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Day 31

Tide wandered through the minds of a thousand tech-priests, studying their thoughts, feelings, memories, personalities, everything that made them who they were. Some were more mechanical than others, with brains that had been cut apart and attached to additional processors that let them think faster, allowed them to make calculations at a speed even the greatest mathematicians would be incapable of. Others had modified their bodies but left their minds untouched, some simply because they had not yet had the chance to do so, others because they saw their minds as something granted to them by the Machine God and thus sacred.

These were the candidates he was considering per Vidriov's request. It had taken him a matter of moments to determine that Vidriov would be receptive to working alongside him, though that had taken an unexpected form with Vidriov's belief he was some agent of the Machine God.

There were others he could see would take that same road if he revealed himself to them. He had no issues with working alongside the religious, even the fanatics, so long as they did not cause others to suffer. However, he did not want to be worshipped either and was painfully aware of the risk of these tech-priests not only all coming to the same conclusion, but also finding each other and reassuring themselves of that conclusion. Enough that they might create a cult around him.

That was in no one's interests.

The thousand or so tech-priest candidates were of a variety of ranks, stations, and specializations, all of which related to some kind of technology Tide would like to see… expanded upon. There were plenty of others outside the candidates who would be receptive to him, but these were the high-value targets, so to speak.

The reason he was taking his time was to try and minimize the risks of creating someone fanatically devoted to him. He did not desire blind faith. Loyalty, perhaps, but not towards himself as much as towards… Well, he hadn't quite figured that out yet either.

What 'cause' would they be fighting for? No, fighting was the wrong word. He doubted he'd let any of them fight for him, he had puppet soldiers and pure forms for that. What cause would they be working for?

Tide had long ago, well, it was more like a few weeks prior, decided not to run or try to escape the galaxy, but to try and heal the universe. It was a tall order and hilariously ironic if one knew even the slightest bit about what kind of monster the Flood really was, but what did it entail?

Well, he would have to defeat Chaos. No big deal, he just had to find a way to destroy or otherwise render powerless four beings that were widely considered gods and at the very least had the power to back up that title. Similarly, the Tyranids would have to go and the C'tan likely as well.

But… where did that leave everyone else in the galaxy? What did his idea of total victory look like?

He wasn't sure. There were plenty of routes he could take, each with their own problems and benefits. The real question of each of them was, at its core… how much did he interact with people?

Did he take a leading role in questions of governance, determining and, more specifically, enforcing laws? Did he act as some moral authority to keep people from committing the worst kinds of horrific crimes that delighted the Chaos Gods and wounded the universe itself? Did he not interact at all and simply reveal himself to a select few as he had thus far?

Tide returned his focus to the task at hand. Regardless of the shape the future took, whether he achieved victory or not, he had to believe it would be better than if he simply chose to abandon everything.

He considered his options. He could approach them all at once, if he wished, he had the biomass to accomplish such a task at this point relatively easy.

He would approach a few of them, he decided, the ones that he could convince fairly swiftly. He was somewhat amused that one of those tech-priests he'd selected was in service to the Sisters of Battle, the most fanatical of the God-Emperor's servants. But then, he was already in the process of helping several Sisters with their issues, so he supposed it was only natural that Logis Calarn would be next.

"I'ZE DA BIGGEST!" Gutta Shankgutz roared, holding the head of Dagga Goreteef, only for his own head to be snipped off from behind by the power klaw of Nobrot Facesplitta, who was in turn shredded by the shoota of Headmangla Runtpunta.

"I'ZE DA-!" Headmangla started to roar to the crowd of gathered Orks, cheering and hooting for the bloodshed, only for him to be cut short as the fighting pit within the circle of wrecks that made up their arena exploded.

Blood sprayed across the crowd, with bits of limbs and debris sent flying into several at high speeds, killing plenty. Those that remained cheered louder as the one who'd fired the blast walked, or rather stomped forward.

Bonesmasha Skraploota was the shootiest Ork that ever was, or so he claimed. He was certainly the one lugging around the most firepower among this sorry gathering of gits, owing to having been entombed within one of the few Deff Dreads that had been brought with Grinhide's WAAAGH! The Deff Dread's kannon that had just reduced several of the largest remaining Orks for kilometers around to so much red and green paste lowered, though only slightly, while Skraploota's twin power klaws snipped and sparked and his deffgun whined in a way that had the nearest Boys taking several steps back.

"I'ZE DA BIGGEST!" Skraploota proclaimed and no one stepped forward to challenge that. "I'ZE DA SMARTEST!" If anyone was smarter, they were smart enough to keep their traps shut as well. "I'ZE DA BOSS NOW!"

Murmurs among the gathered Orks soon turned into chants. "BONESMASHA! BONESMASH! BONESMASHA!"

From within his Deff Dread, Skraploota grinned a grin of violence, of greed, and of brutal cunning.

Cass slowed her breathing, one hand resting against the wall as she tried to steady herself. The endless corridors swirled around her. She saw Brunt reach out to her with his good hand, but she pushed his hand away.

"Stay… still," She said, swallowing her own bile, feeling it burn her throat. In her other hand, she held his limp arm, the sleeve of his shirt torn away, an ugly trio of red slashes digging through his flesh. The monster that had slashed it open laid a few feet away, riddled with autogun rounds.

"Don't push yourself," Brunt said and she shook her head, instantly regretting it as her vision swam.

"S'fine," She whispered, even as she swayed on her feet. He reached out again and this time she didn't push him away as he wrapped his good arm around her, holding her upright. She rested her head against his arm and, slowly, they both sunk to a sitting position. "We… We can't stay here."

"I know," Brunt said, but he did not try to move her. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened, trying to get her bearings back. She focused on his face.

He'd never been clean shaven, but now he was on his way to growing an actual beard now. Even with that hair covering his face, she could still make out the slight strain in his eyes, the tightening of his jaws. He was hiding the pain his arm caused him, she was sure.

She grabbed the cloth that had once been his sleeve. She'd already cleaned the wound, at least as much as anything could be cleaned in the bowels of a hive city and she saw him wince as she wrapped it tightly about him, the dull cloth darkening even further as it soaked up blood like a man dying of thirst drank water.

"Too… tight?" She asked between panted breaths. He shook his head.

Slowly, the world seemed to right itself and the pounding in her head faded.

"Better?" He asked, as though he weren't the one who'd been hurt.

"Better," She nodded. "Don't… be so reckless."

"I won't," He apologized. She hugged him, mindful of his wounded arm, and he wrapped his good one around her shoulders again, drawing her in tight. He kissed her atop her head.

"We'll get through this," she whispered. It was a lie, they both knew, but it was nice to hear it said.

The sound of screeches echoed down the corridors and their moment of respite ended. Neither could be sure if the sounds were nearby or had been bounced around for kilometers, but nor did they wish to find out.

"Up we go," She said and they both helped the other to their feet. With only one arm he could reliably use, they would have to leave one of their two autoguns behind, though Cass made sure to take the ammunition before they made their way down the corridor. Perhaps they could find a handgun for Brunt to use, she told herself, though she wondered if it would make a difference.

She wondered if it wouldn't be better to just… She cut off her line of thought before it could continue, unwilling to even consider that. Life for the both of them had been a struggle to survive since when they were born. They hadn't lost the will to live then and had found one another to find refuge in.

