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999.M41 Minutes before the fall of Cadia || Follax IV; Sector Darkspire; Segmentum Ultima; Imperium Nihilis ||
"Are we ready?"
The question resounded around the spacious room, carrying a tone of nervousness and childish excitement.
While it would have been endearing if the question came from a child but alas it had not.
Azkaral, a proud member of the Word Bearers Legion was astounded hearing the deep emotion hidden in his Brother-Sergant's voice. He was a man who stood against the Corpse Emperor ten thousand years ago and was among the first to be enlightened.
Now this several millennia-old monster who has conducted innumerable rituals in service to their Gods without anything other than cold determination and satisfaction was barely containing himself from jumping in excitement.
"Yes, Brother-Sergeant," he kept his thoughts to himself and answered, "the ritual preparations and the sacrifices have been gathered and accomplished per your directions."
And what sacrifices they were. Azkaral felt a similar excitement well up in him at the thought.
Never before has he been part of a Ritual sacrificing the entire population of several planets at once. Follax IV was a Hive World too, with billions of inhabitants.
What great goal could they accomplish with such a grand ritual? He sadly wasn't privy to it, nobody was, only the Sergeant. Even summoning a greater demon wouldn't take this much effort, maybe they were aiming for a Demon Prince? Or something even greater?
"Good," the ancient voice whispered, its excitement barely hidden this time, "We shall start at once then, we haven't got much time."
And they did. At the order of the Sergeant, all Brothers kneeled across the fifteen different planets and sang.
Their song was filled with zealous devotion and their demonically gifted psychic might reverberated across the warp.
Their souls linked and resonated through the rituals, filling each Brother's soul with the strength of the billions of the reaped souls.
As their song neared its crescendo Azkaral felt an enormous shockwave travel through him. With the shockwave came a deepening of his connection to the Warp.
Azkaral pulled this newfound connection to its limit as he felt many of his Brothers do so as well. He didn't know why but this must have been the reason the Sargent wanted to perform the Ritual at this exact time.
Soon enough the crescendo arrived and Azkaral felt a pull on his soul, it was a familiar sensation he associated with getting banished. Now, though the pull wasn't coming from his connection to his Gods, nor the Warp but the Ritual.
A normal person would have been horrified in his position but Azkaral only felt two things at this moment.
A regret, for not seeing what magnificent result this ritual would achieve.
And joy, at the knowledge that he would contribute his very being to this goal.
He didn't even attempt to resist as he felt himself being pulled into the grand Ritual with the Sergeant at its center.
His last individual thought was elation at feeling his many brothers be pulled along with him.
Malachias felt the unimaginable power well up inside him, threatening to tear his soul apart.
He has taken many precautions against such an occurrence but it seems it might barely be enough.
His soul wouldn't last much longer, but it should be enough. It can't have all been for nothing.
Such an opportunity came once in history and never again, never would it repeat itself.
Malachias was known as the Apostate, well one of the things he was known as was the Apostate for his exceptionally accurate visions of the future. They were irregular and came without his prompting but he welcomed them all.
Such visions were seen as the blessings of the Lord of Change and he felt nothing but gratitude for them.
Especially for this one.
A crack appeared in space above him and a small container fell out of it.
The crack, which revealed a dark storage on the other side closed just as quickly as it appeared but it left behind a gift.
Malachias smiled as he held the orb-shaped container maybe a fourth of his size. One of the dearly kept relics of the Shadowkeepers just fell right into his hands, straight from the most impregnable vault below the imperial palace on Holy Terra itself.
Moments before this container sat somewhere below the very throne of the corpse emperor.
A chuckle left him briefly followed by a wince. He couldn't last much longer.
He placed the container in the middle of the Ritual circle he was kneeling on and continued the song.
With all his power he reached out, as far as he could and he searched.
The warp has never before been so powerful yet so weak at the same time, its sudden expansion weakened its barriers momentarily.
This didn't make much difference but for his goals, it would be essential.
His reach extended beyond the Warp and out into the deep immaterial, his soul brushed against the great sea of other universes and examined them. He felt them, tasted them and he discarded them to search for another.
None of them were what he wanted. There were many powerful souls and interesting beings in all of them but he wanted more. Something that would throw the Galaxy, no this Reality into Chaos.
He coughed out blood and his eyes were bloodshot, barely holding his physical form together to tether his enormous amalgam of a soul but he found it.
He briefly felt it, not quite knowing how or where but he felt it.
He latched onto that feeling and pulled himself along like a drowning man clutching a thrown rope.
He dragged himself along even if he couldn't quite comprehend how or where he was going.
How could he? If he was searching left and right before then the current direction he was going in was upwards. Something alien and he felt like he didn't belong. Reality itself was trying to force him out of this place, this plane of existence.
With a last smirk, he grabbed at the first soul he sensed. To his delight it didn't resist, he felt even in his state if it did he couldn't have done anything to drag it along as he was pulled back down into his reality.
He clutched the soul as if his life depended on it as his surroundings blended together.
In a single moment that felt longer than his whole life up until now, he was back.
Without a single second of hesitation, he plunged his hand into the container and felt it shatter under his strength.
Good, he thought as that was the last of it.
He gently guided the soul into what was inside the container.
A perfect body for a perfect soul. His greatest masterpiece. No this was the greatest masterpiece that has ever existed and ever will.
A bioweapon left over from the Dark Age of Technology that even the Corpse Emperor couldn't destroy infused with the soul of a higher dimensional being.
"For...Chaos," Malachias murmured as both his physical body and soul started to disintegrate, this wasn't just banishment, this was oblivion.
He barely saw snow-white tendrils lash out of the broken container before he finally perished
999.M41 Few minutes after the fall of Cadia || ???
I watched the myriad of twinkling lights travel above me as a deep sense of regret welled up in me. Souls, I think.
Flowing in streams to places I dare not imagine.
In life I would have scoffed at the notion, well I did scoff at it when Mom tried to tell me about souls and spiritualism. If she was here, she would probably tell me 'I told you so!'.
I watched them for what felt like an eternity by now. I was like a cripple laying at the bottom of a valley, watching the beautiful shining stars swim across the night sky above me.
Why wasn't I among them? Was it because I didn't believe it? Shouldn't I be going to hell for that?
This feels much more like a limbo, purgatory if you will.
I have given up on shouting or asking for help long ago, it didn't help that I didn't have a voice and nor did it help that all the other souls ignored everything around them. They moved like cogs in a machine, with purpose yet no will of their own.
Maybe this was hell. My personal one for always thinking that only oblivion would await me at the end of my life.
I asked for oblivion and I got an eternity of this instead. The monotony would be driving a human mad by now but I just felt bored by it all. Maybe this was a result of not having a body or I was just weird to begin with.
The only thing I regret is that I died too soon, it was 2030 and I was only 23 years old fresh out of college.
I didn't get on well with Mom and I would be surprised if she only came to my funeral to berate me for dying so stupidly and light some sort of incense for my soul or something.
Dad died just a few years ago, I loved him even if he was far from perfect. Divorce from Mom hit him hard and he lost himself in alcohol whenever I wasn't living with him. He tried his best I think and he was always sober and there for me when I needed him the most, unlike Mom.
I was an only child, my grandparents died while I was young and I only had a few close friends. At least some of the others would have probably mourned me.
