lost and recycled.
Then – yes, there it was. Inside a cable in a doorway neurocircuitry panel. Ancient, faulty. Its alloy impure from the moment of creation untold ages ago, stressed from overuse. Half-life draining. Waiting for the moment it was fated to short.
He reached out with a spectral hand and helped the moment come.
Glyphs, each as tall as the intruder, lit up in two rows. Sigils of protection, threatening death to any that dare enter without the assent of Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace.
The threat might have been more potent if the glyphs themselves were not guttering like lamp wicks in a gale, the electrical fault cascading throughout the gateway. Finally, the great slab ground backward and parted between the columns of glyphs, each massive piece separating and sliding behind the inner wall of the chamber.
Trazyn had been collecting artefacts for his gallery for aeons, now. Not even the Dead Gods themselves knew how long. And while he knew his collection better than any being alive, the sprawling complex of halls and exhibition spaces was as much a labyrinth to him as it was to the intruder. Architect-wraiths followed standing orders to build outward, meaning that the facility sprawled in every direction with chambers Trazyn himself had never commissioned or visited. Some proved perfect housing for new acquisitions, while others languished, forgotten for millennia.
This was one such forgotten gallery. Empty and sterile, sealed directly after its creation. No construction debris marred its shining blackstone floor. Not even dust settled on the empty display plinths.
But before the intruder lay a group of work-scarabs. They lay on their backs like stones collected together in a river, spindly legs pointing skyward to harvest ambient energy waves to power their dormant energy banks.
The intruder stirred his metal fingers over the mindless drones, casting an interstitial command that awakened them from their slumber. He followed by interlocking his fingers in the Hexagram of Thuul, ­severing them from the security network.
He knelt down to their level, leaning heavily on his staff. For a moment, he paused to admire the aquamarine plates of their carapace. Gold fili­gree, set in geometric circuit-patterns, inlaid in their jewelled casings.
Nihilakh Dynasty, the intruder thought, sighing. So rich, yet so vulgar. Not even the lowest scarab escapes your garish eye.
Then, leaning down to the awakened scarabs, he whispered where he wanted to go.
Legs skittered on the hard surface of the floor, almost in excitement, then the swarm departed as one, milling around the intruder and passing over his clawed feet in their haste to direct him to the proper corridor.
Orikan the Diviner, Master Astromancer of the Sautekh Dynasty, architect of time, and the last seer of the necrontyr followed them.
Trazyn stepped out of the wormhole and closed it behind him.
No one else would be coming back.
It had been a near-run thing. Much closer than he would’ve liked. With the World Spirit bleeding power, the panicking aeldari savages had overwhelmed the lychguard defending the temple’s gateway and forced themselves inside.
Trazyn had fled upward, climbing lizard-rib stairways to an upper gallery and used his obliterator to blast a passageway through the wraithbone dome.
The Night Scythe had been waiting for him outside, hovering upside down to protect the captive wormhole on its belly. Its wings were scored to black metal by the shuriken volleys peppering it from below, gold and green decorative dermis flaking off like rust.
Trazyn got a glimpse of the aeldari temple complex – the rainforest canopy far below him, broken here and there by monoliths and bone arches – before he leapt onto the underside of the Scythe, strode across its pitted skin and dropped into the wormhole.
He left the Scythes with an order to return, or if too heavily damaged, expend all ammunition then ram a high-priority target. Preferably one of the cursed carnosaurs.
‘Chief archaeovist, overlord, master.’ Sannet the Light-Sculptor, Trazyn’s chief curator, knelt. His eight-fingered hands splayed on the polished floor in obeisance. ‘Solemnace rejoices at your return.’
‘Does it?’ Trazyn responded, looking around at the receiving party. It was just Sannet, accompanied by an archive wraith ready to receive the artefacts. Behind them, a hallway wide enough to refurbish a battle-barge stretched empty for thousands of cubits. ‘I see.’
Solemnace was not rejoicing. Indeed, it would not celebrate anything, by Trazyn’s calculation, for ten millennia or more. Solemnace was a dormant world, its officials, warriors and servants in the stasis-death of the Great Sleep. Only Trazyn had awakened early, and he needed a mere skeleton crew to keep the world running at the standard he preferred.
‘A successful endeavour, my lord?’
Trazyn swept a hand over the stasis-caskets on the wraith’s back. The ­jewelled boxes opened, pale wisps of blue vapour curling from their ­interiors. Trazyn set the gem into the larger box and closed the lid manually, ensuring it locked. He nestled the tesseract labyrinth containing the aeldari war host in the smaller box, giving its top a merry tap for good measure.
‘My lord, is this for archive, or display?’ Sannet conjured a stylus out of his necrodermis and held it expectantly over the phos-glyph projection tablet that hovered in his hand.
‘The primitives shall be displayed in the aeldari diaspora gallery with the rest of their kin.’
‘Between the craftworlders and drukhari displays, I assume.’
The stylus danced on the light of the hologram tablet as Sannet spoke. Normally a necron would not need such a thing, but like many who had arisen from the Great Sleep, Sannet’s neural matrix had degraded over sixty million years. The deterioration had affected his short-term mnemonics. He could remember chains of code-hexes yet fail to recall what had just been said. The constant note-taking, obnoxious as it was, helped with that. Auditory information would not imprint on his engrams, but the tactile experience of writing the words created a work­around. Though he could no longer serve as the cryptek he’d once been, Trazyn valued him for his skill with hard-light hologram projections – the method he had chosen to display his collection.
Everyone had their damage. Of the few who’d already arisen, several of the old highborn of necrontyr emerged not knowing their names. Others were complete automatons, or even mad. In dark moments, Trazyn feared that in ten thousand years, when the dynasties began to awaken in full, he would find all of his peers had diminished.
Not he, though. Trazyn had emerged with his faculties entirely intact.
‘My lord?’ Sannet cocked his head, the aperture of his single cyclopic eye narrowing. ‘Permission to repeat the question?’
‘Hmm? You may.’
‘And what shall I do with the gem?’
‘The gem,’ Trazyn mused. He folded his hands and tapped his index fingers together with a soft tink, tink, tink. ‘Upon reconsideration, I will handle this specimen myself.’ He opened the box and scooped up the precious stone, feeling its warmth, and stowed it amongst the collection of trinkets hanging at his hip. ‘The determination will have to wait pending appraisal, of course, but this may be one of the oldest objects yet collected. Meet me in the War in Heaven gallery.’
Trazyn turned to go, summoning his Catacomb command barge with a thought, then stopped.
An interstitial message burned in the corner of his vision, the holographic phos-glyphs casting a jade glow on Trazyn’s death mask. Security glyphs blinked on its message seal.
He opened the message, unfurling it downward like a scroll, absorbing the technical data like the calculation machine he was. ‘What’s this, Sannet?’
Sannet opened an identical alert. ‘Exhibit breach, in the Dawnward Sector. Gallery MXXIII, Thoth subcontinent, coordinates 52.941472, -1.174056.’
‘The hrud burrow ecosystem,’ Trazyn snarled. He conjured a holographic image.
The image was dim in colour, tinged with the green corposant of the chrysoprase projection, but the visuals were crisp and comprehensible. A barrel-shaped container of earth – four thousand cubits wide, and three thousand tall – floated in suspensor fields at the centre of a vast chamber. Long-limbed creatures milled about the top, struggling from holes in its surface.
Trazyn sliced at the hologram with his fingers and it split in two like a cutaway schematic. On the inside of the earthen plug, tunnels wormed their way between vaulted worship chambers and earthen family burrows. Hrud scrambled upward, sensing their moment to escape had come. After all, they had been imprisoned inside hard-light holograms – caught like insects in amber – for at least two millennia. Thoughts frozen at the moment of their acquisition, with only the most astute and neuro­logically gifted sensing that any time had passed at all. Those races steeped in the empyrean – for whom the tides of the warp were part of their very make-up – tended not to fare as well.
They tended to go mad.
Like these hrud, for instance. Tearing each other apart with their shovel-like digging claws, spattering odd, viscous flesh on the tunnel walls. Strange arms, articulated like a spine, doubled in on themselves as they struck at each other like drovers whipping at a herd.
‘Seismic activity?’ asked Trazyn. That was usually the cause.
‘No reports of stasis field failure on the tectonic plates, lord archaeovist,’ Sannet replied. ‘Tesseract restart protocol and stasis containment not answering.’
‘Deploy the containment phalanx,’ Trazyn said. ‘With swiftness.’
‘And hurt the exhibits, lord?’
‘They’re panicking, trying to dig out,’ Trazyn said, pointing at the milling creatures choking the corridors. A few had split off, and were tearing at the walls, trying to find the sunlight they so despised. Anything but the centuries of claustrophobic dark. ‘I have at least ten thousand more hrud in storage, but Dead Gods know when I’ll acquire another intact burrow. Act now, and we can minimise tunnel and gallery collapses and repopulate the display.’
Sannet’s multijointed fingers danced over a floating glyph-panel, making Trazyn recall the waving sea anemones of the World Spirit chamber.
‘Immortals, lord?’
‘Indeed.’
Reality cracked and sizzled among the panicking hrud, green energy blossoms searing into being as the Immortals translated to the display’s surface. Hrud dropped, arms knotting and beating the ground in spontaneous seizure.
Lesser creatures, Trazyn reflected, so vulnerable to translation proximity.
He made a mnemonic record of the thought, factoring it into his next acquisition venture. Wasteful to harm a specimen unnecessarily.
The Immortals swung their double-barrelled gauss blasters up as one and picked their first shot.
Each one acquired a different target. No redundancy, no wasted effort, no need to strategise. Networked combat algorithms meant every Immortal knew the others’ next action. They tracked their firing solutions as they waited for the order.
‘Execute,’ said Trazyn, sending the impulse command even before the words left his lipless mouth.
Ropy beams of energy erupted from the gauss blasters, pulling the hrud apart from the inside out, coiled electricity melting their flesh like hot breath dissolves frost. Viridian lightning raced from the emitter chambers of tesla carbines, dancing through the crowded knots of alien bodies, lighting spot fires in their filthy robes where it lanced through them.
Before the alien screams crescendoed, before the tangled stream of hrud could reverse their flight and take shelter in the tunnels, before even the crack of the tesla carbines ended, the Immortals picked new targets and fired again.
‘Tesla cannons stay above ground,’ ordered Trazyn. ‘Dial back gauss blasters. Enable beam limiters to affect flesh and blood only. Any being who so much as scorches a bas-relief in the burrow chapels gets remade into a mining scarab.’
‘Will you supervise personally?’ enquired Sannet.
Trazyn had planned to, of course. Stream his consciousness down into one of the Immortals. Ensure the job was done right.
And yet…
Trazyn had no palms to itch. No spine to tingle. No stomach to knot when he sensed a thing out of place. Yet he still possessed a subconscious.
It was an irony of the necron race that, despite all their technological mastery, the workings of their own minds remained mysterious. Trazyn’s neural systems had been wrought by the transcendent star gods, whose ways were mysterious and vicious. Trazyn did not understand how it was possible, but there were still things locked away in his mind, buried, felt rather than known.
Like a sense of danger.
He conjured a phos-glyph panel, split it into five sections, and searched through the inscription-code, slowing his chronosense so that he could process libraries of data in seconds.
‘Lord?’
‘Fault protocols should’ve caught the tesseract failure,’ he said.
‘They did, lord archaeovist. But they failed.’
‘Obviously,’ he sneered, pointing. ‘The protocol should’ve been instant­aneous. Instead it took two microseconds. Why?’
‘Ageing systems? Solemnace is…’ He caught Trazyn’s look and trailed off, casting his monocular downward as he searched for a euphemism that would not besmirch the overlord’s beloved gallery. ‘Historic?’
‘And the alert systems, they were unaffected by this fault, I suppose?’ He looked down on his cryptek. ‘This is sabotage. And not clumsy sabo­tage. Show me all completed door activations and curatorial assets.’
‘Lord, I… odd.’
‘Save the commentary for manuscript analysis,’ he snapped. ‘Report.’
‘I have a gate activation in the reserve gallery space. Several. Two standard solar orbits ago. Encryption key matches a swarm of maintenance scarabs that are not listed as active.’
‘Headed where?’
Lights eternally burned in the War in Heaven gallery. It was the only way Trazyn could stand to come here.
He was not a superstitious being. Losing one’s soul, after all, tended to dampen one’s fear of the mystic. And the great necropolis-capital of ancient necrontyr – filled with a blighted, death-obsessed people – was funereal long before his species had imprisoned their minds inside bodies of deathless necrodermis. Indeed, stasis-crypts covered Solemn­ace, each of his billions of subjects nestled in a sarcophagus that sustained their cold, metal bodies. It was the same on tomb worlds across the galaxy.
But just because one was dead did not mean he could not be haunted, and Trazyn entered this chamber of memory with bowed head and soft steps even when he was not expecting an ambush.
He kept to the deep shadows, reshaping the necrodermis on the bottom of his feet into a spongy wire lattice that cushioned his armoured tread. He kept focus, forcing himself not to look at the rows of plinths that surrounded him in a double line like a phaeron’s honour guard.
They were enemies. Here, an aeldari stood mid-leap, the tip of her wraithbone dance slipper barely kissing the black display base. Next, a hulking krork, mountainous shoulders bunched and slick with battle-sweat. A Khaineite warrior in green armour, crouched low, legs wide, weaving his chainsword forward and up as if hooking it under a lychguard’s shield. A jokaero maintenance-slave.
And across from them, blank dummies wearing the resplendent armour of the ancient necrontyr. A reminder of a time when they needed armour, before their bodies were living metal. The old times, sixty-five million years gone. The Flesh Times.
Their long shadows met in the centre, mingling as if they still battled.
Trazyn remembered the war. As chief archaeovist, he had attended every clash that logistics allowed. Recording impressions, taking samples. Attending the embalming of each great phaeron that fell to the Old Ones and their twisted creations. These were old mnemonics, blurry like image-plate negatives cooked by heat. Burned away by the process of biotransference that had placed him in this eternal body.
