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Hi all. I've been hammering away for the last few weeks with various real-life commitments. I've been working on a /Nosleep horror story which is posted on Reddit and is doing fairly well for a first effort (if only I'd picked a better title, damn it).

My 20K, HH and 40K commitments have not been forgotten. I've hardly written anything about the Eldar and yet they have a genuinely fascinating backstory. The latest Codex makes the Craftworld Eldar really interesting. They're beaten, they're spent and they clearly need to start having more sex. Their former gods are dead, and their new god (interesting how nobody's ever run with the idea that Slaanesh is technically an Eldar deity) wants to torture their souls forever. Despite this, they're still blowing on the dying embers of hope, thinking they own the galaxy.

This thread will be updated as I write more fiction. These are intended to be colour text that was fun to write and quick to read.

-1- One distant day (Farseer)



-2- Red River (Storm Guardians)



-3- We Will Always Resist (Crone World)

A fine colection of stories, Well done and moar please

Really awesome stuff. Thoroughly enjoyed all three. Looking forward to some more any time you like.

You really could run this series for ages (please do!) with a short blast on each of the Warrior Aspects and other combatants, a short story for each Craftworld, historical events, mythological tales. The possibilities with Eldar are actually so huge I'm surprised there's not more Eldar fiction on DakkaDakka.

Would love to read some Exodite Dragon Knight fiction if you have a notion for it.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks gents. Writing fiction of any kind has taken a back burner due to real-life stuff.

I'm currently planning a Heresy-era "Eldar Seers Meet Mortarion" story.

You're right though, the Eldar don't get any love in the fiction. GW seems to ignore the Eldar.

-4- Blood Fealty (Dark Eldar)

“We do not justify ourselves to false kings,” Shelah said. “You are little better than the mon-keigh, scurrying in darkness, betraying their own kind.”
“Beware, whore of Khaine,” the man replied with a cold smile. “There are those among my children who would make you scream louder than that pretty mask ever could.”
“You filth!” Fermah railed. “You speak to a warrior who defended our culture long before your kind tore it down.”
“I see,” said the dark king. “And in the millennia since our brothers and sisters were dragged screaming into hell, how have our noble Craftworld kin fared? Is our empire rebuilt? Have you enslaved or destroyed She Who Thirsts? Have you silenced that noisy bonfire cast by the mon-keigh Emperor? Or is the child-goddess still hungry? Are your Craftworlds all in ruin? Are your seers still blinded by a human’s light?”
- Blood Fealty part 3, "Parley with Monsters"

Part One: Journey into Hell

When the portal opened, she felt the brightest, coldest fear of her existence.

She had lived through the destruction of her people, and faced the false deity humans called Mortarion; she had destroyed the Arcane World-Sphere, killing Traylor the Silent King before his warriors could unleash their horror upon the galaxy; a Tyranid norn queen had fallen to her blade.
The greenskin knew her as the Screaming Devil. In the Or’an Sector, thousands of Tau soldiers swore blood oaths to hunt her and slay her for her “crimes”. Fifty million Imperial Guard witnessed her slaying the plague marine Belgoth the Vomitous, and while the crumbling Imperium claimed victory over the renegade legions, Shelah Frozen Star had left the human warriors with a single question: if a lone Exarch could end a war with a stroke of her blade, what could the guardians of Arashnor Craftworld do to an Imperial battlefleet? Shelah Frozen Star had slain enemy warlords, had sliced her way through battalions of soldiers of every species. The Imperium had cancelled plans to attack her Craftworld – a battle which the humans would certainly have won – because of her.

And she knew horror.

Three Harlequins stood to her right. Only three.

They were a silent riot of colour, of meaning, their auras speaking of a restrained lust to perform, to show her the secrets underlying existence. While their masks were currently blank, leaving the merest suggestion of features, those faces would project ultimate terrors when the performers were engaged in dance or battle, if they even recognised a difference between these disciplines.

