Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

It’s been nearly a day since the … event, and Amberley Veil still couldn’t quite shake the last traces of shock from her system. What she had seen, what she’d witnessed Echidna do, it somehow eclipsed everything else before. 

All the strange psyker’s previous feats of power were nonsensical, entirely outside her own experiences. Amberley had no context for them, no benchmark to measure them against. She didn’t know what another psyker would have been capable of wielding Echidna’s flesh-shaping power. 

She knew that the woman was beyond any Sanctioned Psyker, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. The Imperium eliminated any and all psykers beyond a certain level of power where the risk-and-reward analysis tipped over into the negative. Maybe Echidna’s greatest feat wasn’t truly her psychic power, but that she was — mostly — sane despite it. All psykers powerful enough to affect entire planetary surfaces with their Warpcraft tended to be driven mad by the whispers of the Warp, broken by their own ability to sense what no human mind could comprehend. 

But Echidna wasn’t. She was most certainly mad, in some meanings of the word, but not that way. Her madness was internal, coming from within, not without, and perhaps exacerbated by her unfathomably long life. Amberley knew some old nobles who pushed the rejuvenal treatments to the limit, and knew that even the Dreadnaughts whose minds were honed and hardened eventually broke under the ever-growing weight of time and their own memories.

An entire planet shrouded by a field akin to the power of a Blank, and a barrier cast around not one, but two celestial bodies. If the old records held true, feats like that were in the realm of power reserved to the God-Emperor himself, back when he still walked among mankind. 

So it was with a great measure of trepidation that Amberley Veil walked into the vast conference room, having arrived early to the meeting called by this enigmatic woman. Ciaphas was at her shoulder, despite his extensive list of objections, and his aide Jurgen at the other. 

Her eyes swept across the room, catching on the few figures not scattered about. The Tau Ethereal Coldstone was there with a pair of his attendants, all of them looking a lighter shade of blue than was healthy and wearing a stoic look that seemed a bit more wooden than usual. Next was a pair of Eldar, the one called Valenith who served as Echidna’s right hand — mostly in the form of a tightly clenched fist — and Kaylith who’d taken to leading the woman’s newly formed elite enforcers a few months back. A pair of Echidna’s ‘mini-mes’ lingered nearby, and Amberley recognised one of them as the clone responsible for leading all her ‘sisters’. Of course Selene Voss was also there, watching her paramour like one would an anxiously pacing child and … that seemed to be it.

A rather private meeting then. Amberley mused to herself, giving the host a respectful nod before settling down into one of the chairs. It was close by to the other groups, but far enough not to hear them if they whispered. 

“And that’s all of us, since Octavian is off doing something again,” Echidna said, both her voice and demeanour conveying some nebulous mixture of intense negative emotions. Amberly identified anger, frustration, annoyance, and something else that sent a shiver of dread down her spine: worry, concern, fear. What could make Echidna feel even the slightest sliver of fear? The only time she’d seen any similar emotion from the woman was when that Tyranid superstructure attacked her, and that was more a momentary panic than actual fear. “We can begin. First off, I’m in dire need of some good news. Did the Ethereal Council of your Sept send their reply yet, Coldstone?”

“They have,” the Tau said, giving a slight nod. “They send their appreciation for your information, warning and also for the … trophies. They have been crucial in convincing them of the veracity of my reports, and your claims. The Drukhari have been declared incompatible with the Tau’va, and will be killed on sight when encountered by warriors of the Velk’Han Sept. Creatures capable of such systematic depravity and callous cruelty have no place in this galaxy.”

The ‘trophies’ in question were a rather extensive collection of Drukhari technology, including some of their living — now very much dead — furniture. It was the kind of thing that made even the most hardened Guardsmen queasy, with even Ciaphas looking a bit pale after seeing what Drukhari actually used the slaves they regularly captured for. For the Tau, she wouldn’t have been surprised if a few of their ‘Honoured Ethereals’ got reintroduced to their last meals.

“Good,” Echidna said, her voice almost a purr of cruel satisfaction. She shouldn’t have been surprised; these Tau and their Sept were all but cut off from their Empire, and they’d just been shown some of the true horrors in this galaxy. Amberley wouldn’t be surprised if they were willing to do damned near anything to have even just a tenuous promise from Echidna to handle such threats if one ever came upon their Sept. “So! I assume the lot of you heard the hasty announcement about the suspiciously sudden ‘Warp Storm’ I’d protected us from yesterday? Well, we are here to discuss what actually happened and so I can hear what you think about my various plans going forward.”