She forced herself to grin and Brunt noticed her expression. "Something funny?" He asked, not able to help the small chuckle that came out of his own lips at the sign of her glee.

"Just remembering how that monster's head went pop," She said and he gave a short laugh.

"Heh, yeah." He made a popping sound with his lips and she gave her own chuckle.

She had no idea why either of them found the sound funny. It just was.

Aliciel laid on her back on a sandy beach, staring up at the sun. Her eyes should have hurt, should have been strained by the brightness, but she felt nothing save the warmth of its light on her face combined with the gentle wind.

She had been here for… years, she thought. It felt like years, in any case. Idling away time in a way she never had before, had never been allowed to before. She had seen the sun dip below the horizon and the stars come out to dance through the sky a thousand times and more, yet the beauty of it never failed to stir her heart. A heart that she'd thought had been rendered cold and indifferent to such wonders for close to fifty years.

Distantly, she heard the whine of a shuttle's engine and she became aware of someone lying next to her, someone whose face she'd never seen but who she had come to know quite well over the years.

You're content here and now. I am glad, but there is still pain in you.

She nodded, sighing. She had put this off for years and he had allowed it, never forcing the issue. What 'he' was had never been clear to her. He had never named himself, assuming he even was a he, but she had never felt daemonic malice from his being. Nor had she felt any indications of the God-Emperor's light within him.

He was… something else. A third party. Something grey that had infringed upon her world of black and white. Not a servant of the God-Emperor, but also not wicked, as she had been taught all things not touched by His divinity were.

"Am I ready?" She asked, uncertainty trickling through her.

I am not the one who can answer that question.

He paused, waiting for her to speak. If she said no, if she said 'not today', he would recede and return again tomorrow. Of this, she was certain, because she had said 'not today' every day before now and he had departed every time. He was patient. Eternal, she thought.

"Yes," Aliciel finally said, closing her eyes.

She felt the water of the ocean rise and sweep her out into the sea.

When she opened her eyes, Aliciel stared up into the starry sky of Gulrac, as a star fell from a sky, burning a path downwards. She could hear its distant roar, or perhaps imagined it.

Her body moved on its own, acting as it had that night. She swam as fast as she could back to her village, but her limbs, so short and weak, would never be fast enough to beat the shuttle. She wondered if she should have tried so hard, knowing what was to come. Part of her wanted her body to stop, to swim away. She knew if she tried, she would be allowed that.

Nonetheless, she continued onwards, unwilling to back down. She reached the shore and rose out of the water. She tried to run to her village, but she was already tired and the water her clothes had gathered weighed her down. By the time she arrived, the shuttle had been there for a while already.

She rememberd that craft perfectly and it stood out sharply in her memory and here and now. Its hull was the color of blood and emlazoned with golden symbols she didn't recognize back then, save for the Imperial Aquilla displayed most prominently on its wings. The craft possessed additional decoration in the form of a golden eagle's head that took up most of the prow, the ostentatious design continuing along its length so that the wings of the ship looked like the wings of the eagle. Emerging from the opened beak at the front was the shuttle's rotary lascannon.

Almost as prominent as the Aquilla was another symbol, that of a flower of some kind, as blood red as the shuttle. She also saw it on the armor of the women who stepped off the shuttle craft.

She'd thought them angels at first, but these were no Space Marines. They called out names, other children of the village, and demanded they step forward. She remembered not understanding what was happening as she was ushered forward by her terrified parents. She recalled asking one of the women in armor, who barked for her to be silent and obedient. She had been, even when they herded her and the rest onto the shuttlecraft, packing them in tight in its cargo hold.

She had never been on a shuttlecraft before that, never even seen one. She did not understand what was happening, none of them had. Some started to cry, but the women demanded they stop. One child hadn't and one of the women had taken hold of his hair and slammed his skull into the bulkhead. Not enough to kill him, though that would have been a horrifically easy task as she would come to learn, but enough to stun him and stop his tears, if only for a little while.

They had been loud, demanding, and explained nothing to any of them about what was happening or where they were being taken, only claiming that they should be grateful for the honor that had been bestowed upon them without saying what that honor was or why. Questions were punished, anything besides silence was. Each of them had learned quickly how to keep their sobbing quiet, how to keep the tears from falling and hold them in.

Aliciel had not been grateful until much later, when that gratitude had been beaten and carved into her. She'd looked back on these memories and seen them as a time when she'd been weak, worthless, unable to comprehend that the God-Emperor had chosen the children of her village for great works.

The shuttle came to a stop after what could have been hours, shuddering as it landed. She and the rest of the children had been ushered or shoved out of the craft. Suddenly, the first child to depart the shuttle screamed in terror, receiving a gauntleted cuff to the head for his terror from one of the women. The scream had come from looking out of the hangar of a great warship into the depths of space and upon a great, blue-green something that seemed to be floating there.

Only later would Aliciel learn that that had been the last time she would ever see Gulrac, her home, and her family.

They were herded like the cattle some of the villagers raised, pushed into a vast labyrinth of metal corridors covered in strange decorations. What she thought were rugs hung from the walls. Some depicted images of women similar to the ones who had taken them fighting terrible creatures that could not have been human, winning each time. There were others that showed men and women being burned alive atop pyres. The smoke the flames produced seemed to have eyes and fangs and claws and she'd shuddered at the sight.

Finally, they were shoved into a vast chamber, filled with hundreds of other children, some crying, others sitting quietly with their arms wrapped around their legs, dead eyes staring at nothing.

Suddenly, one of the women shouted and Aliciel turned to see one of the children from her group bolting away down the corridor. One of the armored women raised their weapon, a strange tool she had never seen before that had something like a match lit on the muzzle. Aliciel drew back at the memory, a coldness growing through her that made her shiver in fear.

She had forgotten this part. She had forgotten for a reason.

STOP! Aliciel screamed into her mind and the world froze to a halt, the figures and the battleship fading away in a moment, but the memories were still strong in her own mind. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying to stop herself from remembering what had happened, what the women had done, but it was impossible.

"I'm not ready, I'm not ready," Aliciel wept into her arms as she curled into a fetal position, rocking back and forth. "I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry…"

You have nothing to be sorry for. You did nothing wrong.

His presence was like a warm blanket wrapping around her.

"They…" Aliciel started to speak, but choked on her words. "They…"

I know.

For a while, Aliciel said nothing else, the only sound her quiet sobbing.

Day 32

In the hive of Limos, countless Orks laid dead, their carcasses left to rot openly. The city was dead, but it was not quiet. The sounds of factories churning, battering away at metal, forges burning, layered the city in sound akin to the rumbling of thunder. So it was that none heard the buzzing, growing louder, coming closer. The air defenses of Limos, strong enough that no Ork craft could land within the city itself, were blind to what was approaching from within the roiling black clouds that choked the sky. They did not hear the buzzing, not as it swept around the spires, like water passing around a stone placed within a river, not as it hung there for a moment.

And so, they did not notice when the buzzing stopped.

Through the streets, drones of the Brood Mind moved about, some moving dead Orks into great piles, others transporting crates of material between foundries or to the defenses. They were preparing for the siege that they believed was to come. They did not realize it had already arrived and their defenses were already compromised.

A drone felt something small hit his head. Had such a thing ever existed on Monstrum, the drone might have thought it to be a raindrop. Yet, such weather did not occur on the ash-choked world. And this was no raindrop.

