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I decided to try something very different for this one. What was Chaos like before the Fall of the Eldar?

PART 1

They wore faceless black visors and sculpted black body armour devoid of markings. Both were clearly male from their height and build, but they never spoke to her. They practically dragged her, one man gripping each arm tight enough to hurt. She was tough, and fairly strong, and she'd once killed a man who tried to rape her in an alley, but she was helpless in the soldiers' grasp. They might have been hoisting a doll between them.

The men marched her along a series of bland, empty corridors. This whole place was as featureless as their faceplates. Only black doors marred its white perfection. It might have been some sanitised hospital, with sterile white walls and soft white lumen-strips along the ceiling, rather than an army barracks or a prison. She'd been to prison a few times as one of the last human beings to break the law, and they'd never treated her like this. She didn't ask questions of the men, or protest, or resist in any way. She'd tried it earlier and earned a power maul to the back of her head. Set to low, of course, which is why she still had an intact skull, but it was like being hit by a warhammer wrapped in velvet. These men with their new technology. So proud to parade their first weapon of the power generation, so quick to use it.

The group reached a door that looked like all the other doors. There were no markings, no room number. They virtually threw her into the room. She went down painfully on hands and knees. Her head just missed the corner of a table. She got up and dusted herself down, even though the room was spotlessly clean, and her clothes were well beyond such easy salvation. She looked around the room. There was one white table and a single matching chair. The walls were blank white. There was no sign of the door she'd just come in through. More technology, more tricks. The ceiling was one huge lumen square. It had been set to maximum brightness.

"Well?" she said to the empty air. "I know you're there. You scared or something?"

One of the walls shimmered and became a reflective screen. She peered into it and saw only herself. She'd looked better. Her hair, formerly dyed blonde, was a stringy ginger mess. Her face was bruised. The makeup had run. She reminded herself of nightmares she used to have about plastek dummies coming to life. She worse a short, frayed skirt with tights torn beyond hope and there were narcotic powder stains on her green blouse, which was opened to reveal just a little too much cleavage.

"Sit down, whore," a metallic voice grated from the ceiling.

"I prefer the term 'erotic masseuse'," she replied.

"Sit down," the voice repeated. "Now. Or sanctions will be taken."

"You getting a bot to interrogate me?" she smirked. "What's the matter, you scared I'll turn you on?"

The loudest voice she'd ever heard shrieked from the hidden vox. Covering her ears, as she did instinctively, didn't make any difference. She couldn't hear her own screaming. Her ears tickled as blood began to run from them. She hunched, an animal pinned in a hunter's crosshair, and staggered over to the chair.

The noise stopped as soon as she was seated. Her mouth was moving, still pleading, swearing, cursing her captors, but no noise existed beyond the memory of that metallic shriek. They'd calibrated it perfectly to overwhelm a human, of course. The human race hadn't become less ingenious over the last twenty millennia. Nor had its computers. They waited until her hearing returned. It did so with surprising speed: further proof that these were professional torturers.

"State your name," he voice said.

"Your Mother," she replied.

"State your name."

"I just said. Don't you recognise me? Does mummy need to give you a spanking?"

The nopise shrieked again, cutting off abruptly. She could hear her own screams this time.

"Sarah Carter," she gasped. "You bastards."

"Sarah Carter, state your planet of origin."

"Tau Ceti, the Lavintha district. Of the stack-city. Tau Proxima system. That specific enough?"

"State your occupation."

"What do you think?" she snarled, gesturing at her clothes.

"You are a whore, one of the last in a society no longer driven by money or sex. You are an anachronism. You are obsolete."

"I'll show you obsolete, tin man. I want to talk to a human, not some soulless bot."

There was a brief pause, but it seemed to last forever.

"How do you know you are not?"

That threw her. She licked her lips, wondering how to react.

"Look," she said, "so I'm visiting friends on Earth and maybe I try to earn a few credits with my tricks. It's not like men queue up for that stuff. I'm desperate for money. Maybe if the Terran Council helped people like me -"

"There is no help for people like you."

She blinked several times. People didn't talk to each other like this. Everyone was supposed to care about each other, right? What was that crap the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Happiness were shovelling these days? Something about banding together to face the grim darkness of the twenty-first millennium.

"Do you own a book called the Codex Infernum?"

"The what?" she said.

"Do you own a book called the Codex Infernum?"

"No!"

"Have you ever read a book called the Codex Infernum?"

"No! The Codex what?"

That noise, that excruciating, immolating noise again, assaulting her through the ears and shaking her brain. She couldn't resist it, couldn't think for herself. Her mind was a musical instrument being plucked by the clumsy, eager fingers of children.

"Stop it! Please! I can't stand that sound."

Silence. Blissful, blessed, sacred peace. She began to cry.

"There is no sound," the voice said, showing no remorse.

"Not now you've stopped it, genius," she replied. "Who programmed you, anyway? He sucks!"

"There has never been any sound. You are imagining it."

"Oh, come on!"

"You are imagining it because you are ill."

"Oh, come on, I may run the occasional line of Skylight but -"

"Sarah Carter, you have been arrested on suspicion of consorting with proscribed powers. You are a drug addled-whore, or an exceptionally talented actress trying to portray one."

"You can't talk to me like that!" she yelled, getting up. "I've got rights."

"You have consorted with proscribed powers. You have used the Codex Infernum. You have no rights. Confess."