Shelah glanced behind her. The defenders of Arashnor had sent five of their greatest warriors to show the Craftworld’s dedication: four Dire Avengers and their Exarch, each armed with shuriken weapons which could penetrate power armour. The Aspect Warriors stood as if in repose. They would leap into action faster than the speed of thought should violence be needed.

Nine souls would travel through the portal into hell. Only nine.

That was a number sacred to the Changer of Ways. It was all the Craftworld could spare. Shelah would have to ensure that this inauspicious sign did not represent irony, and did not end with tragedy.

The gateway before her was formed from rising blades of curved crystal. Wards of considerable potency had been woven into the gateway’s fabric. The entryway was a howling maw of blue power, threaded by lightning. Only those attuned to the spiritual plane would have seen it, though anyone could step through it, whether the portal was visible to them or not.

She showed no fear. Shelah stepped into the maw.

*

The party emerged into the webway. Shimmering blue walls formed tunnels through nothingness. The walls were partially translucent. Blackness beckoned beyond the webway’s fragile path. Terrors far greater than the Thirsting One’s children lived in the darkness outside; creatures spawned by some unimaginable primogenitor, things that existed only to devour those who travelled into the emptiness. They were the guardians which prevented mortals, daemons and even the gods themselves from trespassing into realms not meant for them. To contemplate such creatures was maddening even to the formidable mind of an Eldar Exarch. Shelah returned her attention to the webway, finding comfort in its gentle silence.

The party made its way along a route no human could have followed. The sanity-scorching turns, the sheer number of ways to go, as major arteries of the webway branched off into dozens of smaller routes. While this place was not without guardians of its own, it was probably the safest place an Eldar could reside. Safety was a relative term. Several times they crossed paths with alien travellers. Necrontyr warriors marched in silence, looking for life to kill. Debased worshippers of the Thirsting One waged war against Harlequin troupes, Biel-Tan warriors and the immaterial nightmares protecting the webway. These disparate groups were little more than ghosts or shadows to Shelah’s party. The webway knew what was coming, and it remembered what had been. To see something did not mean it was happening now.

Once, the party glimpsed towering human warriors wearing armour which resembled the power suits of the Adeptus Astartes, but which was far more sophisticated in appearance – where it had not been debased with iconography depicting mankind’s final fall into darkness. Some of these future Astartes were female. Shelah had no time to wonder at any of this, for they had reached their destination, the place which caused her to know dread.

She allowed the Harlequins, who had remained silent all this time, to lead her into Commorragh.

*

The stench hit her harder than any Ork warlord’s fist. Screams, shrieks, pleas, assailed her from the instant she left the webway. Even the Dire Avengers gasped when they saw the human torment around them. The walls screamed, shrieked, hundreds of arms waving helplessly. Faces screamed from the floors, the walls, the ceiling. Mouths opened to vomit black blood.

Eight of their dark kin waited in the wailing tunnel. Seven had their faces concealed behind visors of black wraithbone. Their apparent leader was a female with long red hair tied in a severe ponytail. Her face was terrifying. It was as though an Eldar maiden had been tortured on some crone world until the sunlight within her soul had been utterly eclipsed. Yet still, some dark radiance fluttered beneath her skin. The woman’s sneer was beyond cruel. What could twist someone with such hatred? What could empty an Eldar’s eyes of all hope?

A long scar ran down the left side of her face. Shelah immediately recognised the work of a Tyranid Genestealer. This woman was clearly a formidable warrior and well-chosen to lead her kin.

The dark warriors stood with insulting lack of readiness, as if they received deadly warriors every day, and as if pandemonium were not unfolding around them. And yet each was armed with weapons which dripped venom, a black acid which burned the floor and raised the stink of cooking meat. Their armour was all blades and jagged edges. Even above the human ruin, the scent of corrupted blood fluttered on the air, tormenting Shelah’s sense of smell. The dark kin did not simply wear their armour. It had been hooked and sliced into their flesh. Every movement drew blood.

