New Imperium Interlogue Ch. 01

Greetings all! While the wife and I work on some other things and projects, we'll be dropping a series of intros to other characters in the New Imperium universe. They're more of a framing device, and will be non-erotic, but will open up other stories within the greater setting. Once they're all complete, let us know in the comments which one you want fleshed out first!

"How small you are," An enormous shadow flickered in a realm of tangible madness and liquid rage. A silhouette tumbled past it, plucked from one place of corruption and destined to be deposited in another.

"I did not fail, masters!" The smaller shape called into the void.

Silent cacophony.

"The portal opened!"

"A portal, insect," the shadow in the madness roared. "Not a rift! Not a gaping wound in reality. Not even a speck compared to the great tear in the cosmos created by your...brothers."

The small shape hurtled onwards, wreathed in lightning made of fear and flames of liquid hate. "I will use it, master! I will bring a new world to your glory!"

"Yes, you will, little worm. You have blundered into a place I thought lost, through a crack too small for me to wriggle through," the shadow laughed, and the mortal's body was flensed into a million agonizing pieces before being remade by every scintillating blast of lightning and flame. "Swear to serve me, and you will bear my mark into this new and fertile place."

The dying mortal sorcerer considered for only a moment, but the pain was infinite. Which god of the unending glories of the Warp had seen fit to take notice? Tzeentch, lord of change and madness? Slannesh, ever-thirsting, and giver of unimaginable pain and pleasure? Khorne, master of war and rage and blood? Or Father Nurgle, paternalistic master of rot and decay? He'd served all four in their own ways in his previous existence, but now he was being forced to choose.

The agony was too great, even for his enhanced physique, and the opportunity too delicious to ignore, "Yes, master! Yes! I swear to serve you!"

The laughter grew richer and more powerful, blotting out every other sensation than the endless pain, "Go, insect. Gather for me an army. An Army! An unending legion of hate, and I will see fit to grant you ever more power."

The chaos sorcerer's stomach dropped as he was hurtled ever onwards in the not-place of the Warp, towards a scintillating gash set against a softly glowing pearlescent wall. It shrunk as he approached until he was sure he would be unable to reach it in time, but he strained towards it with a taloned hand. He punched through, splintering the semi-solid wall on each side of the gash, and he was through.

***

I, Rugaz Lar, cast from the Corpse-Emperor's so-called love, apprenticed under Chaos Lords various and sundry, scourge of Trigos IV, thrice-cursed foe of the Order of the Blessed Rose, woke as I hurtled towards a landscape of rolling green hills and sandy-colored rock.

Cold air whistled past my helmeted face and residual pain fired through my nerves. My senses, enhanced by Astartes gene engineering, endless surgical tinkering, and exposure to raw Warp power, quickly estimated how quickly I was falling and how long I had before smashing into the ground below. As I tumbled, I realized that my projected impact zone was not another rolling green field but an expanse of darkened pits and charred, half-collapsed structures.

I still clutched my ancient staff, carved from corrupted Aeldari wraithbone, and focused my psyker magicks through it. The warp was different here and tasted strange to my corrupted mind, but I had no time to consider that. As the peculiar, half-ruined camp loomed huge through the eye-slits in my helmet, I sent a rippling wave of pure force away from me and let it ricochet from the mud and back into my armored form. It was an imperfect solution and sent fresh pain shooting through me, but it checked my lethal speed enough to slop me into the mud with breathless instead of bone-crushing force.

The mud was cold, and the air stunk of death, filth, and rot, but my armor and enhanced senses detected no lethal toxins. There were toxins, certainly, and my mind tingled with a robust but strangely flavored sense of the Warp. This place was steeped in the Warp but not like any other world I'd ever visited. The toxins stunk of Father Nurgle's blessings, but they were faint and almost...diluted.

Had it been Nurgle that had spared me and cast me here? If so, where was the mark he'd promised? My armor, a gift from a Warp-Smith of the Iron Warriors for producing two score daemon engines, registered nothing other than minor trauma from the fall. The minor daemon bound within it, an animalistic Fury, hissed angrily in my mind at having been cast back into reality after a brief return to its true home.

Something hissed through the stench and clattered off of my power pack. I wheeled, all sense of curiosity gone and replaced by the cold rush of combat. Amber runes crowded my helmet's display, denoting distances and threat levels of the pathetic band of mortals approaching my impact site.

Their appearance only reinforced my assumption of Nurgle's involvement. Five half-rotted corpses looked down from the rim of the shallow crater. These were not the usual shambolic husks; no, well-made armor painted in deep purples and black covered their ragged frames, and each carried well-maintained weapons. One, with intently glowing yellow eyes, was reloading a large crossbow that had done nothing but rouse my anger.

I took a step up through the mud and kicked something loose. Unbothered by the plague-scum above me, I stopped to fish the offending object free. They were shouting at me in guttural and twisted voices, but they were of no real concern. A great ax slid free from the mud, with a long haft of ancient bone bleached pure white by the eons and wrapped in indecipherable black runes that twisted beneath my gaze. At one end of the head was a long, perfectly straight, tapered spike of the same impossibly hard bone, the tip blackened by whatever warp powers had been used in its forging. The other end was a stylized skull with the jaw opened impossibly wide to accommodate the razor-sharp blade made of some unknown black metal.

