Despite the overwhelming urge to just let free and release my new toy into the weak fleshy bits of the worm and leave it nothing but ash, I restrained myself.
Temperance was a heavenly virtue and with me being the pure and virtuous soul that I was, I of course, had ample amounts of it.
Bio-energy, I need energy. Don’t throw the dark abyssal fireball at it.
I disregarded the pained growls the pathetic worm was letting out and released my tendrils. From the moment I reached its flesh, it was already over for the damned thing.
Now I just had to be careful to not poke holes into its stomach or whatever organ produced that acid.
Just as that thought passed through my mind, of course one of my tendrils poked into a sac of ‘I don’t want to know’ which released enough acid to fill a living room with.
I hissed, more out of annoyance than pain as I felt my tendril dissolve into nothing. This wasn’t regular Tyranid acid that dissolved stuff into biomass, that’d just be throwing my energy back at me. This was the most vicious thing the hive mind could come up with in short order.
As the acid flowed through the cavern, my unfortunate tendril borrowed into the worm’s flesh. I could hear it melt not just my tendril but the worm’s body along with it. This damned thing was going to melt itself into unusable goo just to spite me, or maybe it was just a happy little accident for it.
I hope it hurts.
I retrieved what remained of the dumb little tendril that brought this upon my head, resolving myself to spank it later. Nah, that’s just spanking myself. Let’s not do that.
Thankfully, the worm still thought it could win somehow, so the other acid sacs didn’t burst by themselves and so with an added layer of care, I absorbed as much biomass as I could.
The worm was huge, so I got a large influx of bio-energy, but with most of its mass being made up of carapace or its acidic stomach, I got much less than I was expecting.
Then I felt the ground inch dangerously close.
‘Alright,’ I hummed in my mind. ‘Time to leave.’
In a flash, all my tendrils surged back into my body and I kicked myself away from the beast, flying through the gaping cavern I dug into its side and watching the now lifeless carcass smash into the ground.
It didn’t burrow back into the dirt, merely slamming against it and kicking up a cloud of sand.
The worm might have been a hasty try of a flailing Hive Mind, but it could have done the same damage had I not learned how to use Blink, or if I didn’t have this form to fall back to.
Nice try.
I fell down from my jump, slowing my fall with a touch of TK as I did so I didn’t make a crater when I touched down.
Then I went to eat up any remaining biomass from the carcass, and when I was done with that, I moved on to absorb whatever remained of the acidic sacs.
I might not have been able to absorb the acid, but the organ that made it and the sac that stored it would be a great addition to my toolkit.
There it is.
I found some remains of both. Among the dissolved flesh and carapace it wasn’t too hard to find the still intact organs. Both had to be immune to the acid, so they were left behind.
If I layer that onto my armour, I won’t have to worry about acid like that again.
Throwing those ideas over to my Mind Cores to figure out, I shifted back into my Psyker Form, grunting as my Soulbone Skeleton sort of manifested into my body. I knew it was there all this time, phased out, but somehow still held inside my body, but it just phasing back into my body was a rather uncomfortable feeling.
Not sure how that even bothered me anymore, I just turned into a large Tyranid-like monster and that didn’t make me all too uncomfortable. Gone were the days when just shifting into a non-human form made me nauseous.
I stood up, forming a new set of clothing over my body out of a silk-like material. It wasn’t as form fitting or stretchy as my bodysuit, but the look and feel of it on my skin made up for that.
Let’s see how Selene is do-
Reality slowed down around me, not in the figurative sense, but literally.
I forced bio-energy into my legs to kick myself away, but it all felt so sluggish, the only reason my mind could even keep up with the ever slowing time was that I thought more with my soul than with my brain.
I could practically feel some alien energy twisting around my body, one I wasn’t quite familiar with and I was sure it wasn’t anything Psychic or Warp related. There was not a single soul for kilometers around here, aside from the cultists.