“I hate the humans,” Arkith said, the Avenger stepping close to Shelah to voice his disgust, “but nothing deserves… this.”

“Perversion!” Fermah snarled. She seemed to be wrestling with herself, trying not to level her catapult at the dark kin. “Allow me to kill all these tortured souls, and deny the Commorites their satisfaction.”

“By all means,” said the woman leading their dark kin, “do what you must.” She whirled and shot one of her own men through the centre of his faceplate, blowing blood and wraithbone across the warriors behind him. The human tapestry wailed all the louder, pleading for her to shoot them too.

“Begging for destruction,” the dark leader said. “Tiresome, but funnier than listening to them pleading for life. What kind of life is it to be a mon-keigh?”

She had killed her man, then re-holstered her gun and returned to face the Craftworlders with a speed that only the most powerful Tyranid bio-form could have matched. Shelah was considered one of the fastest and most graceful warriors of her Craftworld. Even she reconsidered the level of threat from the dark kin, raising it from extreme to ultimate.

“You are no mere Kabalite warrior,” she said. This drew a wider, nastier smile, although the other’s eyes remained dead.

“My apologies, sister, but I can only understand you when you scream.”

Donning the mask of an Exarch had a notable effect on the wearer’s psyche. Millennia of specialised warfare projected themselves into the mind, into the soul. Only the most outrageous of threats could evoke even the slightest fear. Here, in this realm of torture, Shelah’s every reflex, every instinct warned her to kill and kill again, to end the dark kin and destroy this terrible place.

The Harlequins stepped between Craftworlder and Commorite. Two of the Harlequins’ face masks had become bronze faces caught somewhere between amusement and despair. The third displayed a face crying diamonds of blood.
There would be no killing just yet.

-4- Blood Fealty (Dark Eldar)

Part Two: The Dark City

The dead-eyed Commorite leader revealed her name to be Ha’kahte. That was as much as she spoke about herself. She led the Craftworlders and the Harlequins through a tortuous maze of buildings carved from black stone. Commorragh was far removed from the material universe, and the constructions around them reflected this. Spike-studded towers lanced thousands of feet overhead, seeming to twist like fingers clutching at the sky. The city’s distant architecture leaned and tilted at a variety of insane angles. It looked like Commorragh folded in upon itself. Green suns burned above. Each star had been dragged from the material universe, dooming whole civilisations, just so the dark kin could admire their vile beauty. None of their warmth reached the city-spires below. None of their energy was harnessed. They had been taken because they could be taken; the slow deaths of entire ecosystems had merely been an amusing side effect to be watched by those nobles and voyeurs with the power and influence to do so.

Laughing youths soared between buildings on skyboards and jetbikes shaped like dagger blades. Occasionally, a head would be neatly severed or a jetbike would shatter upon contact with monofilament wires stretching across chasms. Battles raged in some quarters of Commorragh. These were mostly between rival factions of Commorrite, although interestingly, the party flew far above a number of clanking Gargants. How had the orks managed to invade this place?

The Raider commandeered by Ha’kahte provided barely enough room for Shelah’s party. Only two dark kin, silent sentinels, accompanied their mistress. They held casually onto chains dangling from the Raider’s fins, chains that ended in monomolecular hooks which sliced armour and flesh each time the transport jinked to dodge passing traffic which came screaming past, or to avoid falling bodies.

Shelah and her Avengers also held on, looking around them with revulsion. Corpses dangled from the Raider’s hull to form a kind of skirt around it. Many were human. Several were orkoid. A small number were Tyranids. Two were Eldar. These two had suffered the foulest abuse before their deaths.

Ha’kahte sneered at the Craftworlders, reading their body language.

“Do you appreciate the view?” she asked politely, her tone at odds with her expression. “Does it make a pleasant change from all those trees and crystals?” Strangely, as Ha’kahte spoke, a voice whispered different words in Shelah’s mind: “How did you restrain yourself from drinking your father’s blood while the Maiden Worlds fell?”

The memories evoked by that whisper were too unexpected to be properly distressing.

