The name of the present moment was crisis.
Ro-fhessi said to Zephro, ‘This habitation, and the ceremony, were ordained by Eldrad Ulthran.’ Eldrad, the foremost farseer of Ulthwé. Ro-fhessi’s mentor...
Also the agent – over a century previously – of Zephro’s own salvation.
If a supreme farseer of the calibre of Ulthran declared that an enterprise should occur, that was because the farseer had dreamed the runes of futurity. The enterprise would be undertaken – whether it be a seemingly suicidal raid upon an Imperial stronghold, or an attack upon a squat warlord who seemed of no consequence to the eldar, or an expedition to a Chaos world. The farseer had scried the skein of probabilities. He had glimpsed how such an action could produce a cascade of significant happenings. One of these happenings would very likely avert a disaster elsewhere and elsewhen. Perhaps it would promote a success unachievable otherwise. Even if his oracle made no apparent sense or even seemed utterly perilous, the eldar would heed a farseer. Consequently eldar actions often seemed capricious to human beings. On a deeper level the contrary was the truth. It was owing to one such oracle that Zephro Carnelian himself had been saved and had become an Illuminatus...
On account of its proximity to the Eye of Terror, Ulthwé was the craft-world most closely menaced by Chaos. Frequently throughout its history, warbands of Chaos Marines and other warped entities had attacked Ulthwé, to be repelled only with tragic losses. Ulthwé was sailing away from the Eye, yet only at sub-light speed. Thousands more years would pass before the craftworld reached any region of dubious safety.
Abandon Ulthwé’s domes and docks and space-spires? Evacuate in ships by way of the swirling webway portal held in stasis to the stern of the craftworld? Flee through the webway portals within Ulthwé itself?
The eldar could hardly afford to lose any craftworld, any sanctuary in the endless night. Let not the name of Ulthwé fall out of the sad litany of survival: of Bieltan and Saimhann, of Alaitoc and Ulthwé and Iyanden...
Iyanden? That once-vast craftworld was now much devastated due to attack by tyranids. Its yellow-uniformed guardians still defended their ruined home. Iyanden was still a part of the litany. Let Iyanden be named for a while longer. Let Ulthwé be named forever.
From time to time, Ulthwé’s domes and spires and keel were damaged by ferocious onslaughts of Chaos minions. Even so, wraithbone slowly regenerated itself. Ulthwé was quasi-living. Within the infinity circuit of its wraithbone structure were all the souls of bygone inhabitants. To abandon those would be an abomination.
From Ulthwé had come Striking Scorpion aspect warriors and Eldrad Ulthran himself and the Warlock Ketshamine to purge Zephro’s world and rescue him from horror.
To save him from the quintessence of horror, from horror in its most primary embodiment! And from the planet Horror too, from a world which was ceasing to be of the ordinary universe and was being polluted by rheum from the Eye.
Zephro’s world had once been called Hurrah by its human colonists in their sheer jubilation at reaching it and in joy at its lush fertility.
Thereafter, a minor warp storm had isolated that world for several thousand years, but had not condemned Hurrah to barbarism or savagery. On the contrary, the arts of civilization were cultivated to a pitch which even the eldar might have acknowledged as above contempt. Perhaps this was Hurrah’s doom. If only the planet had been more brutish, forcing a pious puritanism upon its people. When the warp storm finally calmed, corruption began to attend the cultured pleasures of Hurrah, like mould upon a sweetly rotting fruit. And Chaos was nearby.
Zephro could still recall the blooming of his own psychic talent. He could conjure sensual phantasmagoria out of thin air. He entertained friends, then eager audiences, with voluptuous pageants. He could even render temporarily tangible some nymph conjured from his throbbing imagination, producing a seductive physical presence, a succubus. Zephro became rich and celebrated, lord of revels who could tune his body to experience prolonged exquisite delights, and who could bestow this orgiastic capability upon those around him.
Soon, pain entered into pleasure as a seemingly necessary spice.
A little sprinkle of spice at first.
Then more.
The erotics of cruelty were burgeoning on Hurrah – which was becoming Horror.
Fantasy torture-parlours became fashionable. Zephro himself became an exquisite illusory torturer, much in demand. He conjured imaginary pageants of pain. These seemed almost innocuous at first. Only visionary victims were involved. The phantoms, in any case, seemed to relish agony.