Bring his hand up to his head, the drone plucked up something small, fuzzy, and wriggling, bringing it before their eyes. A fly? Irrelevant.

The drone squished the little creature between his fingers, surprised by how viscous the yellow-green paste it became was. Then, the drone felt another fly drop on his head.

The drone, and countless others, looked up and saw it was raining.

It was raining flies.

Trillions of tiny, fuzzy bodies dropped from the sky, crashing to the ground, pelting the drones, the dead Orks, everything. The drones had no context for what was happening, but the Brood Mind had seen insects of a similar sort in past infiltrations, creatures of dark powers.

Even as the drones went about as quickly as they could, stamping whole clumps of the flies that crawled everywhere into paste, they watched as the creatures seemed to descend upon the dead, swarming the piles of corpses by the millions. Not unusual, for the creatures were known to be drawn to old meat, but what happened next was far stranger.

The flies seemed to burrow into the meat, not to eat or lay eggs, but to force their tiny bodies inside the flesh. They crawled through the open jaws of the orks or through their ears, disappearing. And then, the first ork twitched and rose.

This was not something the Brood Mind had encountered before.

The dead rose by the tens, then the hundreds, then the thousands and more and more continued to rise, within the walls of the hive city, well past their strongest defenses. The drones reacted nearly instantly, throwing themselves in waves at their undead foes, only to be ripped apart by the Orks, literally in some cases, as the Brood Mind tried to gain time.

Time had been its ally before, but no longer.

The Orks rushed through the city, unleashing guttural roars made all the more monstrous by the decay within their vocal cords. All the while, the flies descended upon the dead and soon the Brood Mind's own drones that had been killed were getting back up and joining the greenskin horde. Yet, in some places of the hive, Orks were few. In these cases, the flies made do.

They swarmed over the bodies of the drones by the hundreds of thousands, dozens being killed every time a drone tried to slap some away, but undeterred. The drones squeeze their mouths shut tight, but the flies tear through their lips with sharp mandibles, picking the flesh apart piece by piece, and tiny bodies possessed of greater strength than any fly should possess and a unified mind work together to force jaws apart, allowing the swarm inside. Some drones cover their mouths with their hands, but the swarm simply diverts its attention and crawls inside the ears or chew through the eyes or push up through the nose.

These drones soon drop to the floor and the flies that are left abandon them in search for a new victim, finding their next almost as soon as their previous is rising back to their feet, some not even possessing eyes but no longer needing them to see.

The flies rush ahead of the undead horde, filling the corridors of Limos with darkness as the swarm fills them to the brim, the horrendous buzzing now very much audible over the dying machines as more and more drones rush to defend against this new threat.

Filtration masks, endlessly mass produced and intended for even smaller foes, are donned, but this only provides a modicum of protection to one part of their body. Drones fall to the ground, crushing thousands of flies as they roll about in a vain attempt to rid themselves of their attackers that bite with mandibles that grow longer and sharper with each tiny piece of flesh consumed. However, it is only when the corridors of Limos are bathed in the breath of flamers that the swarm's advance falters, if only for a moment.

Hundreds of thousands of tiny bodies are burned to ash in an instant by each burst of fire, whole swarms being reduced to blackened dust piled up on the floor. But there are only so many flamers and Limos is a city filled with tunnels, with vents, with cracks and passages so well-suited for the tiny invaders. One-by-one, the flamer-equipped drones fall dead, gripped in their death throes for barely a moment before they too rise, weapons in hand.

In the main city, the Orks rush down, their bodies already starting to change. Some grow claws longer than the choppas they'd wielded in life, some have their arms lengthen and thin out into tentacles with sharpened spikes of bone that jut out. Others latch onto one another and pull their multiple bodies together, growths of flesh that sprout from them melding their myriad forms into one larger and greater, monsters as varied as they were horrific.

The Brood Mind took this all in stride, even as it did everything it could to stymy this new attacker, but it was clear that such efforts would not avail it. It sent out its most valued forms to try and lead a counterattack, only for them too to fall under the weight of the swarm or to the raw power of undead bodies that continued to shift and change more quickly than it could adapt.

A new strategy was adapted, one the Brood Mind had never used before, but seen many of its enemies use in face of the God Mind's approach: denial.

It could not stop this attack and every form and drone it lost was a new enemy it would have to fight in the future. That was, of course, assuming it could fight whatever… this thing was.

A group of a dozen drones and bioforms clumped together into a group, mere moments before the swarm would be upon them. Without hesitation, one equipped with a laspistol turned their weapon, not upon the approaching insects, but the promethium tank of another drone.

The ensuing fireball consumed the group and millions of flies with it, but such were their enemy's numbers that those losses were mere drops in the ocean. Still, the flies did not bother with the piles of ash that resulted.

More and more groups of the Brood Mind's bioforms and drones rushed towards one another. For each addition to a group, a hundred were too slow and fell to the swarm. More explosions rocked the hive city, more fireballs consuming more flies, but it wasn't enough, it was never going to be enough.

Genestealers could not feel afraid. It was a genetic impossibility for them.

And yet… The Brood Mind saw its future; it saw its death within the approaching swarm. Cut off from the God Mind by the storm, its knowledge, its existence, would be lost. It had existed as a part of a greater whole, even if a fragmented part, for countless eons.

Perhaps it was because of the Ghoul Stars and the strangeness of those systems that affected it. Perhaps it was an adaptation it had acquired unknowingly. Or, perhaps, it was a remnant of something the God Mind had thought had been removed long, long ago. Regardless of the reason, regardless of the why or how, the Brood Mind felt something that, interpreted by the brains of its drones, seemed very much like fear.

It felt the mind of the thing from the hive city of Malum, but it had changed. It had grown, far more quickly than the Brood Mind had expected it to be able to. And that mind knew the Brood felt it and pressed through that brief connection a strange feeling, a desire not meant for itself, but for the Brood Mind. A suggestion, a word of advice, something it should do, but it could not understand the meaning behind it, so alien was the concept.

Its drones understood the feeling and translated it in their minds into a single word.

Run.

Peri groaned as a spike of pain from her stomach nearly bowled her over. She leaned against the doorframe of her home, an expansive room by the standards of most hab blocks in Malum. Just enough space for a family of four to live… Or seven if they squeezed in together, as Peri's family had to.

By the grace of the God-Emperor, each family member's shifts was timed such that only around half of them were at home at any given time.

Nanel, her brother, and his daughter, Selene, were at home by the time she was there. As was Orin, their father, though that was always the case these days.

"Could you tear off the vines?" Nanel asked her, as he had every day for the last week. His back was against the wall, his booted feet nearly touching the other side of the room. Selene slept in the crook of one of his arms, resting her head against his chest. A few feet away, resting the other way so that his body could fully lay down, was Orin, only the rise and fall of his chest telling her the ancient, withered form of the man of nearly forty-five was still alive.

"They just…" Peri took a deep breath. The hunger had her limbs shaking slightly and her vision nearly blackened completely when she turned to look up. Her fingers were like claws with their vice grip on the door frame, the only thing keeping her upright. Slowly, her vision cleared and she the damned things had indeed reappeared, stuck to the ceiling as if by industrial sealant. "Coming back."