They passed a large building daubed with glyphs that had been ancient when the Eldar race fell. It only took the Raider a moment to pass the building, such was its ferocious speed. Shelah heard the most dire sounds emanating from the building in that moment. She had heard enemies sobbing in despair before, but she had never heard such abject hopelessness from anyone. The Exarch was almost unaffected for now; but later, when she returned to Arashnor, she knew the sounds would come back to her. Shelah’s dreams were wretched indeed – thousands of years of enemies roaring, pleading, all dying, none of them dying well – and now she would have new dreams as well.

They drew nearer to what appeared at first to be some type of arena. A huge circular space curved behind an obsidian monolith of a building, whose lines had seemingly been etched in green fire. The sense of dread emanating from this building was strong enough to constrict the lungs. Even Shelah’s Exarch armour could not blot out the worst of it. Her dreams reared up in her imagination: Space Marines gasping and dying as she slit their throats and stabbed them time and again, Tau officers pleading for their squadmate’s lives as she hacked her way through them all. So many deaths, the screaming so loud, and this building drowned it all out just by being there. Who could say what manner of desecration had occurred here, over how many millennia?

A ledge jutted from that morbid building. Their Raider came to an immediate stop several feet away from it. Humans would certainly have been thrown forward, to plunge screaming to the ground thousands of feet below. None of the Eldar were caught unawares or even jolted. Each one of them had to leap across the dizzying void to reach the ledge. The Harlequins seemed to shimmer and flicker as they cartwheeled through the air to land without a sound. Ha’kahte and her men simply jumped without showing off any acrobatic skills.

“Guard your thoughts, brothers and sisters,” the Commorite said to them. Her eyes met the blazing eye sockets of Shelah’s mask. “The creatures of shadow gather in the gloom,” that unknown voice whispered in Shelah’s mind.

There are no psykers among the dark kin, Shelah reminded herself. There are no daemons in the dark city. The Craftworlders must have been exposed to some toxin upon arrival here, something that played with their minds.

“Come now, sister,” Ha’kahte said. “I thought the vaunted Exarchs were strangers to fear?”

In the back of her mind, the Exarch heard the words, “Your life will end upon the walls of Commoragh, and your soul will wish it had been claimed by the Thirsting One.”

(More to follow)

-4- Blood Fealty (Dark Eldar)

Part Three: Parley with Monsters

If Commorragh’s vista wasn’t nightmarish enough, the building’s interior was a representation of Eldar hell.

Vast statues of spike-armoured warriors reared around the party. Each was crafted from a variety of metal so precious that civilisations had become extinct in their quest to obtain them. Each was a work of art whose talent and vision went beyond genius, beyond insanity, to that realm far beyond both which only the most gifted and tormented Eldar knew. And each was posed as if disembowelling or otherwise slaughtering some unseen adversary. No enemy of the Eldar would be immortalised in sculpture. Aliens were simply ingredients to be painted onto walls, or grown into new things. They were worthy of notice only because of their ability to suffer. Suffering was indeed the theme within this building, which was little more than a throne room of epic scale. Bodies beyond counting were sown into the walls. Eldar, human, so many races were blended together, all of them alive, all of them writhing in torment.

An unfamiliar sensation itched in Shelah’s eyes. The Exarch realised she was weeping. Tears of an Exarch were among the most sought-after elements in existence. A sorrowful Exarch, that rarest of rare beings, would attract clouds of daemons to crystalise in the air around her. Legend had it that Craftworld seers had used this to strike at the Thirsting One’s children and taunt that wicked god – to denude her of a portion of her power. Could such a thing be done? Would it make any difference?

Who knew what vile flesh magic the dark kin might work with an Exarch’s tears?

“This is abomination!” Fermah snarled. “We should slay these throwbacks and grant mercy to the suffering wretches on the walls.”