He could not even remember what his old body had looked like. At times, his mind reconstructed an image – or what he thought was an image – for a microsecond. The curve of long fingers gripping a stylus. Dark pupils staring back from a burnished mirror. Gone, always gone, the moment his mind’s eye tried to focus on it. A self-protection protocol.
What came after the flames, that was clearer. Titanic clashes. Armies of metal marching with dire purpose into the faltering lines of the reptilian Old Ones. Imotekh the stormlord, carving through the piteous ancient ones like the necrontyr death god they’d discovered was all too real. The Dead Gods, the ones he had helped murder, mouths afire as they feasted on innumerable suns. And then these aeldari and krork, beings so adept at their own particular aspect of violence. One all rage and clamour, the other grace and silence.
These intrusive mnemonic routines ran in the background, passing in the span of a finger snap as he stalked forward, primary subroutines looking for evidence of the intruder.
Scry-filters layered over his oculars, searching for security anomalies. He could see the stasis fields surrounding each plinth, shimmering like the air above a candle flame. Protection against seismic violence in this most precious of galleries. The bulbous, ever-flowing swell of the magnetic fields pressed upon each other, ensuring that nothing save Trazyn could pass without triggering an alarm.
Then he saw the hex, and relief flooded his cold hydraulics.
Because to think about this problem meant banishing thoughts of the past.
Two magnetic fields had been parted where they met, pinned back with technomantic hexes that burned with the blue-white glow of arcing electricity. Occult glyphs, engraved on the very skin of reality.
Trazyn was no sorcerer. He had little talent for the occult arts, and less patience – besides, he was an overlord, he had crypteks to deal with that sort of thing. Delegation was one of the chief joys of power.
Yet Trazyn knew hex-work. He could appreciate the fineness of the calligraphy and radiant strength inherent in the techno-plasm. He took mnemonic image-records of it for his crypteks as he ducked through the break in the field.
Trazyn nearly missed the curse-snare just beyond it – would have, if he’d been anywhere else. Yet he knew every atom of this place, and noticed the void-black glyphs on the ebony floor just before his foot passed their hexagonal boundary.
Chronomancy, he thought. He conjured his empathic obliterator and touched its glowing tips to the border.
Begone, he willed, feeling his power course into the staff.
The hex-snare guttered and died, snuffed out of existence as if it had never been. Perhaps it had not, now. The relic imprisoned in the obliterator, able to warp reality at times, was a product of ancient and forgotten wizardry.
Wizardry that Trazyn was eager to visit upon the form of Orikan.
For only the Diviner would be so bold.
Trazyn found the astromancer where he least expected him. There were so many precious things in the War in Heaven gallery. Power plants of un­known manufacture. Command diadems worn by the phaerons of antiquity. An aeldari skimmer in the colours of a vanished clan. And above all those stasis-displays floated a great metal conqueror wyrm, seeded on planets the necron fleet bypassed to hunt their population to extinction.
This gallery, the Old Necrontyr Gallery, was naught but mournful curiosities. Scrolls from when his kin still had eyes to read. Long tar pipes, so pleasurable to those who had mouths to smoke them. A cane turned from hardwood, inlaid with ivory, its head shaped like the old, hook-beaked god of wisdom.
Trazyn knew the feel of that old god well – he’d spent much of his biological life leaning on that cane.
And in the centre of this melancholy chamber stood Orikan, weaving hexes upon the air.
Trazyn is no fool, Orikan thought.
Or at least, he was not a complete fool.
He’d been fool enough to take such a small force down to the Exodite world, for instance. A force that was so easily besieged once Orikan warned the primitives he was coming.
A delicious irony: to pillage Trazyn’s cultural treasures while he was away plundering the backwater world of some feral aeldari.
But that foolishness was recent, compared to what Orikan saw around him. For it had been Trazyn’s crowning folly to build this place, devoting his boundless, undying energies to a museum few of their blank-eyed kin could appreciate. Once the necrons fully awakened, after all, how many would even be sane?
Then again, the fool had proven far more resilient than Orikan’s divination models had predicted. His escape from the Exodites, for instance, occurred with a speed Orikan’s calculations had not considered probable.
But that was Trazyn, wasn’t it? Born under fortunate stars. Always the statistical outlier, never having to work for it, the bastard.
It could be the place. Abnormal chrono-streams threw off his powers of divination. Intrusions from the immaterium snarled the calculations, and this planet, well, Solemnace was a nightmare. So many objects and beings out of place, held ageless in stasis fields and tesseract vaults. Ten thousand discrete timelines worth of chrono-noise. He could feel it even on the edge of the sector, a great cataract on the eye of the universe. A blood clot in the timestream.
Solemnace would have to fall someday, but right now it was not his main concern.
But the trash data had snarled his predictions more than once during this infiltration. Orikan had even been forced to reverse his paces and sabotage the hrud burrow to provide a distraction.
Thankfully, he had all the time in the world.
Hexes and zodiacs burned around him, floating in the aether, pinning back layers of magnetic fields and diverting sensor beams back to receivers. Masking his presence from the environment-sniffers.
All those layers of security for one inert object.
Trazyn either had some inkling of what this object did, or he was the most paranoid being in the galaxy. Or perhaps the Overlord of Solemn­ace believed that if something should be done, it should be overdone.
Typical Nihilakh attitude.
It had taken Orikan three necrontyr solar years just to get to this point, gingerly peeling back each layer of security.
Nearly there.
The final stasis field shimmered a gossamer blue as Orikan wove the spell. Third finger and thumb of his left hand pressed together, marking the triangular borders of the working. Right hand dancing inside like a harpist’s, painting glyphs forgotten by most in the ancient days. Hexes so forbidden that in the Flesh Times, any who spoke them aloud would have his teeth pulled and tongue branded.
Perfect.
He put his fingers together, spoke the final invocation, and snapped them.
The hex flared to life, dripping purple sparks where the borders held back the field.
Orikan tentatively put a metal finger to the centre of the working and pushed it inward.
Horns blared, gongs crashed. Chamber lights snapped into the full-burn of midday.
Bastard.
Orikan’s olfactory transducers picked up the hint of gauss flayers power­ing up.
Bastard!
The beam hit him in the head, his reinforced golden headdress stripping, the beam drilling towards his precious neural spools.
Orikan slowed his chronosense, ignoring the alarming heat in his cranial chamber, the way he could feel his mnemonic banks beginning to smoke. The beam drilled, slowed, stopped. Pain – or what pain Orikan felt out of usefulness – paused between throbs. The shower of sparks from his field-cutting hex dribbled and shut off. A frozen waterfall of electricity.
Orikan completed the mental ritual, thought the words, and ran the chants through a verbal emitter in his whickering tail to ensure the incantation was not altered by the extreme heat engulfing his skull.
The beam withdrew, his cranium rebuilding itself. Sparks flowed upward into the border of the hex. Horns and war-gongs sounded in reverse, their long reverberations building to the crescendo of the first strike or blow. Hard lights shut off.
His hands, independent of him, wove backward, unmaking the spell.
And he saw it. A hekkat glyph insufficiently drawn. One of the staffs branching from the upper orb was unconnected, a space of two microns separating the spear of the line from the curve of the circle.
It was what made the astromancer discipline such a difficult one. Mastery required total precision, total focus. When one used arithmancy to shape time and space, even the slightest error mattered. And with overlapping hexes this complicated, errors were easy to make.
Even musing on Trazyn, though it was but a stray thought in a tertiary subroutine, had been enough to force an error.
This, this was why he’d been living the last twenty minutes over and over again. Three years, cumulative, to get from the first plinth to the object that lay within.
Orikan took a breath. Unnecessary biologically, but critical to focus, and redrew the hex. Then he activated the working and reached inside. Felt his metal hand, cold and gentle, close around the artefact and bring it out of the field.
A perfect tetrahedral pyramid, shaped from living metal. Glyphs glistened on its surface, iridescent in the low light, veins of crystalline substance marbling through its structure.
Puzzle box. Celestial compass. Key. Depending on what you believed, it might be any of these things.
And he believed it was much, much more.
‘The Astrarium Mysterios,’ breathed Orikan.
‘Interesting,’ replied Trazyn. ‘I had wondered what that was.’
‘Archaeovist.’ Orikan paired the greeting with a polite bow. It achieved the proper depth and angle for a greeting of equal colleagues, but remained just shallow enough to communicate contempt.
‘Astromancer,’ said Trazyn, returning the bow with a nod. The proper gesture for an overlord greeting guests on his own world, serving as both welcome and a warning. It was, consequently, identical to the duelling bow. ‘Had you announced your arrival I would have arranged an honour guard. A figure of your… reputation should not be wandering here alone.’
‘Kind and proper, my colleague. Kind and proper.’ Orikan moved sideways, insectile. ‘But I would not trouble you, especially since, for a planetary overlord, you are so often away from Solemnace.’
They were circling each other now, pretence dissolving. They’d long been rivals, back to the Flesh Times, and Trazyn had frequently imagined what it would be like to land a blow on the Diviner. But Orikan’s movements unnerved him. The curse of biotransference had made ­parodies of them all, but none more extreme than he and Orikan. While Trazyn had been remade into a hunched, hooded thing – a scholar eternally at his work – Orikan’s slight frame had twisted to reflect the soul within.
He was all things quick and venomous. His face and headdress recalled a hooded serpent. His curled tail, segmented back armour and spindly limbs echoed the waste-scorpions of the old capital. Divination orbs ran down his spine, swirling with cloudy energy. A single baleful ocular, mocking the foresight the crypteks claimed to possess, gleamed with haughty malice.
‘Thievery is beneath you, Orikan. Hand back the trinket and perhaps we can continue your research under supervision. After all, I of all beings can understand the wish to covertly acquire–’
‘Understand?’ Orikan snapped. ‘To understand is not in you, Trazyn. You’re a bird building a nest with shiny things. A child with a rock collection. You want things simply to have them. Their true meaning, their use, is lost on you.’
‘Hurtful,’ chided Trazyn. He dipped his obliterator so it pointed at the device in Orikan’s hand. ‘Even if true, I see no reason why that allows you to steal my things.’
‘You stole it first. From the Ammunos Dynasty.’
‘The Ammunos Dynasty is naught but inert metal now – you can’t steal from the dead, that’s called archaeology. The point is to memoria­lise, learn, study what came before us. We look to the past to navigate the future.’
‘I prefer to look to the future to navigate the future,’ said Orikan. ‘For instance, there were twenty-seven times I could have attacked just now, but none would have got past your guard.’
‘Indeed?’
‘But twenty-eight is a slaying blow.’
It came faster than Trazyn thought possible. He slowed his chrono­sense, but it did no good. Orikan leapt to his left and conjured his star-headed staff. In Trazyn’s enhanced oculars the jagged supernova head of the weapon blurred, a chrono-field boiling around it. He was speeding himself up, his weapons up, creating a pocket of reality where time moved faster than–
The jagged sun cut right past his obliterator and sheared through his upper left arm with a shriek of parting metal and a gush of sparks. It buried itself in his upper ribcage and kept cutting. Trazyn felt it lodge in his central reactor. A flash. Battery acids and reactor fluid spouted in the air, flecks dotting Orikan’s leering death mask where they sizzled like oil on an engine.
Trazyn went down on one knee.
‘Thus ended Trazyn, called Infinite,’ mocked Orikan, twisting his staff deeper. ‘Lord of Solemnace, keeper of trinkets, peerless in arrogance, lord of forgotten–’
And then he stopped, because the face before him was not Trazyn, but a mere lychguard.The obliterator swung from behind him, catching the Diviner on his segmented back plates as he twisted to evade.
It connected with a flash of searing light – a brightness so pure, it overwhelmed Trazyn’s oculars, refracting and scattering in the lenses so the world disappeared for a moment then snapped back painted in prismatic rainbow hues.
The blow took Orikan off his feet and sent him crashing into a display case, shorting out the stasis field and denting the plinth with his shoulder plate. Ceramic ritual urns atop the plinth, their cracks painstakingly hardened with period-correct resin, rocked and steadied.
Trazyn picked up the fallen puzzle box.
‘I like to keep a spare body in this gallery,’ he chuckled. ‘So much faster to stream my consciousness into it than come by barge. Translation can destabilise the stasis fields, you know.’
Orikan tried to rise, legs twitching. Sparks crackled from his broken spine.
‘So, my valued colleague,’ Trazyn said. ‘Let’s have a short symposium, shall we? You referred to this as the Astrarium Mysterios. But surely you don’t believe it’s the real thing? Most likely a copy, a curiosity meant to represent the object of legend, yes?’
‘You –on’t know –at you ha–e.’ Orikan’s vocal emitters buzzed and skipped from the power overload, interrupting his crow-like voice. He pulled himself along the floor, hauling his crippled form upright so he leaned against the plinth, twitching legs trailing unnaturally to the side. ‘–lways a slave t– the past. Ev–n if you –new what it wa– you wouldn’t po–sess the vision to –se it.’
Trazyn opened his palm and cast a stasis field, pinning the Diviner in place from the second vertebrae down.
‘Slave to the past? A lack of vision? Perhaps, my dear astromancer. Perhaps.’ Trazyn tossed the puzzle box in the air and caught it again, delighting as Orikan’s monocular widened in distress. The casualness was feigned. He’d plotted the object’s arc two hundred times before making the throw, and put it gingerly into his dimensional pocket. ‘But you are a slave to your visions, with no sense of the past. I suppose it is our natures, yes? My lot is to preserve, yours to predict. Oh, yes, I see you do not like that word, predict. No doubt you think it clumsy. Well, I have a prediction for you, dear Orikan.’ He released his obliterator – it stood immobile, balanced on its pointed haft – and held a hand to his steely forehead, as if glimpsing the ethereal. ‘A vision of your own future.’