Reaching up, she dragged down the patch of vines, tearing them off. They came off easily, far more easily than they had the first time, though the ones that stretched across the ceiling of the corridor outside their hab unit remained stubbornly fixed in place. She left the vines on the floor. She wasn't sure if Nanel or someone else got rid of them when she slept, but they were always gone by the time her next shift came.

"They're persistent," Nanel nodded. Grime covered his face, as Peri knew it covered her own. "I hear some are eating them."

"God-Emperor have mercy upon them then, those vines smell fouler than the pox," Peri said, shaking her head. She pulled a small satchel from around her neck. "Dinner time."

Peri came to sit across from Nanel, resting her back against the wall as he did. She toed off her shoes, one by one, while handing Nanel the satchel. Unwilling to disturb his sleeping daughter, he expertly undid the rope clasp with one hand and withdrew the sole ration bar from within.

"Only one?" He asked. He didn't seem surprised, just disappointed.

"There's a war on. One hab unit, one ration bar," Peri repeated the words the distributor had told her and Nanel frowned, but said nothing. With bone-thin fingers, he carefully broke apart the bar into four pieces, though they weren't all the same size. The largest, he placed on Selene's lap, for when the small girl woke up. The second biggest he lightly tossed to land on Orin's chest. The third was Peri's, but she tossed it back to him and took the smallest for herself, devouring it before he could muster the strength to protest.

Nanel ate his portion under Peri's watchful gaze, washing it down with a small sip from the cannister of water that was passed back to Peri, who sipped from it as well. It wasn't filling in the slightest, only taking the edge off her hunger. Leaning back, her head thudded against the wall.

She closed her eyes and was asleep a moment later.

"Peri…" She turned her head away from the noise. "Peri, wake up."

Reluctantly, Peri opened bleary eyes, to see Nanel crouched next to her, staring at something at the entrance. Selene had moved from his arm to Orin's, the two sleeping peacefully, as Peri should have been.

"Wuzzit?" Her words were slurred as she glanced over, only for her eyes to snap open at the color of blood.

Except it wasn't blood that she saw, resting in her door frame. She didn't know what it was she saw.

Four… things rested there, in her door frame. They were spherical, almost perfectly so, and a bright red, brighter than blood in fact, and strangely shiny in this place matted with grime, dust, and ash. Peri barely noticed that the vines she had torn away earlier were already gone.

"What are they?" Peri asked in a whisper, suddenly quite awake and alert. Sometimes, things from the underhive crept upwards, but she had never seem something like this.

"I don't know," Nanel replied just as quietly. "I heard something drop from the ceiling, I thought it was a rat or… something else."

Slowly, cautiously, Peri shifted onto her feet in a similar crouch. She moved as quietly as she could towards the strange spheres, watching them with the attention of an overseer. She reached out towards the closest one with a single finger.

"Peri!" Nanel whispered harshly, but it was too late to realize what his sister intended. Peri's finger touched the sphere.

Nothing happened.

She picked up the sphere, eyeing it suspiciously. It was quite soft to the touch, almost feeling like flesh. She brought it closer to her face and sniffed. Her eyes widened.

"Peri!" Nanel said, no longer whispering, though his exclamation this time was more out of shock than rebuke as Peri sank her teeth into the sphere.

For a long time, Peri didn't hear anything, didn't see anything, didn't think anything. There was only the taste.

It was… Well, she had no idea what it was. She had no context with which to describe it. It was so different from the ration bars she'd eaten all her life. Where those were dry, this was wet. Where those were brittle, this was crisp, a strangely delightful crunch sound accompanying her bite. Where those were tasteless, this was…. This was…

Sweetness.

She paused at the word that seemed to enter her mind unbidden. She had never heard of it before, but… it oddly seemed to fit the taste. 'Sweetness'. Yes, that's what it was. The dryness of her mouth was gone. In a matter of moments, the entire sphere had disappeared and she had to fight her own body to keep herself from choking from how quickly she swallowed the strange food.

Quickly, she grabbed up the other three spheres, gathering them to her and handing one to Nanel, who had a flabbergasted look on his face.

"Eat it!" She insisted, even as she stepped over him towards Orin and Selene, almost shaking them awake.

"Wha-?" Selene was the first to wake, looking on the verge of tears as she was ripped from slumber. Orin simply rose quietly, shaking his head to clear it. She quickly pressed the two remaining spheres into their hands.

"Eat these," She said, an almost mad look in her eyes. Confused and possibly frightened, both complied, their eyes widening in shock just as hers had. Both devoured their spheres just as quickly as she had and it was a wonder neither choked.

"We can't eat these!" Nanel said, as though all three had gone insane. "The law is-!"

He was cut off as Peri grabbed the hand holding his sphere, pushing it towards his nose. The moment he smelled the thing, his mouth opened and teeth sank into it. Peri smiled as her brother lost any problems he had.

"What was that?" Selene asked, still seemingly confused, but a beaming smile on her face. "It was good!"

Orin grunted his agreement.

"I… don't know," Peri admitted, before Selene raised her hand and pointed.

"Look, look!" She said, laughing in delight. They all turned their heads to look outside, into the corridor. The ceiling, previously only covered in vines, was now nearly entirely filled with the red spheres.

Almost in a daze, Peri rose and stepped into the doorway of their hab unit, looking down both ends of the corridor. She could see others doing the same, all looking just as confused as her, some with the sticky juices of the spheres dribbling down their chins.

The entire corridor ceiling was a sea of ruby red. Thousands of the things. Tens of thousands.

"W-what does it mean?" Peri asked as Nanel squeezed past her. He reached up and plucked another of the things off the ceiling, taking a bite out of it.

"I have no idea," Nanel replied, his words slightly muffled by his meal. All around him, others were emerging, reaching up.

Peri had never known what the feeling of being 'full' was. Today would be the day she learned.

Day 32, Continued

Calarn Alpha-4-3 recognized that something about his present situation was… off.

He was in his laboratorium, but it was not the one he'd made of the command center used by the Sisters for their siege of Janus, nor was it the one he used in the lower levels of their chapel in Deimos. He studied it for a moment, quickly recognizing the room he was within.

This was the laboratorium he had not mastered himself, but been a servant within. A facility on Novarus, one of three Forge Worlds in the system of the same name, and the world where he had learned the arts and cants of the Machine Cult.

He was working on something, he suddenly realized as he looked down at two hands, both made of flesh rather than steel. They worked with machine-like grace and accuracy, despite their failings, upon the inside of a helmet.

A very sophisticated helmet, of a pattern he did not recognize. It was painted red save for a large, silvery material that must have been the visor. He held it in his flesh-grown hands and looked it over, finding he knew each of its systems without even having to think of the answer.

"What… is this?" He'd meant to think the words, but spoke them instead, addressing his question as much to the empty laboratorium around him as himself.

Just a place to talk. Set-dressing, nothing more.

Calarn's eyes, both rudimentary flesh, widened in shock as the voice echoed around and through him, each syllable like a peal of distant thunder, quiet, but powerful. Within that voice, he felt an ocean, an endless depth spreading out beneath him, around him, above him. It was terrifying, it was awe-inspiring, it was… it was…

Familiar?

Calarn felt curiosity and interest pique around him and he felt the laboratorium fade away around him. He sank deeper into a warm void, feeling memories he had forgotten, had been forced to forget, rise around him like a fog.

The past swallowed him.