The Harlequins did not physically react to this. Instead, their masks changed to reflect comical expressions of surprise. Dire Avengers were among the most merciless of killers. Fermah had always retained much of his nobility of spirit even in his armour. The spirit-stones of those who had worn it before him could never quite temper Fermah’s emotions. It was the Arashnor way to allow its warriors some memory of who they had been in their former lives. Rather than offer a weakness for the enemy to exploit, it drove Arashnor’s warriors far harder, as they were reminded not just of what they were fighting for, but why they did so.

The Avenger’s horror only drew another smirk from Ha’kahte. She led the party towards the throne at the far wall of the chamber. It took several minutes for the party to reach the figure seated within the throne, such was the chamber’s size. They remained far outside the range of any hurled dagger; not even the rulers of Commorragh would brook the slightest possibility of treason against them.

Twenty Incubi warriors stood at the ready around the throne. Each of these tall and muscular warriors wore armour more ornate than the kabalite warriors escorting the Craftworlders. Every Incubus held a staff whose bladed edges thrummed with power. They wore identical skull masks, painted white, which regarded harlequin and Craftworlder with equal contempt.

The man sitting in the throne was half-naked. Thin, plastic-looking robes defended his modesty. An alarming tapestry of tattoos and scars decorated what flesh could be seen. The portion of his torso visible behind his robes was rippled with muscle. He sat brooding, looking somewhere above the party’s heads, unwilling to sully his eyes by looking directly at his guests.

Silence fell, though it could never be truly silent in this place, for the walls themselves groaned with a pain that went beyond words.

“Is this all you send?” the man said after a few moments. His voice carried with amazing strength. “A smattering of outcasts, with three painted fools?”

The Craftworlders stiffened at this fresh outrage. Each Harlequin’s mask told a different story, though their expressions contained varied hints of amusement.

“We do not justify ourselves to false kings,” Shelah said. “You are little better than the mon-keigh, scurrying in darkness, betraying their own kind.”

“Beware, whore of Khaine,” the man replied with a cold smile. “There are those among my children who would make you scream louder than that pretty mask ever could.”

“You filth!” Fermah railed. “You speak to a warrior who defended our culture long before your kind tore it down.”

“I see,” said the dark king. “And in the millennia since our brothers and sisters were dragged screaming into hell, how have our noble Craftworld kin fared? Is our empire rebuilt? Have you enslaved or destroyed She Who Thirsts? Have you silenced that noisy bonfire cast by the mon-keigh Emperor? Or is the child-goddess still hungry? Are your Craftworlds all in ruin? Are your seers still blinded by a human’s light?”

“We fight,” Shelah replied in an even voice, motioning for Fermah to back down. “We confront our enemies and destroy them where this is possible. We escape the Thirsting One’s hells. Our souls belong to us.”

The king remained silent.

“Tell me,” Shelah continued. “Has the emptiness inside you been filled? Do you commit forbidden acts of torture for nothing more than sport? Dare you venture into our galaxy and remain there, unshrouded by the cobwebs of the webway?”

“The same hell waits for us all.” It was the first time any of the Harlequins had spoken since arriving on Arashnor Craftworld. That seemed so long ago now. “You know why we are here, dread king. The son of Horus is ascendant. He is leading the final attack against his former brothers.”

“The Space Marines,” sighed the king. “Always the Space Marines. One cannot indulge his baser desires in the privacy of his own dungeon without mon-keigh elite raining down on him.”

“We cannot allow Abaddon's attack to succeed,” said Shelah.

“He will fail, as he has always failed. Does the Imperium not take him seriously this time?”

“The Imperium cannot prevail,” said another of the Harlequins. Their voices were strangely without passion, and it was hard to identify a speaker’s gender without glancing at the curves of their bodies. “They will never acknowledge this, but they require allies.”

“Again,” said the king. “How many times is this now? Thirteen?”

“That number has some significance to the mon-keigh,” the third Harlequin said. This was news even to shelah and the dark king.

