A Light Not Extinguished

Chapter 11: Mystery

"An end to sickness. An end to disease. And the beginning of a new age."
-Amy Dallon, the chief scientist in charge of developing the Panacea STC after its official release, M23. 891.

***

M24, 200

Former star system

Anathames are weapons of another breed, different from power swords or disintegration rifles. Terrible weapons made in the forges of the Kinebrach, the Warp is woven into them on a fundamental level, making them potent arcane weaponry. These ritual blades are powerful beyond compare- cutting apart the fabric of space-time to create portals is the least of their capabilities. What makes them feared is the ability to hurt Warp presences permanently, in some cases even managing to destroy daemons and souls for good.

Ollanius Persson held one such weapon now, as he made his way through the innards of a Eldar pleasure craft. Anathames were no stranger to him- the Perpetual had studied under the wise Kinebrach weapon-sages of Ghilladur thousands of years ago, and in some of the countless wars that he had fought he had wielded this type of weapon.

The pleasure craft Akolys which he was on sailed beneath the shadow of an Aeldari Star-Carrier. Unlike everything else of Aeldari design, Star-Carriers were huge and graceless things, made in the age before the decay of the Empire of Ten Million Suns. Behind it trailed a miniaturized sun, trapped and shrunken by sorcery on a stellar scale that the Aeldari had devised at the peak of their ascendancy, and dragged by chains of pure darkness. The Star-Carrier was delivering the sun to the Webway City of Khedas, where it would serve as both power and light source. Without the star to hold them in place, the three planets that originally belonged in the star system spiralled away, flung into the reaches of deep space.

Slicing apart another rift in space, Ollanius slipped through, bypassing layers of walls and the psychomatons that patrolled the corridors between them. The scanners in his helmet told him that his mission objective was close, just past a few rooms. The armor he was currently wearing was in stealth mode, refractive prism-shards shielding him from sight, while his soul was obscured by a synthetic Stone Aegis. How this was achieved, Ollanius didn't know- when he asked Adam about it, the warrior-scientist had started rambling about things like 'Warp frequency harmonics' and 'geodesic pattern recognition' for at least a dozen minutes. The First Perpetual never really had a knack for science. Oh sure, he had invented a thing or two(the sawmill would always have a special place in his heart), but it was never really one of his specialities.

He continued, sneaking past a room where three Eldar were doing... unspeakable things with a pillar of tentacles, and another one filled with orbs of pulsating lights wherein lust-inducing images flickered, each one holding a hedonistic memory for a bored Aeldari to savour.

Finally he slipped into the last room, where an Aeldari was standing over a twitching, whimpering lump of meat, the alien idly poking at it with a scalpel that had at least a dozen spinning drill bits attached to the front.

She never stood a chance.

With practiced ease, Ollanius slid the anathame into the gap between the second and third digits of her spine, severing the connection between her brain and legs. The phase-iron wristblade on his left arm went into the back of her brain with a satisfying wet thunk as the Eldar's face went slack, the light leaving her eyes as the anathame destroyed her soul. Even without speaking the name of a target, anathames were still powerful tools of destruction, and she did not have the strength to withstand one.

Without so much as a whisper, the Eldar corpse toppled to the floor. Ollanius hurried over to the barely-recognizable human body, ripping out spools of nano-filament and cruel-looking hooks, before standing back.