The glassy floor rumbled as ancient tomb-doors grated open. Mono­liths rose around the gallery, scraping against the time-worn slabs as they ground from their stasis chambers.
Inside each stood a sarcophagus niche shrouded with milky green fog. The vapour washed heavily towards the floor, lit from within like storm clouds as animation systems crackled to life. And as it sank, the fog revealed crested helms. Dispersion shields and bladed weapons stood ready in inert hands. A phalanx of lychguards, eye sockets dark.
‘In my vision,’ Trazyn continued, ‘I see you as a permanent addition to this gallery. You are, after all, a priceless antique, are you not? Orikan the Diviner, seer of the necrontyr, maker of predictions, who warned our kind against accepting the Deceiver’s horrific bargain.’ He chuckled, raised the Astrarium Mysterios. ‘I think I’ll put you somewhere where you can gaze on this. Just out of reach. For eternity.’
‘The worst th-ng about biotransference,’ said Orikan, his voice recovering, ‘is that in the Flesh Times you at least stopped to breathe every once in a while.’
Trazyn laughed. ‘I’ve always envied your acid tongue.’ He rapped the floor twice with his obliterator’s haft. ‘Perhaps I’ll display it separately.’
The lychguards’ eyes flared as one, popping like fuses. They lowered long warscythes, snapped shields into position, and advanced. A contracting circle of metal closed on the Diviner.
‘You call me a predictor, Trazyn,’ spat Orikan. ‘But mere prediction is no longer of use to me. What use are visions when the powerful refuse to heed them? You marched to your doom, believing the Deceiver’s promises over my auguries. Why speak truth to those that choose to be deaf to it?’
Hyperphase blades, vibrating in and out of reality, drew closer around the Diviner. Energy fields sizzled in the dry air of the hermetically sealed chamber. They were thirty steps away, then twenty.
‘Since you all turned your back on me, my powers have grown,’ said Orikan. ‘And I have changed my focus.’ Trazyn could see the astro­mancer’s cranial coolants were running at triple capacity, beads of condensate plumping on his golden hood and running down to sizzle on his long skull. ‘Why predict the future,’ said Orikan, ‘when I can reshape it?’
‘How, exactly?’ said Trazyn, then to the lychguard, ‘Mind the artefacts.’
‘How else do you shape the future?’ Orikan said, a smile in his avian voice. He fixed Trazyn with a stare. ‘By destroying the past.’
Trazyn saw the blow just as Orikan’s head twitched. He threw himself forward, shouting, on an interception trajectory he knew could not succeed.
There was no way to be faster than a chronomancer.
Orikan’s head slammed backward into the plinth behind him. Metal dented and cracked. Levitator arrays shorted out. The eggshell-thin ceramics, rotating like a priceless constellation, dropped.
The Diviner spoke an arcane word that burst the stasis field and scrambled out of the way, hands clawing for purchase on the floor. Half-functioning feet launched him off the plinth, slamming the ground like pistons to drive himself forward. Scrambling, then crawling.
As he moved, his body superheated, welding damaged pieces together. Ghostly vapour twisted up from the severed vertebrae of his spine, cables seeking each other out like bloodwyrms sniffing for a mate.
Trazyn cared not. He dived for the falling relics, slowing his chrono­sense to try to make a decision.
It was mathematically impossible to save them all. But one – he could save one priceless example of necrontyr ceramic work. Working angles and probabilities, he chose a bright purple jar. Sautekh, Fourth Dynasty. A scene of the midsummer sky above the necrontyr home world, a starfield shining through the glaze of twilight.
It fell directly into the cup of his hands. So focused on it was he that Trazyn could see the imprint of the potter’s fingerprints beneath the bright paint.
But necron hands were not meant to handle such fine pottery. It contacted his palm and crushed inward, cracks shooting through it as if a summer lightning storm had split the sky of Trazyn’s half-forgotten home world. His chronosense dialled back to its slowest, every moment of the jar’s destruction played out in individual tragedies.
Around him, ceramics fell like hail, scattering painted shards as they smashed against the floor.
‘Barbarian!’ Trazyn roared, his restoration protocols already running a damage analysis, matching potsherds by break pattern and sorting artistic styles as he shouted commands to the lychguards. ‘Nihilakh, Twelfth Dynasty. Kill him. Thokt, Nineteenth Dynasty. Kill him. Ogdobekh, Thirtieth Dynasty. KILL HIM.’
Orikan called the fallen Staff of Tomorrow to his hand as if it were a living thing.
The first lychguard bore down on him before he could even stand. A mistake. Orikan scuttled backward like a crab, thrusting his staff at the lychguard’s oculars. When the tomb guard raised his dispersion shield the Diviner scythed the staff in low, the blazing halo of its headpiece severing both legs at the ankles.
As the guard fell, Orikan sprang to his feet, slamming the pointed haft of his staff into the fallen warrior’s segmented throat. He shot an electrostatic discharge through the staff and overloaded the foe’s neural matrix. The warrior’s oculars, awakened after sixty million years of sleep, winked out.
Orikan ducked, a warscythe passing a finger’s span over his head. He kicked out backward, destabilising the opponent, and broke off, dodging behind a display of gold-inlayed smoking pipes to buy himself a moment.
The lychguard recovered and stalked towards him.
‘Idiot! The ceramics!’ shouted Trazyn, hastily casting a stasis field around the ruined shards. ‘Watch where you step.’
Lychguards stalled, turned, went around. They stalked a wide peri­meter outside the priceless debris field, their circular formation growing ragged, holes in the net developing as one group pressed in faster than the other.
Orikan circled around the pipe display, keeping it between him and the closest guards, his back momentarily shielded by the broken cer­a­mics. ‘Surrender the Mysterios, Trazyn, and this can end.’
‘You have broken all covenants, astromancer. All rules of protocol. Destroyed the last examples of our world’s–’
Orikan planted his foot against the display and shoved. For a sicken­ing instant it creaked over like an axed tree, the racks of pipes held in impossible symmetry until the stasis field gave out and they crashed down at the advancing lychguards’ feet.
‘Stop!’ Trazyn pleaded.
The ancient pipes shattered. Bowls that once held dream-tar husbanded in forgotten temple gardens scattered broken amongst the feet of the lychguard, who froze mid-step, torn between the command to advance and the one that prevented them from damaging the artefacts.
Orikan put his shoulder against a case of surgical instruments and heaved. Grabbed a disintegrating scroll and threw it across the chamber like a streamer, completing his barrier of antiquities. His own warding circle of defacement.
The lychguard halted, awaiting orders.
‘If you wish to treat with me, scribe,’ sneered Orikan. ‘Come inside.’
Trazyn obliged, vaulting the debris. Channelling power through to his leap, his obliterator swinging down like a great hammer.
It drove down on Orikan’s staff, the iron clang of their meeting echoing off the walls. For an instant, the lodestones of their weapons touched, sizzling and popping like power cables in water. Trazyn shoved the Diviner backward with the haft of his obliterator. Then the staffs swirled and clashed again, wheeling so fast that they left spectral fans of energy in their wake.
‘Vandal,’ Trazyn roared, thrusting his obliterator like a spear. ‘You have destroyed objects made by craftsmen dead long before we breathed. Pieces of our past that can never be remade.’
Orikan parried, rolling the blow upward and leaping sideways to avoid the downward chop that followed it. ‘Useless things. Fetishes of a vanished past.’
Trazyn reversed his obliterator and slapped the staff into Orikan’s side, staggering the Diviner. The chronomancer back-pedalled, wisps of radio­active aurora twisting from the burn in his lower thorax.
Trazyn came on again, his fury burning. Circuits flared hot. Viscous electrofluid pumped through his system like magma.
Neither of them were warriors. For Trazyn, the dust of the archive was more familiar than that of the parade ground, and Orikan had spent aeons training his mind and neglecting his body. Had this duel occurred during the Flesh Times, it would have been comical. Two withered ancients, rangy, round-shouldered, stained with ink and smelling of incense tearing at each other with barely the strength to bruise. But biotransference had, for all its horrors, made every necron an armoured juggernaut. The two swung at each other, filling the gallery with the sounds of the forge. They locked weapons, shoved and bashed their plated skulls like horned beasts.
The lychguard looked on, impassive. They knew an aristocratic duel when they saw it, though none had seen one quite like this.
Orikan broke away, whirling. ‘Give me the Mysterios, Trazyn.’
‘I will tear you–’
Orikan sent the Staff of Tomorrow spinning end over end across the chamber, its head burning the air so it left the after-image of a discus as it scythed into a case of antiquities.‘No!’
Trazyn smashed the obliterator down, and the Diviner met it with the Logarithm of Sullet, conjuring a swirl of ochre void that he wielded like a buckler. Incompatible realities clashed, the solar flare of the ancient weapon meeting the lightless aether in a backfire that extinguished the tiny portal and threw the obliterator from Trazyn’s grip.
Such was his fury, he cared not. Trazyn leapt upon the astromancer and beat him with bare fists. Each clashing blow left imprints on the living metal of Orikan’s necrodermis. Orikan tried to scuttle out from under the archaeovist, but Trazyn grabbed a string of ritual tiles and dragged him back so roughly that one tile sheared off in his grasp.
Alarm gongs and trumpet klaxons filled the air. Swarms of restoration scarabs crawled down the walls like curtains, their auto-instinctual protocols calling them to preserve the scene.
Trazyn saw none of it. His oculars were deep-focused on Orikan, fists slamming down over and over. Sparks showering from each blow.
The Diviner laughed. Bodies as resilient as theirs could do little damage without the aid of phase weapons and flayers.
Yet Trazyn kept hammering, beating the Diviner into the floor until he felt weak.
No, he was weak.
Only then did he notice the Diviner’s questing tail wrapped around his throat, closing off his cable-artery, pinching off the coolant that kept his neurals from overheating.
‘Barbarian,’ Trazyn said, rolling to the side, his anger spent.
Orikan sprang to his feet, ready, called his staff.
‘This can end, archivist,’ he crowed. ‘Surrender the Mysterios, and it will stop.’
Trazyn struggled to his feet, metallic dust from the pulverised floor shaking loose from his scaled cloak. ‘Is it truly worth so much, Orikan?’ He spread a hand at the destruction.
‘What it is worth to me is immaterial,’ said Orikan. ‘The question is, what is it worth to you? Is it worth every object in this gallery? Because I am willing to pull this chamber in upon itself if that is what is required.’
‘Our heritage. Our legacy.’
‘If it is so important, sacrifice one to save all.’
Trazyn wiped his hands together, a nervous habit from a time long ago – so long ago – when they were eternally stained with ink. Calculations whirled in his matrices. If/then logic problems created and discarded.
If he orders the lychguard to advance, the artefacts become irrecoverable and Orikan destroys the gallery.
No.
If he attacks Orikan, then Orikan continues this rampage.
No.
If he gives up the Astrarium Mysterios…
Trazyn slid long fingers into his dimensional pocket and withdrew the Mysterios. Such a small thing. Insignificant, really. A curiosity. A replica of a mythical object that never existed.
At least he had assumed so. Orikan, clearly, thought different.
‘A bargain,’ said Trazyn. His voice had a tinge of desperation so alien that he saw two of the more sentient lychguards exchange a glance. ‘You are a chronomancer. Perhaps the greatest of your kind. You can undo this destruction. It would be nothing for you.’
Orikan paused, considering. ‘I can.’
‘Then do it.’
‘First, hand over the device.’
‘I am not a simpleton, Diviner.’
Orikan spread his hands. ‘You have me surrounded. Once restored, you may resume your interest in my, ah, preservation. Shall I give away my one point of leverage so easily?’
Trazyn hesitated. Stepped forward.
Orikan withdrew a step.
Trazyn placed the puzzle box on the ground, as carefully as if it were a newborn, and stepped back.
‘Now your part,’ he said.
Orikan’s eye narrowed, and for a microsecond, Trazyn thought he detected regret in that gaze. He did not step forward to take the device.
‘The difficulty, Trazyn, is that undoing the damage means travelling back in the timeline, before all this occurred.’ He met Trazyn’s gaze. ‘And if I did that, you would have no memory of this accord.’
Trazyn saw the transdimensional beamer. Knew what it meant.
Canoptek wraiths used them to banish unwanted construction debris into extra-dimensional space – a large-scale version of the pocket dimension he kept at his own hip.
Orikan’s snapshot caught the Mysterios, lancing it out of existence. Sending it somewhere in the great nowhere.
Trazyn dived for Orikan as the Diviner turned the sidearm on himself.
By the time Trazyn’s hands got there, nothing occupied the space but empty air.
Trazyn the Infinite, archaeovist of the Solemnace galleries, stood in the centre of his ruined past.
And howled for revenge.CHAPTER FOUR

NEPHRETH: Do not mourn if I am slain, instead, entomb me like the phaerons of old. Not in a high ziggurat, but in a vault below flat ground covered by sand, where no questing eye shall find my bones. Raise no stele and carve no inscription, save one: ‘In this tomb rests a true son of the necrontyr, unmarked by its corruption. Open and be damned.’
– War in Heaven, Act III, Scene II, Line 1

Solemnace was famous for its galleries – sweeping reconstructions of battles, titanic heroes preserved in hard-light, recreations of history’s greatest moments. Even before the Great Sleep, Trazyn had entertained visitors from nearly every dynasty with his collection of wonders.
What was less known, was that it also contained one of the greatest document collections in the galaxy, a rival even to the aeldari’s fabled Black Library.
Trazyn, after all, had once been a chronicler and archivist. Though artefacts were his passion, he did not neglect the written word.
It was not a project that required his close attention. He handled acquisitions, of course, for that was the most interesting part, but the rest he delegated to cryptek scribes who catalogued, cross-referenced and digitised each work. Trazyn hoped that in another ten millennia, when the necron legions were destined to awaken, all of their literature, history and discourses would be accessible, a mnemonic copy sent to the library of each tomb world. A great work, for the benefit of all.