They couldn’t be the culprits behind this, I’d have felt a ritual activating and the taint of Chaos spreading long before it could have ever hit me.
I tried to activate Blink, but my soul thread refused to widen enough, I barely managed to draw on any Soul Energy and all that amounted to was to let out a blast of energy which blew back some of the weird energy constricting around my body like an orb-like cage.
I pushed the energy back, but all that did was make the orb wider without damaging the weird structure of the channels I was just now beginning to sense.
I contemplated straight up abandoning this body. Whoever was behind this obviously knew what they were doing and probably knew what I was capable of. How much did they know? How did they hide from my senses?
Even Mephiston couldn’t hide … his … Soul.
I see.
Even though it hurt to do, I knew what I had to do. This could be an opportunity instead of a waste body yet.
Barring a single, microscopic tendril, the eldritch parts of myself diffused into bio-energy and I controlled that energy, storing it in my body. I spread it through my body, enhancing it so even if I were to lose all motor functions, harming this body would be challenging, even to the fuckwit who was probably doing this to me.
We will see who will have the last laugh. Archivist.
With that thought, I pulled my consciousness back from the body and felt any awareness of it go dim a nanosecond later. I could still feel that it was there, and that I had a connection to it, but it was like going from playing a game in 8k on 240fps to listening to a shitty old radio.
Gone was my control over it and most of my senses in that body grew foggy.
It wasn’t much of a surprise, being time-locked wasn’t something that was easy to escape from and just that my connection to that body, even as it was, surprised me a bit.
I knew this was a possible outcome a while back, me just existing would draw attention from those that cared enough to keep an eye out on the galaxy at large. Out of all the possible fuckheads to come after my hide, the one I suspected being behind this was the … least problematic? Well, he was problematic alright, but not in the existential threat way.
This felt more like a forced visit to an eccentric and senile grandpa, one that had far too much of both time and power to do whatever his deranged mind wished.
As it was, his hobby was kidnapping and / or stealing anything he found interesting, which seemingly included me now.
Though, it was all just a hypothesis, but my avatar being intact aside from locked in a time-stasis was in line with his methods and if it soon got transported into a sub-dimension … which it just did, I could be sure who it was.
Trazyn. Necron Overlord of Solemnace and Lead Archivist of the Infinite Galeries, his personal collection of a little bit of everything interesting going from 60 million years of Necrontyr pottery to a perfect clone of the Primarch Fulgrim.
He probably found me interesting, which was true. I was interested, but him stealing my avatar was annoying.
Still, if I could manage to free it once he transported it into the heart of his Infinite Galleries … then there would be a feast. A whole Primarch, a Krork, peak Eldar Warriors and who knew what else was hidden away in there.
This was an opportunity instead of a setback. That energy stored in that avatar was an investment.
I’ll have to remake my skeleton.
The ethereal eyebrows of my soul twitched at that. Making Soulbone was a tiresome and time-consuming thing.
If I can’t even get back Atiesh …
As if answering my call the glimmering white staff shifted into existence right next to my soul and came to orbit around it with a sense of … eagerness?
‘What a nice staff you are?’ I cooed at it like an idiot and Atiesh seemed to preen under my praise, moving just a bit faster with a touch of vibration going through its body.
I gave up on questioning ‘how’ it escaped the time-locked sub-dimension which was probably warded up to the heavens against Psychic activity, but then I remembered that even if the scale of it was small as of yet, Atiesh should be capable of Reality Warping.
I closed my mental eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. I have the staff; the rest is replaceable, this is an investment.
Vanity and pride were annoying, and I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t lacking in either, so just lying down and taking the kidnapping without retaliation was hurting me on a psychological level.
Still, it could have been much worse.
There were many worse people to draw to myself.
Personally, catching Eldrad’s attention was more worrying and that Lord of Change could be even more troublesome than that old Farseer.
I’d be a fool to think the powers that be were unaware of my existence. The Chaos Gods probably knew something was up and that it was related to me, just me connecting to the Warp probably told them that, if Tzeentch didn’t have a hand in me being here in the first place.