"Screw you, psycho! I've never heard such crap! I'm going to the Ministry of Law!"

The wall to her right shimmered and appeared to vanish. She gasped and grabbed hold of the table. Beyond the confines of this room stretched a dead lunar landscape. A planet filled the black sky: an ochre giant surrounded by a vast ring of ice and debris. Moving lights twinkled, not stars but starships.

"That's - that's -" she said, sitting slowly back down.

"You are viewing the planet Saturn. This facility is located on Saturn's moon, Titan. After your arrest on Earth, you were rendered unconscious and transported here. There is no escape for you, Sarah Carter; there is nowhere to go. There is only you, and us. Confess."

She sat slowly, putting her head in her hands.

"You bastards."

This time the noise ripped through her whole body, trembling her insides. It was like dying in the slowest, most painful way imaginable. The sound was a discordant song, millions of voices pitched higher than a human's all singing at once. Her mental defences eroded in the first moment. She was on the floor, in the foetal position, crying and begging long before it stopped.

Sarah sat up slowly, amazed she was still intact. Her body reacted without pain or hesitation. She stood, facing her reflection.

"If you are innocent," the voice asked her, "then why do you cast no shadow?"

"Cast no..." she said, looking down, then around her. Silence stretched for several heartbeats. Then she looked slowly up at her reflection, matted hair hanging over the right side of her face, with a smile partway between mocking and amused.

"Oops," she said.

PART 2

"You are judged guilty of consorting with proscribed powers," the voice said. Sarah smiled a little broader, a little nastier.

"I hear the fear in your voice," she said. "Pain is music to me. You're not a bot, are you?"

"You are an agent of Satan. Sanctions will be taken."

"Satan," she said. Spittle began to drool from her mouth, slapping as it hit the ground. "The tattered angel? My... patron has a grander design than petty revenge."

"What design is that?"

"Humans," Sarah said. She swept her hair back, away from her face. It was a feminine gesture in a creature that had lost all femininity. "So blunt. So frightened, holding candles to light the dark. You're funnier than the Eldar. They aren't scared of anything."

"Tell us what you have done with the Codex Infernum."

"I dropped it in the water near Mersey City. Notice any dead fish lately?"

There was a long pause.

"You have infected a number of human males living in the Merseyshire region of the Brittanic Kingdoms," said the voice. There was definite strain in it now. "They passed this infection to colleagues and family members. We have been unable to find a source, method of transmission or cure. Fifty-three innocent human lives were terminated by teams from the Ministry of Health. The Britannic Kingdoms are now under quarantine."

"The Ministry of Health," Sarah mocked. She returned to the table and sat in the chair, slowly crossing her legs, still playing the whore. "What are your Ultima-level containment protocols against the power of a god?"

"Satan is not God. You are a blasphemer against human religion. You have attacked the human homeworld. Sanctions will be taken."

Sarah yawned.

The noise blasted her. Despite her sudden arrogance, she screamed, clawing at her face with fingernails that had become yellowed claws. The meat beneath her skin was rotten. Putrid blood spluttered out, already coagulated, to stain the table black and red. Maggots fell out of the rips her nail-claws carved.

"That vile noise!" she screamed. "Your sonic weapons hurt, but they cannot kill me."

"There is no noise," said the voice. "There are no sonic weapons. We know what you are, daemon. You are hearing prayers."

PART 3

The screeching, shrieking sound coalesced into human voices. Each spoke in a different accent, or dialect, or language. Some were male, some female. The prayers were of various religions and all of them hurt like a knife plunging through the ears into Sarah's brain.

"...lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil -"

"...on the day when the wrong-doer gnaweth his hands, he will say: Ah, would that I had chosen a way together with the messenger of Allah -"

"Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who bestows good things upon the unworthy -"

"The weak and feeble gods of Terra!" Sarah screamed. She stood up, knocking the chair over - it had been fixed to the floor and plastic squealed as it bent and snapped. "Where were they when the Grandfather was born? A trillion worlds, ruined by disease. A black and terrible death, taking your souls, forming his first army, while your weak gods quailed and moaned with anguish! The Grandfather has returned to claim his due!"

"You are a daemon of Satan. Malum Gladius. Hell Knight. You are a creature of the hyper-realm, possessing the form of a woman. You thirst for mayhem and death."

"I am a herald of the Grandfather. I am the gifter of pox. I am the saint of infection. Soon, I shall be His first human martyr."

"Begone, daemon. Your time is done. Return to hell and dwell with the fallen angels."

"Hell," Sarah said. She began to laugh. It was a hideous sound, full of madness and pain. "You think you know what hell is? You think that burning cave is the worst place you can go? The Grandfather could quench those flames with bile and piss if He so chose."

"Enough!"

"What you call hell, we call paradise. You will rot for eternity, fruitful trees in His garden of delights. I will drag you there myself. I will make love to you while you die and die again... for where there is death, there is also rebirth. Do you want me to be your whore for eternity? I understand this physical form is... attractive."

PART 4

Sarah's tirade was interrupted by the clattering of gunfire. Bullets thwacked into her shoulders and back, throwing flesh and dead blood across the room. She grinned with malice and turned around, regarding the black-armoured guards pumping submachinegun rounds into her.