Trazyn liked great works. Indeed, he had been awake far longer than even the handful of his early-risen kin – and had learned quickly that lofty pursuits were an essential component to immortality. A necron overlord’s greatest enemy was not the savage orks, the grasping humans or the cunning aeldari. Boredom was the greatest foe, one that must be continually battled lest madness or despondency set in.
So he had his gallery, and his holographic archive, ready to gift once his kin arose.
And besides, if all the tomb worlds had their own archives, no researchers would come to muck about in his. Nobody touching his precious manuscripts or asking obnoxious questions.
Trazyn was not feeling charitable as he stalked down into the depths of Solemnace, past his restoration rooms and extensive wine cellar. He approached the carved wooden doors of the library, warm and inviting, and threw them open with a shove that stressed the hinges.
His fury, though terrible, was always brief. Trazyn did not burn hot for long – his anger was cold and dry like the desert night. A focused, lasting anger both practical and useful.
Shelves reached to the ceiling. Rotating cradles, like the side wheels of great river barges, held arcane tomes and scrolls. Crypteks paused in their copying, stunned.
‘I require assistance,’ he said. ‘Then solitude.’
‘Of course, my lord,’ said the chief librarian. ‘Is this about the proposed expansion?’
‘The what?’
The cryptek bowed, obsequious. ‘The stacks are full, my lord. We are over capacity. I have humbly suggested that we expand the collection into the space currently occupied by the wine cellars.’
‘But then where would I put my wine, librarian?’
‘You… you do not drink wine, my lord.’
‘Of course I don’t,’ Trazyn snapped. ‘It’s far too valuable. Request denied. Enlist excavation wraiths to dig another chamber.’
‘My lord…’
‘And bring me everything you have about the War in Heaven, Phaeron Nephreth, and the Astrarium Mysterios. I want the physical manuscripts.’
‘Quite an eclectic subject, lord archaeovist.’ He called up a phos-glyph panel and ran a text scry. ‘In addition to the larger works, there are many small references in various mediums that need special handling and transport. There are sheet-gold scrolls, foundation stele, platinum slab-tablets–’
‘Everything,’ Trazyn said, in a tone that did not brook dissent. ‘Bring it all, then go away. I will be some time.’
‘Yes, sire.’
‘But first, bring me the legal code. The volumes on inter-dynastic theft and trials.’
‘Is there to be a trial, my lord?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Trazyn, fingering the ritual tile he had ripped from Orikan’s frame. ‘There most certainly will be.’
Mandragora, Eastern Fringe
Nine Standard Years Later
Mandragora the Golden. Mandragora of the Emerald Skies. Mandra­gora, dynastic seat of the mighty Sautekh.
Orikan despised it, even now. Even as he’d exited the dolmen gate, the scars of his perilous journey fresh on his necrodermis, he could not help but release his venom.
‘Land of whisperers and sycophants. I should have stayed with the drukhari.’
Once the third most powerful dynasty in the Necron Empire, the crownworld of the Sautekh was a dead place. Great sand dunes drifted against its ziggurats and palaces, burying them beneath golden cascades that mocked its grand title. Windstorms scoured its monuments with the planet’s abrasive silica grains, stripping the gilded sepulchres and obelisks to their living metal interior and giving the entire city – or what one could see of it – the appearance of brushed steel. A few districts retained their grandeur, sheltered in the lee of great stasis tombs and spared the caustic attentions of windblown sand. There, statues of ancient phaerons still stared imperious over the desert, faces distinct and spared the weathering of less fortunate monuments.
There, the few hundred awakened members of the Sautekh Dynasty lived a pantomime existence. Accidental custodians of the silent necro­polis, awakened ten thousand years too early, busying themselves taking care of a world that was largely self-sufficient. Waiting for the distant day when the countless billions of sleepers would emerge.
Orikan stayed well away from those districts. Before the Great Sleep, he’d found Mandragora oppressive. So many beings milling, clamouring, constantly interrupting. Constant politics – petty creatures struggling for petty victories.
It had been a difficult place to focus. Even achieving a basic chrono-trance required shutting the world out with slab-thick walls in his astromantic observatory, perched on the humped mountain overlooking the city, and above its sky-erasing glow.
Yet maintaining a presence was necessary. Personal preferences aside, Mandragora was the Sautekh power centre, and Orikan could not be a court astromancer from his hermitage on Rithcairn – more’s the pity.
But Mandragora had much to recommend itself, in these strange days. A stable dolmen gate to access the webway. The quiet dark of a dead, sterile metropolis. And of course, an automated defence grid that was the best in the empire – just the sort of thing you need if you’ve stolen from one of the most dangerous beings in the galaxy.
Using the transdimensional beamer had been a desperate risk, little better than casting lots. He’d adjusted the translocation paths to his own specifications, of course – Orikan was reckless, not dull-witted – but there had been a chance some infinitesimal variable would mar his transit. A chance that, instead of the glowing tunnels of the webway, he would have sprung back into reality in the heart of a star, or floating in deep space between dimensions. Even absent those extreme cases, there was every possibility he would come out at a random point in space-time, forced to adjust and use the beamer again and again, ­hoping the increasingly wild translations would bring him home, and not to realities increasingly aberrant from his own.
That would not have been ideal. But also not a tragedy.
After all, Orikan had time.
But his astromantic divinations proved true enough, and his translation landed him in a disused portion of the webway. Not the exact point he’d intended, unfortunately, but close enough. Then again, it was possible it was exactly the spot he’d meant, but that the network had changed into something unrecognisable. With the webway destabilised, it was increasingly difficult to tell.
The aeldari’s great cataclysm had rocked the network to its foundations, snapping away arcways that used to see fleets pass and flinging them into the immaterium. Un-things from that dimension of madness increasingly stalked the corridors, and every cycle the aeldari’s witch seers collapsed more pathways to keep the evils out.
Orikan had wound through the coils of the labyrinth dimension, clearing passages and lurking in shadows. What remained of the old enemy’s civilisation was in flight. Neo-primitives like the ones Trazyn had pillaged, migrating to new home worlds. Vicious raiders hunting their own, all societal bonds broken. Refugees, eyes hollow with fear, hurtling helter-skelter through the halls without regard for where they headed.
Orikan did not blame them. After all, what the young race birthed had shaken him so badly he’d needed a century of meditation to recover, and he’d merely glimpsed it via astral precognition.
The aeldari’s time upon the stage was ending in an era of lamentation and horror.
‘Fair comeuppance,’ he’d said, upon witnessing his first group of refu­gees, ‘for what your decadence has unleashed upon the galaxy.’
Slithering between the chaos, the doubling back and hiding turned a one-month transit from Solemnace to Mandragora into a nine-year odyssey. Three cycles alone had been spent burning his way through a wending corridor infested with carnivorous fungoid blooms. His cara­pace bore new scars – talismans of an unfortunate encounter with drukhari incubi – and his power plant needed a refurbishment.
But mostly, he required time for meditation and study.
Now, atop his astromancer’s tower, he watched the stars – sensing gravity’s pull on the transit of planets, its infinite algebraic possibility influencing even the smallest events in the galaxy.
The astronomers of old, stupid and superstitious as they had been, had guessed at this connection. But their pathetic spirituality had little to do with the scientific precision Orikan now used to chart the pull of gravity and flow of particles, the bending of space-time around sucking black holes, the chain of bizarre causality that could turn a breath on one continent into a typhoon on another.
And those lines of power, light, energy and time tended to snare around certain objects.
Like the one that floated, slowly turning, at the centre of the observation deck. Jade shadows underlit it from the suspensor field beneath, and phos-glyph equations and grids – written on the very air – surrounded it in a cloud.
Lines traced from each theorem to the multisided surface of the Astrarium Mysterios. Autonomic calculators measured and remeasured each face, edge and vertex.
There were eight, twelve and six respectively. A perfect octahedron.
‘Which is puzzling,’ he said aloud to the Mysterios. ‘Because according to my engrammatic banks, you were a pyramid when I left Solemnace.’
He’d tried to review his mnemonic data and pinpoint the exact moment of this transmutation, but it was useless. The mirrored geo­metry of the webway – especially since the cataclysm – fouled his recall systems into a dreamlike blur.
‘You have undergone a transmutation. No surprise, as that is your function. But exactly when did you change?’ he asked, rhetorically. It was sometimes easier to think aloud. Split his consciousness into a portion that stimulated questions, and a portion that searched for possible answers. ‘What was the catalyst for this transmutation? What was the method?’
Spectromantic analysis indicated a device composed of solid living metal. The same substance that made up the tower, his staff, Orikan’s own necrodermis.
There were also trace amounts of mercury and unknown crystal buried in its heart – strange. Not standard components in necron technology.
Little wonder Trazyn – blind to the metaphysical and lacking imagination – labelled it a forgery. Even those initiated into the cryptek mysteries, if they lacked sufficient study and insight, would have thought the same.
Orikan had possessed the Mysterios for a decade, and he still could not ken the basics of its operation. Perhaps it was time-dependent, gradually opening as the aeons ground on, ensuring that the shorter-lived races would never access its secrets.
‘Conversely,’ he mused, the answering part of his consciousness taking over, ‘it is possible contact with the webway activated it. Or that it lay inert until it passed through a dolmen gate. Such a security measure would keep it from being activated outside the control of its makers.’
The Ammunos Dynasty, Dead Gods curse their lifeless atoms, had been renowned for their secrecy and paranoia. In moments of frustration, Orikan took pleasure in imagining the solar flare ionising the neural matrices of the sleeping dynasty, shock waves scrambling their tomb world’s magnetic field and rendering all systems inert. Mass neural death, in the span of a few minutes.
Too bad they hadn’t been awake to feel it.
Over the past cycle, Orikan had bombarded the Mysterios with every energy wave he considered safe, spoken to it in hex-decrypt, and even tried contacting any hidden consciousness through neural-transference.
He’d raised twelve crypteks – in body only, minds still at rest – and installed them kneeling around the observation deck. He networked their blank minds with his to increase his analytic capacity and engrammatic storage, running theorems and suppositions until two of them overheated, blue flames bursting from their ocular sockets before they translated to the resurrection forge to be rebuilt.
Nothing.
He had called scarabs to clean up the ash piles when he noticed that one did not follow the swarm. One with a jewelled red back plate.
‘What?’ he said, resisting the urge to crush it beneath his foot.
The little drone knelt in a servile bow, shaking slightly in his presence. Its carapace scissored open to reveal a message orbuculum.
The chrysoprase projection juddered and flickered for a moment, resolving into the one being Orikan did not want to see.
‘Master Orikan, Seer of the Sautekh, the one called Diviner,’ said the tall being, staring into his eyes as if she were standing in the room. ‘I am Executioner Phillias of the Triarch praetorians, herald of the Awakened Council. By order of the Council you are to present yourself on Bekyra with immediate haste to face accusations brought by Trazyn, overlord of Solemnace and archaeovist of the–’
‘Bastard,’ Orikan muttered. ‘Squealed to the council, did you?’
‘–relating to alleged acts on Solemnace. This scarab is slaved to your neural signature and will alert the Council if it detects noncompliant travel. Failure to present yourself in original body – not a surrogate – will be punished by the cancellation of your resurrection protocols. Glory to the Infinite Empire.’
The image winked out, and Orikan swore.
For he was going on trial.
‘Is he coming?’
The speaker, Lord Nemesor Zuberkar, rested his hyperphase sword tip down on the floor of the dais. With a hard twist, he sent it spinning like a top, the unbalanced energy blade making a sound like a faulty turbofan as it rotated in place. Each time, he caught the hilt just before it lost momentum and fell.
Fwomp. Fwomp. Fwomp. Catch.
Fwomp. Fwomp. Fwomp. Fwomp. Catch.
‘A summons from the Awakened Council carries full force of law,’ said Trazyn. ‘Orikan will come.’
And if he does not, Trazyn thought, you will cancel his reanimation protocol and Executioner Phillias will hunt him down with that great execution scythe of hers. Which was clearly the result she hoped for – she had been sharpening the great half-moon blade since they had convened, running a molecular smoother over the orbit of the power field, aligning the particles along the wicked edge.
Nothing more dangerous than a bored killer.
‘Do you agree?’ Zuberkar asked the phaerakh to his left.
‘I do,’ replied Phaerakh Ossuaria, her voice icy. Furious, as usual, that a mere overlord was addressing her as an equal.
‘I concur,’ said High Metallurgist Quellkah, leaning forward from the platform’s third throne. ‘This body holds authority in these disputes. So says the law.’
Zuberkar shrugged, spun the sword.
Fwomp. Fwomp. Fwomp. Catch.
‘Cease that,’ snapped Ossuaria, deigning to turn her head towards the overlord, her tile diadem veil clattering. ‘It’s interminable.’
‘You may be a phaerakh,’ Zuberkar said. ‘But you are a phaerakh of the Rytak. I owe you no obedience.’
The two locked oculars. Trazyn had little doubt that they were trading insults through interstitial transfer.
‘Please, my comrades,’ Quellkah said. ‘On this dais we are equals. It is the keystone of our great peace. Our body holds the empire together. We owe allegiance not to each other, but to the oaths we have taken.’
The rivals broke eye contact and, as one, looked at the cryptek.
‘Not that you need reminding,’ he said, shrinking back into his chair.
Trazyn swallowed a smile. Quellkah was right, of course. Not that it would help his cause. Even before biotransference, necrontyr society had been conservative and hierarchical, and those instincts held sway even in these strange times.
After the War in Heaven, when the C’tan star gods fought the Old Ones, with the necrons as their imprisoned metal army, the necrons had seen their chance to avenge the deception of biotransference. Rising up, they slew their erstwhile gods, shattering them into pieces and sealing the shards – each still powerful enough to level cities – in huge tesseract labyrinths. Yet in destroying the Old Ones and the divine C’tan, even the implacable necrons had overtaxed themselves. It was clear the aeldari were the rising race, and would shape the galaxy’s next great epoch.