My biggest regret both in life and now is that I was born too soon and died even sooner than I planned. I couldn't see where science would advance, would neural implants work? would we colonize Mars? what about AI or the new regenerative treatments?
I was obsessed with sci-fi and science. I wanted to know if our dreams would come true, yet I died.
Such a dumb death too.
Who the hell dies from slipping on a banana peel for real? Well, I did but that's not the point. I thought it only happened in cartoons.
I felt a faint sense of something disgusting on my 'skin' and I shivered.
Next thing I knew whatever it was had latched onto me.
The revulsion and disgust were overwhelming yet I couldn't do anything, I was just a soul, an inert and weak little human soul from earth. I couldn't move before and I couldn't move now.
I was ripped out of where I was, I felt myself being dragged along with this thing as it traveled through the infinity of existence and I began to wonder.
Was this a demon? Did he come to bring me down to hell with himself after I rotted in purgatory for god knows how long?
Maybe they liked to torment unbelievers with this, to let them think and marinate in their doubts before throwing them into the flames of hell.
The demon crashed into something and its frail shell shattered under his strength. He dragged me through the crack but I already saw it mending itself and the opening probably closed moments after we went through.
It stopped. Fuck. This was weird it didn't feel especially hot in here.
He didn't let me think much before he plunged his hand along with my soul into something.
OHHHHHHHHH what the fuck is happening?
I felt again, though it was weird.
I could move.
I felt the air on my skin, the vibrations it carried.
I understood the vibrations to be sounds. No words. "For...Chaos!"
Next came light. I could feel it with my skin just like air. Was I some kind of eyeball monster now to be able to see with my skin?
No. It was weird but I knew my new body. I understood what it was and how it worked.
I reached out of this broken orb-like box I was in and 'looked' around with two of my tentacles like some kind of snail. Yeah, tentacles or well tendrils? Whatever they were long and white and I could perfectly control them like they were my fingers.
Instead, they didn't have bones or joints so they bent however I wanted them.
Oh, this was trippy as fuck.
My weird soul 'vision' or whatever I had as a soul is still there, overlaid the current vision I had giving me an ever-increasing sense of nausea and headache.
I couldn't even close my eyes or turn my head away as I had neither. I was some kind of eldritch monster made up of only these white tentacles that didn't have a solid core or main body.
There was a feeling of dissonance that was driving me crazy but the nausea and headache went away as fast as they came. My new body couldn't feel those kinds of things.
I writhed on the floor once I managed to fall out of the broken orb, even if I could control the tentacles perfectly that didn't make moving my eldritch body easier.
I wish I had my previous body at least in this hell.
My discomfort and nausea came back in force as my body started to shift and morph subconsciously. I knew that it wasn't something that was doing this to me but myself.
A moment later when I looked down on a perfect replica of my human hands I knew it wasn't some god or demon that granted my wish but my own body. I still felt This monstrous eldritch body deep within me but the outer shell was human.
I sighed in relief and closed my eyes. Even if it was fake it gave me a calming sense of familiarity.
Just what the hell was going on?
999.M41 FEW MINUTES AFTER THE FALL OF CADIA || FOLLAX IV; SEGMENTUM ULTIMA; IMPERIUM NIHILIS
I slumped down to the ground and felt the cold concrete scrape against my bare butt.
Looking down I noticed I didn't seem to be able to replicate my clothes too, great.
With a sigh, I looked around the dark room. This was a large room with no windows, no furniture, or any kind of paint. Only cold concrete on all sides.
My fingers brushed against something sticky on the floor and looking at the ground for the first time in detail I noticed a peculiar painting on it. There was no other way to put it than a ritual circle, painted in blood.
I was sitting near the middle of it, with the broken orb I crawled out of being right there. That doesn't bode well.
No sign of the demon that brought me here, nor a fiery hell.
Didn't I hear him speak though? I was barely able to comprehend it at the time but I think I heard 'for chaos' back then.
No matter, he seems to have gone away and left me here, all alone again. Not that I would want the companionship of that thing, the shiver that ran through my now human body was far more pronounced than before. My hands visibly shook and my vision clouded over as the aftereffect of the revulsion ran through me.
Unfortunately, this shifted my attention back to my soul and its senses.
I suddenly felt like I was all alone in a dark and eerie place, an endless rolling dark ocean expanding below me. Thankfully I levitated far away from it but even from here I could feel a faint whisper of the same revulsion emanating from this ocean. I saw brief flickers of the things lurking deeper below the waves and it terrified me.
Monsters that wouldn't be out of place in the most disgusting R-rated horror movies, no these were things that no sane human mind could think up it was only the upper parts of this thing that appeared like a dark ocean. I didn't even want to know what lurked deeper below.
If I was religious I would probably be thanking God right now for not being dropped into the water, alas I was not. Why wasn't I falling into it as I saw the many other small souls flicker below the waves? They were so small though, so weak, and somehow felt lesser than me.
They were dragged along by the currents and were only prey to the many predators lurking nearby, the shinier a soul seemed the more of the monsters gathered around them. They didn't pounce though, they waited for an opportunity that didn't seem to come.
To say I was endlessly confused would be an understatement. I pulled my senses back into my human body and stood up shakily.
Here I was, a nude 23-year-old girl standing in the middle of a ritual circle drawn in blood in a dark underground room. I wasn't dead at least.
I was far too calm about this but I didn't care, I wanted to get out of this dark room as soon as possible. My questions could wait, I couldn't get answers and even if I could there would only be another torrent of new questions popping up or so I assume.
Thankfully there was a way out, a small light flickered from an opening on the wall.
I made my way over, stumbling a few times due to my shaky legs or the copious amounts of blood coating the floor. It wasn't dry yet, did that mean all of this was fresh blood? No, focus.
Get out, then questions.
I steadied herself on the wall once I reached the opening. Deep breaths.
That was a mistake. I coughed as I tasted the revolting smell of stale blood and molt on the air.
Even the air below all these felt different. Artificial and far too stale.
Far from the natural air back on Earth.
My walking was getting better as my shaking subsided once I put the room behind me.
The flickering lights on the top of the small concrete hallway didn't help calm my nerves though. Still, this hallway which wouldn't be out of place in a horror videogame was better than the room.
The ritual circle induced a deep sense of unease and the dark ocean felt somehow closer to me back there. As I put distance between us even my soul calmed.
The hallways were like an abandoned maze. I stumbled across several rooms but all of them were abandoned, with no person in sight only splatters of dried blood and the signs of brutal fighting.
The concrete walls were sliced through in some places and had small dents in others. Ruined furniture and inert, rusty machines filled up the many rooms down here.
Still not a single window or natural source of light to be seen, nor anything living.
It took maybe an hour for me to find something different, time was hard to measure with my thoughts still muddled by all that had happened and locked inside this concrete building.
The room stank like all hell even from a few turns away but I made my way over and the sight that greeted me wasn't too different from what I expected.
The room was a large hall reaching twenty meters in height. The haphazard pile of human corpses reached halfway up to that.
My heart was beating in my throat and breathing grew increasingly harder. I steadied myself on the doorframe of the hallway as I took it all in.
The floor was covered in similar bloody scribblings to the one I arrived at. All of my leftover human instincts told me to leave this room running and screaming but something held me back.