For the first time, she cast a shadow, as if it has suddenly escaped from somewhere within her. A nightmare was painted across the men and up the wall behind them: insanity in silhouette. Sarah was a woman of average height and weight but her shadow was that of a tall figure, grotesquely bloated in the abdomen, with a jagged horn protruding from the head. One of its arms ended in corpse-claws, while the other hand brandished a blade Sarah wasn't holding.

She opened her mouth as if to scream, but the voice that emerged wasn't human. It was the chorus of thousands of insects, buzzing, chirping, ticking. Swarms of flying black things left her mouth and surrounded the two guards. They began to scream and shriek like men who'd been set on fire. The guards collapsed, writhing, bleeding. Their bodies writhed long after their screaming stopped as thousands of tiny, winged creatures ate them from the inside out.

Hundreds of other insects swirled around the room. The lumen ceiling above began to flicker as though there were malfunctioning bulbs up there. Impossible, since it was a single light source, yet as the humans of Titan were about to find out, impossible meant nothing in this dark millennium.

Alarms were sounding. They blared in the room and in the corridors beyond. Sarah turned to the doorway which had appeared in the side wall. No trickery hid it from her now: the Grandfather was watching. He wouldn't let these pitiful humans spoil the fun of his newest champion. The clouds of flies buzzed out into the corridor, looking for warm mouths and eyes to lay their eggs within.

A new voice, female and calm, came across the vox.

"Infernal event in section alpha-five, interrogation room three six two. Malum Gladius, psionic capabilities. Co-ordinate defence. This is not a drill. Repeat, infernal event..."

Sarah turned back to the mirrored wall. She smirked at her frightful reflection, its ruined beauty a tribute so appropriate that it was virtually art.

"I can see you in there, little men," she said, leering at the terrified-looking controllers sitting at a desk. Her soul-sight had always been able to penetrate the glass; she simply hadn't bothered to use it until now. "Are you still monitoring me? Do you still want to know what I learned from the Codex Infernum?"

She made her way out of the interrogation room into the perfect white corridors, leaving footprints in the dead guards' blood. The flickering, besmirched interrogation room was little more than a shrine to the Grandfather, her victims already rotting.

"Or shall I just show you?" Sarah said, with a grin that displayed newly-yellowed fangs.

PART 5

David Trainor had been monitoring interrogations for five years. Humans, aliens, humans somehow controlled or possessed by aliens, he thought he'd seen it all. Not only was this the most unintentionally arrogant thing a human being could think, it was being proved wrong right now.

He and his fellow controllers gawped at the sheer horror taking place before them. The holy people were located elsewhere within the facility, and they were still saying their prayers, unaware that Sarah Carter had not been exorcised, was not under control, and was probably looking for them at this very moment.

"It should have worked..." Zhu Wong kept saying over and over. Trainor looked across at his fellow controller. Not only had they lost control of the situation, Wong had lost control of himself.

"God damn," Billy Macey said. The third controller, a gruff technician born in the Panpacific stack city of Midmerica, was grey, like he was having a heart attack. "She got out. God damn."

Their computer displays were useless, the holographic screens displaying a bizarre scrawl written in a language their AI couldn't interpret.

Sarah Carter's bio-readings were just... insane. They weren't even remotely consistent with Satanic possession. This was something worse. Much worse. Something new, with the power to kill them all.

"We need to get the drok out of here," said Trainor. His jaw was locked so tight with fear, he could barely get the words out, and had to growl them.

"Good thinking," said Macey, fear stripping the words of sacrasm. "Let's go."

Trainor nearly fell over in his haste to get out of his chair. Macey, bigger and burlier, grabbed him and practically threw him into the door, which slid upwards into the ceiling. The two men tripped on each other's feet and went down, swearing and tussling.

"Ah, there you are, gentlemen," said Sarah. "How nice to get acquainted."

Both men froze, Trainor feeling like he might soil himself, and looked up at the monster smiling down on them.

"I recall offering to be your eternal whore," she said to Trainor, her voice like honey and love in his heart and mind even as maggots dripped from rents in her face.

"Th-that's right, you did!" Trainor said, thinking that if he could somehow force himself to get her off, she might let him go. The thought was repulsive beyond belief - but being alive beat being a sex-tree in some drok-hole version of hell.

"I was going to withdraw the offer," Sarah said thoughtfully, then smiled at Trainor as though he'd just made her day. "But I accept. Thank you."

She leaned forward and breathed in their faces. Acrid musk, far beyond the stink of any plague-pit, wrapped itself around the two controllers. They gagged and writhed in agony.

Trainor couldn't think, couldn't breathe. All he could do was convulse as he felt his heart burst and his lungs explode. Effluent leaked from every opening in his body.

Macey was screaming right in his ear. It sounded like he was being roasted alive.

"I'll be back for you, David," Sarah said. She stepped across them. Trainor saw, before his eyeballs burst, that she was smiling into the control room at the now-shrieking Zhu Wong.

"I'm not making the same offer to you," she told him. As she stepped into the room, and the door slid down behind her, Trainor heard her saying, "Zhou, I've got something much worse for you."

PART 6

Aadab Galla had been set to return to Earth on the AMS Sydney Harbour when she heard the warnings across all vox channels.

Infernal event.

She'd been cleaning her teeth, and not only did she swallow the entire mouthful of gooey toothpaste-and-water, she nearly swallowed the toothbrush too.

Infernal event.

It was the kind of thing only starship crews heard, and then only the most unlucky, those doomed imminently to die. The most powerful and dreaded words in human culture.

