A Light Not Extinguished

Chapter 30: Lord of Poisons

"Death to the False Gods!"
-Hekatii, the Red Crone, proclaiming the first Unforgiving Crusade

Excess is virtue. Hedonism is grace. Such are the values that the Children of Isha now live by, in this godless age. The Webway cities are the exemplars of this, built with technologies that the younger races barely comprehend and hosting all manner of depravities. Any kind of pleasure can be bought and sold within these dens of sin- artifacts, drugs, sex, sorceries, as long as you have things of value in exchange- or enough violence to dish out.

And yet all actions have an equivalent reaction. When one indulges in excess, then one is also inviting addiction into their heart and soul. And for many, they don't realize that they've already lost all agency- until it is too late. And so this is the fate that awaits a great many Aeldari- all of their being enslaved to a particular sensation or other, losing all rationality and slaughtering all before them for more- until their peers murder them or banish them away to the darkness of the cities' underworlds.

Away from the light of false suns, these degenerates who are shunned by even those who walk the path of Slaanesh tear into each other with the savagery of animals, drinking deep of the narcotic-rich blood that they all possess in an attempt to relive the sensations of their past life. In time, they lose all traces of their personality, reduced to hungering, slavering beasts little different than Chaos Spawn.

All that flesh and bone, the potent souls of Aeldari within, all burning with the singular need to consume, howling in the darkness? It merges and mutates and festers. The Unborn Goddess knows this, and it is satisfied. For they are unbound desire in its purest form, free from all pretense of civility.

And now, as the only galactic power that has any hope of matching the Aeldari Empire marches through the Webway, one of the Dark Muses seeks to loose these abominations upon the legions of humanity...

[...]

M24. 315.

Webway junction A-01523

UR-271 watched through a thousand electronic eyes as the armies under her command flew through the tunnel.

They had managed to lock down the Webway control node in this section— the assassination forces of the Longinus Legion had infiltrated the complex and systematically murdered everything within. The control node contained the mechanisms needed to manipulate the dimensions of this particular section— length, number of junctions, new branches, even sever entire tunnels from the main networks. Thousands of these control nodes were scattered all over the Webway, all with varying ranges. Regrettably, the methods of finer manipulation currently eluded the Federation— the command chambers of those nodes could only be used by psykers, and no one had grasped the technique needed to use one so far. A human psyker had described it as 'A musical instrument that changed every time you played a note while freezing your arms'.

The tunnel they were passing through was roughly half a kilometre across, enough to accommodate a full assault force. She had arranged her forces in a circular formation, considering that in this labyrinthine dimension attacks could come from anywhere, and that was without taking into account sudden breaches in the structural integrity of the Webway walls.

The sensors were picking up biometric signatures in front of them approaching rapidly, and UR-271 gave the order to halt and prepare weapons. A great howl of longing echoed through the tunnels, threaded with the power of the Warp and causing audio and visual receptors to temporarily freeze up with static. UR-217 gave the order for preemptive fire, and watched as the enemy turned the corner and revealed itself.

The Zhar Magul had come. First were the younger ones, still humanoid and bounding along the floor on all fours, skin bleached white after spending so long in the darkness of the underworlds without the illumination of false suns, moaning and climbing over each other in their haste. There was no coherence in their howls, but the meaning in them was obvious even to an Iron Mind.