Something deep within me wanted me to use this, I knew I could use it. My new body wasn't running on prayers and hope. It needed sustenance.
In other words, the eldritch monster that was me was starving and this pile of human corpses started to look more and more like a meal instead of the horrible scene I knew it to be.
I unconsciously took a step forward, then another until I found myself looking down on the face of a man.
Horror was etched onto his face and he was missing the lower part of his body. Many of them were, to bleed them out better I think.
That's what they were, after all, blood sacrifices and material. For the ritual that presumably resulted in my dead soul being dragged into this shithole and tossed into this eldritch body.
That's not even a complaint. Whatever messed up place this was it is probably better than spending eternity as a vegetable in purgatory.
I grimaced at the overwhelming stench of blood and rotting corpses.
Bon appetit I guess
My human conscience didn't die screaming or get locked into the back of my mind.
It changed along with me, I didn't even notice it before it was far too late to go back. I wasn't going to enjoy this but it would keep me alive for longer.
I felt my need for sustenance and knowledge like a constant pain in my side. Whatever I was needed this.
I could get much more from this than any human could. I could now transform biomass without waste into energy for myself and get buried knowledge hidden deep inside these bodies.
My 'instincts?' told me I wasn't able to mimic a human quite well now, it was only an outer shell that would be quite easy to see through for anyone with proper equipment or senses.
I studied computer engineering, not human anatomy. Not that even that would have given me a perfect understanding of the human body.
This would though. I only needed to eat them and absorb them. Assimilate whatever was useful about them and extract any information that would be useful. The rest would be stored as energy.
Yes. I needed this to survive.
With a deep breath that was entirely unnecessary, I shifted back into my real form.
My human bones, muscle, and skin melted into the pure white tendrils that came crawling out from deep within. In the time it would take for me to blink, I was done with the morphing and I descended on my first target.
Thankfully I didn't have taste in this form nor did I have smell. I subconsciously understood what kind of substances I absorbed but I didn't feel them, I just knew.
Along with it came the satisfying sensation of energy filling my starving body. I didn't feel it as strongly before but now that I got a taste and endless hunger settled in the back of my mind, urging me to quickly consume more.
For a moment I was distracted by the bizarre way my white skin or maybe flesh absorbed the corpse, the moment I touched it the skin and flesh on the body disappeared. My tendrils carved hollow lines through it wherever they passed and I felt the abysmal amounts of increase to my energy.
The questions about how this was possible, why I was here, or where I was were all inconsequential right now.
My new body's instincts told me this was the first form of sustenance it had in more than ten millennia and the way energy streamed into whatever counted as my stomach felt almost euphoric.
I lashed out with tens of long tendrils, they extended into the pile and weaved through it.
With a thought they split and the tens of questing tendrils became hundreds. With my increasing energy capacity, I could morph them however I wished so I did. Tendrils flattened as much as they could while retaining most of their strength to make it easier to absorb the food and I stood there at the edge of the pile.
If I was in my human form I would have sighed in satisfaction maybe even moaned but I wasn't so all that was left for me to do is to coordinate all of my appendages to finish this meal as fast as possible. I still wasn't too comfortable with this form and the dissonance I felt increased with every additional second I've spent in it.
I experienced the half a minute it took to transmute all of the organic matter in the room into energy in a trance-like daze. It felt like I'd spent hours on it with all the micromanaging it took to not tangle up a few hundred twisting and turning tendrils.
When I retook my human form I nearly collapsed on the floor, maybe a combination of exhaustion or after-meal tiredness. My body looked a bit different than it did before, I used all the knowledge I gained about the human body and its biological template to fix whatever I could.
The energy wasn't the only thing I gained from this, I understood how everything worked and combined into a large interconnected network of bones, muscles, organs, and neural pathways. The only thing I was still somewhat missing was the brain. I could replicate one but I still couldn't understand how the myriad of connecting neurons resulted in consciousness or how the memories were stored in them. Yet.
That would need something that hasn't been left to rot for days, maybe months in a moldy room.
I could eventually extract memories from them. With a start, I realized I was probably the greatest shapeshifter there was if that was the case, or was my soul a dead giveaway even then? I didn't know. Before I died I would have scoffed at the notion of souls being a thing.
I wasn't a stubborn moron though, I could accept facts when my face has been smashed into them.
Yeah, being reincarnated as an eldritch biomorph by some kind of demonic ritual was perfectly understandable. Probably an average Tuesday around here.
I snorted at that, right? I didn't even know what day it was.
Now for the changes in my body.
I fixed up a few things. My horrid eyesight was replaced by the best I could make it. The grinding joints in my fingers were also obviously replaced by perfect ones, cracking my knuckles has been one of my nervous traits.
I've made other similar fixes and I made all of my humanoid parts as good as I could with my current knowledge, such a shame I wasn't a bio-engineer. If I was I could already start thinking about upgrades that could bring me above the human level. Memories and knowledge.
That would come in handy.
If I found a single damned living human in this maze.
I turned and made my way out of the room, the stink has been considerably lessened with the source gone but my human nose was still objecting to staying any more than necessary here.
As I passed the door I morphed my right index finger into a tendril and tried to 'eat' the concrete making up the doorframe. With a bit of force, a small chunk of concrete slipped through my skin and I recoiled at the sensation.
The concrete wasn't getting broken down nor was it getting turned into energy, it was sort of just swimming there under my skin. I grimaced as I felt it, just like it was under my human skin but as if I had nerves all around it. Its form and shape were clear in my mind but not its composition.
I 'spat' it out. It plopped through my alien skin and clattered on the similar concrete floor.
Useful to know that I could 'eat' my way out of here but also let's not do that unless necessary.
Wait.
'first form of sustenance it had in more than ten millennia'
That would be about 8000 BC, wouldn't it?
Maybe aliens did build the pyramids.
Or I was very far from the pyramids
More questions that these boring concrete hallways can't answer, I could fill several pages with them by now.
As the weird person I was the first thing that came to my mind when musing about all the things I didn't know was Occam's Razor. 'Occam's razor is a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.'
That means the simplest answer is usually the right one.
Based on that, my standing theory about my situation is that I somehow spent a few millennia as a soul then somehow got transplanted into this body which was suspiciously geared towards infiltration and such.
A cold breeze swept across the hallway and I shivered a bit. My looted clothes, if they can be called that, at least protected my privates from the chilly wind.
Why was there wind in an underground hallway anyways?
My aimless walk turned into a slow jog as I followed the direction the breeze came from. It wasn't natural, that I knew as it tasted the same artificial air as before but colder like it was flowing through an AC.
After five turns in these maddening hallways, I was glad I didn't sprint, that would have been a waste of energy I decided as I looked through the crack in the wall and into something that could be called a ventilation shaft.
I mean you usually didn't just make a vertical shaft from the same damn concrete and call it a ventilation shaft.
I would have thought I was something else were it not for the sign next to it. Let's dismiss the fact that the crack was probably not a mistake but a feature if it had a sign next to it for now.
I could read the sign, surprisingly. It was like those anime openings, a bunch of languages cobbled together without much sense and afterward it made to sound somewhat like Latin. I'm sure the Romans would be turning in their graves were they to read this thing. Still the meaning 'Ventilation' and 'Beware' I could understand even if one was somewhat French and the other similar to the German word 'Achtung' meaning attention.
