"I am starting to feel like I am the only individual who retains some form of sanity."
"You get used to it when working here, Harkoth."
Ami looks at Harkoth with a smirk as she said, "You may be the only one here with sanity." She stared away as she went into thought for a few seconds before staring back at him. "What have you been up to?"
"Hello, Mathius. A round of ale please? I am paying," she said as she kept to herself from the woman in the tavern. She still got the chills running up her spine just with the woman being here.
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
"You get used to it when working here, Harkoth."
Ami Arpatia wrote:
She eased up with Lord Ubba's words. "You're right...She has to be a Slaanesh-looking cur. The Allfather is our enemy salvation," she said as she rested her hand on his as she smiled up at him. She did feel a lot safe when he is around her. She hope to one day to fight alongside him killing those degenerate Hive scum and those orks that needs to be obliterated from existence.
"That witch over there," she said to Donatos as she pointed to the woman with the icy blue eyes. "She has a eerily glow to her. She has to be either a Slaanesh cur or death, itself," she said to him with a stern look on her face as she kept beside Ubba for protection.
Donatos Aphael wrote:
He sipped from his goblet of wine before shooting a glare back over towards Ami and Ubba.
"Brother-Lieutenant Greystorm, Guardswoman Ami.....is there a problem?"
"Brother-Lieutenant Greystorm, Guardswoman Ami.....is there a problem?"
"She DOES stink of heresy...." he growled.
Donatos Aphael wrote:
He sipped from his goblet of wine before shooting a glare back over towards Ami and Ubba.
"Brother-Lieutenant Greystorm, Guardswoman Ami.....is there a problem?"
"Brother-Lieutenant Greystorm, Guardswoman Ami.....is there a problem?"
"Everything is fine, Brother-Captain"
She stood there close to Ubba as to let him know he made her feel safe. "We are fine, Donatos. She is just another passerby," she said as she agreed with Ubba about the woman being the stench of heresy. "She has to have the stench of heresy, Brother Ubba," she finally said to him as she got closer as she felt safer.
The_Diva wrote:
Ubba Greystorm wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
Her gaze kept on the woman's icy blue eyes as she felt inferior to her. She kept repeating the Emperor of Mankind as she kept herself from pulling her plasma pistol on the woman. She was indeed afraid, but anyone would be to a entity that could easily defile them and destroy them without remorse. For her, her Lord General was whom she looked up. A orphan now having meaning would not let anyone talk bad about Alaksandr, her Lord General. But this woman had a eerily glow to her that frightened Ami a lot.
She looked at Ixqueya, the silence that could be cut by a knife, her eyes still fixated on her. If she had known who she was, she would have simply sat down and kept quiet. "Why are you just staring at me?" Ami asked her as she by now was curious, her fear turning to pride for what she believed in. "If this is death, I don't fear it. Death will fear me." she said, her stern expression showed as her purple eyes glimmer slightly. She had a strong resolve. She will believe what she will even if it was some false deity. It was better then not believing in nothing. Perhaps she could resolve the difference between her and Ixgueya. "I am not here for trouble," she said after she sat down, her eyes still staring at her, her eyes following if need be.
She looked at Ixqueya, the silence that could be cut by a knife, her eyes still fixated on her. If she had known who she was, she would have simply sat down and kept quiet. "Why are you just staring at me?" Ami asked her as she by now was curious, her fear turning to pride for what she believed in. "If this is death, I don't fear it. Death will fear me." she said, her stern expression showed as her purple eyes glimmer slightly. She had a strong resolve. She will believe what she will even if it was some false deity. It was better then not believing in nothing. Perhaps she could resolve the difference between her and Ixgueya. "I am not here for trouble," she said after she sat down, her eyes still staring at her, her eyes following if need be.
He rested a massive hand on her shoulder "ignore her. Never forget you are an instrument of the might of the Allfather. She is a Slaaneshi-looking cur" the Son of Russ spoke in his thundering voice.
Providentially for you. I am at work. So ixqueya cant dismantle your oc verbally. I will have her remeber your ic disrespect and she will break your oc down when I have the time. Ooc is impacting my ic response [the time]. Once its settled, she wilk reply late if I have time during my lunch I will try and draft something then.
I have her status alive.))
Ixqueya Jorgenskull wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
Ixqueya Jorgenskull wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
"By the Lord General, how did you do that?" she asked the woman with the ledger. She had been astonished as to what happened to it and was curious for a answer.