Then tangible succubi were used; and these also seemed to relish torment.
Then certain men and women volunteered. Finally victims were being kidnapped or bought or otherwise coerced.
The transition had been so subtle and insidious. Each stage seemed to lead naturally towards the next; indeed, to
demand
the next. One day, Zephro experienced a paroxysm of revulsion – an appalled recognition and rejection of evil. In that very spasm he was suddenly robbed of all control over his own body. A spirit which was not his usurped the governance of his limbs and his lips and his loins, all, all of him. It was a fierce, squirming, lecherous, bloodthirsty entity. Slaanesh, Slaanesh, was the throb in his ears and the pulse in his veins.
Within his brain, a maddening lisping voice was whispering over and over unearthly words which curdled his imprisoned mind.
Q’tlahs ‘itsu ‘aksho.
Q’qha’shy’ythlis...
Q’qha’thashi’i...
What were these foul things which were being invoked? He soon knew. He dreamed of them.
By night or by day he dreamed, whenever his possessed body was too fatigued to move around any more with his mind as its impotent passenger.
Which was worse? The vile actions undertaken by his body – or the dreams?
He dreamed of luscious lethal daemonettes. He dreamed of poisonous fiends which were half human and half scorpion. He dreamed of ostrich-horses with voluptuous legs and lashing blue tongues, upon which daemonettes rode.
It seemed that soon those daemonettes and fiends might try to rip their way into the world through his very own flesh – which was his own no more. They might tear a gateway open in his bowels. They might emerge through his anus and then expand to full-size.
How his mind fought against this hideous prospect.
The entity which possessed him met its first resistance.
Could Zephro regain control of part of himself? With all his psychic power he fought harder. Frequently his body lurched and drooled, convulsed by tics and coursing with sweat, feverish and incontinent. Still he could not oust the entity which directed him. That entity took him to all those places of painful pleasure where he had performed previously. He presided over the entertaining torment of prisoners. But now each pang which he inflicted rebounded upon himself, excruciating him until his mind screamed. He would have succumbed to gibbering insanity, except that he knew that thereby the entity hoped to defeat him utterly and swallow his soul forever.
Somehow he endured – fastened in the torture dungeon which his usurped body had become.
The struggle lasted for weeks. For months. His waking hours were a nightmare more agonizing than his dire dreams.
While stumbling through the streets of the capital city of this world which was now Horror he did indeed spy daemonettes on their steeds, and fiends too – should the entity which was controlling him jerk Zephro’s head in their direction in acknowledgement. Evidently such creatures had emerged from other victims of possession. He would glimpse an eviscerated corpse, torn open by the abominations it had hatched. The city – to the extent that he could notice it – was increasingly ravaged and despoiled. He was in the midst of a vile war, a helpless participant.
At last, in a plazza where fountains gushed blood, Zephro had found himself aligned, with caterwauling devotees of pain and daemonettes upon their steeds, against the remnants of true humanity. A jagged sword writhed in Zephro’s grip. In vain he strove to restrain it, and restrain himself.
The devotees’ eyes were distorted and aslant. They were armed with saw-toothed swords alive with flickering green fire. Heedless of any minor wounds, even relishing them, they stormed barricades of rubble and overturned carts manned by musketeers and pistoleers and archers.
Fiends were running forth, some on all fours, some with their segmented burnished pastel bodies upright. The intoxicating musky perfume of these creatures! If one of them reached a defender and touched him with its long tongue, the man was stunned with a desire which became hysterical obsession – until the poisonous tail lashed him into toxic spasms. To the rear of the melee, tattooed daemonettes in tightly provocative chain-armour capered on their mounts. They flourished their pincers. They kicked with their clawed feet. They summoned fiend after fiend into existence from out of columns of dense, scented mists.
But then the eldar had come.
T
HE
S
TRIKING
S
CORPIONS
had seemed, at first sight, to be a new and terrible manifestation of the evils which already haunted Horror.
Their insectoid armour and sloping helms were green, with bands of black – which Zephro was to learn was the funereal black of Ulthwé. They wielded buzzing chainswords and pistols coupled by flexible tubes to their arms. From the cheeks of their helms jutted pods like mandibles, an insect’s biting mouth-parts.