Infernal event.

The strange aliens, those malign intelligences, dwelling within the hyper-realm - those unknowable and utterly hostile xenotypes that could only be repelled by a Gellar shield - there was no way they could have broken loose here, on a station located in realspace, within the gravity well of a planet.

Could they?

She spat into the sink and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand as she raced from the bathroom into her suite. There were so many things to do, all of which needed doing now, and she couldn't think -

"Mummy?" a little voice came from one of the adjoining rooms.

"Ishaq," she said, running to her five-year-old and scooping him up in her arms. "Where did daddy go?"

"I don't know," Ishaq said, somehow not concerned by his mother's panic. "Are we having dinner yet?"

"Later, darling," said Galla. She looked around wildly. The suite was modest and modern, with the kind of reserved style only the elite could afford, and yet it was the same as any other suite in the Titan facility. Working here was hard, often harrowing, and the Terran Empire repaid the facility staff for their diligence and loyalty.

"Uncle," she said aloud.

"Yes, ma'am?" the station's AI politely replied.

"What's going on? Where's my husband?"

"You don't want to know, and he was called to observe an interrogation in alpha-five."

"I need him -"

"I know, ma'am," the AI replied. "The good news is, he's still alive, and I just gave him directions to the AMS Sydney Harbour at docking arm five."

Someone among the Facility staff had nicknamed their AI Uncle Benny for some reason and the name had stuck. For its part, Uncle Benny seemed pleased with the name, and tried its best to live up to the sense of warmth and family that implied.

Galla looked around, wondering where her husband kept his gun. Aadab Galla was pretty senior in the Facility's heirarchy, but she had never kept a weapon in spite of the potential dangers of living here. The idea of little Ishaq somehow getting hold of a weapon -

But Maymun, her husband, had bought one from a Terran Navy armsman as soon as the Galla family had arrived here. So like that stubborn, clever, infuriating man to contradict his wife's wishes. If she didn't love him so much, she'd have blasted him out of an airlock.

Galla laughed and cried at the same time as she forgot the gun and carried her son out of their quarters and along a series of corridors. People bustled this way and that, confused, scared. The Facility might be a potential danger, but the living areas were sealed and protected by ex-Empire Guard troopers, grizzled vets who'd fought the Alnerans, the Spindar and who knew what other strange alien breeds.

People asked Galla what was happening, but she didn't know any more than they did. If Uncle hadn't told them, it must be really bad.

The corridors were pristine and well lit, but bland. It wasn't much of a place for children, but the school provided much of the entertainment kids -

There was a loud explosion, followed by a wave of screams which spread along the corridor towards them as people either saw what was coming, or were panicked by those who had. Gunfire raged, and there was some kind of loud buzzing, almost a humming, a bit like some kind of static.

Pirates, Galla thought, or maybe those bloody Alnerans -

She started running when she saw darkness swarming along the corridor towards them. It looked like the walls were rotting and the lumen strips were dying. All around her, white lumen strips turned the yellow of infected urine. Rust spread, impossibly, across plastek walls. Plastek peeled from the ceiling and walls. There was some kind of wet slush welling up from the floor and it stank of effluent.

Aadab Galla sloshed through the filth, people knocking her this way and that as they ran from here to nowhere. She held onto Ishaq like he was melded to her.

Galla made it into her quarters, and Uncle slammed the door down and sealed it, just as the tide of flying insects hit the other side with the force of a power hammer. The door bent inwards like some giant had punched it and left the shape of his arm in the metal.

"Uncle," Galla said.

"Give me a minute, ma'am," Uncle said, "I'm summoning the Empire Guard, and I'm trying to separate the civilians from the attacker."

"Uncle!" Galla shouted.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the AI responded, knowing what she was asking without needing to hear the words. "Your husband is dead."

I just read through all of this, and well done NoPoet. I like the idea behind it, you certainly have a knack for expanding on the ancient history of 40k.

I concur with Black Jack. It is great work.

Thank you very much gents, it means a great deal to me. I took some real risks with this work. I feel that recent terrible experiences with women, and my discovery of brilliantly-written and disturbing "Creepypasta", have spurred me to rather insane heights. I've literally never enjoyed hammering away at a keyboard as much as I did while writing this story. The entire thing is a massive gamble on my part and it looks like that gamble is paying off.

@Tacical_Spam - are you actually Matt Ward or just taking his face in vain?

---

PART 7

Sarah Carter strode through the devastation she had wrought. Her feet splashed through sewer-filth. Corpses smushed as she stepped in the ruined hulks. Excremental stalagtites began to grow from the ceiling, attracting circling crowds of flies.

She barely felt the bullet impacts. Worms inside her flesh wriggled, pushing carbon bullets back out. Occasionally spent rounds tinkled of plopped into the filth below. At least ten Empire Guard soldiers lay dead in the corridors behind her and from the ruined, eaten, exploded corpses ahead of her, the Grandfather had claimed upwards of twenty civilians and their children. No longer would young laughter echo from these walls. It was almost a shame: the Grandfather was not only lord of ruination, he was also the wellspring of joy and happiness.

"Why did you all deny Him?" she asked the corpses. "He offers you freedom from fear. If you had only accepted his poisoned love, as I did, you would have worn horror and disease like armour. The things that have killed you now would have sustained you forever."

She kicked a young boy's corpse. Bits of it slopped against a wall. Her strength was still growing. Her body was becoming a living carcass, inured to pain and suffering. The Grandfather knew that human strength, human endurance, human courage, were only limited by the fear of pain. Free a human from pain, which was to free them from fear, and you created a shining, heroic being, capable of overturning the universe.

Sarah paused. In her former human life, she hadn't been a whore. That had been an act. A way to bring the Grandfather's blessing to ungrateful men. She'd been a geneticist, qualified and paid beyond the dreams of most Empire citizens. In an Empire of a hundred worlds, it was easy for all but the most talented, the most gifted, to vanish amid the dross of a hundred billion people.

Something of her former life returned to her then. She remembered the simple pleasure of work, of owning a land-car and a skimmer. She remembered being married. Thoughts of eating his face and neck didn't trouble her as much as they might have: Mike had resisted the Grandfather's gift, which is why she'd had to kill him slow and bloody, and even though he'd denied them until the end, the Grandfather had promised to re-shape Mike's soul anyway. Mike would be waiting for her in the Garden of Delights. Sarah wasn't sure how that worked. She thought humans had to accept the Grandfather, and if they didn't, their souls would go to the gods of Terra. But then, those gods were naught beside the Grandfather. They were seals, honking and flopping away from a polar bear. So the Grandfather had told her, and so she'd seen for herself when He had transported her to His mansion and ducked her head into the eternal cauldron, forcing her to drown in the filth, capturing her soul and reuiniting it with her body when it tried to flee.

Nobody else had to suffer like Sarah had. All she had to do was persuade them to accept the Grandfather's love into their hearts. It was already there, in all humans, regardless of faith or personal heroism. Everyone feared death. Everyone got sick. The Grandfather had been speaking to every human who had ever lived, and nobody had been listening.

Until Sarah found the book. The Codex Infernum. It had opened her eyes; opened her mind; opened her heart.

She left spores among the dead. It wasn't a conscious thing that she did. Each spore left her diminished somehow, like her energy was a receding tide, but the Grandfather's love was a strange thing. It would recede, leaving Sarah exhausted and weak, then as the fruits she planted grew, it would return in a tidal wave and her enemies would be washed away.

Sarah moved on. There were hundreds of humans still alive, hiding, waiting for the Grandfather's love to find them.

PART 8

The thing that had been Zhou Wong screamed as it reared backwards. Horrified Empire Guard troopers blasted it with submachinegun and small arms fire.

Wong was on all fours. His body had bloated outwards, ripping his clothes off, and spindly rib-bones pressed against his flanks, flaring his body outwards. His flesh had become yellowish, skin dried to parchment. Blades burst from his back as his spine enlarged and became weaponised. His back bulged upwards obscenely and writhed with inner life. Wong's face was still, hideously, human.

The Wong-creature's cries were not of pain, although there was plenty of fear.

"He loves you all!" Wong was shrieking. "Accept his seed and be like me! Please! It is a better way to be! I am so happy! Aaaaagh!"

Sergeant Volker, formerly of the 1st Terran Heavy Infantry regiment, also known as the Darkstormers, levelled his shotgun and blew Wong's face apart with a single shot. Wong collapsed and lay dead.

"That's how you do it," Volker said, pumping the barrel of his gun to eject the shell. "Nothing wrong with a bit of old-school -"

Wong's back exploded, showering the nearby troopers with flesh and bone. Volker doubled over, a bone-blade piercing his stomach, through his Cogent armour. Soldiers backed away, screaming.

Something huge splashed across the floor, sliding in its own birth fluids. If Sarah Carter's shadow had been madness captured in silhouette, here was disease and death given actual form.

The thing was like a slug. Slime and blood slathered its flanks. It reared up on four legs, a howl of pure joy ululating along corpse-choked corridors. Fans of tentactles tipped with mouths writhed from its head. Beady black eyes opened and fixed on Sergeant Volker as he tried to rise, holding the blade that had punctured his stomach.

The beast waddled across to him, ignoring his screamed warnings and curses, and licked him with a massive, stinking thing that looked like a whale's tongue. Slime coated the wounded sergeant.

It penetrated his armour so easily, Volker might have been naked. His body went into convulsions and his spine snapped. He fell over backwards, unable to move, feeling his body shutting down one organ at a time. His hearing was the last thing to fail. He heard a losing battle, as his squad left him to die alone in the slime and filth.

Only, he didn't die. He lay there, as the sounds of battle moved slowly away, and listened to the giggling of children, as small, impish things gathered around him. Their size and their playful attitudes were reflected in the sounds they made.

He could hear them snapping off bits of bone that they found, and knew they were making tools of them.

Get away from me, he wanted to say, but his body did nothing.

Volker might have been paralysed, but as the imp-creatures began to etch graffiti into his flesh, the sergeant realised he could still feel pain.

PART 9

There had been silence for over an hour before Aadab Galla, still cradling her son, dared to whisper.

"Uncle, what's happening?"

She was hiding in a cupboard, beneath piles of clothes. It was hot and oppressive, and she was feeling claustrophobic. Ishaq was asleep in her arms. She knew he was afraid, that children were far more affected by things than adults seemed to realise, and she was grateful the heat had lulled him to sleep.

"The fighting has moved on, ma'am," Uncle said in a low voice. The AI was projecting its voice into the cupboard. Galla didn't understand directional sound projection but was grateful someone had invented it. The last thing they needed was noise in their quarters, attracting... whatever was out there.