Amberley had an inkling to it; her ship’s auger array detected a Warp Jump at the edges of the system, and the auspex operators even caught an incoming vox message being projected on all frequencies. Whatever Echidna had done, it masked both the source and the vox message before the ship’s acting captain could give the order to put the vox message through. 

But Amberley had done her homework before coming to this backwater sector, and all the clues were lining up for something she dearly wished wasn’t what actually happened. 

“How many of you here are familiar with the tale of the Limitless Grasp?”

Amberley recited a rather colourful slew of curses she’d collected over her long years of travelling the Damocles Gulf. She could actually curse for fifteen minutes straight without repeating a single word just by shifting between different Low Gothic dialects she was fluent in. Ciaphas had actually timed it once when he’d gotten her a bit more drunk than she’d ever intended on becoming. 

Amberley was the only one to nod, and so began Echidna’s little horror story. The woman enjoyed seeing Cain and the Taus’ faces pale a bit too much, in Amberley’s opinion, because the tale was a touch too dramatic to be proper in an official briefing. But it wasn’t like she was about to tell the stupidly powerful psyker that she already disliked Amberley the most out of everyone gathered in the room … other than Jurgen. Even though Echidna was unaffected by his nature, she was far from unaffected by the grumbling murmurs the aide couldn’t help but voice every now and then. Cain would have been short of an aide very quickly if Echidna didn’t value the worth of her own promises so highly; of that, the Inquisitor was certain.

Amberley knew why she was disliked, of course; Echidna disliked Inquisitors by default, it seemed and had found her initial cautious wariness distasteful for some reason. She’d have thought that it was how her disingenuous facade clashed with the woman’s blunt personality … but she seemed to like Ciaphas Cain of all people, the same man who admitted he wasn’t even sure there existed a Ciaphas Cain beneath all his masks, lies and manipulations. Then again, maybe Echidna saw the same deeply hidden core of gold in the man that Amberley herself found so enthralling, or just found the man amusing. It could be either, really. It certainly also helped that he was no ‘Emperor botherer’ as he would call it.

“So, any questions?” Echidna asked, finishing up her tale.

“There is truly no way to destroy it?” Coldstone asked, looking both dubious and weary, like he was internally panicking and desperately trying to convince himself things like the Limitless Grasp didn’t exist, or were over-exaggerated folk myths. But if she were to guess, a part of his mind was also already beginning to compile a new slew of regulations and countermeasures to minimise the damage caused by hostile Warp phenomena like the Limitless Grasp.

“It destroys itself every time it reappears, as I’ve said.” The ‘were you not listening?’ went unsaid. “And if you mean whether we can stop the phenomenon, then … Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I have ideas, but they are far-fetched and more hopes than something I expect to actually work. As I said, the phenomenon, and many others like it, are caused by the Hadex Anomaly, which so happens to be at the very heart of my new domain. I’d hoped that being absorbed into the Great Rift would normalise it, but it seems it only empowered it, which is close to the worst-case scenario.”

Amberley failed to comprehend what she’d just heard for a long moment. Did she really mean … ? It was madness. Something even her most deranged Ordo Malleus colleagues would have scoffed at and deemed impossible from the get-go. There were things in this galaxy you couldn’t just ‘deal with’ in a permanent fashion. All you could do was to hold back the tide at best, and slow its inexorable advance at worst. Containment was very often the very best case scenario, something of a far-off dream in most cases. 

Tyranids as a whole. Chaos. The Ruinous Powers. The Halo Stars. The Ghoul Stars. The Necrons. Orks as a whole. The Eye of Terror. The Maelstrom. The Hadex Anomaly.

After a moment, Amberly decided to voice her thoughts. She really did not want to deal with whatever would be left of Echidna if she foolishly waded into the Hadex Anomaly. A corrupted phantom of the woman akin to the Limitless Grasp, which could die a thousand times without ever truly being vanquished, was something out of her worst nightmares. 

“Nothing is impossible in this galaxy,” Echidna said with a hint of her usual disdain, something which always crept into her voice whenever she encountered something that reminded her of how disappointed she was in the current state of humanity. That was probably another cause of her dislike of Amberley; she — and Inquisitors as a whole — reminded her of how far the current age was from mankind’s Golden Age. She’d called them ‘living embodiments of everything that’s wrong with the Imperium’. “Something only becomes impossible when you stop dreaming, when you stop believing that it is, in fact, possible. The Necrons killed Gods; they built machines that can snuff out stars from halfway across the galaxy. I refuse to believe that erasing this cancer upon spacetime is somehow more challenging than that. It’s been brought into existence by human effort; there is no way it cannot be destroyed, or at the very least suppressed into impotence by the same thing.”