Ixqueya’s regard settled upon Ami with the authority of permafrost. The cerulean of her eyes carried the pallor of glacial depths where light is remembered rather than permitted. A single brow inclined upward. It was as austere as a magistrate’s seal impressed into cold wax.
Her tongue, bifurcated and faintly lustrous, traced her mouth in a gesture less sensual than liturgical, as though she were sealing a vow against entropy. “The act was sequestration,” she said. “Not display.”
Silence followed. Dense. Instructive. The kind that accumulates beneath snowdrifts and headstones. “To open a gate to my province is to tithe oneself. Borders are devout. They demand marrow, focus, and the acceptance of aftermath.” Her chin lifted by a margin, granting the space a measured absolution.
“This required less. A permissive fold. Indexed. Anchored to flesh.” Her mouth curved, precise and unmerciful. Her gaze fixed Ami in place, unblinking, as though inscribing her name into a ledger of the living.
“The world anoints women as reliquaries without reverence. I chose to formalize the blasphemy.” A final pause. The words that followed were neither cruel nor kind. Merely final.
“Utility is doctrine. Excess is sin. We already bear enough burdens as women. And your general means nothing to me. He is, after all, a small man casting a small shadow. He inhabits a single mote cast adrift within a virtually infinite sea of motes that are subject to currents and eddies." She stated candidly.
She stood up with a stern look on her face after she heard what the woman said. "So meaning you took it...as a debt?" she said as she stood there with a stern look on her face still. Should I trust her? she thought to herself as she responded to the momentarily.
She stayed quiet for a while until the conversation was picked up once again as she thought what was said. "Seems extreme to send something that small to a different dimension," she said as she relaxes a little from what she heard. The process was still confusing to her, but perhaps further explanation will help her understand.
She was freaked out by how the woman stared at her compared to what she told her. That stare felt like the woman was doing something. Her voice wasn't there as though she couldn't speak any words, her purple eyes stared deeply in the other woman's eyes.
At that moment she wanted to put her hand on her plasma pistol, but it felt like she was frozen in place. This woman was no ordinary woman. Was she a degenerate or something else. She jerked her head to her Lord General before turning her gaze back at the other woman.
She finally got her voice as she said, "You mean we are better than men?" she asked out of curiosity. "And you are unnatural." She started uttering the chant of the Emperor of Mankind as she took her book to her chest as though to protect herself from the sinful woman.
She stood there not moving an inch, her body again seizing up as though fear was setting in. Why did I have to look at her? she asked herself in her mind, her eyes closed as she kept muttering the words of the Emperor of Mankind.
Ami rose with a rigidity mistaken for resolve, her suspicion coagulating into accusation. The notion of debt emerged from her mouth as if the universe itself were obligated to balance its ledgers according to her catechism. Ixqueya did not rise to meet it. She did not acknowledge it at all. Her stillness possessed the gravity of a sepulcher seal, a silence that rendered the soldier’s agitation performative. The reflex to sanctify ignorance by calling it theft.
The woman’s thoughts scuttled for vocabulary sturdy enough to cage the event. Extremity. Dimension. Unnatural. Each term was a talisman swung against incomprehension. She mistook Ixqueya’s gaze for action because indoctrination trains the faithful to believe that unfamiliarity is aggression. The stare remained fixed, glacial, ecclesiastical. It carried the authority of winter when it first hardens the ground and teaches caravans the difference between intent and permission.
Her hand drifted toward her weapon and stalled. Not restrained. Invalidated. In that moment she discovered the obscene fragility of doctrine when confronted with a reality that does not negotiate. The body does not answer to scripture when the cosmos declines to listen. Panic curdled into reverence. Reverence ossified into paralysis. She reached for the only refuge her empire had ever given her. A chant rehearsed to ward off the intolerable recognition that faith is often nothing more than a story told loudly enough to drown out doubt.
The Emperor she invoked was not divine. He was a reliquary of fear enthroned in metallurgy and myth. A sovereign embalmed by necessity and worshipped because his followers could not endure a universe without a paternal silhouette. That empire mistook preservation for transcendence, consumption for purity, and extermination for order. It fed its god with bodies and called the transaction salvation. This was not holiness. It was necropolitical inertia. A civilization too frightened to admit mortality, elevating a corpse into a sun and wondering why the light required so much blood.