“Interesting,” said the king, tracing clawed fingers across his own face. “Perhaps they are soon to birth their own god. I wonder what that would be like?” He smiled. His features were impossibly handsome. “I wonder what it would do, and where you would seek to go while it happened.” He glanced around him. “There is always room on my walls…”

“You are wasting our time,” Shelah said. “The humans cannot be allowed to fall. We must fight. We must commit everything we have.”

Ha’kahte exchanged a passionless look with her leader.

“If the humans cannot resolve their own problems, then of course we must intervene once more,” she said. Her sarcasm seemed almost childish. “However, I believe my lord’s price will be steep. Steeper than last time, certainly.”

“Claim all the mon-keigh you want,” replied Shelah. “It is of no consequence, so long as your enjoyment of them does not strengthen our enemies.”

“No daemons shall suckle on their souls,” the king said, sounding insulted. “The Thirsting Children won’t even hear a whimper of pain. That is for our entertainment only. I do believe that many of those poor doomed mon-keigh will wish they had been taken by daemons. Tell me, warrior, why you impose just this one trite condition. Why are Banshees so blunt? It is you who are barely above the mon-keigh. I would see you abase yourself before me.”

“Never,” Shelah said with genuine anger. The spirits within her armour tried to goad her towards attack. She would have died, of course, probably in a way more horrible than she could imagine. She wondered how many of the dark kin would fall before that happened.

“There will be no bloodshed between us,” all three Harlequins said at once. It was such an eerie moment that even the dark king fell silent.

“There will most certainly be bloodshed between us,” Ha’kahte said, eyeing Shelah with undisguised enjoyment. “I will face you in the arena when this is done. We will fight, and your screams will nourish my soul for millennia to come.”

“You have no soul,” Shelah replied. “You are an empty doll, as are all your kind. Your victory, if such may be, will be as empty as your eyes.”

“Such love between kindred,” one of the Harlequins said. Their masks each displayed mocking amusement.

“Go, then,” said the dark king. “Let us be done with this pretence. Assemble your forces, as I will assemble mine. We go to war; and we shall wreak such vengeance upon our enemies that the gods themselves will foul the warp in fear.”

As the Craftworlders were led back to the Raider, plots were already being set in motion by each Eldar faction. There would never be any lasting truce, as there could never be a lasting peace in the wider galaxy. For all of fate was ruled by the God of Change, and the God of Change was either cruel beyond all ken, or hopelessly insane.

-End-

A nice story that just keeps on getting better with each new instalment. Well done sir, well done.

Also your horror story is damned good!

EDIT: Oops, simultaneous post. Thank you very much Trondheim. As ever, your feedback is very welcome.

-5- Eye of the Gods (Death Guard, Naval battle)

He felt the deaths of his brothers and sisters even as his vessel was rocked by the detonation of theirs.

Elajhn gripped the wraithbone growth in front of him. It served as a tactical console which projected information directly into a crew member’s brain. The captain watched in a mixture of horror and fury as a graceful white work of art, formerly the starship known as Elendril ol Thuamas, evaporated under enemy fire. Swathes of tactical data were projected over the scene: fleet dispositions, contamination monitors, enough information to wound the mind of one lacking Elajhn’s centuries of experience.

“Maintain fire on your targets,” the captain told his crew without emotion. “They must not leave the Eye.”

The interior of Elhaddu hel Vaul Shraine, which translated as something like Vaul’s Sharpened Hammer, was as white as its exterior. The consoles and support structures were cyan blue. Warp spiders rippled across every surface. The little guardian mites were birthing and dying in their millions to keep the vessel’s interior free of daemonic taint. Crew wearing the blue armour of Elhaddir Craftworld tried to ignore the bucking motion of their vessel, tried to block out the soul-screams of their dying kin, whose essence was even now being devoured by flocks of daemonic entities.

We should never have come here, thought Elajhn. This was never our war.