Calarn ran down, his augmented legs carrying him swiftly. Swifter than the magos, in any case, whose tread-wheeled body now laid in sparking pieces strewn across the space hulk, blending in seamlessly with the debris of the wreck, or hung around delicate necks on strings of intestines.

Beside him, matching his pace, a pair of Sororitas, whose names he had never learned. Lascivious howls and screaming binaric calls hounded them down the labyrinthine halls, nipping at their heals. Calarn turned his head to look back and regretted it almost immediately.

The things that chased them were not creatures born of either the flesh or the metal they possessed. They looked almost like servitors, but none of the Machine God's modified servants were so… wrong. Supple skin merged, seamless and grotesque, with metal limbs that ended in blades and pincers.

Calarn had encountered mortal servants of the Ruinous Powers before, even a red-fleshed daemon that had nearly taken his head. But while the mortals were crude flesh and the daemon was fashioned from Warp witchcraft, these… things were some combination of the two and a third aspect as well, a corruption of the blessed machine.

The monstrous fleshforms roared in a way that caused his sensors to crackle, as though the Machine Spirits within his own augments were trying to escape in fear. What little skin he still had crawled.

"In there!" One of the Sisters called and he felt a gauntleted hand grasp his robes and pull him off his feet. The Sister that had grabbed him half-pushed, half-tossed him into what looked to be some kind of ancient storage room, filled with cargo modules of a pattern he didn't recognize but were almost certainly human. Were it under different circumstances, he would have felt elation, but in that moment he only felt fear.

"Close the door!" The Sister who had spoken earlier demanded, but he was already at the console next to the ancient door. He whispered the rites and reached with a mechadendrite to connect with the old interface, praying to the Machine God that there was still power within its systems.

The moment he connected his mind to the machine, the door into the cargo bay slammed shut, the angry and disappointed screeches of the creatures outside muffled by a foot of metal. The Sisters thanked him, one clapped him on the soldier.

But Calarn hadn't done anything. He couldn't do anything. His body was frozen, his augments non-responsive as his brain's commands to them were overridden by something else, something with a strength much greater than his own.

Rudimentary cybernetic implants… With an oddly religious tone.

"Is everything alright, tech-priest?" One of the Sisters asked.

"The ancient… machine spirits of this vessel are attempting to override my control of the door." It was his voice that spoke, harshly blared out through audio speakers. "I must remain connected for now."

Sorry about that, but I haven't gotten to talk to anyone in a while.

Calarn knew what was speaking to him and, if he had the option, he would have opened the door and allowed the monsters outside to rip him and the Sisters to shreds rather than face the most dreaded enemy of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

And that is why I am not allowing you the option. Humanity seems to have taken a turn for the worse since the nineteenth millennium.

He could feel its presence in his skull. It was like… tiny wiring snaking through his mind, but every wire carried the power of a battleship within it, capable of annihilating everything that he was with even an errant thought.

I have questions, you seem knowledgeable and are conveniently connected to my systems. So… I'll apologize for this, as it won't be pleasant, but I'll make sure you don't remember it afterwards.

Calarn felt darkness take him.

Then, he was back, not on the space hulk, but in the laboratorium.

He had forgotten. Been forced to forget, his memories locked away within his own mind. Untouched until something new had come along and freed truth from the cage placed upon it. Something of greater power than even an Abominable Intelligence.

Where the Abominable Intelligence had possessed the power of warships within every iota of its being, this… this mind he felt now was larger, far larger. Not infinite, nor was its presence so diffuse as to simply be wires within his mind. It was like he was submerged in the depths of an endless ocean, empty, colorless, yet… far from alone.

Only one being could be responsible for such a mind, for such a presence. Beyond mortal flesh, beyond the power of machines crafted by man, a spirit greater than those that inhabited the god-machines themselves.

This was an entity willed into being by the Machine God.

For some reason, Calarn was suddenly quite certain that the ocean around him felt exasperation.

Tide wasn't sure why fully half of the twenty tech-priests he'd revealed himself to had decided, all on their own, that he was either the Omnissiah or some form of chosen or near-god. The issue when dealing with fanatics, he supposed. Vidriov was not a unique case, it seemed.

Regardless of his futile attempts to convince them he wasn't divine in any regard, he now had a small team of researchers willing to work with him. It would be a while before he could have them doing anything other than side-projects like Vidriov's version of the Mjolnir armor, they did have jobs to do around the hives after all, but still.

He could use puppets combined with augmentations to mimic them and perform their jobs for them, giving them the chance to do more, but that would be some time as he'd have to craft all their mechanical parts. That would be easy enough to do in Malum, but while he could just use Neural Physics to transport the materials to the other hives affected by the Mechanicus' bombs where his Puppets and younger Graveminds were slowly starting to grow.

Calarn's interaction with an artificial intelligence was… interesting, to say the least. Especially since it happened to be on a space hulk. However, further perusal of both the hulk currently in orbit and his newest ally's memories, both previously locked and not, gave him no confirmation of whether the hulk from his memory was the same monstrous hybrid. The memories had been quite expertly hidden within one of Calarn's oldest brain augmentations, a processor that was nearly a hundred years older than the tech-priest himself.

Had the AI logically assumed that such an antiquated piece of technology would quickly be replaced, thus ensuring the memory couldn't be accessed in the future? If so, they had underestimated the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Still, if the hulks were the same… He'd not be opening the sealed portions of it just yet. Probably not for a while. Not until he felt confident in taking on… well, either an ancient artificial intelligence of unknown capabilities or a horde of Slaaneshi daemon engines.

Perhaps he should try and throw the space hulk into the sun? No, he wasn't sure what effect that could have. A powerful enough power generator could destabilize the sun and the planet he was on sort of needed that.

Problems for later, he decided. For the moment, he had another matter to turn to.

Limos was now a city of the dead.

He'd taken a page out of Nurgle's book with the swarms of flies and resurrecting the dead. It had been shockingly effective. He'd known, intellectually, that he'd take the city without too much difficulty, but to see it happen, to do it, was another thing entirely.

It was funny, in a morose sort of way. The genestealers had spent years spreading throughout Limos, infiltrating its upper echelons, its defense forces, its worker population. When their revolution had been provoked early, they had exploded in numbers and power, infecting anyone they could get their claws into and killing anyone they couldn't.

And in a span of twelve hours he'd rendered all that work and effort null and void. The factories they'd repaired and worked to create gas masks to defend against his spores were now his. The weapons they'd crafted belonged to him. And their dead now were already starting to mutate, exploding into new swarms of flies already heading towards the next genestealer-controlled hive in Whiro.

Not all of their dead, however. Trillions of flies departed, the swarm having quintupled in size, but the bulk of the biomass still remained behind.

No, it wasn't just biomass, Tide reminded himself. He needed to remember that.

Tide was aware of the atrocity that had been committed here and that the humans turned into drones were blameless in it. With each and every drone he'd infected, he'd tried to fight the infection, not the human it possessed, and failed every time. For all the speed he was capable of, the only thing he could ensure was that the souls of those that had once been the men and women of Limos were kept safe within his Domain.

For a short time, Limos was a silent grave as the last buzzing of the flies disappeared. The dead remained still, motionless. In that moment of respite, Tide performed a headcount.

Twenty-seven billion, three hundred forty-two million, six hundred fifty-four thousand, one hundred and eleven humans had been murdered here by the genestealers, either from being transformed against their will into a mindless drone or at the hands of those that had.