Ixqueya observed without intervention. Argument would have been indulgence. The soldier’s muttering continued, a pilgrim’s litany spoken into a blizzard that did not answer. In time, the general she revered, the emperor she clutched, the insignia she kissed, would all submit to the same audit as every dominion that confuses supremacy with eternity. Winter claims without malice. Death does not debate. Faiths that mistake domination for divinity are always punctual to their own extinction. The only variable is how long it takes them to realize the hymn has ended.
Ixqueya had killed her lot before, effortlessly. Their corpses were already in her army. Their secrets laid bare. A pity, to have fallen so far and to have learned nothing at all. That was the travesty of her verse. A parody of what could have been. They were not strong, they were weak. They just barked loudly like a small inbred mongrel. How easily she could choke such bravado from them. Providentially for the lot, there was no reason to. For their fate had been sealed the moment they were born. They would die and join her realm. As all their fallen brothers have.
Irony.
For one that held so desperately to dominion over death and so assured of her power, it became a necessity to cast these things into ignonimity for beholding had become intolerable, no... overwhelming, the giantess presumed her clatter and self-assurance had some inkling of influence or supremacy over the souls but Aleksandr knew what perturbed her was precisely this, she was disregarded, unheard, unaccounted for, a flake of snow speaking of inevitabilities and divining impossible futures before what was evident, a roaring bright flame. The faith militant in contrast stood in the silence she claimed to represent, the indifference she attempted to portray, the certainty she claimed to represent... the underlying notions, the swirling thoughts, the insecurity rooted in all that bravado.
A cornered beast that snaps, the feigned bravado that signals desperation, echoes of self-preserving paranoia turned jest and opposition, it wasnt a matter of what truths were, the simple matter was she was no different in her ignorance than they, no more willing to comprehend a truth beyond what was hers, what offered her power, the comfort of her own dominion, of what she could control, She could not comprehend benevolence. she believed in the universality of her harshness, she claimed others haughty yet in her own refused to yield, her frigidity a reaction, her icy demeanor an expression of longing, her critique laced with an envious bitterness... thence, there was irony, her ailment was self-inflicted, casting cold for that was all she knew. What disturbed her so was the contradiction of those around her and what they came to represent, how deeply offensive their presence and belief was to her gilded abeyance, her certain platitude... she was not spared the toll of her precious winter, she was isolated and it made her feel small... and Aleksandr knew, this is what she hated, not that her deathly winter was not certain but it did not provide her a sense of meaning, that despite everything, deep inside she beckoned for something more... that the cold exterior was a farce beckoning for warmth.
And of Faith.
The Emperor was not a caricature of Death, He was the defiance of it
Ubba, Donatos, Arpatia, Harkoth and Von Drakenfell... individually they seemed at odds, they seemed contrasting, distanced by impossible lengths between their homeworlds, before the nothingness of the void and a universe that only offered demise, destruction and consumption... eventual... certain... individually they differed in personality and in mannerism, entire cultures and systems apart with neither being able to comprehend the lifetime of the other... but to them this mattered little for they were unified by something grander... Hope made Manifest... Progression, Survival, Fortitude, and Discipline.... Faith... Faith
And perhaps there was some truth to the matter that in the grim darkness of this millenium, the Imperial creed suffered, detracted even from what the Emperor once taught but that fundamental message of hope, the defiance against the certainty of doom and darkness, the very idea that there was a power vested in every soul that urged them forward to rebel against such great horrors as were present in their realm... that singular idea... brought them here, this reverence was something she was yet to accomplish, what she offered was merely an afterthought, a mundane reality, an acknowledgement... death be done... but what would that Death mean ?
Aleksandr rose looking onto his compatriots, his eyes filled with fervor and hope, each one of them a warrior, a scholar and a scion of the Emperor in their own right.
" What we do defines us. Our deeds are like shadows and depending on whether we run into or from the sun, they either lie behind us or before us. Shall we lie down meekly as a lamb before the ravening wolf or shall we oppose such horrors as the galaxy will throw at us with proud contempt? Suffer neither fear nor doubt, for this is the arch-enemy. We are and we will continue to be and in our stead there be billions, our triumphs eclipse our tragedies, death only spurns for us what they thought it would extinguish. We are The Emperor's Own... What fear of death have we who know there is eternal veneration in the great and noble deeds? No bastion or mountain is too great, we serve the Emperor, we do not succumb to death, we conquer it in myriad ways.
We are One... and we will see The Emperor's Wrath delivered.