The tentacles and the weird stuff that happened around me combined with the future probably being thrown into disarray was something that had his fingerprints all over it.
A sane person would ask though, ‘Why would he do that? You can kill demons, that has to be bad for a Chaos God, right?’ and they would be right … but as they say, ‘No one fucks Tzeenth up like Tzeentch’.
Being one of his worshipers has to be one of the most miserable things in the world. From what I knew, he loved watching interesting people resist him and throw the galaxy into disarray, but when they bent, he discarded them.
There was even a Greater Demon that he threw into the equivalent of a black hole in the Warp which … came out with two heads, didn’t it?
I wanted to smash my head into a wall. Regular Lords of change did not have two heads. How did I forget that?
That just pushed up the danger level of that feathered weirdo a notch, after all, the Greater Demon that came out of that Black Hole that even the God of sorcery couldn’t see into was none other than Kairos Fateweaver, the same oversized chicken that was giving me headaches with his riddle-like speech a while ago.
I need a drink … or a Selene to hug.
Enough self-pity! Let’s get to it.
I hummed to myself, floating around in my Soul puddle a bit. It was … changing. That was expected. Just because it wasn’t constantly molested by Chaos and all that ugly stuff in the Warp, it was still a realm of emotions, thoughts and unreality.
I could see the stars of tiny realms forming inside of it, not quite able to tell what they were going to be.
Would they represent parts of me? Or was it all somehow going to reflect the tiny segment of reality this puddle can interact with through me?
Thoughts for later, let’s check up on Selly before she becomes super paranoid.
There came the problem, did I disengage the flimsy soul thread connecting me to my time-locked body … avatar, or did I try making a new one?
It’d be fucking great if I could make as many soul-threads as I wanted, it’d allow me to spread about much more and interact with reality on a much further scale than what a single avatar could allow me, but there had to be a downside. There were no freebies in this shithole of a galaxy.
Do I have to make it out of my soul or something? Rip off a fragment of it?
No, that would be far too dumb even for warhammer.
Let’s just try it.
I poked it.
By it, I mean the veil between Realspace and the Immaterium. It wasn’t a thin veil in the regular sense; it was fucky in the way everything relating to the Immaterium was.
There weren’t set rules for it.
You could just slip through a thin veil and end up in the Warp proper with a single step or you could treat it as the shore of a sea where the further and deeper you go, the more fucky and Warpy it gets.
The FTL drives the Tau made use of this sea-shore-like property of it without the makers of it even knowing. They just sort of sailed on the outermost layer of the Warp and as such, mostly remained unmolested by demons.
Sometimes, being bad at something was a talent and with those blue commies, having the flimsiest souls in existence and remaining under the radar of demons was their greatest strength.
So when I say I poked at that veil, I meant it by the first described way, intending to just go out of the Immaterium in a single step with it. Of course it didn’t work. Why would anything work on the first try?
So I started poking about, harder, gentler, here, there and I even tried to just sort of force it open, but so far, no results.
Shitty method it is.
That ‘sea shore’ metaphor becomes far too convoluted to explain how all this works when you take into consideration that my puddle and the Warp were separate while they could both be the ‘sea’ in the metaphor.
So, anyway, I started trying to push a thread of condensed Soul Energy into Realspace the long way around instead of taking the shortcut.
It was really damned long, even with time and distances being a bit fucked in here.
I hope Selene doesn’t worry too much. If that tin headed fucker did anything to her, I’m sending his museum into a star.
P3t1 A NOTE FROM ARAWN FROSTGUARD
Don't mind me, I'm just setting stuff up for the future. *whistles*
I have 11 Advanced Chapters on Patreon, you can read 2 advanced chapters for 1$ or all of them for 5$ here: Join Now!
Though, if you don't mind the few weeks of waiting, don't bother. With time everything will be rolled out for free on RR.