But the metal dynasties knew that no era lasts forever, and they had the advantage of deathless sleep. Already Orikan had foreseen the fall of the aeldari and the rise of mankind. All of necron kind, sleeping sixty million years in stasis.
The galaxy was a wild place, though, and even the genius of the crypteks had its limit. Occasional faulty awakenings occurred, perhaps only affecting one sarcophagus, or at other times the tomb of a whole phalanx. It was entirely random, part of no plan, affecting everyone from the lowliest warriors of foot to those of phaeronic rank like Ossuaria, who had woken to find herself the only conscious being on her silent tomb world.
Without the rigid class structure holding them in check, those awakened by fault fell to chaos. Some awakened whole decurions without the aid of a cryptek, damaging the neural pathways of their fellows and turning them into automatons. Others took the opportunity to settle old scores, murdering rivals as they slumbered in their sarcophagi.
It was the Triarch praetorians, an order of cloistered warriors who had eschewed sleep to watch over the stasis tombs, who finally insisted on the council. And they had given it Phillias as their executioner and – Trazyn suspected – their spy.
The Awakened Council gave the necrons a minimalist, ad hoc govern­ment. They protected the sleepers under pain of death and set strict limits on the number and type of artificial risings. With premature resurrection so often leading to damage, no necron was to be animated except under circumstances of dire necessity.
But in a society where feuds were commonplace, its greatest task was to settle disputes with tribunals like the one Orikan would, in a bare moment, be late to.
Phillias tested the blade of her scythe on the edge of a metal thumb.
Zuberkar spun the sword.
Fwomp. Fwomp. Fwomp. Catch.
‘One more time–’
Reality shrieked and tore, lighting the death masks of the council with balefire. A rough translation, the kind conducted in a hurry.
‘I would prefer we make this quick,’ said Orikan, green fire still licking at his body.
‘Let me summarise,’ said the Diviner. ‘I am accused of stealing an object from Overlord Trazyn, and destroying old, worthless clutter.’
‘Priceless antiquities,’ Trazyn corrected, holding out his wooden cane as an exhibit. The inlaid wood was snapped in two, its splintered ends already decomposing from its time out of the stasis field.
‘Priceless and worthless are the same thing,’ Orikan spat. ‘And I remember a time when you were all too eager to give up that hobble stick. But if you must, draw up a list and we shall discuss restitution.’
‘The relative worth of these objects,’ Quellkah said, curbing Trazyn’s response, ‘is not for you to decide, Orikan. If you admit to this theft and vandalism of a tomb world, it is a serious offence. The law prescribes banishment or death.’
‘A law created by this body,’ Orikan snapped. ‘A body whose authority in this matter I do not recognise.’
Trazyn smiled. Same old Orikan, hostile to any authority, no matter how powerful. He would fist fight the sun if he thought it was telling him what to do. It was why Trazyn had pursued this course – the Diviner would build his own mausoleum, block by block.
‘And why is that?’ enquired Ossuaria. ‘We have held these tribunals, without challenge, for centuries.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Orikan. ‘But not with me. It is not a fair process. High Metallurgist Quellkah, do you recall our dispute as young adepts?’
‘A… long time ago, my colleague,’ he faltered. ‘The stars have wheeled quite a bit since then.’
‘Ossuaria,’ Orikan snapped, already ignoring the high metallurgist. ‘My lovely phaerakh. I believe you still owe me a debt for divinatory services. A substantial uncollected debt. After all, who else could’ve predicted where your brother the phaeron and his seven heirs would be on that unfortunate day.’
Ossuaria stiffened.
Zuberkar leaned back, laughing and shaking his bulkhead-jawed head. ‘Cunning mynix. You said they were lost in a void storm.’
‘And Lord… Nemesor… Zuberkar,’ Orikan continued, pausing after each title. ‘We’ve had no dealings, but the Mephrit are old enemies of the Sautekh Dynasty. I would not put it past you to continue that kin feud.’
‘I wouldn’t either,’ Zuberkar confessed, patting a hand on his blood-coloured chest armour. The Mephrit had never been shy about their viciousness.
‘Come to your point,’ Trazyn rumbled, darkly, then quieted as Executioner Phillias turned to him and placed a finger to her lipless mouth.
‘In summation,’ Orikan continued. ‘No judgement you hand down will be free from the perception of bias. And given the size and stature of my dynasty, are you willing to risk the phaeron’s displeasure when he wakes to find an unsanctioned council has executed his chief seer?’
Silence. The three figures sat statue-still on their onyx thrones – symbols of power that felt shakier than they had a moment before.
‘He would, no doubt, unleash the stormlord.’ Orikan let that hang, then turned to Quellkah. ‘High metallurgist, you campaigned with Lord Imotekh on Calliope, did you not? Perhaps you could enlighten your fellow… what do you call yourselves? Ah yes, council members about what happens when the stormlord goes forth in his panoply of war.’
Again, silence. All knew what had happened to the Khuvu Dynasty at Calliope. Even now, sixty million years and several celestial wars later, ‘Gone like the Khuvu’ was a regular idiom in necrontyr speech. Back when their kind still ate, it was what one said after clearing an entire plate.
‘It would…’ began Quellkah. ‘Ah, it would be prudent to remove the appearance of bias.’
‘Perhaps we should suspend proceedings,’ said Ossuaria. ‘Only until a suitable representative of the Sautekh has arisen to oversee the proceedings on behalf of the dynasty.’
‘It is what they would do for us,’ added Zuberkar, aware that the transcription-scarabs would record his words, but not his disbelieving tone. ‘Will that serve you, Trazyn of Nihilakh?’
‘It damn well won’t!’ Trazyn shouted, dialling back his venom when Phillias put up a hand. ‘It damn won’t,’ he repeated. ‘Until a Sautekh representative awakens? It’s not scheduled for another ten millennia. And this jackal-son… the defendant… can control the stasis-crypts on Mandragora. The phaeron will awaken when he wills it. As the accusatory, I cannot accept this.’
‘Have you a solution, then?’ Orikan asked. ‘If this body is not willing to continue, then what else is there to do but suspend it and issue a continuance?’
Trazyn paused, reviewing the volumes of necrontyr law he’d encoded in his last decade of study. He watched Orikan smile, the Diviner clearly misinterpreting his hesitation as a loss for words. Keep smiling, reactor leak, he thought.
‘If this tribunal cannot hear the case,’ he said. ‘As accusatory I assert my right to a mediator.’
‘A what?’ Orikan said.
‘A mediator,’ repeated Quellkah. ‘Yes, indeed that is the proper procedure.’
‘It is?’ Zuberkar narrowed his oculars.
‘When the council formed,’ Trazyn explained, ‘you all voted that the legal codes of old held sway in all instances not covered by the new codes. And I assert my ancient rights to a mediator of overlord rank or above, one that has no ties to the Sautekh or the Nihilakh dynasties.’
The council members looked at Quellkah.
‘It is proper,’ the cryptek said. ‘It could be done.’
‘But where to find a mediator?’ asked Ossuaria.
‘Forgive me for interjecting, phaerakh,’ said Trazyn. ‘This is a council world, one with dynastic representatives entombed below. And I’m sure the high metallurgist could call upon his skills to raise one in safety… provided we came to agreement on whom to select.’
Trazyn cast a glance at Orikan, scrying his demeanour.
Though the seer’s death mask remained impassive, Trazyn received a glyph-message via interstitial link.
Bastard.
The selection process took two standard years of bickering, politicking, and the occasional threat of violence. It was, in other words, a standard necron court case.
It was no accident that all dispute resolutions were, by highly practical tradition, observed by an armed executioner. More than a few cases in the ancient records ended with the phrase: Case dismissed after accusatory’s dismemberment.
But finally, the council made their selection.
‘It… has been sixty million years?’ said Overlord Vokksh, his orange oculars blinking with the haze of tomb-sleep. He would remember soon that he no longer needed to blink.
‘Indeed, overlord,’ said Quellkah, bending over the stasis sarcophagus, which was propped up at an angle, its occupant still within. ‘It would be best not to move your body overmuch, my lord. We have primarily awoken your neural matrices and vocal actuators. This will assist your re-entombment procedure afterward.’
‘Why?’
‘We need you to adjudicate a case, my lord,’ the high metallurgist explained. ‘After all, you were chosen to be the Charnovokh representative here, were you not? I have encoded the particulars of the accusatory’s writ. Do you see them?’
‘Yesssss,’ the overlord hissed, one slow hand gripping the narrow steel beard that jutted from his chin and rubbing it between two fingers. ‘Proceed.’
Trazyn stood before the onyx dais, preparing his case. It was not exactly how he’d expected this to play out, but then again, trying a case a mere twelve years after an offence was almost scandalously fast by necron standards. The sort of frontier justice portrayed in the theatrical ­dramas, not how things happened in reality.
Trazyn activated an orbuculum, casting a projection of the Astrarium Mysterios in the centre of the chamber. It rotated in space, semi-translucent, surrounded by ocular-captures of Orikan burglarising.‘Twelve standard years ago, Orikan – called the Diviner, seer of the necrontyr – feloniously entered the tomb world of Solemnace in the attempt to steal this artefact, the Astrarium Mysterios. In his addled state, he believed it to be a prize worth destabilising the peace for. I apprehended him, and in his escape he destroyed a host of precious cultural objects recovered from home soil.’
Trazyn swept his hand left and right, scrolling through chrysoprase holograms of snapped canes, shattered vessels, a pipe with a broken stem. ‘These objects…’
‘How did you obtain that?’ pointed Zuberkar. ‘The pipe?’
‘Standard acquisition procedures,’ he evaded. ‘All above board.’
‘Go back,’ said Zuberkar. ‘That pipe’s Mephrit made. It should be in our gallery.’
‘My dear overlord,’ Trazyn said, ‘Solemnace holds all of these objects in trust for the good of all our kind.’
‘Damn that! It has my family sigil on it.’
‘If you make a formal request through the proper channels, we can certainly arrange its return,’ Trazyn said. He of course made all decisions regarding the gallery, but had always found that ‘we’ was a magical word for deflecting blame. ‘But we firmly believe that these precious relics should be in a place where experts can ensure their proper preser­vation and display.’
‘This enquiry is not concerned with Overlord Trazyn’s acquisition processes,’ cut in Overlord Vokksh, his vocal actuators now calibrated to cancel out the sleep-slur. Trazyn could see why the overlord was known for his power as a magistrate – he had a fine orator’s voice with an undeniable sense of authority. ‘You are in the right to protest the Diviner’s intrusion, as well as his vandalism. It is no small thing. But I see no reason to pursue death or banishment. Restitution can be made through the re-engramming of several thousand Sautekh warriors and their transfer to your command, or the surrender of planetary tithes. Indeed, that may be too radical considering your dubious ownership. Given that, why have you escalated this petty dispute so high?’
Trazyn reconjured the projection, settling it on the puzzle box.
‘This is the Astrarium Mysterios, the object of Orikan’s desire.’
‘A puzzle box?’ asked Vokksh.
‘A mere puzzle box,’ said Orikan, before a glance from Vokksh hushed him.
‘A map,’ corrected Trazyn. ‘An encrypted celestial chart. In certain esoteric corners of our society, an astrarium was used to reveal the location of occult gatherings or arcane pilgrimage sites. They can be activated by a spoken key-phrase, or coordinates, opening when they’re at a specific point on the galactic plane. Each one is individual, and each becomes inert after its successful use. I believed this one to have been already used or even a replica.’
‘But you no longer believe that?’
‘Orikan would not have been so rash if he though it inert.’ Trazyn stared at his rival, but instead of hatred, Orikan’s hooded eye was fixed on him with interest. ‘He suspects that it leads to a fabulous treasure.’
‘And do you have any idea where it leads?’ Vokksh leaned slightly forward in his casket, propping himself up on an elbow. Quellkah approached him, fussing, and he waved the high metallurgist away. ‘Do not make us wait.’
‘According to the encoded glyphs on its surface,’ Trazyn said, pausing to enhance the drama, ‘the Astrarium Mysterios leads to the tomb of Nephreth the Untouched, the last natural phaeron of the Ammunos Dynasty.’
There was a pause, then a barking laugh from Zuberkar.
‘Nephreth the Untouched?’ he mocked. ‘From that godawful long tragedy?’
‘Yes,’ said Trazyn. ‘Nephreth is primarily known as a character in the theatrical drama The War in Heaven, but he did exist.’
‘Of course he existed,’ Phaerakh Ossuaria sniped. ‘It’s a historical play. Or history-inspired, at least. But to suggest that any of it resembles what actually occurred…’
‘You remember, do you?’ enquired Trazyn. ‘I mean truly remember. Step forward, if you recall the days before biotransference. Can anyone tell me, with certainty, that their mnemonics contain a perfect record, with no deterioration during the aeons of sleep?’
None stepped forward. The high metallurgist shifted uncomfortably. They all knew what biotransference had done to them. Mnemonics of the Flesh Times were like the memories an adult has of childhood. One knows that one was a child, that one was born and lived years only through second-hand stories. Knows that there are friends, once close companions in youth, who are nothing but fleeting ghosts in memory. Sensations disconnected from context. Things retained, but with no memory of learning them – one knows the colour blue, but cannot recall the first time one knew its name.
Indeed, it was the purpose of those mawkish stage dramas to reinforce necron history, lest they forget. It was the reason why even oafs like Zuberkar knew the characters and plots inside out despite hating their length.
(They had, to be clear, grown punishingly long. Now that actors could memorise thousands of pages via engrammatic recall, and the audience had no biological needs to interrupt the performance, the forgotten cryptek-playwrights who’d contributed to the drama had gone overboard. A full performance could take well over a decade.)
‘My research has concluded that the dramas may be more accurate than previously believed,’ said Trazyn. He waved towards the orbuculum, summoning bas-reliefs depicting the War in Heaven. Necrontyr warriors and star-chariots, worn free of detail by the antiquity of the carving, advanced on the Old Ones’ doom engines.