Ixqueya rose with an unhurried exactitude, as though elevation itself were a prerogative that required no justification. Her eyes did not flare. They clarified. Hoarfrost blue, pitilessly lucid. She regarded the assemblage of postures and borrowed sanctities before her with the affect of a magistrate reviewing a sentence already rendered.
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
When she saw Aleksandr finally take attention to the woman, her demeanor became softer as she had felt safe from this maniac of a woman who would only try to ruin them into oblivion. She would not yield to a heretic such as her. Her belief in the Emperor of Mankind, the Allfather, would protect her from such creatures as this one. This degenerate humanoid would be beneath her boot as she would point her plasma pistol down at her as she would make her plea for her very life. Indeed she wouldn't let the woman take a foothold over her or her comrades.
She watched him stand up with pride as her face made a grin. Fun was going to happen soon, and she would be here to witness it. She would even enjoy it extremely. His speech had empowered. It even sent chills up and down her spine. She felt for once she mattered to someone, and it was Aleksandr, Ubba, and Donatos. Her mind was racing as she stood there silently letting her Lord General speak for them. She would wait for the right moment to speak out those words. After she finally heard the final line, she shot her hand up as to salute him. "AD VICTORIAM! FOR VICTORY FOR US AND THE EMPEROR OF MANKIND!" she shouted with pride for them all, her purple eyes stared directly at the icy woman. "You might be death, but we DO NOT FEAR DEATH!" she exclaimed as she stared at her Lord General.
"What we do, Lord General, is for our Allfather! We will not back down. We will conquer these heathens!" she said in stride as she kept her hand up in salute before going into a military style in front of him. She had pride in the Imperium. Her new rank would show soon enough as she was ready to take the fight to any degenerate humanoid or ork that would dare try and defile their comrades.
She watched him stand up with pride as her face made a grin. Fun was going to happen soon, and she would be here to witness it. She would even enjoy it extremely. His speech had empowered. It even sent chills up and down her spine. She felt for once she mattered to someone, and it was Aleksandr, Ubba, and Donatos. Her mind was racing as she stood there silently letting her Lord General speak for them. She would wait for the right moment to speak out those words. After she finally heard the final line, she shot her hand up as to salute him. "AD VICTORIAM! FOR VICTORY FOR US AND THE EMPEROR OF MANKIND!" she shouted with pride for them all, her purple eyes stared directly at the icy woman. "You might be death, but we DO NOT FEAR DEATH!" she exclaimed as she stared at her Lord General.
"What we do, Lord General, is for our Allfather! We will not back down. We will conquer these heathens!" she said in stride as she kept her hand up in salute before going into a military style in front of him. She had pride in the Imperium. Her new rank would show soon enough as she was ready to take the fight to any degenerate humanoid or ork that would dare try and defile their comrades.
The_Diva wrote:
Ixqueya rose with an unhurried exactitude, as though elevation itself were a prerogative that required no justification. Her eyes did not flare. They clarified. Hoarfrost blue, pitilessly lucid. She regarded the assemblage of postures and borrowed sanctities before her with the affect of a magistrate reviewing a sentence already rendered.
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
" And yet in all your grandeur and your expulsion of our fragmented histories, what is available for the record and known to the lexographers and the scholars of whom possess this knowledge... did you aim to impress upon us with this cacophony of common knowledge, only one thing is made evident in such and such excalamations "
Aleksandr took pause, nodding to a guardsman
" That you have heard of us. We however, have not heard of you and refuse to acknowledge such carefully coated attempts at false hegemonies, do you think sorcerors have not made such utterances before nor chaos has spoken to us in such witty tongues... no... we know you as well, not in the form you present with, not in your syllables and origins... but what you are beyond the carapace of a giantess... a falsehood, a factor of ruin, another wisp of the immaterium given presumption of dominion upon false masteries and fledgling powers beyond the veil. We not only know you... We refuse your terms unless you yield to ours.
The guardsman returned handing Aleksandr a round device, with words engraved into it, he held it up for the Wych to behold, for it was a collar that held her very name.
" BY THE EMPEROR, KNEEL OR BE KNELT "
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ixqueya rose with an unhurried exactitude, as though elevation itself were a prerogative that required no justification. Her eyes did not flare. They clarified. Hoarfrost blue, pitilessly lucid. She regarded the assemblage of postures and borrowed sanctities before her with the affect of a magistrate reviewing a sentence already rendered.
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
“You call me heretic,” she said, each consonant honed to a cold, immaculate edge. “You do so because it is the only syllable your conditioning permits when comprehension fails.”
Her gaze settled on the devotional implements, the sanctimonious epithets, the hand that mimed protection. Her mouth resolved into a thin configuration of disdain, precise and joyless.
“You speak of the Emperor as though he were metaphysical statute. I have heard this liturgy in its earlier iterations. I have heard it at the moment of its collapse.” She let the ledger cant, candlelight skidding along its edge like a blade tested for balance. “I know your watchwords. I know your apothegms. Cadia stands. It stood until it did not. Only in death does duty end. A narcotic aphorism for those who require endless obligation to launder atrocity. The Emperor protects. A nursery charm for soldiers frightened by the silence between orders.”
Her cadence remained clinical. The cruelty lay in its restraint.
“I know Istvaan’s treachery. I know Prospero’s cinders. I know the Siege, the walls, the rationing of souls beneath the Throne’s pall. I know the Heresy not as parable but as recurrence. I know the Administratum’s calculus of expendables. I know the Ecclesiarchy’s commerce in suffering. I know the Inquisition’s habit of sanctifying paranoia. I know the Astra Militarum’s talent for becoming meat with a banner. I know the Astartes’ conversion of massacre into euphemism and its christening as compliance.”
She raised her eyes again, and the contempt sharpened into something corrosive.
“You wonder how I speak these names without having genuflected in your chapels or bled in your trenches.” A pause, exact as a scalpel’s hesitation. “Because your dead are not as obedient as you insist.”
Ixqueya tapped the ledger once. The sound was slight. It carried the finality of a nail seated.
“Your fallen do not come to me as plunder. They arrive by choice.” Her gaze hardened. “When the shouting ends and the bolter hymns fall silent, the lies evacuate first. What remains understands itself. They leave your slogans behind. They come to me to serve, not your throne, but the truth of what they have become.” A fractional incline of her head. “They are not servants. They are attestations. They are weight. They are knowledge. They are the chapters of your history you failed to redact.”
Her presence cooled further, the frigid femininity of it turning predatory rather than alluring. Appraising. Exacting.
“Do not mistake me for your pageant of death,” she continued. “I am not your counterfeit reaper, not a costume donned to frighten children into obedience. I am the remainder. I am what waits when theater collapses.” Her eyes did not waver. “Reality does not announce itself with hymns.”
She dismissed the words they had flung like talismans.
“And your so-called gods of Chaos.” The faintest curl of her lip. “Delusional excrescences. Hunger given personality. Parasites that feed on emotion and call it dominion. I have watched powers like them dwindle, fracture, and file themselves into my ledgers alongside legions that once believed eternity was a guarantee. Everything that requires worship is already provisional.”
She leaned in by a measure, eyes never leaving theirs.
“For sixty-one cycles I have conducted this accounting. I have seen emperors grander than your carrion idol discover the limits of noise. Repetition teaches efficiency. My people learned it well.” She straightened, immaculate in her disdain. “Your Emperor’s light is a mote among motes. In true winter, motes do not legislate. They are smothered.”
Her voice lowered, razor-clean.
“If you seek conflict, initiate it. I will not petition your restraint. I will not bargain with delusion.” A final pause. “I will simply record the result, as I have always done, and continue the work that awaits you all.”
The silence that followed was not absence. It was an inspection. Ixqueya’s gaze remained fixed, as though the room itself were being measured for burial allotment. Then her mouth moved again, sparing them the indulgence of surprise.
“And since you seem to require further blasphemy before you can understand that I am not guessing,” she said, “I will give you more.”
She let the ledger cant, not theatrically, but with the minute ritual of a priest turning a page.
“I know the Age of Strife, when mankind learned the taste of its own abandonment. I know the Dark Age of Technology, your lost Eden built on sins you prefer to romanticize. I know the Men of Iron, the old betrayal that taught humanity to fear its own genius more than any alien claw.”
Her eyes narrowed, winter-clear.
“I know the Treaty of Mars, the necessary sacrilege that yoked Terra’s hunger to the Mechanicum’s machine-prayers. I know the Unification Wars, the ash of Terra before your Imperium learned to call conquest ‘order.’ I know the Thunder Warriors, discarded when their usefulness expired, like broken tools thrown into snowdrifts.”
The ledger’s edge caught candlelight again, sharp as a confession.