Despite the overwhelming urge to just let free and release my new toy into the weak fleshy bits of the worm and leave it nothing but ash, I restrained myself.
Temperance was a heavenly virtue and with me being the pure and virtuous soul that I was, I of course, had ample amounts of it.
Bio-energy, I need energy. Don’t throw the dark abyssal fireball at it.
I disregarded the pained growls the pathetic worm was letting out and released my tendrils. From the moment I reached its flesh, it was already over for the damned thing.
Now I just had to be careful to not poke holes into its stomach or whatever organ produced that acid.
Just as that thought passed through my mind, of course one of my tendrils poked into a sac of ‘I don’t want to know’ which released enough acid to fill a living room with.
I hissed, more out of annoyance than pain as I felt my tendril dissolve into nothing. This wasn’t regular Tyranid acid that dissolved stuff into biomass, that’d just be throwing my energy back at me. This was the most vicious thing the hive mind could come up with in short order.
As the acid flowed through the cavern, my unfortunate tendril borrowed into the worm’s flesh. I could hear it melt not just my tendril but the worm’s body along with it. This damned thing was going to melt itself into unusable goo just to spite me, or maybe it was just a happy little accident for it.
I hope it hurts.
I retrieved what remained of the dumb little tendril that brought this upon my head, resolving myself to spank it later. Nah, that’s just spanking myself. Let’s not do that.
Thankfully, the worm still thought it could win somehow, so the other acid sacs didn’t burst by themselves and so with an added layer of care, I absorbed as much biomass as I could.
The worm was huge, so I got a large influx of bio-energy, but with most of its mass being made up of carapace or its acidic stomach, I got much less than I was expecting.
Then I felt the ground inch dangerously close.
‘Alright,’ I hummed in my mind. ‘Time to leave.’
In a flash, all my tendrils surged back into my body and I kicked myself away from the beast, flying through the gaping cavern I dug into its side and watching the now lifeless carcass smash into the ground.
It didn’t burrow back into the dirt, merely slamming against it and kicking up a cloud of sand.
The worm might have been a hasty try of a flailing Hive Mind, but it could have done the same damage had I not learned how to use Blink, or if I didn’t have this form to fall back to.
Nice try.
I fell down from my jump, slowing my fall with a touch of TK as I did so I didn’t make a crater when I touched down.
Then I went to eat up any remaining biomass from the carcass, and when I was done with that, I moved on to absorb whatever remained of the acidic sacs.
I might not have been able to absorb the acid, but the organ that made it and the sac that stored it would be a great addition to my toolkit.
There it is.
I found some remains of both. Among the dissolved flesh and carapace it wasn’t too hard to find the still intact organs. Both had to be immune to the acid, so they were left behind.
If I layer that onto my armour, I won’t have to worry about acid like that again.
Throwing those ideas over to my Mind Cores to figure out, I shifted back into my Psyker Form, grunting as my Soulbone Skeleton sort of manifested into my body. I knew it was there all this time, phased out, but somehow still held inside my body, but it just phasing back into my body was a rather uncomfortable feeling.
Not sure how that even bothered me anymore, I just turned into a large Tyranid-like monster and that didn’t make me all too uncomfortable. Gone were the days when just shifting into a non-human form made me nauseous.
I stood up, forming a new set of clothing over my body out of a silk-like material. It wasn’t as form fitting or stretchy as my bodysuit, but the look and feel of it on my skin made up for that.
Let’s see how Selene is do-
Reality slowed down around me, not in the figurative sense, but literally.
I forced bio-energy into my legs to kick myself away, but it all felt so sluggish, the only reason my mind could even keep up with the ever slowing time was that I thought more with my soul than with my brain.
I could practically feel some alien energy twisting around my body, one I wasn’t quite familiar with and I was sure it wasn’t anything Psychic or Warp related. There was not a single soul for kilometers around here, aside from the cultists.