I think I've read a linguistic study once where they predicted that in the future the most dominant human languages would combine into a sort of global language for humanity. Back then I thought it was unlikely, almost everyone spoke English already in the second millennium so why would they need a language like this?
I got distracted again. It was a bad habit, not too bad now but it didn't help when I got distracted by noticing a bee through my window while studying for my physics exam. That wouldn't be too bad but I spent the next 8 hours sitting in front of my computer and researching how the ecosystem on earth would crumble if bees disappeared suddenly.
I had to take physics the next semester.
Now looking at this shaft, heh. There isn't much light here but I can still see somewhat well, so not seeing either the bottom or the top of this two-meter-wide shaft doesn't bode well. Am I somewhere far underground as I feared?
I stood there wondering how the hell could I climb up the concrete wall before I realized I was a damned tentacle monster.
With a thought, the fingers on one of my hands morphed into snow-white claws, well tendrils that I shaped like claws. I didn't know how sharp or tough they were if I wasn't trying to break down biomatter with them so this was as good a time as any to test.
The answer was both disappointing and expected. Turns out my flesh-eating eldritch tentacles weren't made to claw through concrete.
Not that it would matter if I knew how to replicate something that could claw through concrete.
With a grimace, I stabbed my fingers into the wall inside the shaft and felt the displaced concrete shift under my skin. I pushed it out of my fingers and tossed them outside my body around my elbow.
Tiny threadlike tendrils materialized inside my arms to guide them through, they shifted them through my human flesh and bones like they weren't even there and without harming them. It was infinitely fascinating to a sci-fi nerd like me and technobabble like 'phase-shifting' and such were already flooding my mind.
I stuck my other hand into the wall like the first and repeated the process, followed by both of my feet. Good thing I didn't find a shoe or I would have to leave it here.
I wasn't much of an athlete but I had obligatory sports courses in college and the 'strength and fitness' one could be completed by going to weekly wall-climbing training. Which I did.
That was the second time I realized humans could get sore in their finger muscles.
Still, it gave me the courage to now attempt climbing this vertical concrete wall with only the gaping darkness below me and the flickering light slipping through a few cracks as my company. So it proved more useful than most of my other compulsory subjects.
Right hand, left leg, left hand, right leg. Repeat.
That was my world for the next few hours. I hope. My internal clock wasn't too reliable at the best of times.
Looking down I could see the small marks I left on the wall trailing far below me and getting swallowed by the darkness. I've climbed far I think.
Now if there was a damned exit.
My body didn't tire over the climb as I thought it would, wall climbing was exhausting, but whenever I felt soreness or tiredness seep in I instinctually draw on my stored energy and refreshed myself. The soreness went away and I felt like I'd just drank two energy drinks.
I considered the downsides of 'healing' my soreness but realized I could just replicate muscles just as easily as I shifted between my forms.
The only reason I still looked mostly like myself from my previous life was probably familiarity, it was comforting to be back in my 'own' skin.
That was the reason I didn't give myself more muscles than a bodybuilder on steroids would have. I liked being pretty, which might be the reason I didn't replicate my birthmarks. My face might also be a slightly bit different.
I was never an artist in my previous life but I realized why painters said a painting is never finished. I could play around with this 'character creation' forever and I would. It was fun.
While thinking about that I noticed the light seeping through the cracks above me was different. Not flickering and its shade was darker. Not the cold led-like lights that were used all around this maze.
With a new surge of energy infusing my body I accelerated my climbing and got to digging through the cracked wall once I got there.
I was starting to get impatient a few minutes later when I only managed to dig a head-wide opening through the twenty-centimeter-thick concrete.
Wasn't I like an octopus? with no bones and tentacles and all that?
Patting myself mentally on the back at my genius idea I shifted myself wholly into my 'eldritch form'. Damn, that sounds so edgy. Well unless I shout 'Eldritch Form: TRANSFORMATION' every time I do this it is manageable.
It was only an idea but it worked better than expected. When only one of my tendrils reached through the hole I got the idea to try and reabsorb all of my mass on this side.
It worked like a wonder. My mood wasn't the least bit dampened as my now lone tendril flopped to the cold floor.
With a thought the tendril expanded and I stood there, naked as the day I was born, once again. Rest in peace clothes, you have served me well.
Now where did that light come from?
999.M41 Few days after the fall of Cadia ||The Dark Cells; Holy Terra; Segmentum Solar
Lockwarden Borsa Thrusk read through the list displayed by his data slate for the second time to make sure he has not misread the first time. His ever-present frown that would frighten weaker men darkened as the news set in.
Cadia fell. Half of the Imperium has lost the light of the Astronomican.
Inconsequential news to the Lockwarden.
His duty didn't lay in protecting citizens or planets from the horrors crawling out of the warp.
His duty was to keep whatever horrors were locked away under the imperial Palace by the Emperor himself stayed there. He and his predecessors rarely left the Dark Cells and he could count the times his Shield-Host has left the planet throughout the last ten millennia on one hand.
He wouldn't even be reading this report were it not for the fact that he failed. He has failed the Imperium. He has failed his Emperor.
The horrors have escaped their Cells and he couldn't figure out how until now.
The Immaterium has intertwined itself even deeper with the material plane with the catastrophe called the Cicatrix Maleddictum and the perfectly calibrated Ward that prevented Warp-based travel or anything of the sort have either failed or suddenly proved insufficient.
Not once throughout the history of the Dark Cell did so many prisoners escape.
A stain on their honor.
He snorted. Honor, a useless thing.
Duty. That he failed.
The duty of the Shadowkeepers would be to hunt down all of the escapees to the last from now on.
He still had a duty to guard those who didn't manage to escape. Merely a fraction of the horrendous things kept here managed to slip through the guards. They still had to guard the rest.
He would have to dispatch hunters for each of the escapees.
He glanced through the list containing all the cells that have been found empty.
His gaze darkened. He would have to lead a hunting party to secure a few of these.
Monsters that have crawled out of ancient Terran myths now once again haunted humanity.
Toward the end of the list, his gaze paused. This part contained the Artifacts that have gone missing, curious.
Some were sentient while others were so tainted by the wicked powers that they would have been pulled through the immaterial the moment there was a chance. Nothing too out of place.
His gaze stopped at the last item. The small picture depicted an Orb he knew to be only the container of the 'thing' inside.
Many things down here remained because destroying them would have been far too dangerous or even impossible. Even in an age when the Emperor still walked among them.
Then there were the ones that were far too useful to destroy even if they originated in the accursed past of humanity, the Dark Age of Technology.
This thing was one of the few such artifacts that the Emperor himself forbade the destruction of.
The Lockwarden read through the description even if he already knew it by heart.
It would barely be a threat to anything other than a feudal world if it were let loose by itself, a mindless mass of flesh that was pushed by an endless hunger. It was recorded to have absorbed the entire ecosystem of a planet once.
Its use didn't come from its destructive capability or even its use as a weapon. This was a tool.
In the right hands, it could create monsters more dangerous than any other.
He tapped his finger to the side of the data slate, his metal-clad fingers clinking on the similarly metallic tablet.
How did this psychically inert, soulless artifact disappear from its Cell, now that was a question he was quite eager to find an answer to.
He set his data slate down and stood.
He had to gather his shield-host.
There were monsters to hunt.