Was this my mark, my sign of favor?

Primitive black powder cracked in the cool air, and a lead ball flattened itself on my chest plate. Another of the corpses fired a crude rifle at me, though this projectile was rimmed with scintillating blue energy. It ricocheted away, but not before a fraction of its magicks wormed their way through my many psychic wards and thick armor to prick against my skin.

I gathered the unfamiliar and weakened psychic energies around me and forced them through my staff. Searing blue flame speared out and obliterated the corpse that had fired the surprisingly powerful projectile. To their credit, the others merely reloaded or readied their weapons even as smoldering gore and metal spattered their armor.

Another volley of bolts and bullets bounced away from my armor as I strode upwards. Thick smoke from their muskets half-shrouded the corpses, and my helmet seamlessly transferred modes to make them stand out in my vision as clearly as if illuminated by warp fire. One lunged forward with a heavy steel axe, still shouting guttural nonsense from a ruined throat.

I smashed him into the mud with my staff and felt bones snap beneath the blow. Another chopped at my knee-joint and drew sparks from the enchanted ceramite, and I decided to try out my new gift. The black-bladed ax sliced through my second assailant's midriff as if the steel mail were parchment, and the corpse's flesh gave far less resistance. Both halves flopped into the mud, and I smiled behind the snarling visage wrought onto my helmet.

The other two met similarly rapid and gratuitous ends, and I noted the brief flares of...something every time one died. They were brave without being mindless, attacking what they thought were weak points in my Astartes armor with a strength belied by their withered forms. I was not some mindless berserker or insane Tzeenthcian schemer, and I could acknowledge their bravery and discipline even as I cut them to pieces.

Once I gained the crater's rim, I could see that not all of the shabby structures in this place had been abandoned or destroyed. A bell rang in alarm where sentries peered down at me from a dilapidated wooden tower, and more purple-and-black soldiers trooped out of a large building fairly bristling with iron spikes and arcane devices fresh from a Warp-Smith's fever dream. With a chance to see it without hurtling towards it, I realized that this poisoned, muck-filled place had once been a sprawling camp of some kind. A prison camp, by the looks of the collapsed fences and burnt towers, but some conflict or calamity had reduced it all to ruin--all but the strange barracks and its company or so of feudal infantry.

Another musket cracked, and the impact twitched against my shoulder guard. I wheeled, snarling, only to see the bisected soldier perched in the mud, calmly glaring at me even as he smoothly reloaded the weapon. He seemed no worse for wear even after I'd halved his wretched mass.

The other primitives could wait.

I stomped back and lopped off both of his arms, but he just kept glaring up at me. Some kind of foul ichor oozed from his wounds, indicating he was, in some way, still living. Bemused and curious, I cast one of Nurgle's simpler spells to keep any more of his life from ebbing away. To my surprise, he barked something at me that nearly sounded like the black tongue spoken in Commoragh's gutters by the vilest and insane of the fallen Aeldari. Most curious indeed.

A horn sounded. Steel clanked as the other corpses advanced. I flourished the axe in one hand, the staff in the other. Which to use? I wanted dearly to feed more souls to my new patron, whoever it was, with my gift, but I also did not want to linger in this place. The gifts of my superior mind, for now, and the axe later.

The magic tasted different here, yes, but had I not just been cast, unshielded, through the very heart of the warp mere moments before? The enemy came in three columns, halberds and muskets at the ready, and their dark flags fluttered in the faint wind. A hundred pairs of glowing, malevolent eyes bored into me.

Tzeentch, the father of magic, still answered my calls. A great swathe of pinkish fire swept away from me, utterly consuming the central column. There were no screams, no cries of pain or frustration--just the pop and hiss of melting steel and the sizzle of boiling, rotten flesh.

But a wave of psychic pain washed through me. The warp was too weak here, and I'd pushed too hard. How could a world buried in the twisted depths of the warp, which my liege had opened to me, be so deficient?

The other columns spread out, fanning around towards my flanks and brandishing their primitive muskets. A volley cracked in the crisp air and musket balls spanged off ceramite and plasteel. Not just mere guns and powder, no: I saw the psykers within their ranks, weaving fire or liquid shadow between their fingers.

I've always found its use beneath me, but I decided it might be time to draw my bolt pistol. More shots rang out, but it did nothing to disturb my aim as I drew one of the nurglitch psykers into my sights. The round detonated in its moldering rib cage and sent burning scraps of flesh pattering off the others' armor. A sergeant and an annoyingly accurate musketeer went down the same way, but the others didn't falter.

Pain washed through me, and my armor's systems flashed angry red runes in my visor. I turned just in time to see, through dissipating scraps of roiling black sorcery, a fiery bolt streak over the mud. It smashed into my breastplate and knocked me back half a step.

