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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:
Their grasp upon the future, upon the vortex of chance and event that was borne on the warp like froth on a sickened ocean, was unrivalled.
Kaustus had known somehow that the Corona Nox would arrive on Equixus.
It had been foreseen...
He'd been in league with the xenos from the begi
There seemed to be eight of them, although it was difficult to say with any certainly, they moved like liquid light, capering and bounding, never still. She thought she could make out weapons clutched in their long limbs, flat-headed catapults like the fruits of an exotic tree. They slipped from their portal — an entrance, she guessed, to their famed ''webway'' of tu
He dealt with the striking Night Lord with a single swipe of his staff, wyrd lights flaring between its glaive-pommel and the robed creature's antlered helm. Watching it all, probing the Night Lord's astral self at the moment of his defeat, she felt his collapse as though struck herself.
Somewhere, in another world, the eldar gathered around Inquisitor Kaustus. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the tusked man stretched out his hands towards the warlock, the Corona Nox held firm in his grasp. Somewhere the antlered xeno reached out to receive it.
Mita regarded it all as if it were a dream, spiralling away from her at the moment of awakening, and it was only as blackness closed in upon her that she came to understand what had happened.
She had been inside the Night Lord's mind when the eldar lashed out. The Traitor Marine had been knocked down, his senses overwhelmed, his certainties pulverised. He'd been crippled by the strength of the warlock's attack, and as he crashed to the floor and lay still, as his mind shut down and entered a troubled, enforced slumber—
—Mita's mind was dragged down with it.
She found herself immersed within a world unlike any she had seen before. Purple skies raged like bruises, tormented clouds swirling and gathering together — defying the logic of what little breeze there seemed to be. Faces leered from their gaseous topography: half-seen grotes-queries that Mita neither recognised nor cared to see fully.
The ground itself seemed little more solid: a porous sheet of sand and rock that, against all sense, felt spongy to the touch. A charge filled the air, a greasy static that clicked in the ends of her ragged hair and oppressed her skull, like a coming storm.
Nothing seemed real, here. Distant mountain peaks wavered like uncertain mirages, wobbling in their foothill roots, vanishing and reappearing at the whim of...
Who?
For a fearful instant Mita wondered if she had somehow travelled to a world of daemon world. She had heard of such places: confused realms where physics held little sway, where every aspect of every molecule was inseparable from the stuff of Chaos itself. Such worlds were the dreaded rumour of the Inquisition, and as Mita stumbled across fractured landscapes, negotiating ethereal gorges and sudden rivers that oozed from nowhere, the fear that she had somehow been transported to one lay heavy in her mind.
But, no... No, this was no Chaotic realm. The more she observed its howling skies and its weird tides of light and dark, the more she studied the scenes that shimmered in the surfaces of puddles and the images borne on the crest of rocks, the more she sent feelers from her own mind tasting at the sand itself, the more she came to realise where she was. She recognised its flavour.
As if to double check, she paused and stared at her hand, concentrating, altering her perceptions, working hard to focus her psychic self.
'Sword,' she said.
A bright sabre appeared in her palm. She nodded, unsurprised, and walked on, casting the blade away. It vanished before it landed.
She found the Night Lord, as she had known she would, at the peak of a plateau, ringed by a cauldron of rocky outcrops, set upon a cross of stone. Chains bound his arms to the rock, snaking between his ankles and his wrists, pinioning him like a butterfly upon a page. His armour and helm were gone. His claws had been taken from him.
For the first time, unconcealed by shadow or night, unmoving and unresisting, she saw him clearly. His skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, revealing along arms and legs every blue vein, every i
She had never seen so many scars in her life.
Most remarkable was his face. She had expected a countenance of malevolence. Of unrestrained and unrepentant evil. She had expected snarls and burning embers for eyes, a daemonic visage that brandished its corruption openly, like a festering wound.
Instead she found herself meeting the gaze of a troubled child. Oh, his face was that of a man — sallow and gaunt, perhaps, twisted by too many years of frowns and rages — but his eyes were an infant's. Impossibly old, and yet so full of bewilderment. They were the eyes of a youth that had never been allowed to grow old, that had been plucked from its humanity at an early age and never since allowed to return.
'Where is this?' the crucified man said, and if he retained any sense of trauma from the madness of the gallery room, or the rage that had gripped him at the moment the eldar warlock had attacked, he gave no sign of it. He seemed to Mita to be in shock, his voice monotone, his eyes unblinking.
He was a pathetic thing, she thought, spread-eagled before her.
'This is your mind,' she replied, unable to bring herself to hate him. 'A dream, if you like. You're trapped here.'
'And you?'
She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps I'm trapped too.'
He considered this. For all the surrealism of the situation, for all the horror of finding oneself crucified and stripped of their armour, he seemed remarkably calm.
'The eldar did this?' he asked.
'In a way, yes... They made you do it to yourself.'