Lord of the Night

And as Inquisitor Kaustus turned to their shimmering leader with an ebullient bow, holding the crown like some royal offering, needles of doubt and horror punctured Sahaal's brain, seizing his muscles and crippling his rage.

He crashed to the ground insensible, and knew no more.

Mita Ashyn

It was all happening too fast.

The inquisitor's admission of guilt, the arrival of the Night Lord, the unveiling of the Corona Nox. Held at the point of a gun by her former master, pushed and shoved like some dismal piece of meat, Mita had seen it all.

Something had changed about the nightmare Marine. The sight of him no longer filled her with unspeakable dread, his mere presence no longer wrapped cords of corruption and filth around her heart. No longer was he protected by chittering underlings, invisible and malevolent. No longer did the warpspawn of the Dark Gods gather around his soul like flies around a light: a living armour that she could never hope to penetrate.

Had he, she wondered, somehow escaped the predations of Chaos? Had he somehow cleansed himself of the taint that had threatened to smother him?

Was he now, like her, simply another pawn in this obscene game of manipulation and conquest?

Whatever the reason for his abrupt purification, its effect was pronounced: where previously her psychic senses could no more approach and delve into his spirit than she could swallow hot coals, now she had found herself free to explore. Now she could see his true self.

It was almost too much for her to bear.

It was a thing of such sadness, such loneliness, such suspicion and guilt and paranoia, that it almost tore her heart apart.

Pain, rage, ambition, sorrow. Distrust. Isolation. Bitterness.

His mind was like a reflection of hers, magnified a billion times.

She'd felt his brief victory — a surge of joy — at reclaiming the Corona. She'd spiralled with him into despair as the victory crumbled. She'd shared his pain as the servitors tore him to shreds, piece by piece, and she'd risen like a float upon the crest of his triumph as he entrusted the crown to his aide...

The aide, whose mind she had recognised. A swirling psyche without centre, without certainty or solidity of ego. She had seen that mind once before.

The unveiling of the dissimulns had come as no surprise to Mita, although she shared the Night Lord's horror from within his coiling spirit.

And then she shared his revulsion and his awe at what had followed.

The eldar came in a storm of warp-forces so focused, so potent, that Mita slipped to her knees and bled from her ears. Kaustus had left her beneath the guard of his four gun servitors — toys, no doubt, of the murdered governor — and even as she stumbled at the astral crescendo dizzying her senses their guns remained focused intractably upon her head. She didn't care. They were a side-show, an insignificant concern when placed beside what was now unveiling across the smoke and devastation of the room.

Kaustus, you bastard. You made a deal with the devil...

As part of the Ordo Xenos, Mita knew more than most of the alien scourge that was the eldar. Ancient and technologically superior, that their bodies were ostensibly similar to humans' was the one aspect of their race that could be considered familiar. They thought differently. They moved differently. They lived lives of carefully partitioned vocation: monkish existences devoted utterly to a single pathway.

Humanity travelled in the warp like trees casting seeds arbitrarily into the wind, placing trust in providence, guided only by the most rudimentary of navigatory processes. To humanity the warp was an untameable ocean, in which only the foolhardy dared to swim.

The eldar had built roads across it.

They grew old at the speed of stars. They fought like ghosts. Where the teeming masses of the Imperium struggled with crude senses and ugly language, the eldar burned bright with thought: a level of astral awareness and psionic capability that reduced Mita's talents to those of a child. She was a beast compared to them: a primitive fool, barely able to remember to breathe.

She was a baby in the presence of demigods, and at the quiet rear of her mind where the awe at the aliens' arrival had not yet penetrated, where she did not share the pain and rage inculcating the Night Lord's thoughts, she wondered:

Is this how other humans think of me?

It this why they hate me so?

Privileged knowledge or not, the eldar were as great a mystery to Mita as they were to any other human. In her studies in the Librium Xenos on Safaur Inquis the testimony of countless inquisitors was the same: the eldar seemed to act without motive — random and abstract — playing out some ineffable game according to alien rules that only they comprehended. All that was known was this: