Longtime Dakkanaut
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Realized i never put this on the site, it was kinda an aborted attempt but somebody might enjoy it.
'Do you remember the light of that first sun?'
The Prince ran his hand through the pool for the umpteenth time, its ripples reaching for the edges, distorting his frowning face. Silence. He brought his hand up from its surface, the quicksilver leaving no moisture, and felt for his chest. With a pinch of his fingers he released the spirit-stone and allowed it to fall into the pool. It gave no splash and it was eagerly enveloped.
'Do you remember the light of that first sun?'
His voice was now twinged with frustration, the stone let out a faltering glow under the surface. Still silence. He closed his eyes and rolled them up into his skull, for a moment trying to probe deeper into the pool with his other faculties, nothing was revealed in their auguries.
For a few moments he merely stared at his stone in the pool, he needed only to give a thought and it would all end, his mortal body would fall away and the Circuit would finally disperse into the Webway, with it's full complement aboard. Then his Craftworld would die. He snatched his stone from the pool, the splash blunted itself against a field that prevented any loss of fluid.
'Not this time'.
The Wraithbone walls absorbed his voice, soothing away any biting echoes.
They have receded too far, he thought as he looked around the chamber. None of the Farseers were even recognisable now. Once only crystalline deathmasks covered them, now they were amorphous blobs, like elegant statues lost to deci-aeons of erosion. 'The Young Hope' had left him last,
'I will call Ynnead until the halls ring with his name! I will return with his host at my back!',
he had promised before leaving. The Prince also remembered the desperate resignation in the Farseer's eyes, The Young Hope had seen the fates, he knew there was no way out, no Hope, he had just wanted to join the others. The Prince recoiled at his cynicism, it sat unfavourably in the pit of his stomach, he had long since forgiven him for that fleeting, honest, cowardice.
He had lingered on for Aeons past that day, he had wished the place cleansed before he too made the voyage. For a time he fought with renewed, even improved, vigour, revenge sustaining him in no small part. However each time the last invader had been vanquished, ruins dashed upon the walls, and he lay broken and spent, more interlopers flooded in. Like his people, his prowess receded and just like his prowess, so did he.
Other beings strode the empty halls of his Craftworld now, Demons, man-things and worst of all the abominations in cyclopean armour, the ones they called Astartes. If his memory served the current squatters were in the thrall of the ruinous powers, not the man-thing made God. The Prince had always loved the man-things, not as exploitable wretches like some his kind or disposable playthings like his crueller cousins but as wondrous, impossible, beings. In time though, it had warped into the bitterest of hatreds.
He had broken bread with many and even played host to a few in his Craftworld. Of course, he could never let them know how much he enjoyed their company, how he basked in the glow of their mortality. Were they, or any of his peers, to ever have known, he would have died of shame.
They had always been unbowed by their feeble spans. Such achievement, such artifice, such art, some even scraped morsels of wisdom from their dour little lives. Even now, seething in hatred, those achievements stood up.
However, there were changes after the Fall, not just the cataclysmic, irrevocable, ones in his kind but the changes in theirs.
'Beware the Mon-keigh who grasps at eternal life....',
The most prescient among his council had once said, the pall of fate hanging around his words.
'… Their scant souls grow wizened by it, leaving but a cold fury. A fury that burns low until the end of all things they cherish.'
The Astartes and their carrion lords had no endeavour, no need to strive against rapid degradation. For a time they might hold to lofty goals but it always fell away to reveal the grim function that shored up their bones and lengthened their lives, dealing death.
Hundreds of times his people had been routed by their kind, most butchered on the field, or left cut-down and screaming. It wasn't just the ones that tasted immortality either, the corruption had even bled into the doughty man-things that had once delighted him, they fell to his blade as stony faced wretches, pale eyes glazed with hate.
Rage bubbled inside him, a rankle rising to the seat of his mind. He rose from his meditative squat. A new question came to him as he strode to the pool. One he had forbidden himself from asking.
'Do you remember the burning of our young?'
The answer was a whisper that built to deafening cries, blood roared in his temples as all the withdrawn presences answered him from the depths of the Circuit.
'Arise, Young King'.
Voices he had forgotten mixed with those he dimly remembered, all called the same, some even called for it in joyous tones as if they had wanted it all along. The psychic scream rebounded viciously inside the wraithbone walls. The spars holding the roof shuddering with the resonance, aeons of dust dislodging itself from the walls and small cracks slicing across the myriad lumpen tombs. Then silence, far more abrupt and powerful. Those were the last words any inside had for this world.
He would strike one last time, they had always known it was what he'd wanted, the Prince was only sorry none had wanted to join him.
Within moments he had assumed his war panoply, being so truly old he had masteries few Autarchs' (for that was what he was now; a war leader, an Autarch) ever achieved. He wore little armour, plates covered only the regions he could never hope to defend, a great crimson sash covered the rest of his pale, brittle, flesh. He finally pulled a great hood over his face, his enemy could never know how feeble he had become.
In a moment steeped in ceremony he drew his sword from its scabbard, which he let clatter to the ground; now the weapon had been drawn for the last time there was simply no need for it. He rested the sword gently at a slight angle along the cloaked forearm of his right arm, the hilt lying between his wrist and palm, the long blade running a full three feet past his elbow, five in total.
It's runes were that of a witchblade, however it's powerfield was that of a more martial sword. He could not see the threads so could never wield it to it's full potential but the powerfield gave him a greater utility. It had been a gift from one the children of this Craftworld, a child he only faintly remembered.
'To the Crucible', he whispered to nobody.
It was a trip he had made many times, one that had become all too frequent as his people dwindled to nothing. He had sent his young to be eaten by the fire as the rest were eaten by war, now he had no more of his kin to volunteer, to give. Doubtless there would be opposition, the Crucible was an indiscriminate skein to the other side, although holy it had been to his kind, it could be unholy for others. He sensed a congregation of them between himself and the Crucible, old souls constricted by monstrous battle armour and winnowed by some long war. They did not even merit the term human any more. He gifted himself with a rawer anger, the kind that She thirsted for, on the cusp of forfeit the Prince calmed. He left the chamber for the last time, the gait of a warrior in his strides.
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