‘It appears that, indeed, Nephreth was called Untouched due to a genetic resistance to the radiation-induced cancers afflicting our former bodies. Further research suggests that his rebellion against the star gods – his doomed resistance to the process of biotransference – indeed occurred.’
Trazyn looked at Orikan. The Diviner stared intently at the holographic bas-relief, rubbing one of the strands of tiles that fell from his shoulders. One tile was still missing, the one Trazyn had ripped from the Diviner during the struggle on Solemnace. It hung at Trazyn’s hip now, amidst the aeldari gemstone and other curios that dangled there – a reminder of his revenge.
But Trazyn had difficulty reading the Diviner’s mood. Apprehension, perhaps, or merely interest? How much of this did he know?
‘Here drama and history diverges,’ Trazyn said. ‘In the drama, Nephreth was killed attacking the star gods, scorched to nothing by the Burning One. But my archive contains an account that Nephreth’s own dynasty betrayed him, murdering their phaeron and his followers to broker peace with the star gods and gain the, ah, gift of biotransference.’
‘Quite an anticlimax,’ Vokksh muttered.
‘Indeed,’ said Trazyn. ‘But his relatives in the Ammunos Dynasty – despite their betrayal – apparently wished to hedge their bets. After all, they possessed the only genetically uncorrupted sample of the necrontyr species, free of disease and blight.’
Trazyn swept the projection, calling up a manuscript illustration of a death-procession carrying a stasis-casket into a towering gateway.
‘They hid the dead phaeron in a stasis tomb complex called Cephris, hoping to return and recreate the species if they found biotransference not to their liking.’
‘So why didn’t they?’ asked Vokksh. ‘Return, I mean?’
Trazyn shrugged. ‘Unclear. But just as we cannot remember Nephreth, his followers may have forgotten how to activate the device. Over time, they forgot even what it led to – thus its name. The Mysterios. A mystery.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Vokksh. ‘What purpose do you have for keeping this object, Trazyn?’
‘I…’ Trazyn stopped.
‘He wants it for his gallery,’ said Orikan. ‘To stare at it, or rather, not to stare at it. He didn’t even know what he had. It will simply collect dust, a curio serving no purpose.’
‘And what purpose would it serve for you, Orikan?’ asked Vokksh.
‘None,’ growled Trazyn. ‘He doesn’t believe in a return to the flesh. Orikan wants us to be…’ He waved his fingers in the air. ‘Energy beings. Things of light. If he found Nephreth, he would likely incinerate the phaeron to keep rival crypteks from finding a solution that was not his. Ulterior motives, my overlord.’
‘Ulterior motives, you say?’ crowed Orikan. ‘Ask how he acquired it.’
‘It’s not your time to speak, sand tick,’ snarled Trazyn.
‘Yes, quite right,’ said Vokksh. ‘But the question stands. How did you acquire this?’
‘Legitimately.’ Trazyn turned off the orbuculum, packed it in his pocket dimension. ‘If that is all…’
‘Legitimately… how?’ Vokksh pressed.
‘It was part of a lot acquisition from the Ammunos crownworld of Hashtor. Tragic story, Hashtor. A solar flare from the local star triggered a failure cascade to its stasis system. It is a dead world. Legal under salvage.’
No one moved. The Ammunos had been powerful. Secretive and distrusted, but their absence would be a blow.
‘The Ammunos Dynasty,’ Trazyn paused, looking around the room to let the message sink in, ‘will not come to claim it.’
The council and executioner stood, stunned at the dire pronouncement.
Vokksh murmured in the back of his throat. ‘That appears to be legal, under salvage–’
‘Ah,’ goaded Orikan. ‘But when did you acquire it?’ He took a step forward, tile strands rattling against his skeletal body.
‘I have not yielded the floor,’ said Trazyn.
‘Did you steal the Mysterios before the Ammunos died out, or after? Because by my auguries, you raided their vault for artefacts well before the solar flare. In fact, immediately when it became clear the solar flare would snuff them out.’
‘Your information,’ Trazyn said with a hint of frost, ‘is incorrect and out of procedure.’
‘Wait,’ said Vokksh. ‘Are you alleging that Overlord Trazyn, aware of the solar flare, did not alert the tomb world’s Deep Spirit and instead raided it for artefacts?’
‘Just so,’ said Orikan. ‘As you heard him say, the Ammunos Dynasty will not come to claim it. A perfect theft. He walks away with the goods, and the cosmos wipes out the victim. No one can complain.’
‘That is ridiculous,’ Trazyn said.
‘Villain!’ crowed Orikan. ‘Plotter. Traitor to your own kind.’
‘Is it true?’ demanded Vokksh. ‘Keep in mind my vocal scryers are on high alert, any lie will be detected.’
‘Well…’ Trazyn tutted in frustration. ‘Understand, there was very little time to make a decision.’
A groan went up from the council.
‘No, no. Listen,’ he stumbled. ‘Awakening a tomb world takes time. At least a half-century, even under optimal conditions. To save even the higher orders would have taken more time than was available. So I focused on salvaging what I could from the material culture…’
‘Murderer,’ snarled Phaerakh Ossuaria.
‘It is you who should be on trial, Trazyn, not I!’ sang the Diviner. ‘I foresaw your treachery and…’
‘Wait.’ Trazyn motioned for quiet. ‘You foresaw it?’
‘Of course! I foresaw the horror of biotransference. The fall of the ­aeldari. I have seen the coming of hungry creatures you cannot fathom and–’
‘If you foresaw the solar flare,’ asked Trazyn. ‘Why did you not stop it? Did you hope to sweep in afterward and take the astrarium without resistance?’
Orikan stared, frozen. His mouth worked, giving a metallic clunk, clunk, clunk. ‘Ah… you misunderstood me, I think.’
‘Executioner,’ said Vokksh. ‘Take them both.’
‘Bastards,’ muttered Orikan, fingering his ritual tiles. ‘I knew Vokksh was a bad idea.’
‘The Ammunos Dynasty,’ Trazyn paused, looking around the room to let the message sink in, ‘will not come to claim it.’
The council and executioner stood, stunned at the dire pronouncement.
‘Sad news,’ said the adjudicator from her stasis-casket. She raised her head, the resurrection orbs that hung from her headdress tinkling like a chandelier. ‘I assume you are claiming salvage rights?’
Trazyn breathed a sigh of relief. Or at least, the closest he could get to one without lungs. He had worried that Supreme Excellent Lady Yullinn was not the right one to conduct this trial. He feared a lighter touch might let Orikan run wild, yet he had been relatively subdued.
And yet… Trazyn felt displaced. A feeling he could not access perturbed him. Reactor coolant sloshed about his innards as if he’d experienced a hard translation.
He felt a strange heat by his hip, and noticed the ritual tile which hung there, the one he’d taken from Orikan, was warm.
Odd.
‘Overlord Trazyn?’ asked Supreme Excellent Lady Yullinn. ‘Do you wish to claim salvage rights?’
‘Yes. Yes, indeed I do, overlord… ah, supreme lady. Adjudicator.’
‘Are you well, Trazyn?’ the supreme excellent lady’s oculars folded in concern.
‘If the venerable Trazyn is done,’ cut in Orikan. ‘I have evidence to present.’
‘Please do,’ nodded Yullinn. ‘Overlord, please sit down. Clearly what you witnessed on Hashtor has affected you deeply. If you have more evidence to present you may do so after you have recovered.’
That did not seem like the worst idea, Trazyn thought. His head felt clogged. His central reactor cycled at a dangerous rate. And that sense of unreality refused to abate. He locked his legs and took the weight off his frame. A seat without a chair.
‘My lady,’ said Orikan. ‘As you see, Lord Trazyn – a dear friend for many centuries – is having difficulties. Biotransference and the Great Sleep have taken a toll on all of us, I fear. This is but a misunderstanding.’
Trazyn stopped, turned his head. ‘Misunderstanding?’
‘Poor Trazyn. He invited me to conduct research on Solemnace. You see…’ Orikan opened a dimensional pocket and withdrew the Astrarium Mysterios. ‘I also have a device. We were comparing them.’
Trazyn’s eyes found the device and locked there. His sense of being in two places, his void-sick feeling, stopped as if the Astrarium Myst­erios anchored him.
‘Partway through our symposium he became… confused. Poor being. Accused me of stealing his device, even set his lychguard on me.’
Trazyn reached out a hand. Bombarded the astrarium with his spectrometer. Received the results.
‘Of course, I had to defend myself–’
‘He’s transmuted it!’ roared Trazyn. ‘You’ve solved the first puzzle.’ He leapt up from his crouch, bounding towards the device.
Orikan shrank back and the executioner reached for Trazyn, but he leapt away, opening his projection, adding his spectromantic data.
‘The composition is exactly the same, see? The exact same.’ Trazyn snarled as the two component reports joined into one, signalling a one hundred per cent match. ‘He’s lying to you.’
All heads turned towards Orikan.
He tapped a finger on the astrarium, calculating his next move.
‘Oh hell,’ he said.
‘The Ammunos Dynasty,’ Trazyn paused to let the message sink in, ‘will not come to claim it.’
The council and executioner stood, stunned at the dire pronouncement.
‘But that alone does not confirm your salvage rights, does it?’ said Overlord Baalbehk, his voice resonating inside the stasis-casket. He raised his head, the golden sketches of water flowers engraved on his death mask catching the wan light. ‘We cannot simply claim anything we find. It is lawless. And there may be other interested parties.’
‘What?’ said Trazyn, fighting the void-sick feeling in his internals. The blackstone floor rocked like a command barge needing an attitude cali­bration. He tasted radiation coolant in his mouth.
An interstitial alert – overheating on his right hip. Trazyn looked down to find Orikan’s tile glowing white-hot, hissing where it contacted the cold metal of his hip.
‘If I may, overlord,’ said Orikan, stepping into the centre. ‘From my understanding, the Astrarium Mysterios is exempt from the laws of salvage. It is part of the common heritage, owned by all necron kind.’
Overlord Baalbehk nodded. ‘As I said, other interested parties.’
‘Indeed,’ Orikan continued. ‘Lord Trazyn has argued quite convincingly that this tomb, should it be found, would be not only a treasure of history but also a path forward for our kind.’
Trazyn stared at the burning tile. It nagged at him. He had seen it before. Images flashed in his mnemonic banks, lighting up his neural cavity with flashes that came and went like sparks from an overloaded power relay. A headdress, power orbs hanging from it like a chandelier. The deep voice of a courtroom orator.
He put a hand to his aching cranium.
The tile burned through its smoking cord and dropped to the floor.
‘After all,’ said Orikan. ‘Why should the Nihilakh control this incredible find? Whoever takes the Astrarium Mysterios should have a chance to seize this once-in-eternity opportunity for power.’
Trazyn felt the illness recede. It was as if the ornament had been pulling him apart, and as it smouldered on the floor, he heard the shouts of assent and excitement from the council members.
Partisans, every one of them, thought Trazyn. They might claim that they fight for necrontyr, for the Infinite Empire, or their own kind, but it was a lie. They wanted power. For their phaerons, for themselves. Ossuaria murdered her brother and nephews. Zuberkar could not feel powerful without conquest. Even the meek High Metallurgist Quellkah had betrayed friends on the way to his position. Graspers, all of them.
And all of them, the fools, thought they would beat Orikan to the tomb. They saw him as an eccentric, half-mad astrologer. But he was so much more dangerous than that.
And Baalbehk, so rabidly loyal to his own dynasty, was the most mercenary. Baalbehk, whom Trazyn had backed as adjudicator simply because Orikan had protested so greatly when the council proposed him. All at once, Trazyn realised he had been tricked. Orikan had wanted that bias. Counted on it working in his favour.
‘Very well,’ said Baalbehk. ‘The Astrarium Mysterios will be owned by all and none, a free object belonging to he who possesses it. Stealing it shall be no crime, killing for it no sin. And whoever opens the crypt may keep its contents for the greater glory of their dynasty.’
Orikan looked at him, grinning, and in his core Trazyn knew the chronomancer had bested him. The ritual tiles swinging from his shoulders radiated heat so bright it reflected off his long steel bones.
And with his mind clearing, Trazyn realised what the chronomancer had done.So it’s war, Diviner, he sent over interstitial message.
If you can catch me, archaeovist.CHAPTER FIVE

Keph-Re’s Proof: An adept shall not attempt this hex until they have mastered the Ninth Book of Conduction, and successfully channelled powers of up to 77:777 Keph. If so, disjoint the second and third fingers of the right hand at the knuckle, bending them together to form a diamond to concentrate the energy. Of the two outside fingers, snap them backward at the knuckle like eagles’ wings to collect the ambient currents. Once captured, the thumb may be thrust forward, like the antennae on a dish, to direct the energy discharge.
– Currents of Ruin, Folio VI, Canto III

Mandragora
9,984 Years Before the Great Awakening
Orange. After six centuries, Orikan was sick of orange. It tinted everything in his astromantic observatory, from the blackstone floor, to the pherro-conductive astrolabes, to the dead oculars of the crypteks – now twenty in number – that knelt around the Astrarium Mysterios in concentric layers of octagons.
Their repetitive chanting of the Eighty-Eight Theorems buzzed in Orikan’s auditory transducers, filtered out so it didn’t drive him insane.
But the orange light and repetitive chants, much as they annoyed him, were necessary. Zatoth’s Harmonious Sphere was a difficult conduction to sustain, especially as a subroutine. It would have taken most of Orikan’s neural function to bring it into being, leaving him incapable of analysis. And the orange light it cast – visible no matter the spectrum – was a small nuisance considering it let him conduct his rituals outside the flow of time.
For every century that passed outside the chronostatic field, three inched by within.