999.M41 FEW DAYS AFTER THE FALL OF CADIA || FOLLAX IV; SEGMENTUM ULTIMA
My narcissism warred with my pragmatism as I considered growing hair out all over my body like fur to make up for my missing clothes.
A tough decision but in the end another cold breeze made a strong case on the side of pragmatism.
Only until I find some salvageable clothes here, I swore as I suddenly resembled a primate and not the beauty I was moments ago. In my perfectly objective opinion of course.
The light I noticed before wasn't flickering like the cold led lights below, it was steady if a bit darker in shade. More similar to reflected sunlight.
The hundreds of distracting thoughts that have plagued me for the last hours blessedly left me alone as I religiously followed the light. Who knew half a day spent under flickering artificial lights would make seeing sunlight again so liberating?
The hallway I ended up in was a bit different than the sterile concrete one down below, the floor had tiles, the walls had some decorative paint and the ceiling had more than a hanging lightbulb every fifty meters. Not that the lighting worked so I guess those bulbs were just built differently.
The source of the light turned out to be an open doorway out of the building, it lead to a balcony of sorts.
I speedily exited the building and took in the sight before me.
I was very high up.
I didn't think I was overly afraid of heights before but as I looked down into the dark depths between this building and the next I found myself instinctually sinking my fingers into the wall, desperate to hold onto something.
The buildings were made of the same dark and metallic concrete as this one. The very definition of a dystopia.
Soviet architects would have a hard-on for this sight, even if they couldn't design a building this ugly and oppressive.
I was probably somewhere near the top of this building as I was overlooking most of the other buildings in this direction, they were steadily getting smaller and smaller the further they were from me.
My inner sci-fi nerd was giddy at looking at such a dystopian city. Well, it wasn't very inner, I loved sci-fi and science.
Not that I was too good at the latter but I kept up to date with recent discoveries and such. The first picture of a black hole, discovering new subatomic particles and new astrophysical theories was my passion. Even if I didn't understand the underlying calculations and theories that resulted in them I loved the future they painted.
This city resembled an arcology. Well not quite.
Arcologies were perfectly planned out megastructures while the creation of this city didn't seem to involve too much planning. Just many buildings with the bare minimum of structural integrity to hold, thrown together, and expanded whenever needed.
This was more like what would happen to a city when they just continued to expand it. Upwards and outwards to the limit.
Like a Hive.
A Hive City
Now I needed to consider my next steps, so for that what did I know about my current situation?
I was in a dystopian hive city on a planet that might even not be Earth. I considered the dark hue of the sunlight cascading through the thick smog above the city and changed that to 'probably not earth'.
I was some kind of shape-shifting alien now that could copy the bodies of things I 'ate'. This also meant that I could regenerate, well recreate anything that was destroyed based on the template I had with the energy I got from absorbing biomass.
The city was dead silent. Not a single hovercar or whatever people would use to get around in the future. Not a single living being ever since I got here.
I could go towards the centre of the city, the building got increasingly taller that way or I could aim to get out of the city. That wasn't too interesting though, the muddy, dark earth in the distance seemed dead as it could get.
The gigantic broken pipes I saw even from here probably weren't too good for the flora.
What did I want? No that didn't matter as much as what I needed. To survive.
My current energy storage would keep me going for a long time, who knew human corpses were so nutritious?
I grimaced at the thought, was I always like this or was this something that came with being an eldritch alien?
No. No matter how weird I was I don't think I would have even considered eating rotting human corpses for sustenance outside of fiction.
Weirdly enough I wasn't too disturbed by the revelation. If I broke down down there or got scared of even using my abilities I would never have even managed to get here. Breathe less shitty air and feel the light of a sun on my skin.
Speaking of the sunlight, it was constantly trying to give me skin cancer. Thankfully reabsorbing cancerous cells into biomass the moment they were made was quite easy, still it didn't make up for the lost energy I needed to heal the destroyed cells.
While my transmutation of biomatter to energy might be close to perfect the same couldn't be said about the cancerous cell division and its use of my nutrients. It was a negligible loss, maybe lessening my current 5 years of life by a day or two at most but it was annoying.
There was also the matter of extending that five years by finding more biomass to eat.
I wouldn't die if I ran out of energy, my instincts told me that, I would enter a sort of hibernation. A dreamless sleep until something deigned to wander too close to my sleeping form and get turned into breakfast.
I didn't want to get myself into such a vulnerable state so finding food was a must.
Considering the city is dead there must have been other rituals like the one down there all around the place. The rooms and hallways were dusty but it wasn't like it has been uncleaned for decades. Maybe a month or two at most.
Why didn't anyone come here to investigate?
Back on earth if a city went entirely dark like this people would know the next day at the latest. Governments even sooner, so why wasn't there any futuristic robocop here to investigate?
The only reason I could come up with was that whoever made the rituals killed every single person on the planet, or there is a blockade around the planet. FTL travel was unrealistic even by sci-fi standards so intergalactic communication might be the same.
If this planet was dead and no one sent distress signals it could be centuries before anyone stumbled across it and discovered it had been fucked up by cultists.
I would starve myself into hibernation by then so let's hope they managed to get a distress signal out.
I'm still just going off of conjectures and assumptions though. Assumptions that used sci-fi books as their foundation so not the most solid.
For now, I want to see what's in the other direction. From here I can only see this small slice of the city, maybe I could find something promising from higher up.
I glance up at the towering building, it extends hundreds of meters upwards towards the sky but I can see the top from here, while I can't see the bottom of it. The wind might be a problem though, I note as I feel it whip my shoulder-length hair around.
My disturbing fur protects me from most of the cold but this high up with no other building blocking it in this direction it might throw me off even with my now stronger muscles.
I can either find a way further up inside the building or try to climb up while in my tentacle-y form. I have no idea at the moment how long I could bear being in that form, the nausea and dissonance might overwhelm me before I reach the top.
I guess inside it is.
I sighed in satisfaction as I finally managed to put on the clothes I'd found. No more fur for me.
I was close to the top of this tower now, with one or two more floors to go at most and the interior has gotten rather luxurious up here compared to the lower levels.
A hundred floors down even windows started to become a thing as did laminated floors and furniture. Organic sunlight streamed into the room I was in and I turned to examine myself in a vanity mirror standing nearby.
The clothes fit me well, though they would be a bit out there back home. A leathery body glove going from my ankles up to the base of my neck was the most prominent, thankfully I found some fitting underwear to put on under it.
Not that I felt like it would chafe my skin, it only looked leathery but was elastic and breathy as if I was wearing yoga pants and a shirt.
Above it, I wore a tactical belt I found on a lower level and a long red coat that went well with the black body glove under it. I could have worn normal pants and shirts, I've found a bunch of those too but looking into the mirror I knew I made the right decision.
I was pretty back on earth, as a human if I say so myself. I went to the gym so I was fit, if a bit lanky and lacking in some key areas but I always told myself that my cute face made up for it.
Maybe my narcissism wasn't that much of a new thing. I could see the traces of my old face staring back at me with those forest green eyes my granny so praised framed by my bleached white hair.
My once cute face could only be called beautiful now, angular chin, high cheekbones, a small nose and a small mouth with pouty lips. It was a work of art that I spent an embarrassing amount of time on but now I could pat myself on the back for a job well done.
It was like doing makeup just a bit deeper. Which girl wouldn't change a few things about herself if they got the chance? Well, I did just get it so bite me.