“It’s not like anything we have can compare to the Necrons’ techno-sorceries,” Cain said, sounding baffled. It seemed his self-preservation instincts demanded he did his best to convince his host not to commit assisted suicide. 

“There is nothing sorcerous about their technology,” Echidna scoffed. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, yes, but we know the Necrons are anaemic to the Warp. They are entirely of the physical world, without souls. As for not having their technology … did you not see the Pylons I’d been spreading around every planet we visited? Did you think I just found Cadia’s choice of landscape decoration appealing?”

Cain blinked slowly, looking baffled for a moment while Jurgen unhelpfully mumbled about tech-heresy and the unfortunate impotency of his melta. Right, she may have forgotten to inform him about her deal with Echidna, which earned her a stash of knowledge on how to operate Blackstone-based technology. 

“Would I be wrong when I say you intend to make use of Blackstone Pylons in your ‘counterattack’?” Amberley asked warily.

“It’s one of the more extreme options, yes,” Echidna confirmed. “If I could figure out how to erect a Contra-Empyric Nexus focused wholly inward at the portion of the Great Rift cutting into the Jericho Reach … Well, that would very likely solve the problem. Alas, the designs I have require far more celestial anchor points than I have access to here, and the array is shaped as a fractal spiral of sorts. Something which I can’t really make work with the Great Rift sitting fat on top of a quarter slice of the sector.”

Amberley wasn’t sure what a Contra-Empyric Nexus was, and felt rather relieved when she wasn’t forced to ask the question herself. 

“It’s a sector-wide network of Blackstone Pylons that suppresses Empyric energy to such a level that human souls are torn free of their bodies and absolutely no Warpcraft or Warp energy can exist within its bounds, no matter the source,” Echidna explained when one of her ‘daughters’ asked. “A galaxy-wide nexus of that same design is their Silent King’s long-term solution to the problem that is the Great Rift, Chaos and the Warp as a whole. I don’t think I have to explain why letting them succeed is rather detrimental to everything with a soul, but the same technology should be perfectly capable of sealing even the Eye of Terror itself. After all, the Cadian Pylons were one of the central anchors of a similar, much more ancient system. That’s why the Great Rift sprang into being when Abaddon threw a tantrum and smashed the planet to bits.”

Echidna really did love the sound of her own voice, or maybe she just liked being the centre of attention, the most important and the smartest person in whatever room she was in. Amberley didn’t begrudge her for that; there were much worse vices among much lesser people she’d overlooked with ease. 

Amberley, and the Inquisition as a whole, were already aware of most of what she said, or at least heavily suspected it, but it was nonetheless good to have confirmation. Nothing Echidna said or claimed before had ever been disproven, despite some intense efforts from some of her colleagues and agents. 

“But you said this plan is unrealistic, and unlikely to be viable for our purposes,” Coldstone said. “What’s the practical course of action?”

“I wouldn’t call it practical; it might not work at all,” Echidna said, looking somewhat frustrated again. Ah, she finally came upon a foe she couldn’t overwhelm with psychic power, a problem that couldn’t be solved by either brute force or the eldritch intelligence of her mind. The irritation suddenly made perfect sense. “According to the preeminent theories I have on hand, the Hadex Anomaly came into existence during a rare celestial alignment during the sector’s Age of Shadows, when a Hive World’s worth of lunatics enacted some foul ritual that brought the deepest abyss of the Warp into realspace. The alignment has passed … but I believe that all the stars that had played a part in it continue to act as anchors for the Anomaly.”

Echidna stopped there, and it took Amberley a moment to catch on to what the madwoman was suggesting. She felt like groaning in disbelief. She could almost hear the common sense shattering like a pane of glass as it crashed down on the pavement after Echidna casually chucked it out the window. 

How was it that tugging around stars was considered the simplest solution to a problem!? 

Maybe she is right. Not even the most deranged of my ‘esteemed’ colleagues would think to even consider that. By the Warp, none of them would even consider actual solutions to end a phenomenon like the Hadex Anomaly for good. Did mankind stop believing that things could get better? Did all our hopes and dreams die the day Horus slew the Emperor?

It was a discomforting thought.