"There's no-one near us now, then?"

"There are a number of civilian families hiding in their quarters. I've locked them in and I'm counselling a few of them. If my response time seems slower, or I appear distracted, it's because I'm spreading myself thin today."

"Call me Aadab," she said, without knowing why.

"Thank you, Aadab," said Uncle. "Don't worry. I'll do whatever it takes to save as many people as possible, but there's some kind of virus in my network. It's preventing me from controlling certain areas of the Facility. I've never seen anything like this."

"That makes two of us," she said. "Why are we under attack?"

"There was some form of hyper-intrusion during an interrogation," Uncle said. "Standard containment protocols failed almost immediately. The entities are vastly more powerful than anything we've seen before."

"How are they still here?" Aadab asked. "I don't know much about warp physics, but I thought warp aliens could only exist within the hyper-realm."

"I don't know much about warp physics either, Aadab. At a guess, I'd say the intruders are sustaining themselves somehow. They're spreading a form of physical corruption. This is bad for a hundred reasons."

She thought about this for a while. The implications were terrifying.

"Is there any way to generate a Gellar shield around the Facility?" she said. "I know they can do it around certain rooms."

"Not in the time available, Aadab, and the persons most qualified to make such modifications are dead."

The death of Maymun, Aadab's husband, had still not fully sunk in yet. She was too scared, too focused on Ishaq. She began to rock gently. Tears rolled from her eyes. How could such a man as Maymun be dead, just like that? No heroic last stand. No final speech. No chance to go out as a family.

That happy, clever, crafty man, a man who even after all these years could still surprise her, who was devoted to his family and had opposed their move here after Aadab's promotion - how could he be gone?

Had he seen this coming? The idea startled her. It felt like Maymun was still messing with her, making her think in a different way, even though he was beyond the grave.

The more she thought about it, the firmer the idea coalesced. Solar Command thought it would be safer for everyone if this Facility, this place of interrogation and secret law, this outpost of vigilance in a crazy galaxy, had been located away from all population centres. Every precaution had been taken in its construction and it was defended by the best people money could buy.

And yet, the personnel had been allowed to bring their families here and start new lives. The Empire was so sure this Facility was safe and this confidence may have turned to arrogance. Children had paid for that hubris, and now the daemons of hell might well be loose, looking to kill them all.

Another thought hit her. One that shocked her almost out of her body and made her cry again.

They're going to nuke this place, aren't they?

PART 10

Collette Lecomte had only arrived at the Facility last week, being transferred from the Guard training facility outside Paris, yet she was the person who probably saved the Facility from destruction.

They were waiting in the rec room for the beast-creature that had birthed from Wong. Tables and chairs had already been overturned to make barricades. There were seven Empire Guard positioned behind the barricades, all carrying submachineguns, all low on ammo.

Lecomte glanced around at her surviving squad-mates, recognising them all by height and shape. They all wore black Cogent armour. It was the strongest personal body armour the Terran Empire had ever produced. The beast's attacks made a mockery of the Empire's finest protection.

They waited, all eyes and guns trained on the door, hearing the yapping, flailing thing as it flopped towards them.

"Good luck, everyone," Lecomte said, moments before the creature burst into the room.

It looked across the barricades, seeing armoured humans waiting for it, and yipped happily. It didn't seem like a murdering blasphemy from the hyper-realm. In that moment, it was a playful puppy finding new friends.

"Fire!" yelled Lecomte.

The Type-12 Submachinegun, also known as the Shredder, accepted fifty- and seventy-round magazines of carbon bullets, the strongest ammunition that was readily available. Many of the aliens encountered by the Terran Empire were stronger, or faster, or smarter than humans. The Empire Guard needed the best weapons, the best armour, the best wargear, to even stand a chance against them.

Carbon bullets plunged through the beast's flesh. They burst one of its eyes. Tentacles were sheared off by the wall of bullets. This was the best opportunity the Empire Guard had had to fight the beast. Battling it one-on-one in the corridors had been worthless.

Weight of fire slammed the beast back against a wall. It left a slug trail wherever it moved. The beast wailed unhappily. It wasn't hurt physically; it didn't feel pain. It sounded upset, slighted, like a friendly dog that had been kicked by a human when all it had tried to do was play.

Lecomte was out of ammo.

"Fire in the hole!" she shouted, detaching an armour-piercing grenade from her belt.

The beast lunged forwards and caught the grenade, plus a number of bullets, in its mouth. It exploded from within. Poisonous muck splashed against walls, tables, body armour. The beast burped. Smoke came out of its mouth. Then it collapsed in on itself, forming an expanding puddle of sick.

Collette Lecomte ripped her burning helm off and swiped slime from her breastplate. The stink hit her immediately and she collapsed, vomiting, battle helm bouncing away behind her.

Other soldiers were similarly cleansing themselves of burning daemon blood and swearing as their suits filtered some of the stench to them.

Lecomte stood and spat strings of vomit onto the floor.

"Uncle, notify command. Hostile terminated. Now where's that drokking bitch, the one who started it all?"

I can tell you're enthusiastic, not just from the quantity of the writing, but the quality as well. Also, I didn't mention it earlier, but I do love that Nurgle is getting some love; he's my favorite chaos god.

Thank you mate, I'm glad the writing is appealing to you.