My body wasn't left behind and my choice of clothing made that clear. My lanky frame was nowhere to be found and now the girl in the mirror had the body of an amazonian goddess.
I smirked and blushed promptly after my mirror image replicated it, and I could already tell I would get addicted to this. My body was like clay to me now, free to shape and form however I liked it like a sculpture. I could make it gorgeous like I just did but this was hardly the limit. If I wanted I could be a bodybuilder in the next moment, an aged gentleman or even something so far from a human that anyone that saw me would die from a heart attack.
I wasn't averse to the idea of taking on an alien form if need be but the dissonance that I suspected came from my human soul made more than a temporary change impossible.
I don't know when I'd get used to it or if that was even possible. Souls are supposed to be immutable stuff I think?
With a last glance at the mirror, I left the suite with a satisfied grin. The rest of my collected stuff hung over my shoulder in a sack with the satchels and slots in my tactical belt also putting weight on my hips from their contents.
I found a bunch of discarded stuff most of which I had no idea what it was for. Electrical gadgets, tablet-looking thingies and a load of technical tools.
While most of the levels resembled something like a factory from the industrial revolution the last bunch looked much more like modern offices and living quarters. I dare say the last room I was in even reached the levels of a 4-star hotel.
I pocketed anything I thought might be useful for my continued survival and most often than not convenience. Knives, extra clothes and any self-care stuff I found.
I even managed to loot a toothbrush and toothpaste not that I needed those anymore but who knew if I would need them.
My journey up here from the balcony was annoying and strenuous, whoever built this place didn't bother giving an easy way to travel vertically through the tower.
I switched between air vents, stairs and making holes through the ceiling in frustration to make it up here and now only a handful of floors stood between me and my arbitrary goal of reaching the top of this godforsaken skyscraper.
I found a staircase leading upwards after only 10 minutes of wandering around the intricately painted hallways. It wasn't even locked behind a door so I didn't have to exercise my well-practiced lock-picking skills.
Many doors fell victim to those on the floors below my feet, now sporting broken hinges or broken apart locks. I could play around with opening them with my tendrils but that got old after the fifth closed door and using my newfound strength proved to be a much swifter solution.
For once the damned architect decided to be practical and put the staircase leading to the next floor just above the previous one. I still held grievances for the horrendous planning of the lower floors so I'd still rip him a new one if I ever met him but maybe for this, I'd do it gently.
They say third time's the charm and it seemed like it was true once again. The third staircase was nowhere to be found and I'd need to search for my way up the next floor again.
When I stuck my head out a nearby window I found myself grinning. This was the last floor before the top it seemed.
Now I'd just need to do a bit of climbing and I'd have a panoramic view of this beauty of a city
I took an unnecessarily deep breath and then twisted myself through the small window, making sure to latch onto the wall deeply and firmly with my tendrils.
I flattened myself onto the surface of the wall and began what would hopefully be my final climb.
The wind was overwhelming up here, sometimes managing to get between my body and the wall causing me to nearly lose my grip and fall. Thankfully I managed to hold on each time and after an arduous fifteen minutes, I crouched on the top of the building in a semi-human form.
I still had a bunch of tendrils extending from my hands and feet to secure me to the building as I finally took a look around.
This city was massive.
I could probably only see maybe a third or fourth of it but it extended far into the distance on either side of me while at my back was the previous sight of the dead wastes at the edge of the city.
I was looking towards the centre of the city. Some taller spires were dotting the cityscape but most buildings increased incrementally with the tallest being the one at the very centre, reaching high into the atmosphere and its top being hidden behind a cloud of smog.
I was in one of the smaller spires poking through the canopy of this artificial forest, giving me a better view.
I was maybe one-tenth of the way between the city edge and the central spiral.
The city was ugly as hell by the way. The dark exterior of the haphazard buildings not giving it much architectural beauty, nor did I think there was any city planning involved in it. It looked like people just built atop the previous layer of buildings while making the bare minimum of reinforcements so it wouldn't collapse under the extra weight.
It spoke volumes about the sort of people that would build it and the society it would cultivate.
The central spiral was probably the main governmental building here, or maybe a palace for the sovereign if people here had some sort of neo-aristocracy. That should probably be my destination if I wanted to find out more about this place and whether I could survive here, or I'd need to find a way to escape. Maybe there were space whales like in Marvel in this place, if I ate one of those couldn't I just leisurely wander around space while eating radiation?
I glanced back at the dark wastes extending towards the horizon behind me, not a single sign of life out there, nor anything except for the large pipes carrying god knows what into this city.
I only found any corpses in that one room far down from the city's skyline but searching through the lower floors of these buildings for similar places would be such a pain. I wasn't even sure whether I could find anything before I ran out of juice.
By my count, I could keep going at my current energy consumption for about five years, less if I overexert myself or if I need to spend energy on healing myself or stuff like that.
Soon I might need to test out my self-healing capacities if I decided to go for that obnoxious building at the centre, and let's be honest if it's a decision between checking out a potential futuristic palace or a dystopian slum the choice is much more self-explanatory.
If I'm running low I can still choose to search for more food. Oh wait, corpses would decompose by then. Fuck.
I wanted to check out the better parts of this city though, I might regret it later but fuck searching for corpses in the underbelly of this shithole. Yeah.
I already have an idea for quickly travelling between the rooftops of these buildings, if jumping and hoping for the best can be called that. My instincts told me that unless my physical body got obliterated it could be healed back up, even if the only thing remaining was a splatter of gore on the next building.
Experiencing that didn't sound too appealing but it was good to know that it wouldn't be my end.
What could even kill me now?
An explosive with a high enough yield could probably obliterate me enough but there would still be parts of me left to heal from no? My instincts were much less clear on the bare minimum needed for recovery.
A splatter was fine because that was still organic but if I got myself carbonized then I was fucked?
Let's stay away from fire and explosives then. Also acid and stuff that would melt me down.
I focused on the closest building to the spire, its rooftop was maybe 20 meters down and 30 meters away from this one. Humans can't jump that far, I think the longest jump was somewhere around 8 meters with a running start.
Luckily I wasn't much of a human even if I was masquerading as one.
Surprisingly the thought of not being human anymore didn't make me feel the existential dread I assumed people should feel in this situation.
I shook my head, dumb thoughts, I'm thinking far too damned much but what else can I do when alone in a ghost city. I might go crazy here, well crazier. Sane people don't feel relief and joy at becoming a tentacle monster.
Sane people don't jump off rooftops either.
Now for how to reach the other side. My eldritch form wasn't too good for combat as its strength paled in comparison to even my human one, it wasn't built for fighting.
Its purpose was to assimilate and analyze organic matter but it was also nearly weightless, could I turn myself into a kite or something similar? The winds up here would make it annoying but maybe it could work.
I crawled over to the side of the building, still securing my body to the rooftop with my tendrils and glanced down into the gaping depth between the buildings. Damn, couldn't these people build bridges or something? Something to connect two buildings to secure them?
Not that I was an architect, maybe connecting them would be problematic but come on. I liked arcologies much more than haphazard hive cities in my sci-fi settings.
I readied myself, breathing in deeply then I let it out through my nose.