Orikan possessed limitless patience for study. Lost himself in it. Let the pursuit define him. Became nothing but programming and thought that worked the problem. He floated on a suspensor field, fingers positioned in the Open Eye of Sut, perception suite dialled back. Soon, the canoptek wraiths and scarab swarms – ordered to replace fluids and cool reactors every six point four years standard – would move in the background as unreal blurs.
He surrendered his physical self. Allowed his consciousness-protocols to slip so his astral-algorithm could go forth from his metal frame.
Many necrons could transfer their consciousness. Even the meanest overlord could scry part of his mind through the ocular systems of his warriors and scarabs, seeing what they saw. Trazyn – Dead Gods burn him – could even transfer his consciousness into new surrogate bodies. Orikan would give ten worlds to know how the archaeovist did that, though he suspected it involved some mean alien artefact rather than personal study. Trazyn was a boor. A clumsy meddler. A mere–
Orikan refocused.
Projection required serenity, a mind clear of the looping subroutines of obsession and anger. Anger, that was his stumbling block. Always there, anger, a spiteful shadow following him to the astral plane. Even when he projected, it tied him to his body. He might lessen it, feel it grow weaker, but fury always stretched out behind him. An umbilical cable tying him to his physical self. He touched it with his astral fingers, lightly, to get a read on its strength.
They should have listened! Bastards. They never–
About normal, then. He was feeling good after his victory over Trazyn. How he’d fooled that hunching sack of mnemonics calling himself an overlord. What was an overlord to Orikan? A being wrapped in the pursuits of the present, heedless of the future.
The anger again. He released, felt himself sink deeper in the autonomic trance.
Not always a bad thing, that anger. In some of his most clandest­ine experiments, hidden from the eyes of the other cryptek masters, it had even saved him. Snapped him back to his constructed body when the tides of the cosmos threatened to sweep his astral-algorithm out into the vast blackness. A spark whirling up from the fire of existence. Another molecule pressed between the whirring gears of the planets, resigned to the pull of gravitational fields, drifting with the dust of meteor belts and rolling along the curve of space.
The chronostatic field helped with that. Kept him from diffusing. Maintained focus.
Focus. Surrender. Relax. Sink deeper.
Listen to the droning metronome of your power plant.
Listen to the droning metronome of your power.
Listen to the droning metronome.
Listen to the droning.
Listen.
Orikan feels it happen. No, not feels. Knows. He moves beyond feeling as his essence slips out of his chill body and into the soft womb of the chronostatic field. Floating free, he looks back at his solid form, still floating on the suspensor field. Head back, closed ocular pointing skyward at the stars that glint through the invisible defence field. Stars, worlds and fields of space dust, smearing technicolour across the dark sky.
It has taken six years to achieve this state. And now, the work begins.
First Century
The first hundred years pass in deep study. Orikan drifts through his aetheric library, heedless of time and physical constraint. Disappears into the texts, lives between lines of glyphs as if they are rivers running by him, babbling out their knowledge as they pass.
His consciousness alters – as any consciousness does after consuming new knowledge, learning from long-dead teachers; he is no longer the Orikan who sits floating on Mandragora. The Astral Orikan knows, with some melancholy, that this cannot last. That once uploaded back into the body its systems will reassert themselves and his older personality will return. He will retain the key knowledge, but much will be lost.
Letting that go, he gusts into the works of Numinios, studying his cypheric script in ways a being of metal could not. These are esoteric works, indecipherable to those enclosed in the physical. Orikan ­rearranges the glyphs, reading them forward, in reverse, drifting through them to see the encoded backsides.
Numinios was a master of transfiguration, able to rework molecules as easily as he’d encoded the secrets in his uncollected works.
Line by line, with a tedium that would frustrate a mortal consciousness, Orikan decrypts the tangled code.
Ninety years of study. Only a small victory. Orikan discerns a theory on the theoretical function of the device. A better understanding of the molecule chains in the metal.
According to Numinios, molecules formed at a certain resonance can be tied to celestial bodies. Keyed to a certain gravitational signature, sensing the overlap and alignment of directional pull, they can change depending on their location in the cosmos.
Trazyn said, Orikan remembers, that certain astrariums opened due to location. And this state change had occurred as he passed through the webway.
Could it be, he thinks, that this location was in the labyrinth dimension? Did I trigger a state change by pure chance?
Finally, something to test.
Running a gravitational hex through the networked minds of the crypteks, he aims a gravitational projector at the astrarium, its cradle encircling the puzzle box with graviton rays.
He retrieves the logs from his body’s onboard gravitometer, running through the fields he’d passed through on his transit through the webway. Six hundred and forty-seven field configurations.
Orikan sets the graviton ray positions to the first field configuration and fires.
The crypteks’ chanting falters. Orange fire blazes behind their oculars.
Graviton beams, bright violet in his astral vision, spill and ripple over the octahedron’s surface.
Nothing.
He moves to configuration two. And fires.
On configuration four hundred and seventeen, he sees one angle split. It opens like a mouth, revealing a shine of liquid emerald inside the throat of the astrarium, then snaps tight.
Close. Nearly there.
Four hundred and eighteen does it.
Without sound, but radiating extreme heat, the astrarium begins to change. Its sharp edges fold outward, turning inside out. Angles disappear, faces fold in on themselves. Moving in a way matter should not, grinding, as if it is working against purpose to regress.
The octahedron becomes a pyramid once more. It vibrates in the field.
A cryptek screams, his mouth smoking. To Orikan’s dampened perception suite it is no more than a loud breath. Another joins the chorus. Like the pop of firecrackers, one networked neural system fails, then another. They shriek with a pain they should not feel.
Orikan shuts the gravitometer down.
Cryptek heads fall forward, insensate, on steel ribcages.
The astrarium is an octahedron once more, wisps of neon smoke twisting from the glyphs in its surface.
For a bare moment, it projects a name in the smoking air above the device: Vishani.
And a clock: two hundred and sixty-four years, sixteen hours, four seconds.
Three seconds.
Two.
One.
Apparently time is no longer on his side.
Second Century
The trace mercury atoms. The crystal buried deep inside the astrarium. Orikan curses himself for his narrowness of thought, rages at his own leisurely sloth until the spite threatens to yank him back into his rigid body.
Mercury ions. Crystal. Those elements mean only one thing: a mercury-ion trap, a timekeeping device.
Buried inside the Astrarium Mysterios, silently counting the seconds, is an atomic clock.
It will open again in barely over two and a half centuries. Whatever he’d done to it in the webway – whether intended or not – had started a countdown. But the gravitational transmutation suggests that it won’t simply open at the appointed time. It has to be in an appointed place.
Indeed, it is possible – even likely – that his transit through the webway had unknowingly brought the Mysterios close enough to its first keyed location that it had transmuted – even in the dimensional pocket where he carried it.
Which is impossible. But then again, it is also impossible that outside gravity affects the webway at all.
With this knowledge, Orikan casts his consciousness backward in time, to the beginning of his research. After all, he is a slave of the hourglass now, forced to conduct work under the device’s own countdown. If he can make up a century…
Only, he finds it still counting down, not with more time, but less. He quickly reverses himself, shooting his consciousness back to the present.
The Mysterios, it seems, has been proofed against chronomancy.
An alert interrupts his studies. Automatic defences detect an incoming meteorite, but spectromantic analysis indicates the object contains living metal. It notifies him of a firing solution.
Greetings, Trazyn, Orikan thinks. And farewell.
He does nothing. Merely watches the defence grid blink to active, then broadcast that the foreign object has been destroyed.
Orikan goes back to his studies, looks up to see another alert, noticing that thirteen months have passed since the meteorite was destroyed. This time, it’s a meteorite shower. At least thirty objects hurtling towards the atmosphere.
Clearly, the old archaeovist is trying to run the gauntlet, zip from surro­gate to surrogate. Good luck to him.
Automated defences count down the number of remaining meteor­ites from thirty, to fifteen, to two. The surface of the chronostatic sphere ripples like a disturbed pond as the backwash of Mandragora’s air defence grid lets loose. Doomsday cannons and death rays lance the reality outside. If mortals had been there, their lungs would’ve cooked breathing the superheated air.
All targets destroyed.
Orikan dismisses the notice and runs a last decrypt equation on a minor work of Talclus. A rather pedestrian treatise on gridded crypto­mantic equations, but necessary background reading nonetheless.
Satisfied at his preparations, he turns to the main object of this research phase.
The Vishanic Manuscripts.
They are gibberish. Lines of trash glyphs without form or reason. Unreadable and obscure, a legend among initiates of the cryptek mysteries.
Rumour has it they hold a great secret, but if that is true Vishani had guarded it well.
She had been Mistress of Secrets and High Cryptomancer to the Ammunos. The greatest occult encoder of her age.
The Vishanic Manuscripts are not difficult because of their encryptions alone. It is their layers of encryption.
Only six crypteks, including Orikan, have ever decrypted the text.
All of their decryptions were different, and all of them were wrong.
Two rendered a list of Ammunos tomb worlds. Three decryptions formed a history of the Ammunos Dynasty – from three different narrators. Orikan’s solution, maddeningly, had rendered construction schematics for an impossible ziggurat, one whose structure obeyed only its own warped conception of physics. Load-bearing pillars thin as thread. Heavy materials stacked upon fragile ones. Almost a ­parody of a building.
Ages ago, Orikan had even built a scale model in holographic chryso­prase, hoping a geomantic analysis of its angles might lead to an algebraic key.
It had not.
Vishani was not brilliant because she’d hidden the solution to her manuscript – she was brilliant because she’d encoded many solutions into the text. Indeed, there were masters of the cryptek mysteries who believed the whole thing a joke – a prank to bedevil and occupy rival dynasties who hoped to learn the secrets of her phaeron.
If it was, she’d miscalculated. Rumour was that during the War in Heaven, a rival cryptek had imprisoned and tortured her to death in search of the answer. The tale went that she promised to tell him, then when he leaned close to hear her answer, she’d overloaded her reactor, incinerating them both.
Orikan admired the sheer spitefulness of it.
But why, he thinks, go through all that for a prank?
Especially when one of the six translations – the second of the dynastic histories – was the only one to mention Nephreth the Untouched.
If the stories are true, if Nephreth lies hidden, it would have been Vish­ani that spirited him away. And Orikan has no doubt the Astrarium Mysterios is her work. It is too clever, too maddening, to have been made by another.
Orikan works in a white heat. Long obsessed with the Vishanic Manu­scripts – and Orikan is, if anything, a being of obsession – he devours the text for hidden meanings.
It is as if he’s never read this text before, and nine years into the scouring, he realises he has not. Previously when he’d studied the Vishanic Manuscripts, it had been the hard copy kept in the library of his order, supposedly a direct copy of the one on the Ammunos crownworld of Hashtor – though there had always been doubts about that, given the secretive nature of the Ammunos. It would be just like them to disseminate flawed texts.
Indeed, when Orikan had travelled to Ammunos to salvage what he could, he had hoped to recover an original copy of the manuscripts. To his eternal horror, Trazyn had got there first. Orikan had been forced to acquire a data-copy from their aetheric library.
Yet as he reads, Orikan increasingly notices differences. Word orders switched here or there, variant spellings, formatting differences.
He reviews the Ammunos copy side by side with his own data-copy.
They are not the same.
Vishani was a data-sorceress – an encoder the likes of which the cryptek mystics would never see again. Floating in the aether, surrounded by code.
With a flush of discovery, Orikan realises he’s grasped the revelation, the reason why no one could find another layer of encoding in those six decryptions.
The data-copy is the master document. The hard copies they’d worked on for millennia are diversions. The six decryptions were only the first layer of the riddle.
And this decryption of the Ammunos history is so much more than he’d known.
Nephreth was not known as the Untouched simply because his physical form was resistant to the tumours. He was also unmarked in battle, in duels.
Because he was a projectionist. Able through technology and personal focus to cast his mind onto the battlefield as a thoughtform. A being of energy far more powerful than the poor astral-algorithm Orikan has cast. One that did not require a chronostatic field or years of trance preparation.
Think of it, Orikan muses. The children sitting on the Council hoot and cheer over the prospect of returning to the flesh. We could be so much more. Beings of light and power, the eternal lives of the necron wedded to the souls of the necrontyr. Why return to the ravages of mortality when we could become beings of the aether?
Orikan dives into the esoteric treatises of Vishani. Works feverishly, staying rooted, overlaying the countdown on his vision so he remembers the object of his searching.
Year after year, Orikan’s awe grows. Vishani had been a rare genius. Indeed, were she still operational, Orikan’s competitive nature would force him to despise her. Rivalry runs deep among cryptek masters, and he has enough self-knowledge to understand that he is prone to knowledge-jealousy. Yet the dead are no rivals, and he is free to admire the Mistress of Secrets for what she had been.
At least, before she had died so badly.
He spends eighty years meditating over her algebraic poetry. Floats free through her astromantic-maps, admiring the fine detail work of her chrysoprase projections. Devours her treatises on the importance of following an order of operations while casting multilayered quantum shields. At the last, Orikan finds himself shocked speechless that such obvious innovations – the use of a logarithmic spiral in overlapping fields – have not occurred to him.
The Mistress of Secrets had been a polymath of unusual talent and singular vision, if a few eccentricities. The logarithmic spiral, for instance. Its shape appears in her chrysoprase reconstructions of the cosmos, whirling galaxies and sucking black holes making the pattern when in reality they would be far more wild, and as a motif in her collections of algebraic poetry. And it is mentioned six times in the Vishanic Manu­scripts themselves.
Wait.
Orikan summons the manuscripts, enters the patterns to access the Nephreth decryption. Lays the glyph-text out on a two-dimensional grid. Rearranges it via the meter Vishani favoured in her algebraic poetry.
And then, astral hand trembling, he sweeps his palm in a circle, stirring the floating glyphs. Chanting the equation for a perfect logarithmic spiral.