Within seconds of connecting to their minds, he knew their lives, their stories, everything about them. Some memories were rotten by time, others hazed over by delusions and alien thoughts planted by a foreign brood, but the fragments and patches were enough.

It was overwhelming even for the mental power of all his graveminds put together, which nearly equaled a hundred million human minds in might. It was so much information, so much data, like a wave that threatened to split the rock that was his mind.

For a moment, he accepted that feeling, accepted everything. He held fast against it. He had almost forgotten pain of this kind. Not physical, not emotional, but mental. A processing overload, like a computer that was overheating. Eventually, it came to a stop, and he knew it was time.

Slowly, the bodies of the dead in Limos consumed themselves. Orks, genestealer, human, all became the same. Now, it really was just biomass.

He started small. Clumps of biomass nearest to one another merged together into countless Proto-Graveminds. In an instant, he felt his mental power expand an immense degree. He was able to process the memories of the dead much more easily, no longer feeling the splitting pain when he tried to think of them all at once.

Next, those Proto-Graveminds reached out and connected to one another, forming Graveminds, each made up of millions of corpses. And there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. There was another substantial jump in intelligence, but there was something else as well. An indescribable feeling, one that signaled he had another step to take.

Reaching out with tentacles that could reach out for miles, he connected the Graveminds of Limos into a single form, a single mind.

Tide's first Key Mind was born.

He felt the change within himself, the instant of ascension. There was no great crash of thunder, no rumbling throughout the Warp as a mind unparalleled was crafted. There was simply… knowledge. Understanding. Less a gain of knowledge and more an expansion of awareness.

The Key Mind shifted and moved about the empty hive city, tentacles wider than Titans were tall dragging across the ground until they reached the surface, then pushing themselves upwards with muscles strong enough to crumple the hulls of starships like paper. Through the sky, they moved with the sound of distant thunder, gently sliding up along the central hive spires of Limos. They passed through the ash clouds and kept going, winding up and around tens of kilometers of metal and rockrete.

Beyond the cloud cover, nearly a hundred kilometers above the surface, the sky was utterly black save for the white dot of flame that was Monstrum's star. Its dazzling light ensured no other stars could be seen, but Tide knew they were there. He could feel them in a way he couldn't quite translate into any language he knew.

The extensions of himself kept going, as much supported by the hive spires now as by their own strength now that they were so high up. It was another kilometer before they reached the true pinnacle of Limos, wrapped around the centermost and highest spire where the former governor's palace would have been, now a bombed ruin thanks to the genestealer's revolution, though any fires had long been extinguished.

What reached past the ruined palace were the very ends of the two longest tentacles, at their base nearly a hundred meters wide, but at their tips only a few centimeters, barely thicker than a finger. They reached up towards the sky, like hands seeking to peel back the dark veil.

Slowly, the ends of the tentacles circled one another in a lazy motion, curling around one another, winding tighter and tighter. Now there was a shift, a change, as the universe experienced something new, something good, for the first time in countless millions of years.

The moment came.

Purilla walked through the halls of the planetary governor's palace, aware of the eyes watching her. Shortly after the Inquisitor had locked herself away the Governor had posted more guards and spies specifically around her and the Inquisitor. None could possibly be aware of Tide, of course, and she was fairly certain all of them were Altered by this point, but it was still disquieting to know she was being followed. She could sense their minds, feel the fear and hate they felt for her, even if they were trying to hide it. At the very least, they could-.

Purilla suddenly halted, not even aware of the fact that her watchers had a spike of anxiety from the action. She was focused on something else, something much… stranger.

Tide? She asked, inquisitively. She could feel his presence, but it was… distant. Focused elsewhere, on something of monumental importance.

Vidriov adjusted the energy shield's power flow again. Too much power and he'd overheat the components, but too little and the shield would break too easily. It needed to be perfect before he equipped it to the armor, or he would risk-.

His hands paused, setting down the energy shield, as a strange emotion he couldn't quite name expressed itself.

Lord? He'd expected a response almost immediately due to the Machine God's Chosen odd dislike of the term, but there was only… not quite silence, but the feeling of focus coming from Tide was incredibly strong, greater than anything he'd encountered before.

Aliciel floated in the dream-ocean of Tide's Domain, staring up at the night sky. For some reason, the stars seemed to be shining particularly brightly today and she smiled at the odd warmth their light brought. For a long while she drifted, letting her eyes drift shut.

She felt a change. When she opened her eyes for a moment, looking up into the sky, her eyebrows rose in surprise as the stars seemed… happier somehow, though she couldn't quite understand how that could be.

Catherine Ellen stood in her study, staring down at a map of the planet that was the furthest thing from her mind. She gritted her teeth in frustration, crumpling the old paper, then swearing as her own action ruined a section of the map. No one had said as much, but she could tell she was being confined, kept from any chance of commanding again, both by the governor and by Tide.

God-Emperor, forgive her, she was using the damn thing's name-.

Ellen felt it, breathing in sharply. She wasn't sure what 'it' was, but she could guess who, or rather, what was responsible.

All across Monstrum, in hives that had grown thick with invisible spores, men, women, and children felt something, a feeling they couldn't quite explain or fully understand. There was something of it they understood, however. A feeling that they shouldn't miss some kind of event. Not like the feeling that arose when they might be late for a workshift or a sermon, it was not that feeling of anxiety and expectation of punishment. This was the feeling of something strange and alien to most of the people of Monstrum, the feeling of a gift being offered.

So, as one, the people of Monstrum stopped what they were doing. Whether working in the factories, the mines, or shuffling through the endless corridors of the hives, they came to a halt and turned, on their own. Their eyes stared at walls, at metal and rockrete, at halls filled with humans packed together like ration bars, at black clouds, at endless vistas of ashen wastelands and a blazing desert. It did not matter that they could not see, for they were watching all the same with a sense not their own.

In the hive city of Limos, two towers of flesh circled one another above a metal tower emerging from the black clouds of Monstrum. To mortal eyes, to sensors of any kind save those tuned perfectly to the fabric of reality itself, all that would be seen would be just that.

Yet, to the people who felt his presence, a sight unseen throughout time and space was theirs to witness.

The stars wept and their tears fell to Monstrum, gathered between the towers. Drops of liquid starlight coalesced in dimensions higher than those that could be comprehended by mortal minds. Guided by the hands of a being of an even higher reality, the shadow of the star-tears began to appear within the lower realms.

To the eyes of man, what gained shape was a strand of starlight, several meters long and a dozen or so centimeters across. But Tide knew this strand by another name.

He felt nothing but utter joy as he beheld his first Star Road.

The Moment

The stars were weeping.

Selotep thought it must have been a sensors failure on his part. Surely the Celestial Orrery, an artifact of sublime purpose crafted before the War in Heaven itself, before the breaking and chaining of the gods, could not have had suddenly gone faulty.

Yet, his diagnostics showed no problems with himself.

Tears fell, invisible to any sensor that was less tuned to the galaxy's inner workings, the cosmic clockwork of its reality, than it was. But it was not just this galaxy's stars, he realized. The streaks of light that appeared were almost blinding to his single, ocular sensor.