The muscles in my legs tightened like a coiled spring and I flooded them with energy, reinforcing them and pushing them to the limit. The muscles expanded, the muscles contracted and the energy fuelled them beyond what my human heart could provide.
I must have looked quite horrifying, the upper body of a girl and the legs of a giant on steroids.
My body glove proved its worth as it didn't rip or tear but expanded along with my muscles, sticking to me like a second skin.
I let my coiled muscles release and shot off the roof like a bullet, well I felt like a bullet, with the wind whipping my hair around and trying to rip my head off at this speed.
I released a bunch of tendrils out of my body to make up for my compromised eyesight.
It proved to be a good decision as I realised I was already closing in on my targeted building, I wasn't going to make it.
I was steadily losing my momentum as the initial acceleration bled out of me when I was only fifteen meters away from my starting point, only five more meters to go but I could already see myself plummeting like a rock before reaching it.
My previous kite idea didn't even come to my mind as I twisted my form into a white blob in a panic and shot out tendrils towards the building.
The first few were a miss, they only scraped against the wall, ripping out chunks but failed to grip onto it.
The third was close but I lost my grip on the wall when I tried to pull myself in.
By the time the fourth and fifth reached the wall I reached the apex of my jump, soon I would start falling but I managed to calm myself and the tendrils carefully carved out only enough of the wall to gain a steady grip on it.
I would have sighed in relief if I had either lungs or a mouth. Thankfully I didn't have those and neither did I have nerves at the moment which came in especially handy when I got splattered on the wall.
My tendrils still held and I didn't feel any pain but the sensation of going from a spherical form to wall paint wasn't too good. No part of my body got snapped off thankfully, so I didn't even lose any energy from this accident.
The next jump would be better, I didn't know how but I could perfect this.
I converted most of my splattered body back into energy and pulled the rest up with the two tendrils gripping the wall for dear life. Next, I proceeded to crawl up the wall like an octopus with an additional six tendrils to make sure I didn't fall.
I knew I wouldn't die even if I fell to the dark depths but it would be an enormous pain to make it back up here.
Once I made my way onto the rooftop I reformed my human body and sat down, panting hard.
It hit me then, while my clothes were still on me as I held onto them inside my body when I transformed I forgot about my bag.
I gloomily glanced towards the edge, towards the darkness that ate my loot.
Sighing again I laid down on the roof, this one had raised edges so while like this the winds weren't that bad and it wasn't a protruding spire like the previous one so the wind currents got broken on nearby buildings too.
I could have just launched my tendrils over to the next roof and pulled myself along. I knew that but that wasn't cool, a part of me wanted the adrenalin and thrill of jumping off the rooftop but the first one vanished from my body as soon as I transformed.
Turns out eldritch shapeshifters don't need adrenalin and similar stuff to function, nor any other chemical or hormone. That form is cold, my thinking grows cold and calculated too while I'm in it.
It helped now as it managed to calm me down enough to latch onto the wall but it was somewhat concerning, I thought it wouldn't change me too much as I could also think freely while I was only a soul, why would being in a body now influence me?
I stared up at the dark grey sky which for a moment gave was for a glance at the stars hidden behind the constant smog.
Unfamiliar stars, not that I was much of an astronomer but the distant yellowish moon halfway peeking out from the smog curtain was unmistakably different from Earth's moon.
I closed my eyes and sighed once more.
Different world, different me.
999.M41 A FEW DAYS AFTER THE FALL OF CADIA || FOLLAX IV; SEGMENTUM ULTIMA; IMPERIUM NIHILIS
Legs coiled like a spring again.
Flood them with energy.
Release.
Transform, now into a form resembling a kite.
Reach out with four tendrils.
Grab onto the wall.
Pull myself up quickly.
Reform my human body.
I did that for what felt like the thousandth time by now and my enthusiasm was rapidly dwindling.
The motion was near flawless due to the repetition but I was still only a third of the way to the central spire and it's growing increasingly boring with each near-identical rooftop I land on. I need something else for a bit, something to stimulate my mind.
Colours damn it, everything is grey or black up here.
Let's explore this building for a bit, it seemed a bit different, maybe more well-built or solid from the looks of it. The brutalist architectural style still shone through as it looked like a large grey brick but it was solid and its walls mostly smooth.
The roof was conveniently collapsed so I didn't even need to search for a window or a vent to get in.
On closer inspection the 'collapse' might have been intentional, considering the scorch marks that were nearly invisible from further away on the dark grey concrete.
I walked over and crouched down, ran my fingers over the scorch mark and thought.
Well, tried to but I wasn't some kind of detective so the most I could gather from the marks was that the thing wasn't melted through but only blown through. The heat of the explosion only scorched the upper layer of the rocky material.
I shrugged my shoulders and jumped into the hole, with the dim sunlight that got through the smog cloud lighting my way.
I landed with my legs bent and my knees croaking a bit under the exertion but I managed to land from five meters up without much of an injury.
Looking around I noted that most of the room was beyond fucked, whatever collapsed the ceiling was followed by another of its kind that exploded in this room. With a bit of scraping I managed to dig under the scorch on the wall to reveal a grey, almost marble-like material.
Fancy stuff, probably.
The rest of the room was barely recoverable. The charred remains of a wooden desk and maybe a bookshelf? It was hard to tell but it looked like one.
On the wall was the frame of a painting, yeah only the frame. Whatever painting once was there, now only half molten wall remains in its place. It must have offended whoever came here.
Wasn't blowing the room up enough? Couldn't they just blow the whole building up then?
Maybe they wanted the bodies, for a Ritual you know? Like the one I found?
Eh, still soo impractical. Whatever.
Something other than wood is among the remains of the desk so I carefully dig it out, revealing a ... typewriter? It's a bit molten ad battered but it's a typewriter for sure.
I throw it back on the ground.
I'm looking through all the rules when I spot something shiny and gold peaking out beneath a fallen eh, I have no idea what it is. I push the somehow unburned cloth-like material off to reveal a small sculpture.
Looks a bit battered and similarly molten but the shape is still recognizable, a two-headed golden eagle.
I stare at it a bit but shake my head. Eagles have long been incorporated into crests and flags, along with dragons and other animals. The Romans used a golden eagle in a similar pose on their Aquilas, minus the second head.
Still, I couldn't dismiss the stupid idea that sprung into my mind upon seeing the thing so similar to the Imperial Aquila from Warhammer but that was dumb.
It was one thing to travel forward in time which was scientifically possible, it was still comprehendible if I was in a parallel universe as that was a thing that was theoretically possible. It was another thing entirely for that other universe to be a fictional universe thought up by humans on my Earth for a tabletop game. It wasn't totally, entirely impossible as there are supposedly infinite universes so there ought to be one like the Warhammer universe out there but the chance of ending up in it randomly would be less than astronomical.
I didn't end up here randomly though, something pulled my soul here quite literally. Which by itself is something outside of anything even theoretically possible, by that I mean souls.
The human consciousness is the ever-changing connection between the neurons and the chemicals affecting them, humans were still far from understanding its intricacies back on Earth but we 'knew' that souls weren't a thing. Well scientifically anyway, a thing of which existence can't be proven nor disproven is not something science bothers with.
I put the little eagle back on the ground carefully like the fictional emperor of humanity would smite me if I was disrespectful to it and backed away.
More exploration will more likely than not disprove my stupid hypothesis.