“I know Ullanor. I know the Rangdan Xenocides, that redacted abyss you are trained not to name aloud. I know the Primarch Project and the scattering, as if fate reached into a cradle and scattered heirs like dice.”
Her voice remained calm. Her contempt did not.
“I know the Webway Project, the Emperor’s private artery meant to starve older hungers by denying them purchase on mankind’s soul. I know the Council of Nikaea, dread masquerading as jurisprudence. I know the Sisters of Silence, that pariah-cold you call auxiliary because the truth unsettles you.”
A fractional pause, dense as compacted snow.
“I know the Black Ships, the harvest of psykers reduced to inventory. I know the Astronomican, a lighthouse sustained because lives are fed into it until they become fuel. I know the Grey Knights, sealed as a reliquary against what your sermons cannot master.”
Her stare returned to them with a pitiless serenity.
“Some of these you learn as campfire catechism. Others are hoarded behind seals, spoken only in rooms that smell of incense and fear.” She tapped the ledger once. “It does not matter. They arrive to me the same way. In the mouths of the dead who finally stop lying.”
Her tone sharpened into something quietly annihilative.
“You want to believe your Emperor is the terminus of all things. He is not. He is an anxious ember enthroned in machinery, praised as a sun. He is sustained by perpetual immolation and called benevolent for it.” Her eyes held theirs. “Your so-called gods of Chaos are no better. Delirious excrescences. Hunger given faces. Dependent, loud, and mortal in the only way that matters.”
Ixqueya’s mouth curved, faint and predatory.
“In time, the things you fear will also be filed. Their legions will also learn the quiet. Powers like them have done so before.” Her voice lowered again, razor-clean. “Everything that demands worship is already provisional. It is merely awaiting the moment winter arrives and stops pretending to care what you called it.”
(((Made in a rush.)))
" And yet in all your grandeur and your expulsion of our fragmented histories, what is available for the record and known to the lexographers and the scholars of whom possess this knowledge... did you aim to impress upon us with this cacophony of common knowledge, only one thing is made evident in such and such excalamations "
Aleksandr took pause, nodding to a guardsman
" That you have heard of us. We however, have not heard of you and refuse to acknowledge such carefully coated attempts at false hegemonies, do you think sorcerors have not made such utterances before nor chaos has spoken to us in such witty tongues... no... we know you as well, not in the form you present with, not in your syllables and origins... but what you are beyond the carapace of a giantess... a falsehood, a factor of ruin, another wisp of the immaterium given presumption of dominion upon false masteries and fledgling powers beyond the veil. We not only know you... We refuse your terms unless you yield to ours.
The guardsman returned handing Aleksandr a round device, with words engraved into it, he held it up for the Wych to behold, for it was a collar that held her very name.
" BY THE EMPEROR, KNEEL OR BE KNELT "
"I do not fear death. Death will fear me," she said coldly as her purple eyes kept on the woman.
In that exact moment, she saw Aleksandr be handed a collar with Ixqueya's name on it. What was it for? She was surely confused, but she felt like it was to make her bow before their Imperium might. She stood there quiet hearing him bolstering them into excitement. Especially her. She would die for the Emperor of Mankind. Her only existence now was to serve him.
She looked at Aleksandr and asked, "What should we do? She is threatening us?" She knew he had a plan and she wanted to hear it directly from him. She waited for Donatos and Ubba to add their own two cents into the conversation. This woman was truly getting on her nerves about them being killed and whatnot. She still didn't fear death.
((God, you guys are too fast for me to respond...x.x))
She looked at her Lord General and asked him, "What now? Relaxation?" She wanted to leave things be. She had got all riled up for all of this to end flat. Perhaps another time she will be beside him on the battlefield taking it to the Slaanesh scum and the orks. She would enjoy the thrill of the kill. It would be the best she could offer to her superior officer.
"ROUNDS ON ME!"
She yelled out loud as she was hoping for the bartender to come over with ale. She wanted the best strong ale, not the weak tasting ale that tasted watered down. She looked at Aleksandr as she admired him.
"ROUNDS ON ME!"
She yelled out loud as she was hoping for the bartender to come over with ale. She wanted the best strong ale, not the weak tasting ale that tasted watered down. She looked at Aleksandr as she admired him.
"Guess I won't say no to free booze."