For a moment, the ugly, pulsing wound that stretched across the galaxy, the scar that had plunged the side of the galaxy the crownworld Thanatos, and the Celestial Orrery, were on, seemed dim in comparison, its dull glow of madness bathed in starlight.

The light was all headed towards the same thing and, for a moment, he'd thought it was Thanatos. That somehow the universe itself had felt the workings of the Celestial Orrery and sent some kind of sign.

But no, it was elsewhere. He moved slowly, even now, careful not to disturb the holographic projection of the galaxy or risk setting off a cascading chain of supernovas or something worse. He adjusted his view and magnified his sensors to their extremes. The light was headed towards a region of space, one known to the upstart humans as the Ghoul Stars. Even in the days of the War in Heaven that region had been strange. Selotep knew it well as the home of several tomb worlds that had been corrupted by the viruses that afflicted many of their kind. The Bone Kingdom of Drazak and the Lair of the Destroyer were both tombworlds in that region.

But it was not to these worlds that the star-tears fell. Nor to any other necron tombworld that Selotep knew of in the region. Instead, it headed towards a seemingly unimportant world, one of the many controlled by humanity that had been plunged into darkness by the opening of the wound.

He magnified his sensors further and ignored the system alerts that demanded his attention as his systems began to burn from being overworked. It wasn't pain, for even pain would have been a comfort to the cold metal bodies of those who had once been the Necrontyr, and that comfort was something their gods had denied them long ago.

But, just for a moment, lone Selotep watched something incredible come to be and he felt a flicker of an emotion he had long thought stripped away from him:

Wonder.

Day 33

The strand of blue-white starlight danced around the spires of Limos. It seemed to lengthen and shrink as it moved, sometimes appearing only a few meters long, other times dozens. That was because it was lengthening and shrinking.

Star Roads were… strange. Wonderful, but strange. What Tide saw and sensed with his physical senses, through the two massive tentacles that had wound tightly about the spires of Limos, what he viewed was not really the Star Road itself but a shadow of sorts. The real Star Road existed in a higher dimension. It was why they were normally indestructible. Neural Architecture couldn't be harmed by mundane methods because there was no way for those methods to actually attack the architecture.

Of course, that didn't mean Star Roads couldn't be destroyed.

Tide felt his Keymind shudder at the thought and the hive city of Limos quaked as the act sent shudders through the spires as well. Right, he was the size of a city now, important to remember that.

The reason for his disturbed reaction to the thought of losing the Star Road wasn't a practical one. He'd known what he was doing before this would not be creating an extension of himself or fashioning an ordinary tool as one might create a hammer or a gun.

The Star Road was alive. Not in the organic sense of the word, it didn't have a cell structure or anything remotely close to it. It wasn't even necessarily a form of life that three-dimensional beings could comprehend. But it was alive.

And it was… Happy wasn't quite the right word for it, but it was the closest to describe the feeling. It was 'happy' to see him, to exist, and he was just as delighted in return.

He reached out, though not in any physical sense, and the Star Road reacted. Although it wasn't apart of him like his Flood forms were or even like the Altered were, it still listened to his requests. It even seemed to 'enjoy' them in a certain sense.

The Star Road circled the tower, its ends splitting off into multiple smaller strands, then reforming, then splitting again. It stretched out as far as it could go, nearly a hundred meters, then nearly disappeared from sight as it did the opposite, shrinking to the size of a pinprick.

That was another thing: its size. The Star Roads utilized by the Precursors and the Primordial Flood had been incomprehensibly massive structures, physical constructs that spanned the distance between planets and even star systems. Lightyears long. The Primordial Flood had used them to strangle and tear apart entire planets…

He felt something from the Star Road at that thought, at the idea of such destruction. It was not a nice feeling. Not disgust, not hatred, but something just as powerful and just as oppositional.

Was that normal? If every Star Road was akin to this one and felt as it did, then had the Star Roads the Primordial Flood used simply been different or unable to deny it? Given what he knew of the Primordial, Tide suspected it was the latter.

Which meant… No Star Roads being used as weapons for him, he supposed. He… didn't really mind that all that much to be honest. Yes, Star Roads as weapons could be devastatingly powerful, planet-strangling was only one of their many uses, the idea of using another living thing as just a tool of war… disturbed him.

Besides, it wasn't like Star Roads were only useful for their capacity to inflict death. The Primordial Flood had twisted them to that purpose, likely against their will. However, before then, they were a method of faster-than-light travel.

He… likely wouldn't be heading out far, at least relatively. He had an idea of how long the range of his control over the Flood would be with his new Key Mind form, roughly three lightyears in every direction. A truly massive area that stretched well beyond the outermost reaches of the Monstrum system, but also a mere rain drop in the vast ocean that was the galaxy. The next closest system was over five lightyears away. He wouldn't be sending the Star Road outside that range and likely not even outside the system. He wasn't certain he could maintain his connection with the Star Road if it was too far away and he wasn't going to risk it.

That said… he wasn't against doing a bit of in-system exploring so to speak.

The Star Road zipped down in a flash of dazzling speed, reaching the surface of Limos faster than Tide could even think. Despite such a display of speed, there was no shift, no compression of the air or destructive vacuum left behind as a more mundane craft might have caused. There wasn't even a whisper of noise.

The Star Road came to a stop in front of one of his tendrils that had wrapped around a sturdy building for support. A portion of the tendril began to grow like a bubble, larger and larger, before reaching the size of a human head and – POP – it opened.

Crawling from the remains was something similar in appearance to a Flood infection pod. A set of spindly, vine-like limbs, a bulbous body, and a trio of red, sensor stalks emerging from what could have been its mouth. Unlike a normal pod, however, this was not a creature designed for spreading the Flood infection, but one with something like an advanced sensors package. Nothing as capable as what machines could accomplish, but the best of the organic components he had access to.

The pod leapt off the tendril and onto the Star Road, which wrapped gently around its passenger. As it did so, the strands seemed to seal almost like a gelatin of some sort, fully enclosing the tiny Flood form.

And then… they were off.

If the Star Road were any other kind of craft, the Flood form would have been transformed into a paste only a few crushed atoms thick from the sudden acceleration in underwent. Fortunately for the bioform, the Star Road scoffed in the face of something as paltry as 'basic physics'.

In an instant, the Star Road was in orbit. To the sensors he had trained on it, both mechanical and organic, didn't seem to move so much as simply disappear and then reappear. Exactly how it did that, if it was simply moving itself so fast that physical senses couldn't keep up with it or if it was similar to the 'teleportation' he used through Neural Physics, essentially skipping like a stone across the face of the multiverse, Tide couldn't say for sure.

The Star Road was made of starlight or looked to be such, though it quite helpfully seemed to be able to change this. It became virtually invisible for the sake of its passenger.

Relative to Monstrum he'd have been looking down. What he saw only confirmed what he already knew. The world was like a servitor. Dead, but kept functioning by machinery, an entire planet on life support. Across the face of the planet was a sea of black smog. The only island of light was the Barren Lands, scoured into a half-melted desert by the undiluted light of Monstrum's sun, like a brazen, blinded eye looking up into the star's fury. Within that island, three pillars, like claw marks, shined like beacons in the dark. He could certainly see why it received comparisons to the Astronomicon, though he suspected Navigators and anyone else who had seen the real thing would see the three pillars as pale imitations at best. It had been powerful enough to at least flicker through the darkness that smothered it in the Warp, after all. He turned his gaze away from the depressing sight of Monstrum and out into the wider galaxy.