There wasn't much else of note in the room so it was time to go, there was still much more to explore in this building. Hopefully, they are more intact than this room.
The door was lying next to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway in many smaller fragments, its hinges still attached to the doorframe. Someone didn't have the patience to open it it seemed.
The scorching was much less out here but some of the walls and floor were still blackened by it, flamethrowers maybe?
The next few rooms proved to be much more boring than the first, kitchen, lounge, bedroom and a few other similar ones.
I dared not hope for something interesting when I peeked through the tenth doorframe, its door was in a similar state as most of the others, but I was positively surprised as it turned out to be a small library, sort of.
My first thought was joy quickly followed by confusion. I assumed I was in the future, so, like, why the hell did this small library have only what looked like scrolls of papyrus in them?
Even in dystopian cyberpunk settings, people used futuristic tech, computers and memory banks not paper. What the hell?
No, let's focus on the positives. I could get new information out of this, even if the language might make it a pain in the ass. I still couldn't quite accept that this mish-mash of earth language was the real language now but we will see.
I plopped down on a blessedly intact couch and pulled out a handful of scrolls from their places on the nearest shelf.
Reading proved much more of a problem than I first thought as most of the scrolls were not written in the one I assumed to be the common language but a bastardization of Latin. My dumb brain was telling me to call it High Gothic but I refuse, not until I have conclusive evidence.
I didn't want that to be true, suddenly I would go from an apex predator that I would be on Earth with my current powers to a considerably sized ant. I didn't like that, at all.
I did know the utmost basics of Latin, well Ecclesiastical Latin but it had as much in common with this as did Roman Latin I assumed. Mostly only the words sounded like Latin but the grammar seemed very similar to English, someone was very damned lazy here. Did they just want cool-sounding words like in Harry Potter?
The scroll I was reading was a yearly report on production, in this sector of the city. I could understand the date too, god damn it. 985.M41, IF this was from what I won't name would mean it's the 985th year of the 41st millennium.
The next scroll was the same thing, but with 986.M41 as the date.
I threw it behind me and greedily grabbed at the next ones, only looking for the dates one after the other, thankfully Arabic numbers were still the ones used. Would have been even more of a pain if they switched to something else.
988.M41
993.M41
...
998.M41
A sinking feeling settled into the pit of my stomach, that was the last scroll. That would mean the current year would be the next, 999.M41. Even if I wasn't much of a Warhammer fangirl I liked the setting so I've read a handful of the books and watched a bunch of lore videos while eating lunch. You always have to have something to watch while eating, that's just common sense.
So from all that I knew that year, the year when the 13th Black Crusade has torn a new asshole to the Galaxy which the Imperium called the Cicatrix Maledictum or the Great Rift for less nerdy people.
I ripped the dumb scroll apart.
I was breathing heavily as my mind spun in circles, trying to come up with answers but most of myself was denying it still. This could be some sort of well-made recreation of a Warhammer Fan, yeah, totally believable. Maybe humanity just started using the same date system as the Imperium, that was much more likely.
I started feeling light-headed, my mind numbed and my breathing quickened even more in dreadful panic.
My vision blurred and started darkening.
A small part of my mind realized I was hyperventilating from the panic but it didn't matter anymore as I fainted soon after.
As soon as my human mind slipped into unconsciousness I could think again, with no emotion clouding my mind for a single moment of utmost clarity before energy surged through my body to revitalize it and I was fully awake again.
Even though the dread was still there I was much calmer now.
All this didn't mean anything yet, it was still possible for it to be a coincidence but even if it wasn't then so what?
Even if I wasn't an apex predator in a galaxy as dark as the Milky Way in Warhammer I was still a predator and not the prey.
I had to make sure not to be restricted by my thinking it was but make sure to be prepared if it was.
That wasn't much of a stretch, even if I was in that universe I can't know of all the threats that exist just from reading a few books about it. I'd know what were some of the biggest threats but even then a random eldritch abomination could crawl out of the ghoul stars that have never been seen before and eat my ass.
I frowned at the thought, I was always of the mind that aliens didn't exist unless proven otherwise but here I'd have to assume that they do and want to kill me. It was only natural to be cautious and make sure I'd have the best chances of survival.
For now, I need to know more.
I wouldn't entirely believe I was in the grimdark future until I saw a damned Space Marine in smurf blue paint.
The central spire which would be the planetary governor's palace if this was an Imperial Hive world just became a much more important goal. There had to be much more important documents and clues there, not to speak of the fuck loads of Imperial iconography that is a must in one such palace.
Still, there could be something interesting here too.
I was torn between exploring a bit more and dashing for the central spire right this moment, but after taking a moment to reconsider I realised how dumb that was. I had five years to explore this place and travelling a third of the way over there only took a few days, I had more than enough time to do both.
Let's go with five floors down on this building and I'm getting out after that if there isn't anything too interesting.
I nodded to myself, yeah, plans, I needed to have those.
I've been much too whimsical so far, maybe a bit nihilistic too, neglecting to gather all the energy I could before the hypothetical corpses rotted away. I didn't quite realize that I was prioritizing excitement above not starving to death in five years.
Not that it was much too different now that I knew it was like that. I still loathed the idea of wandering through dark, mouldy and decrepit tunnels in the lowest levels of this city searching for rotting corpses. I'd have time after I reached the central spire.
I nodded to myself. Five years was a long time, nearly a fourth of my previous life. It would be more than enough, there had to be other organic life on this planet too, I don't believe they managed to eradicate insects and rodents. Hive cities in the Imperium were crawling with mutated rats and ugly stuff like that.
I looked around the small library and decided to read only stuff that had interesting titles, even that would take a long ass time as there were five bookcases here.
I quickly dismissed the first two as those were the same yearly reports going back to CENTURIES, both boring and uninformative. I had no idea what they were making but the rest were quite easy to understand as they contained disturbingly familiar graphs and tables.
I guess those were eternal.
The third and fourth were similar reports, boring and repetitive but with stuff transportation, now going back only four decades. They really liked keeping records here.
The fifth was somewhat more interesting. I might have cried a little when I managed to read the words 'history' and 'imperium' on it. Something like 'historico imperium' really, I'm not a language genius just the people using it aren't very creative.
From what I'd managed to glean from it after about half an hour of repeated reading it wrote about this dude called 'The Emperor' who did a thing called 'The Great Crusade' and fucked up a bunch of evil aliens while helping humanity flourish. A very interesting story with so much embellishment that I was afraid I might drown in it.
Yep, never heard of anything like that from anywhere else before. Most certainly.
Next~
'Something something Saint Celestine', might be fun but Skip, I can already feel the religious bullshittery even without opening it.
The next few I opened turned out to be guides and stuff like that for operating tools and shit like that in the factories, recorded in entirely untucked scrolls. Boring, Skip.
There were loads of other religious stories and tales but I skipped most of those, the one I started reading out of curiosity turned out to be just as I thought it would. Take a simple children's tale about a knight in shining armour killing something big and bad and turn up the bullshit to eleven while changing the knight into an Adepta Sororitas member or a Space Marine.
What a coincidence that they made up those things just for stories, yeep. Next~
Next~
Next~
Next~
Next~
'The something history of Follax IV'
Now that doesn't sound like religious bullshit, this might be something interesting, maybe even informative but I dare not hope for that after hundreds of useless fairy tales