The Solstice-class battle cruiser recovered its poise as it flew through the explosion of its sister ship. Tracer fire and torpedoes from nearby mon-keigh vessels narrowly missed the agile Eldar vessel. Its solar sails caught a stream of tainted energy – this whole region of space was little short of a stable warp-storm – and the Elhaddu was catapulted forward. The great crest of wraithbone and solar sails fanning out behind and above the vessel’s nose was studded with plasma beamers and torpedo launchers. Every weapon still capable of firing was unleashing hell into the enemy fleet.

Golden beams blasted against void shields. Rotted hull sections bearing the marks of Nurgle were cooked free. Enemy torpedoes, bastardised variants of Imperial designs, were punctured and detonated with shocking force, or else knocked off course and sent spiralling towards other renegade vessels. Traitor Astartes captains were forces to throw unwieldy vessels into evasive manoeuvres. Some vessels all but came apart under the strain. So many near-collisions were averted in the final moments. The Death Guard fleet was utterly disrupted by the actions of just a handful of Eldar vessels.

Star-pulses spat from the Elhaddu’s torpedo launchers. These were not the massive, technologically backward hulks used by Imperials and traitors. Each Eldar torpedo was no more than ten feet in length. Yet for its small size, its honed wraithbone tip could penetrate yards of adamantium armour; sophisticated guidance systems sought out weak points in shield banks, and fractures in hull armour. The torpedoes could dodge incoming fire. Their warheads unleashed an ultra-reactive plasma storm which incinerated crew members, melted technology into slag, detonated ammunition stores and even depleted oxygen. The residue left behind was radioactive to kill anything wearing less than mon-keigh Terminator armour. Dozens of these torpedoes impacted against Death Guard plague ships. It was a testament to the brutality of Imperial design that the renegade vessels were not immediately engulfed in destruction, and a dire warning that the Death Guard Astartes did not simply lay down and die.

The Captain was alerted to the death of another Eldar vessel. This one had been somehow boarded by Deathshroud Terminators. The mon-keigh were stupid and slow but they fulfilled their one purpose well: they were hacking apart Eldar crew members, and in some cases throwing living Eldar out into the void through rents the Terminators chopped into the hull. Spirit stones were being crushed for the sheer spite of it. The crew were primarily civilians who had agreed to fight. Elhaddir Craftworld’s beating heart was being drained of its lifeblood.

Starseer Kehlmonn contacted Elajhn not via some crude radio signal, but via the mind.

“The Thirsting One’s disciples have been defeated,” the seer said, his mental voice sounding like the whisper of a ghost. “Withdraw.”

Elajhn forced down the elation he felt, knowing the extremes of Eldar emotions would draw more daemonic interest. The last starship belonging to the worshippers of dread Slaanesh had been destroyed.

The Death Guard were a long, long way from defeated. If anything, their shots were drawing nearer to the Elhaddu. It was not the Death Guard whose defeat the Eldar sought.

“Retreat to the portal,” Elajhn ordered his crew. They showed no sign of the relief all must have felt; yet he could read it in the flickers of their minds.

The Eye of Terror swelled around the seventeen fleeing Eldar vessels. Two smaller escort ships were blown to pieces. More souls to be swallowed by the Thirsting One, more horrific, tortuous losses suffered by a dying people. Space itself was diseased here. They seemed to be within a nebula all the colours of a fresh bruise. Clouds of stellar gas were as blood clots which clogged a vessel’s intake ports. Leaving this cursed place behind took a strange weight off the soul.

Eighty-one starships dedicated to the Plague God left the Eye of Terror. They did not pursue the Eldar, knowing there was no way to catch them; it would be easier to catch starlight with your hand than hunt down a Solstice-class ship. Instead, the traitors turned towards Cadia, to the naval battles raging in that region.

Elajhn did not spare a thought for the millions that would die once the Death Guard armada joined the fight. He instead recalled the peace and beauty of Elhaddir Craftworld, and how he loved to tend his garden of crystal flowers, and how the worshippers of the Thirsting One had left his Craftworld a near-ruin populated largely by the dead.

If these were to be the final years of the formerly august Craftworld, Elajhn vowed that something of beauty would remain, even if no-one was left to see it.