They couldn’t be the culprits behind this, I’d have felt a ritual activating and the taint of Chaos spreading long before it could have ever hit me.
I tried to activate Blink, but my soul thread refused to widen enough, I barely managed to draw on any Soul Energy and all that amounted to was to let out a blast of energy which blew back some of the weird energy constricting around my body like an orb-like cage.
I pushed the energy back, but all that did was make the orb wider without damaging the weird structure of the channels I was just now beginning to sense.
I contemplated straight up abandoning this body. Whoever was behind this obviously knew what they were doing and probably knew what I was capable of. How much did they know? How did they hide from my senses?
Even Mephiston couldn’t hide … his … Soul.
I see.
Even though it hurt to do, I knew what I had to do. This could be an opportunity instead of a waste body yet.
Barring a single, microscopic tendril, the eldritch parts of myself diffused into bio-energy and I controlled that energy, storing it in my body. I spread it through my body, enhancing it so even if I were to lose all motor functions, harming this body would be challenging, even to the fuckwit who was probably doing this to me.
We will see who will have the last laugh. Archivist.
With that thought, I pulled my consciousness back from the body and felt any awareness of it go dim a nanosecond later. I could still feel that it was there, and that I had a connection to it, but it was like going from playing a game in 8k on 240fps to listening to a shitty old radio.
Gone was my control over it and most of my senses in that body grew foggy.
It wasn’t much of a surprise, being time-locked wasn’t something that was easy to escape from and just that my connection to that body, even as it was, surprised me a bit.
I knew this was a possible outcome a while back, me just existing would draw attention from those that cared enough to keep an eye out on the galaxy at large. Out of all the possible fuckheads to come after my hide, the one I suspected being behind this was the … least problematic? Well, he was problematic alright, but not in the existential threat way.
This felt more like a forced visit to an eccentric and senile grandpa, one that had far too much of both time and power to do whatever his deranged mind wished.
As it was, his hobby was kidnapping and / or stealing anything he found interesting, which seemingly included me now.
Though, it was all just a hypothesis, but my avatar being intact aside from locked in a time-stasis was in line with his methods and if it soon got transported into a sub-dimension … which it just did, I could be sure who it was.
Trazyn. Necron Overlord of Solemnace and Lead Archivist of the Infinite Galeries, his personal collection of a little bit of everything interesting going from 60 million years of Necrontyr pottery to a perfect clone of the Primarch Fulgrim.
He probably found me interesting, which was true. I was interested, but him stealing my avatar was annoying.
Still, if I could manage to free it once he transported it into the heart of his Infinite Galleries … then there would be a feast. A whole Primarch, a Krork, peak Eldar Warriors and who knew what else was hidden away in there.
This was an opportunity instead of a setback. That energy stored in that avatar was an investment.
I’ll have to remake my skeleton.
The ethereal eyebrows of my soul twitched at that. Making Soulbone was a tiresome and time-consuming thing.
If I can’t even get back Atiesh …
As if answering my call the glimmering white staff shifted into existence right next to my soul and came to orbit around it with a sense of … eagerness?
‘What a nice staff you are?’ I cooed at it like an idiot and Atiesh seemed to preen under my praise, moving just a bit faster with a touch of vibration going through its body.
I gave up on questioning ‘how’ it escaped the time-locked sub-dimension which was probably warded up to the heavens against Psychic activity, but then I remembered that even if the scale of it was small as of yet, Atiesh should be capable of Reality Warping.
I closed my mental eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. I have the staff; the rest is replaceable, this is an investment.
Vanity and pride were annoying, and I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t lacking in either, so just lying down and taking the kidnapping without retaliation was hurting me on a psychological level.
Still, it could have been much worse.
There were many worse people to draw to myself.
Personally, catching Eldrad’s attention was more worrying and that Lord of Change could be even more troublesome than that old Farseer.
I’d be a fool to think the powers that be were unaware of my existence. The Chaos Gods probably knew something was up and that it was related to me, just me connecting to the Warp probably told them that, if Tzeentch didn’t have a hand in me being here in the first place.