Ami Arpatia wrote:
She looked at her Lord General and asked him, "What now? Relaxation?" She wanted to leave things be. She had got all riled up for all of this to end flat. Perhaps another time she will be beside him on the battlefield taking it to the Slaanesh scum and the orks. She would enjoy the thrill of the kill. It would be the best she could offer to her superior officer.
"ROUNDS ON ME!"
She yelled out loud as she was hoping for the bartender to come over with ale. She wanted the best strong ale, not the weak tasting ale that tasted watered down. She looked at Aleksandr as she admired him.
"ROUNDS ON ME!"
She yelled out loud as she was hoping for the bartender to come over with ale. She wanted the best strong ale, not the weak tasting ale that tasted watered down. She looked at Aleksandr as she admired him.
" I suppose so Sergeant, but first I need to teach you about the intricacies of your new sidearm... a plasma pistol is no trifling weapon... I present you with the MK VI Castigator pattern plasma pistol, a production run of but a hundred from the forge world of Rho Delphi. "
" Plasma pistols are a testament to imperial ingenuity, featuring a miniaturized and custom tooled onboard fusion reactor which essentially projects a micronized nova at a target, bound to a molecular gravitic core that dispenses the energy unidirectionally upon impact... all this to say, this pistol has enough power to melt through the side of a leman russ and defeat most patterns of power armor within a single shot... however, care must be exercised. Despite our advancements this is a notoriously unstable technology, the reactor onboard this variant is especially agitated giving it exceptional stopping power... you will be an unsuspecting menace to even the most well-armored foes, which you will inevitably have to face as time goes on. It has cooling systems to dissipate heat but you will have to use it carefully. "
Aleksandr leaned in with wide eyes, voice going low
" For if it overheats... you and your squad risk atomic annihilation. "
He leaned back, returning to a pleasant demeanor
" And you are an especially promising recruit, it will be lamentable if we lose you... so ahem... don't die... that's an order.
He added, patting Arpatia's helmet, clearly very proud of her.
" And Guardswoman... firstly, see to it that I am not mocked, and second, I have a new mission for you, one that will see you deployed further into enemy lines by Valkyrie. The Tau have proved most annoying as I learned they had been supplying the rebel factions that turned arms against us on your most recent mission... I want you... yes you and a catachan serving in our sabotage regiment... to infiltrate an enemy outpost, I believe this is where rogue traders and Tau conduct their business. You are to gain entry to their underground communications network and patch in an auspex to the augur node, this will allow us to intercept communication... that is the first part, it will require stealth... then you will make your way through the tunnel to their power infrastructure... a single well placed shot from the plasma pistol should see the job done... ofcourse... this will stir the hornet's nest, and they'll be upon you like flies... not to fret... by that point, the valkyrie gunships will be on their way... make your way out into the open and present at the LZ for extraction.
Aleksandr paused taking a drag off his smoking pipe
" This is a mission that requires tact, and you have shown talent in exercising tactical discretion, therefore you are trusted. You will need to exercise careful planning and strategy in this objective... compromise is not an option, help will not be coming if you are caught... but if you are discovered... you have my utmost sanction... TO BURN EVERYTHING TO THE GROUND ! TEACH THEM THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONSPIRING WITH THE XENO... and Arpatia
Once more Aleksandr leaned in, voice turning low, emphasizing seriousness
" See to it that I am not mocked. "
The sergeant was allowed to remain with the Lord General, despite being a much lower rank, it was obvious the soldiers enjoyed her morale boosting company as well, they had come to accept her as one of their own, she had earned her scars afterall.
"Well, that was a lotta words to just say "Here's a handgun"." I mean even Akatsuki has a handgun but still, it's not overly complicated.
Akatsuki Augus wrote:
"Well, that was a lotta words to just say "Here's a handgun"." I mean even Akatsuki has a handgun but still, it's not overly complicated.
" Your oration proves excessive insofar as to the purpose of corroborating yourself a jester except your best joke is to stand infront of a mirror and that has enough humor vested in it to cause the demise of a harlequin "
Aleksandr added, narrowing his eyes at the quipping one, nevertheless appreciated for adding comic flair.
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
"You get used to it when working here, Harkoth."
"Contradiction: I do not work here."
"Oh, please, I may not be fighting the same way you do, but I can hold my own, even if all I have is a pistol."
"Depends on what kind of pistol it is. If it's a Phosphor Serpenta like the one I have, then that can be quite effective against those who wish to blaspheme the Machine God within my auditory range."
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