The Beast Arises

The troupe ran through the abandoned hall, their light tread leaving no trace in the dust. They were spears of light arrowing through the dark, outshining the dim lanterns set into the vaulting overhead. Carved saints, comical in their anguish and pomposity, loomed out of the dark. They came to a heavy iron door rusted as red as blood. Gehennelith somersaulted, power sword slashing down. His blow delivered, he leapt aside as the sisters Tueneniar and Linead concluded the portal’s shattering with their shuriken pistols.

Lhaerial Rey was through first, her outline a shimmering cloud of diamonds. Gehennelith, Tueneniar, Linead, Barinamean came after, and lastly the death jester Bho, his dathedi spreading a cloud of ebon shards as confusing as a flurry of bats. Bho had his own reasons for coming, unknown to her. Whatever they were, she was glad of his presence.

A corridor stretched away, as dim and sepulchral as the hall they had left. A dead planet for a race that had doomed itself. Blue skies and seas, continent-spanning forests and millions of years of natural glory unsullied by crude humanity cried out to be remembered. It sickened her heart, she who had trod the nightmare ground of the Crone Worlds, who thought herself beyond such feeling. If Eldrad Ulthran himself had not requested her aid, she would never have set foot here.

Everywhere there was only silence, echoing avenues and empty rooms brimming with the self-importance of this race, so arrogant they had paved over the ground that fed them, uprooted the trees that nourished them and boiled away the seas that birthed them. Their crimes were lesser in scale than those of her own ancestors, perhaps, but their folly was worse for its crudeness. There was a majesty in the fall of the eldar, a glorious dance a million cycles in the making. Mankind was a moron chopping at the branch it stood upon. Black-hearted, close-minded, feeble-bodied. Humanity did not deserve to live. She danced out her hatred upon the flagstones as she ran.

Ulthran had chosen their insertion point well. The deaths of the waysingers bought them a stealthy entrance; these halls had been deserted for some time. The passing of their feet was as gentle as the pattering of rain on Terra’s extinct forests. The few maintenance drones they saw, ghoulishly fashioned from the skulls of human dead, they shot down.

It could not last. They burst through a creaking set of doors into a hall that ran for several hundred lengths. High desks marched up both sides in precipitous tiers, hundreds of shelves rearing up over those. More dead wood lit by feeble lights of soulless electricity. The rough scent of humanity was strong there. The place was in disarray, sheets of paper and vellum and plasticised hydrocarbons scattered all about.

They saw their first humans. Pallid things, lumpenly ugly even by the woefully low standards of the race. Several dozen cowered together beneath the desk tiers. Their dull, animal eyes were fixed on the dirty plex-glass of the ceiling a hundred lengths overhead. They did not see the Harlequins until they were practically past them, a kaleidoscopic zephyr that stirred their scattered papers.

Whole family groupings hid together. They had never seen the sun, Lhaerial could sense it. One of their young let out a mewling cry. Lhaerial’s domino-masked face whipped round, looking the human child full in the face. She raised her pistol, but her mind balked at activating it. The girl’s expression was suffused with a terrified wonder. Her eyes glistened at the beauty she saw. Lhaerial vaulted over a fallen lectern, and put her pistol up.

The Harlequins were already gone by the time the scribes began shouting. An alarm bell tolled out shortly after.

Rune signifiers shone on the map projected into Lhaerial’s mind by her wargear. They were closing on their destination, at the very edge of the administrative hives. Six thousand lengths or more to their target.

They emerged at speed into a metal cavern. Under steel skies a vast, decrepit parkland opened up, dotted with huge mansions, the fiefs of petitioner-barons and pensioned scrivener overseers. Light pipes directed weak sunlight into the park. Once it had been a lush place, but many of the trees were dead, skeletal things stark white in the gloom. Scraggly weeds dominated the few patches of day.

Through dirty-mouthed tunnels, ill-disciplined groups of soldiers in black streamed to oppose the Harlequins.

Gehennelith flipped effortlessly over streaking las-bolts, felling several of the humans with shots of pinpoint accuracy: one disc, one kill.

‘Dance their deaths and let us be on,’ ordered Lhaerial. ‘They are weak, but they are many, and we have stirred their ire.’

Truly she spoke, for already Tueneniar had become separated from her troupe mates. Bho’s shuriken cannon wailed as it spat out its deadly gifts. Men ran in terror as the shrieker cannon’s mutagens caused their fellows to explode.