The tentacles and the weird stuff that happened around me combined with the future probably being thrown into disarray was something that had his fingerprints all over it.
A sane person would ask though, ‘Why would he do that? You can kill demons, that has to be bad for a Chaos God, right?’ and they would be right … but as they say, ‘No one fucks Tzeenth up like Tzeentch’.
Being one of his worshipers has to be one of the most miserable things in the world. From what I knew, he loved watching interesting people resist him and throw the galaxy into disarray, but when they bent, he discarded them.
There was even a Greater Demon that he threw into the equivalent of a black hole in the Warp which … came out with two heads, didn’t it?
I wanted to smash my head into a wall. Regular Lords of change did not have two heads. How did I forget that?
That just pushed up the danger level of that feathered weirdo a notch, after all, the Greater Demon that came out of that Black Hole that even the God of sorcery couldn’t see into was none other than Kairos Fateweaver, the same oversized chicken that was giving me headaches with his riddle-like speech a while ago.
I need a drink … or a Selene to hug.
Enough self-pity! Let’s get to it.
I hummed to myself, floating around in my Soul puddle a bit. It was … changing. That was expected. Just because it wasn’t constantly molested by Chaos and all that ugly stuff in the Warp, it was still a realm of emotions, thoughts and unreality.
I could see the stars of tiny realms forming inside of it, not quite able to tell what they were going to be.
Would they represent parts of me? Or was it all somehow going to reflect the tiny segment of reality this puddle can interact with through me?
Thoughts for later, let’s check up on Selly before she becomes super paranoid.
There came the problem, did I disengage the flimsy soul thread connecting me to my time-locked body … avatar, or did I try making a new one?
It’d be fucking great if I could make as many soul-threads as I wanted, it’d allow me to spread about much more and interact with reality on a much further scale than what a single avatar could allow me, but there had to be a downside. There were no freebies in this shithole of a galaxy.
Do I have to make it out of my soul or something? Rip off a fragment of it?
No, that would be far too dumb even for warhammer.
Let’s just try it.
I poked it.
By it, I mean the veil between Realspace and the Immaterium. It wasn’t a thin veil in the regular sense; it was fucky in the way everything relating to the Immaterium was.
There weren’t set rules for it.
You could just slip through a thin veil and end up in the Warp proper with a single step or you could treat it as the shore of a sea where the further and deeper you go, the more fucky and Warpy it gets.
The FTL drives the Tau made use of this sea-shore-like property of it without the makers of it even knowing. They just sort of sailed on the outermost layer of the Warp and as such, mostly remained unmolested by demons.
Sometimes, being bad at something was a talent and with those blue commies, having the flimsiest souls in existence and remaining under the radar of demons was their greatest strength.
So when I say I poked at that veil, I meant it by the first described way, intending to just go out of the Immaterium in a single step with it. Of course it didn’t work. Why would anything work on the first try?
So I started poking about, harder, gentler, here, there and I even tried to just sort of force it open, but so far, no results.
Shitty method it is.
That ‘sea shore’ metaphor becomes far too convoluted to explain how all this works when you take into consideration that my puddle and the Warp were separate while they could both be the ‘sea’ in the metaphor.
So, anyway, I started trying to push a thread of condensed Soul Energy into Realspace the long way around instead of taking the shortcut.
It was really damned long, even with time and distances being a bit fucked in here.
I hope Selene doesn’t worry too much. If that tin headed fucker did anything to her, I’m sending his museum into a star.
P3t1 A NOTE FROM ARAWN FROSTGUARD
Don't mind me, I'm just setting stuff up for the future. *whistles*
I have 11 Advanced Chapters on Patreon, you can read 2 advanced chapters for 1$ or all of them for 5$ here: Join Now!
Though, if you don't mind the few weeks of waiting, don't bother. With time everything will be rolled out for free on RR.