My twin hearts surged with the thrill of battle and the shock of pain, and I snarled behind my similarly carved helmet. "It will not be rotten mongrels that lay me low."

My pistol coughed, and another psyker came apart like rotten fruit. The musketeers were trying to flank me, battering me with endless fire while the psykers chipped away at my weakened defenses. Wicked axes and halberds glowed faintly amidst the black powder smoke. Power weapons? In the hands of plague zombies? It wouldn't be the strangest thing I've seen in the nightmare of reality.

I lunged right, surprising the nearest corpses with the speed I could lend my vast and armored bulk. A musket fired, defacing a carved bloodthirster with a tiny scuff, and the axe snapped out to behead the offender. A sergeant lunged with his halberd, managing to nick the daemon-possessed ceramite protecting my knee, so I reversed the axe and drove the spike through his skull.

The yawning visage containing the axe blade stared back at me, and its eyes glittered with white embers of promised power. Interesting. How very interesting.

But that was a task for another time. I was amongst one of the columns now, protected from the psykers by foul musket smoke and the crush of their comrades. The axe flickered out, again and again, hacking bodies to ribbons, while I parried blows with my other vambrace and delivered hammer blows with my pistol.

None could stand against an adopted child of the Warp. A transhuman paragon of genetic perfection. Son of deserved treason, a masterwork of surgery and genetics, and true heir to a shattered galaxy. A walking demigod of hate and conquest.

I laughed and laughed and laughed, for none could stand against Rugaz Lar.

Their attack finally broke, but they maintained their order and sought to hurt me even then. Survivors bolted back towards the barracks and laboratory, thinking it would protect them. My powers may have been...fickle, but I'd tear the place down with my bare hands if I needed to.

I stomped out of the smoke, murder in my heart, and gazed upon my enemy. My zeal was tempered for a moment as I watched a rider on some flying, skeletal beast take off into the cloudless sky. More soldiers dragged wickedly spiked catapults into position, and a cavalry troop on skeletal horses formed up in front of the barracks. Reinforcements would clearly be on their way, and I had no idea what foul rot those devices held. At the very least, I could finish off the infantry before finding somewhere to ponder the strange state of the Warp.

A lone psyker held his ground between me and the fleeing corpses, his eyes gleaming with hate.

I gathered the energies in my mind, despite the pain I knew it would cause. No half-rotten worm would outdo my powers. I could recover later.

The air around his hands shimmered with blue-white energy, and frost spread away from his feet. Before I could hurl another spell, a churning bolt of ice lanced out and crashed into my breastplate. Alarm runes flashed and wailed, and tendrils of frost wormed into the joints of my armor.

I stomped forwards, ice cracking and flaking away from me. Fire -- pure, simple, fire -- collected in my gauntlets before I launched it towards him with a thought. All it did was smash against an ethereal, bluish barrier. Embers and burning scraps of magic splashed down around him, but he stood defiant.

Another bolt of ice crashed into me, then another. Pain stabbed inwards through the weaker parts of my armor, numbing my limbs and mind. My steps slowed with every blast.

I pushed past the pain in my temples, the aching strain in my withered soul, and gathered every scrap of magic I could find. It wasn't disciplined. It wasn't even formed. A churning, barely contained mass of pure Warp energy gathered between us, and blood trickled from my eyes as I unleashed it on my opponent.

His barrier held back the initial impact, but the warp clung to it like burning promethium. It finally collapsed, my magic seeking out his withered flesh and burning his pathetic mortal form. Gaudy robes and clammy skin alike blackened and crumbled before the inbound power of the warp.

But he did not fall.

Cold blue power built around his hands, even as his fingers were burned away, bone by yellowed bone. Ethereal and unreal clouds built above both of us, sparking with power and choked with frost. He was only a few paces away, and the rage building in my mind demanded the satisfaction of feeling his body implode beneath my grip.

Hailstones crashed down around us and into my armor like bolter shells. Ice stabbed into my skin, into my mind, and my armor threatened to seize up entirely. But he was so close. Just one more step.

I seized what was left of his body in a single massive gauntlet and squeezed. The magic in his hands and behind his eyes faded as bone and atrophied muscle turned to powder. I snarled and laughed, despite the confusion and pain he'd inflicted on me.

And yet, as his ribcage shattered, he smiled at me.

The magical storm faded in an instant, leaving my ears ringing. Distant shouts told me the other corpse-soldiers were still reforming and bringing their heavier weapons to bear. My armor whined and groaned at me, and the bound daemon hissed as it tried to rectify the worst of the damage.

Rugaz Lar is many things, but a fool is not one of them. My pride and fury commanded me to obliterate the remaining troops, but the father of magic whispered sense amongst the rage. I needed to understand this place before I could dominate it, and my wargear required proper maintenance and prayer after our painful journey through the warp. The corpses could keep this place: I would be back for it soon enough.

I turned and stomped away towards some distant wooded hills, but not before stooping down to pick up the still-glaring, limbless guard that had shown so much bravery. Once I could discern its speech or reach directly into its mind, it would serve me as a guide. Or, at the very least, a plaything.