These green warriors did not join the devotees and daemonettes and fiends, except in a deadly duel.
What a swift, lethal duel this was. Although clad in rigid plates of armour, how rapidly and limberly these Striking Scorpions moved. The buzz of a chainsword rose to a wail as the razor-edge monomolecular teeth carved through chitin and bone. What a scream those teeth vented whenever they met metal. The pistols fired little spinning discs too fast to see, until they had exited from a body shredded by their passage.
Those mandibles... A Scorpion paused in front of a fiend, as if dazed by its odour. As the fiend flicked out its tongue and began to swing its tail, minuscule needles sprayed from the mandibles. A flash of light – and plasma was boiling where the slivers had impacted. The fiend’s horned head was ripped open. Its tail still swung. The chainsword sliced through it.
Most of the daemonettes dismounted to be able to attack with their two-toed clawed feet and sharp tails as well as with their crab-claws. Their steeds pranced forth, lashing out abominably long tongues. A Striking Scorpion was ensnared from two directions and pulled from his feet. As he fell, a daemonette fastened a claw upon the Scorpion’s armoured wrist, grinding and wrenching. Another daemonette turned tail. Exposing luscious tattooed buttocks bulging from a chainmail leotard, she back-kicked at the fallen warrior’s groin. Ripping armour loose, she drove the fang of her tail into the gap. The warrior convulsed, firing discs at a sullied sky, his mandibles spitting needles in vain.
More fiends were emerging. The fiends and the mounts seemed bestially unintelligent compared with the daemonettes. Yet with their odours and stings and tongues they caused havoc.
Another Scorpion succumbed to a passionate drunken desire to embrace abomination. What illusions might he be seeing? Was vision itself a paltry blur compared with the pheremonal imperative, the primal fragrance which assaulted the most ancient and deepest part of the brain? A daemonette's claw closed around the deluded victim’s helm, crunching into it.
With their toothed swords, scores of devotees were flailing at these green-clad newcomers. Green fire dripped from armour as though that armour were dissolving gangrenously.
Zephro fought to stay still, to tame his writhing sword. How he struggled not to swing that sword at any Scorpion warrior – even though torment inundated his nerves.
‘Kill me, kill me!’ he shrieked at a Scorpion, who ducked away from him swiftly.
A
ND HERE AT
last came the one whom Zephro would come to know as Eldrad Ulthran. An elaborate staff was in Ulthran’s left hand, a long sword with richly embellished hilt in his right. The crest of his helm resembled a serrated axe-blade. Ulthran’s black cloak was a banner for bold yellow runes. Power shimmered around him – and potentials. With his sword he pointed at Zephro. Accompanying the farseer was a skull-masked companion. Runes the length of an arm decorated the vast sleeves of a skirted costume. The runes were ships of light questing through darkest night. A tail of hair swirled from a topknot knob on his helm, like pitchy smoke.
Later, Zephro would learn the name of this warlock – Ketshamine. Ketshamine gripped a witch blade almost as long as he was tall. Runes decorated the flaring blade in high relief. Rings and loops adorned the triple-guarded hilt.
With this blade the warlock pointed at Zephro as Zephro quivered in his tormented, palsied defiance of the daemon within him. Twisting blades of ice seemed to slice through Zephro’s body, lifting skin from muscle and muscle from bone, grooving the very marrow of the bones and the tissue of his brain, searching and seeking and surgically excising all the immaterial tendrils of the entity within him.
Power, so cold that it blazed, scalpelled at his very essence, peeling and coring him.
The entity within was squealing in anguish.
Zephro pushed inwardly. He might have been attempting to give birth to himself – since he sensed that this thrust of his own stark will was vital to rid himself of the terrible parasite.
‘Begone, begone,’ he screamed while the warlock observed him through that merciless skull-mask.
The witch blade was a bridge of icy mind-energy between the two of them. If Zephro could not redeem himself despite such reinforcement, then he must be destroyed, torn apart. Despite the madness and agony of months, Zephro squeezed at his daemon, experiencing unbelievable pangs yet accepting and using them.
Of a sudden, though he may have looked unaltered, Zephro gave birth to himself indeed – as if he had turned himself inside out. Such coolness balmed and anointed him. He was free. The daemon had dissolved. He owned his body once again.