I realise now that my "survivor stories" series (some of which are on Dakkadakka, and "In the White Room" is not one of them) were kind of like "Creepypasta" in that they're supposedly true stories from the perspectives of people who witnessed and/or survived something terrible. Creepypasta isn't the right word. Grimdarkpasta just sounds daft.

I've decided to name this sub-genre "Darkpasta"

If you like Nurgle, you're gonna love 20K...

Dakkapasta? Is that what you mean to call it?

Just a side note, I am not Ward in the computer-flesh. I am just a humble man.

PART 11

Sarah tried to whistle as she stomped along the death-filled corridor, but the yellowing monoliths she had for teeth wouldn't let her purse her lips, or properly close her mouth. Much of her remaining humanity had been shed as the Grandfather piled his favour upon her body and soul.

She felt the death of her kin as a kind of absence in the soul - like someone had snapped a tendon in her heart. The human military were responding in force. The beasts she had spawned, and the Grandfather's little giggling, mutilating children, were vanishing back to the Garden.

Each vanishing left her diminished. She leaned against a wall, then vomited onto a man's corpse, her distracted mind noticing the way he dissolved beneath her puke. It felt like she was recovering from influenza - weak, disoriented, with surges of false strength that only left her more exhausted.

This must be the downside of immortality. Sarah had an IQ of 154. She knew there would be a downside to the Grandfather's offer but she'd accepted it anyway. Disease ran rampant and then it burned out, to return in greater strength further down the line. She'd always assumed that she would become like this.

Two Empire Guard appeared at the far end of the corridor, shouting. They fixed her in the light of their gun-lamps, then opened up, filling the corridor with fire.

If there was one thing the Grandfather despised, it was fire.

Sarah shrieked and stumbled backwards, flailing ape-like arms. The flies buzzing around her shrivelled and died. Excrement fell, burning and dwindling, from the ceiling.

She couldn't speak as her face and dried-up tongue were on fire. Charred teeth fell out of her mouth. Instead of speaking an incantation, she simply thought it. She imagined the guards' skin ulcerating so badly they looked like they'd been burned or stabbed to death.

As the men fell, she drank in their cries. Horror, agony, revulsion; she saw these things differently now. They were the wine of her dreams, a soothing balm against the sterile ache of realspace. They weren't begging for mercy. They were thanking her for the pleasure she was bestowing them.

The flames on her body began to die. Foul life spilled from her wounds and her body, or the crippled, rotting hulk it had become, was healed.

Deep in her soul, Sarah felt the pleasurable rumbling of the Grandfather's laughter.

"I will grant you whatever you desire," He whispered, something she felt rather than heard.

Sarah thought of her husband, long since dead, the alien virus beyond even the Ministry of Health's ability to fight.

"I want Paul back," she said.

"He is with Jehova," said the Grandfather. "When our work is done, I will eat the gods of Terra, and you will be united with your husband."

Sarah straightened herself. She didn't know what the Grandfather's "work" was, only that He was content to let her kill and kill again. She sensed their was no failure here. Even if the humans killed her, the Grandfather had promised her eternal life, eternal power. How different from her mortal life where she was judged and disliked.

Sustained by bitterness, and comforted by the love of her patron, she strode on, looking for the school district.

PART 12

Eighteen ex-Guard veterans met up with Collette Lecomte within the school district. The kids had been evacuated to the XMS Maritime Bride and the AMS Syndey Harbour, but neither the military ship nor the civilian transport had been allowed to move more than a thousand metres from the Facility's docking port. Twenty-five Terran Navy ships, all XMS-registered, were locking guns and torpedoes on them.

They hadn't fired because Lecomte had assigned five ex-Guard to the radio room. They'd killed another of those grotesquely mutated slug-things and a new horror, a bunch of chuckling, farting little scum who'd been capering amid the devastation. Then the victorious soldiers had contacted Solar Command to inform them only the one major hostile, the former human known as Sarah Carter, was still at large: the little green runts were easy enough to kill, now that the humans were using flamers.

Lecomte positioned her troopers within the school assembly hall and in the surrounding corridors. They would make a fighting retreat until there was nowhere left to go, and then she'd request the Navy to blast this place with nuclear torpedoes. Even Sarah Carter couldn't survive fifty AT explosions in the face, and even if she did, what threat would be she floating through space like a green ice cube?

As they waited, bruised, scared, lower on ammo than any of them were used to, Lecomte glanced around at the childish decorations on the walls: paintings on real paper, prints of the kids' hands made with paint, a teddy bear wearing a pink bow and "United Earth Defence Bear" on his little white t-shirt.

They didn't have to wait long for Sarah. She strolled in, shouting "Knock, knock!"

The Guard hit her with everything they had. Bullets, grenades, shotgun shells, flamer bursts which became a torrent of raging fire. Sarah stood there laughing, with her arms out, while they burned the clothes and flesh from her skeleton. Disgusting organs slopped out to melt into a burning puddle. Sarah's laughter echoed around them even as the cloud of flies around her - those that weren't burning and leaving glowing trails behind them - spontaneously shrivelled and died.

Little green goblin-things followed their mistress into the room. They weren't laughing: they were indignant, hopping up and down in rage. As the flies began to die, the green things popped into nothingness one after the other until none remained.

Sarah's bones collapsed, tinkling together. The smell was indescribable. Heat was a solid wall broadcast by flames that had consumed the entire front half of the assembly hall.