Glyphs drift and turn. Fold and shift. Take new places in a spiral laby­rinth of pure equations that slowly wheels in front of his disbelieving ocular. Motes of useless data drip from the wheeling arithmystic thoughtform like embers falling from a torch.
‘Here rests a phaeron like no other,’ one of the kneeling crypteks murmurs.
‘Behold! The tomb that holds the one who will end the age of metal,’ another drones.
‘He lies within,’ another answers. ‘His incorporeal form lies with eyes open.’
‘Nephreth. Nephreth. Nephreth…’ They take up the chant. Not a droning rote repetition like the Eighty-Eight Theorems, but an ecstatic ululation steeped in passion and trance-joy. Orikan looks around, sees blue light blazing from the eyes of his sleeping crypteks. Glowing fluid leaks from their oculars and mouths, patters on the blackstone floor.
‘Nephreth. Nephreth. Nephreth…’
With a chill, Orikan realises his empty body has joined the chorus.
The wheel of radiant arithmystic glyphs drifts towards the Mysterios, mates with it as if the octahedron were the natural centre of its axis. As they meet, the spiral spins faster and faster, quick as a chariot wheel at first, then rotating with the cutting speed of a circular saw.
Glyphs on the Mysterios pulse with internal power. Beams of energy spear out of every symbol and angle, filling the observation deck with a projection that burns with an astral intensity that Orikan cannot look directly at.
But he knows what it is.
A star map.
Trazyn was known throughout the dynasties for many things – giving up was not one of them.
Even before the transition to metal, his fellows considered him notori­ously dogged, even stubborn in his pursuits. But immortality had made him relentless, granting a patience that his frail body of flesh could not tolerate.
Trazyn was not, in other terms, a coward. His power plant held nothing but scorn for those who deserted an endeavour.
But he was willing to admit it when he needed to change his approach.
Mandragora, for instance. He’d exhausted his options on that score. After his endeavour with the meteor shower – a plan that resulted in a rather unpleasant number of disintegrations – he’d abandoned orbital entry.
It was certainly true that the Sautekh were jumped-up warmongers with no sense of culture. A middling dynasty at best, coasting on the strength of a few competent generals. And without doubt, they were far too arrogant for Trazyn’s liking.
But they certainly knew how to build an air defence grid.
Sneaking in via the dolmen gate proved similarly fruitless. Five steps past the arch took him into a pack of rather unfriendly canoptek spyders. To ensure he hadn’t just been unlucky, he’d tried twice more before realising the swarm lurked around the gate on an endless patrol.
After roughly a century, he’d taken stock. Stepped back and considered his options.
He’d become too consumed with the puzzle of breaking Mandra­gora’s defences and forgotten that the Astrarium Mysterios was a means to an end, not the goal in itself. Become, in essence, the short-sighted buffoon Orikan accused him of being.
Because even more than quitters, Trazyn loathed those who lacked imagination.
Which is why he’d gathered his crypteks in the archive’s reading room – the closest thing to an audience chamber he possessed. They stood around a chest-high table, its sides carved in a turquoise and gold bas-relief depicting the Departure of the Silent King.
Their tireless legs made chairs unnecessary.
‘Start with this,’ said Trazyn, tapping one finger on the tile he’d collected off Orikan. ‘What is its composition?’
Sannet paused, his stylus hovering over his phos-glyph tablet. ‘There are limits to what I can say, my lord. Certain mysteries of the cryptek order are inviolate. The punishment for revealing them are quite–’
‘Sannet,’ Trazyn interrupted. ‘You have been to my gallery, yes?’
‘I… have.’
‘Then you know that I possess every conceivable apparatus of violence? I believe you asked to be excused from cataloguing the drukhari gallery, correct?’
Sannet said nothing.
‘To wit, if you truly believe the cryptek masters can devise a punishment more horrid than even the most casual selection out of my gallery, I’m willing to prove you mistaken.’
‘It’s a time tile,’ Sannet blurted. ‘When we achieve a certain mastery in a school, we carry tokens of our achievement. The higher the mastery, the longer the chain of tiles.’
‘Obviously,’ Trazyn tilted his head. ‘I am not unfamiliar with the structure of your little cult, Sannet.’
‘But they are not merely symbolic,’ the cryptek added, pushing his stylus away from him, as if worried he might spontaneously transcribe his own betrayal. ‘They’re essence-totems, forged from whatever substance our school studies. Khybur over there is a voidmancer, and his tiles are the distilled substance of the gulf between stars. I am – or rather, was – a dimensionalist.’ He reverently held up the trail of shimmering purple tiles that swayed from his shoulder. ‘These are the blood of the universe, harvested from the wounds created when we tear open dimensional gateways and emblematic of–’
‘And this, I assume,’ said Trazyn, peering at the tile, ‘is time?’
‘Correct, my lord. Pure space-time. When we cast our hexes, the power resonates with these totems.’
‘Would it still react with its fellows were it in the same room? For example, if I stole one of Khybur’s totems and he channelled a black hole, would the tile heat?’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said Khybur. ‘The ambient energy of the hex would react with the tile even if it was not one of mine. It is why crypteks join together in conclaves during battle – the resonance can produce much more powerful hexes. But if it was paired with its fellows it would certainly demonstrate a strong kinship.’
‘So if Orikan used chronomancy while I held this totem, it would become hot?’
‘Warm,’ corrected the voidmancer Khybur. ‘To become hot, he would need to have been altering the timeline multiple times. And likely the one holding it would experience ill effects. Mismatched memories. Extreme discomfort.’
‘So you’re positing he went back more than once?’ Trazyn asked.
‘You misunderstand, my lord.’ Khybur said it gently. ‘Chronological manipulation on that scale would not be possible, beyond even the highest practitioners of their school. One trip back takes a great deal of focus and energy. Two, at most. Three–’
‘Would be needed to make the totem this hot?’ Trazyn projected a temperature reading saved from his engram banks. ‘He is capable, my faithful ones. More capable than anyone expected. Talented enough to foil the council’s verdict not one time, but at least three that I can partially recall.’ He summoned a projection of the puzzle box. ‘And now he has the Mysterios on the crownworld of Mandragora.’
‘I have drawn up new formulations for a Mandragora assault,’ said Trazyn’s tactical-cryptek, Tekk-Nev. ‘It is well fortified, as your… reconnaissance discovered.’
‘An artful euphemism for repeated atomisation, Tekk-Nev,’ Trazyn smiled. ‘You shall go far.’
Tekk-Nev ignored the compliment. ‘There are no options below a legion-level deployment.’
‘Prepare strike packages,’ said Trazyn. ‘Have the option ready. But I want possibilities beyond direct assault. The Mysterios is merely a map, a means to an end. When Orikan does conclude his research, he’ll need to come out of his hole to claim the prize. So how do we find out where he’s headed, and how can I counteract his chronomancy once I catch him?’
No one spoke for some time, the whole table working on the problem in quiet cogitation.
‘There are,’ said Sannet, then stopped to clear his vocal actuators, which had frozen up in the three-year silence. ‘There are two artefacts that might assist you.’
‘Artefacts?’ said Trazyn, scepticism echoing in his vocals. ‘I have searched the catalogue six times. There’s nothing–’
‘Not here on Solemnace, my lord,’ smiled Sannet. ‘Forgive me, but yours is not the only collection in the galaxy.’
Trazyn considered disassembling the cryptek for his impertinence, but if Sannet had felt able to interrupt him, what he had was clearly good. He nodded for the datamancer to continue.
And when he heard what the being had to say, Trazyn smiled.
It had, after all, been too long since his last visit.
The canoptek spyder’s identification beam swept over Trazyn’s death mask, reading the signature of his systemic aura. Satisfied, it bowed down in reverence and levitated backward and away, leaving the gateway clear.
‘Lord Trazyn,’ it buzzed, crude vocals static-laced from aeons of disuse. ‘Signal my network if you require assistance.’
‘Obliged,’ said Trazyn, and strode through the graven doorway.
‘Before you access the vaults,’ continued the spyder, ‘I have been instructed to play you the following message.’
A hatch in the floor opened to reveal an orbuculum. A broad-shouldered cryptek guttered into existence, the chrysoprase data partially corrupted so his ghostly, blue-tinged form was missing pieces like an incomplete puzzle.
‘Hail, Overlord Trazyn,’ said the image, enormous metal beard wagg­ling as it spoke. ‘I suspected you might pay us a visit during our slumber.’
‘Transmogrifier Hurakh!’ said Trazyn, though he knew the message could not answer. ‘Leaving a welcome card, you sentimental thing.’
‘It is beyond doubt that you are in your rights to be here. The archaeovist of the Nihilakh, after all, maintains curatorial oversight of the dynasty’s vault.’
‘Nice of you to say.’
‘But these are the vaults of blessed Gheden, not Solemnace. Examine and study what you will, but I have taken inventory of all collections and will notice any absences.’
‘The nerve,’ said Trazyn, not in the least offended. He walked through the projection and continued into the chamber.
‘We remember well the incident on Thelemis,’ continued Hurakh, speaking to nothing. ‘And charge you on your honour…’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Trazyn, leaving the scrambled messenger behind. ‘Understood.’
What he was here for, mainly, could not be carried anyway.
The Nihilakh treasure houses constituted fully half of Gheden’s subsurface structures. Vast and glittering, they spoke of a dynastic empire of breathtaking scope. As Trazyn walked the Golden Causeway – metal feet reverberating off the shining surface of the raised walkway – he passed doorways overflowing with fine objects and precious metals, the chambers within filled until they became impassable. Artefacts of long-dead civilisations stood heaped in piles, their surfaces dancing with the light of glittering gemstones carelessly tossed beside them. On his left, a full-sized necrontyr barge fashioned from platinum lay shipwrecked upon a pile of rubies, void-silk sails hanging slack in the windless air.
Trazyn hated the display. His fingers twitched with the urge to sort, catalogue and display each object in its proper context. But he knew that, despite appearances, Hurakh had already done so. This disorganised hoard was an act of feigned carelessness, a bit of theatre to overawe visitors with Nihilakh extravagance and abundance. In truth, Hurakh had logged and recorded every coin – could probably even tell you if it was head or tails side up. After all, dynasties did not become wealthy by being careless with their treasure.
Trazyn dimmed his oculars and walked on to the most exclusive vault in Gheden – the Chamber of the Seer.
The great head floated in the centre of a spherical vault. Hoses trailed from the neck like dangling roots, pumping luminous magenta fluid in and out of the decapitated beast’s severed neck. It was squat and reptilian, large as a temple, and was purported to be the last of its race – though what that race might be, Trazyn did not know.
The greatest treasure of the Nihilakh.
The Yyth Seer.
He entered it across the beast’s tongue, approaching the resonance chamber built into its open mouth. As he crossed, Trazyn saw the great bulging eyes blink once. It came slow, like a cloud passing over the sun. Trazyn told himself it was not alive. Not really. The thought of it being otherwise was too disturbing. The horror of being kept in infinite undeath merely to fulfil a needed role.
Trazyn banished that thought, it being too close for comfort.
A circle of blackstone chairs stood on the seer’s mouth, in case the wash of visions made even the hardy bodies of the necrons collapse. A living metal dome stretched above the chairs, forced against the Seer’s palate and keeping its jaws open wide.
Trazyn sat and summoned a phos-glyph panel, activating the neuro­graphic resonators that shaped the Seer’s visions into holographic images.
‘Orikan will find the opening point of the Astrarium Mysterios. I need to know where and when that will happen.’
Trazyn’s sensor suite recorded a temperature drop. Feathery crystals of frost formed on the chill metal of his arms and hands. Around him, the huge mouth shifted, the living metal ceiling groaning in protest. In the centre of the circle of chairs, nestled together like a campfire, the neurographic projectors glowed to life. Static electricity prickled Trazyn’s arms, snapping and popping as he moved his fingers to discharge it.
Above the imagers, blurred images morphed and changed, came into being then dissipated. Tropical canopy. Coral atolls. A world of blue and green.
He knew it. Recognised it.
‘Impossible,’ breathed Trazyn.
Trazyn stopped at the artefact gallery on his way out.
The object was right where Sannet had said it would be.
The Timesplinter Cloak, forged from crystallised shards of time itself. An ancient chronomantic artefact that allowed the wearer to see the matrix of the future. Just the thing one needed to shape their destiny – or negate a particularly troublesome time-sorcerer.
‘I’m sure Transmogrifier Hurakh would not mind my borrowing it for a spell,’ said Trazyn. ‘He is, after all, not scheduled to wake for another ten thousand years.’
But just in case, Trazyn activated the security-bypass talisman Sannet had provided.
When I’m done, he promised himself, I’ll simply put it back. Hurakh won’t even notice it was gone…
Trazyn left in a hurry. The security alarms were rather loud.
Mandragora
Sub-Crypt, 3,000 Cubits Below Surface
Orikan checked his hermetic field for the twelfth time. Ran an operational diagnostic. It came back all clear, repelling both outside atoms and data transmissions, setting the chance of failure at less than one in fifty million.
He looked at the abominable being before him and knew that was not good enough. He channelled more power into the field.
‘And after the battle,’ the thing said, its voice chillingly unlike any necron. Growling, spitting. Rusted. ‘Our kind may do what we wish.’
‘You may,’ said Orikan. ‘I will not force you to return.’
Silence. A form moved in the shadow, circling to Orikan’s right, the Diviner’s perception suite picking up the gleam of ocular light on bladed limbs.
Orikan tried not to look at it, to keep his ocular focused on the twisted being that floated before him. Yet subroutines still tried to calculate whether the aberration on his flank intended to attack.
‘It would be a great service to the dynasty,’ Orikan said.
‘I care nothing for this dynasty,’ the thing said. ‘But if you provide things, living things, biologicals for us to kill… we will come.’
His objective achieved, Orikan retreated into the tomb’s quarantine airlock and watched as the inner door closed and cycled.
Never taking his gaze off the monstrosities that lurked within.

Edit Report
Pub: 13 May 2021 23:42 UTC
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