If Tide had still been a human, his breath would have hitched in his throat.

In another life, he had been fond of gazing at the stars. He'd done so only a rare few times since most of his days had been spent within a city or urban areas with large amounts of light pollution. Yet, the rare few times he had been in an area with enough darkness to look up and see the galaxy staring back…

Something that had always struck him was the sheer number of stars. On a night in a city, he'd be lucky to see a dozen or so dim lights, if even that many. Yet, from better viewing points… there had been countless. And not just stars, but nebula as well. Planets if he had planned and shooting stars if he was lucky.

It hadn't prepared him for this.

Thousands of stars, like eyes that glinted in the darkness, stared back at him. Nebula stretched across vast expanses of them. But what he felt was not the awe and wonder he'd felt in his past when going star-gazing, even with this perfect view. Because something else was holding his gaze, something that did not belong.

Stretching across the center of the sky like an ugly scar was a line. It looked almost like a nebula that had been stretched out, but this was no star-maker. Red, purplish-pink, blue, green, and a thousand other hues, many of which should not have existed, pulsed within the open wound. He could feel it more clearly now, like the slow twisting of a knife.

The Cicatrix Maledictum, the rent in the galaxy, in the universe, caused by the Chaos Gods and the fools that worshipped them. It was a malicious grin carved into reality's flesh and he could feel the hunger and insanity between its lips.

Like the sight of a car crash, it was difficult to tear his eyes, in as far as they could be called eyes, away. However, he managed it. He had other things to do. More important things.

His tiny body and the spherical vessel it sailed in moved, freezing to a halt near the space hulk that hung in orbit. He'd never had an outside view of it, save for the occasional glimpse through a telescope from the very height of Malum's spires beyond the black smog. It was easy to forget just how massive even a single vessel of the thing was, even as he was spread across nearly its entirety.

It was a wretched thing, almost egg-shaped. If he'd only had the silhouette to go off of, he'd have thought it was just a particularly ugly asteroid. However, he was less interested in the forest for the moment and more so in the trees themselves.

Slowly, he zigzagged around the hulk, the Star Road purposefully moving slow enough for him to still be able to study it, though their speed was still quite a bit faster than what most spacecraft should have been capable of, not to mention the ability to turn and change directions in an instant.

There were hundreds of ships making up the outer layer. Some looked almost like they had rammed prow-first into the body and it was only the lack of damage around their bodies that allowed him to determine they had been fused with the body like the rest. Several massive engines that were clearly built onto the hulk itself rather than any of its vessels stuck out like sore thumbs, though it would have been easy to mistake the protrusions as just being random scrap bits poking out given the look of their construction and state of disrepair. Ork technology, almost certainly.

He'd tried before to figure out where exactly the Ork command center on the hulk had been. Tide believed he had eventually found it only thanks to the presence of a red button roughly the size of a large dinner platter, labeled in the Ork language as 'Go'. He'd carefully checked everything the button was attached to and found it was simply connected to a box filled with various bits of metal and wire held together by duct tape. He had not pressed it, just in case.

His small body zipped about in its unique vessel. A part of him wondered if he shouldn't make more Star Roads. However, if he did, he would need to concentrate on the task with everything he had and that was something he was hesitant to do again. While he hadn't lost control of anything and nothing bad had happened this time, almost every one of his bodies, including his puppets, had paused in what they were doing.

He wasn't sure what had possessed him to share what he was doing with all the Altered. Part of it hadn't even been intentional. There didn't seem to be any serious repercussions for that just yet, though he was already being asked about it by almost every one of those Altered he had revealed himself too.

He was fortunate enough that the pause in his puppets was masqueraded by the pause in the Altered. He wasn't surprised many were taking it as a religious sign, even if he wasn't overly pleased by it. Vidriov was all but frothing at his non-existent mouth, asking to get access to the Star Road and to bear witness to the next Star Road's creation.

He'd deal with that… later.

Tide noted the most 'whole' vessels, which were only partially fused into the rest of the body. There were three in particular that caught his eye.

The first was a smaller ship, what he recognized as a Sword-class Frigate. Its prow looked like it had slid into a far larger xenos cruiser whose origins he couldn't determine. From the inside, he quickly determined its location and found his way into the frigate with tiny, fly-sized scouts and MOAs. It was pretty easy to determine that the bulk of the ship was intact, if covered in Ork filth and in serious disrepair. It would just be a matter of sawing off the rest of the vessel from the stuck prow and replacing that.

The second was a bulkier craft, a transport of a class he didn't recognize but was unmistakably of Imperial make. It sort of looked like a Sword-class frigate whose prow had been squished inwards, though it was nearly twice the length of the frigate. Unlike the frigate, the transport wasn't buried into the hulk but instead looked almost like it had landed onto it. This was merely an illusion, however, as the transport possessed something like the tailfin of some ancient sailing vessel and it was this that had fused into the space hulk. Like the frigate's prow, he could saw that off and replace it.

Finally, the third and largest vessel was an Imperial cruiser, five kilometers long, far bigger than even the transport. From the memories of one Mechanicus member, he recognized it as a Dictator-class cruiser, one that likely belonged to the Mechanicus given its relatively sparse aesthetics. It looked almost like it had been submerged at an odd angle into the rest of the hulk, only parts of the upper half of its body and the prow able to be seen. It would be far more difficult to get at than the other two ships… but far more lucrative as well, because of the weapon at its prow. Poking out into the void like some menacing blade challenging any who would dare face its wrath was a nova cannon.

Tide didn't consider himself to be a violent person, but even he was a fan of 'Big Gun'.

He'd have to get Vidriov and some other tech-priests up here, once he'd found a way to excavate the vessels. While having them as ships would be immensely beneficial in defending Monstrum from any would-be attackers, not to mention possibly letting him depart the system and allow to begin expanding across the galaxy, there was another reason why he wanted to excavate the ships.

Namely, he wanted the tech-priests to rediscover the technology that went in to make each of the vessels and replicate it for himself. He already had a few vague designs of future vessels he might be able to create, though they wouldn't get further without knowing more. He'd have liked if at least one tech-priest had possessed such knowledge already, but it seemed Monstrum wasn't in great need of starship designers.

Of course, even if he could construct a fleet, the method of travel was another matter. Tide wasn't exactly enthused about the idea of sending his physical forms hurtling through hell, even if his mind was probably safe. The Star Road could grow with time and effort on his part, he knew, but it would be a long time before it'd be able to transport something like a fleet or even an army. And… he didn't like the idea of doing that, as it felt like he was circumventing the Star Road's 'desire' to not be used as a weapon.

Fortunately, his recently expanded awareness had opened a new possibility for him. Or, rather, confirmed an old possibility: Slipspace.

He could definitively state that the eleventh-dimensional space existed within this universe. He wasn't sure how he knew that, how he could sense Slipspace, nor was he sure how he might be able to access it… But that was part of the reason why he'd revealed himself to so many tech-priests.

In an instant, Tide looked through those he'd recently appeared to and found one suitable for the task he had in mind.

Logis Sathar.

Sathar paused in their work, looking up in spite of the fact that they knew no one would be there. It was still strange to them, the idea of having a voice in their head other than their own.

"Tide, did you need something?"

How would you like to discover a new kind of faster-than-light travel?