Then there was silence, other than the crackling of flames.

"Clear," trooper Gault voxed. Others from the corridors, then from the radio room, began to do the same.

"You guys ok?" Lecomte voxed to her squad. They variously nodded, said "Yeah" or gave her the thumbs-up. A couple of them remained silent, struggling to come to terms with what they'd witnessed.

Lecomte switched her vox to wide-broadcast.

"This is Collete Lecomte of Facility security, calling the Navy ships in orbit," she said. "All hostiles terminated. I repeat, all hostiles terminated. Infernal event is over. Medical assistance required."

PART 13

Aadab Galla had dressed in her best for the funeral. She held Ishaq's hand. He looked a darling in his little suit. Everyone had commented on it.

Men and women representing the eight faiths among the Facility personnel stood in a line. Only five coffins, covered in the flag of the Terran Empire - an eagle facing right, wings spread, whose body was a thunderbolt, guarding the United Earth behind it - were present. Most of the dead had been ruined so thoroughly that the corridors containing them had been burned, purged again and again, and repeatedly blessed by members of every faith.

Kohen Dembitz led the ceremony, tears running from her eyes. If despair was what she felt, it was not reflected in her voice.

"The enemy has a new face," she said. "Seventy-three innocent lives ended in this Facility. More died on Earth. Who knows how many other innocent souls have met their maker in the name of such... evil?"

Ishaq started to ask his mother something. Galla hushed him. Ishaq didn't understand why she was crying. Maymun was gone, claimed by a ruthless new enemy.

"Perhaps the enemy hoped to divide us," the Kohen continued. "Instead, they find a species more united against them than ever. This is a dark galaxy, a dark millennium, yet humanity shall prevail. Whether we endure for a year or ten thousand years, the human race will remember what happened here. Our enemies shall discover our strength."

*

Semper Denzel was bored off his head. Nobody at the Ministry of Health ever took him seriously. He knew his ideas could help. Humans were clearly outmatched in this galaxy of Eldar and Alnerans. They needed Denzel's project. He just had to make those breakthroughs, so his theory became practical.

He sat at his terminal, looking at the holographic screen in front of him. It was damnably blank. The scorn his ideas received were stifling his creativity. His ideas were stillborn.

If you're out there, and you're listening, Denzel prayed, help me now. Please. I can save so many lives.

"Hey," a female voice said from beside him. Denzel opened his eyes and stared in amazement.

"Sarah!" he smiled. He stood up and hugged his colleague, burying his face in her blonde hair. "Where the hell have you been? We thought you'd been kidnapped!"

Sarah laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

"I couldn't just leave my best friend in the whole world, could I?" she said. She pulled back and they gazed into each other's eyes. Denzel pulled away, embarrassed. He didn't like showing affection. She'd surprised him.

"Seriously, where have you been?" Denzel asked her.

"I went to Earth,"she said.

"No way! What did you go there for? Earth sucks! All the action's here, at Proxima Colony."

"Listen to you," Sarah grinned. "You sound like an advert for the Colonial Fleet."

Denzel sat back down.

"Now you're here," he said, "you can help me with this. You're smarter than I am. Maybe you can see where I'm screwing up."

"That's exactly why I'm here, " Sarah said, pulling a chair up next to Denzel. "I've had some ideas. Now this is kind of long-term, but eventually, we can re-shape the human race."

Denzel closed the blank document in front of him.

"In that case," he said, "let's get our project back on the road. Terminal, please access my personal project database. Folder name: The Human Genhancement Project."

FINAL PART

David Trainor opened his eyes. They were sore as hell and seemed welded together by gunk.

"Where..." he tried to say, but his throat was full of phlegm.

Vision returned slowly. It was blurry at first and coalesced into a landscape that he first thought was some kind of sick wall-art.

It was like a jungle but all the vines were alive. They curled, slunk, throbbed, pulsated. He could hear a thousand heartbeats. They hammered his brain, then settled down as his body seemed to adapt.

He tried to look up but his head wouldn't move. Panic flared. His body wasn't broken, it was restrained somehow. His eyes flicked up and looked at a sky that seemed brown with diseased clouds. Flocks of strange pterodactyl-things and giant, bulbous flies swirled in the sky.

The smell was... David vomited down himself. The act felt almost pleasurable. Warmth spread down him.

Something was coming towards him through the jungle. Vines folded out of the figure's path.

David began to scream. His voice gurgled as his throat kept filling with snot.

The creature was human in shape only. Its belly was distended and torn. Guts hung from rents in the flesh. Its arms and legs were too long, and there was only one large eye in the centre of a face whose only other feature was a long, decaying mouth. A tongue, like a pink snake, drifted from its mouth, licking tiny, sharp teeth. The creature's most defining feature though, was the single horn that protruded from its forehead. A heart was impaled on the end of it. It was small enough to have been a baby's.

"Ah, officer David Trainor of the Titan Facility," the daemon said. "You know me as Sarah Carter. This is what I look like in the Warp."

"Whu - what do you want?" he shrieked at her.

"We made a deal," she said, sounding surprised that he didn't know. "I thought you needed a whore?"

Dark humor to end it all. Well done NoPoet. It was a very well done piece. And Papa Nurgle claims the win, all the better.

Crazy woman will be crazy, that and Well done! A Nice read from end to end