Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hello there. You can call me Blight. I’m a 40k and AoS player from Iowa and I’ve been asked to share this story with you and maybe articles about 40k and AoS if people are interested.

Well here goes

Despair

He had failed. The thought filled him with more dread than awaiting the charge of a greenskin horde. The shaso stared at the corpse of the ethereal his detachment had been assigned to protect. His troops had gathered around the impromptu funeral, some openly wept and he didn’t have the heart to discipline them. They all now bore the burden of allowing one of the greatest tragedies to have ever befallen their sept.

It was just supposed to have been a simple operation to annex this Agri-World. What the humans called a warp storm had overtaken the system and it was determined that the planet had been cut off from their Imperium of Man. Then the barbarians came.

Their ship had screamed into the system like a predator pouncing on prey. When their troop carriers fell from the sky he was prepared to fight Space Marines; what he got were monsters. Savage versions of the enhanced, guel’a, warriors bounded out riding giant beasts of fur and fang. It had taken the entire firing line to fell one when the rest of the pack had burst from a nearby ruin. Their leader had barreled his way to the honored ethereal and tore him to pieces without hesitation or regard to the great one’s pleas for reason. From there it had almost become a complete rout but he managed to regain a semblance of order and drove them off with the help of the riptide heavy battle suits he had been assigned. Now all that was left was the sounds of still near howls and their shame. The wolves would return soon.

As the shaso brooded on their situation the unnatural skyline had taken on a sickly quality and the droning of insects could be heard on the wind. His suit’s COMM burst into life and from it came the sound of thousands of tiny wings beating in unison. It had begun to take an almost familiar melody; like a song he could almost remember being sung by a stranger. He tried to raise the others and confirm if they were recieving the same strange signal, but none of them reacted to his calls. They could still be lost in mourning. Then a voice became audible over the haunting sound. It was barely a whisper at first but soon it was as if the voice was in the suit with him. He could feel foetid breath on his ear. He had wanted to disengage his COMM, open his suit (anything to stop this), but a strange malaise had gripped him.

“Worry not little one, I wish you no harm. Rarely does your kind even glimmer in the sea of souls but your despair is a shining beacon in the dark. Such suffering is rare, potent.” The voice spoke with the dying words of a thousand mortals on their sickbeads.

The shaso had vomited inside of his suit at some point he could not recall and his suit blared with warnings for his vitals but he continued to listen while the droning began to sound like a woman faintly humming.

“Your sadness must find an outlet. Allow me to aid you. Allow me to ease your suffering as only the grandfather can.” The voice began to change too, taking on distinctly feminine and disturbingly familiar qualities.

“What would you ask in return?” He choked out through phlegm caked lips.
“I wish for nothing but to share my father’s gifts with you and your people, and bring you deliverance. All you have to do is let me in” the voice said.

The shas’o was becoming light headed. He wasn’t sure how long he had stood over the corpse of the ethereal but now it was all he could see. The humming was growing louder and he could almost recognize the melody. Then as fever sweat creased his brow it came to him in a flood like a boil bursting at fullness. As a young child he had contracted a debilitating fever that had almost crippled him. His future as a firewarrior was in question but his matriarch had stayed by his side and tended to his sickbed. She taught him the combat drills he had missed from the day’s lessons. At his worst moments she had hummed a local song she had picked up from the guel’a. The song was now all he heard and then with a cracked and bleeding smile he began to hum.

Their commander had not moved from his place of mourning for some time and some fire warriors began to worry that he had become catatonic in his grief. There were always rumors of such things happening to commanders who had allowed an ethereal to die. Then the shas’o jerked suddenly as if in a palsey. His body guards moved to aid him but as they did their COMMs came to sudden life. All they could hear was the sound of their commander humming, and it was infectious. As the signal spread from ear piece to ear piece the whole of the detachment began to hum in sync. Suits began to leak brackish fluids from ruptured seals. Armor plates began to corrode and flake, and power cells began to whine with strain. As one they turned to their shas’o, now the leader of their choir, from whom a great pool of detritus had formed. A huge hand burst from the pool and began to pull it’s colossal bulk into this world. “The bargain is struck” it said with the voice of a woman long dead.

-------If you liked this, the rest of the story can be found: http://midwestwargaming.com/despair-short-40k-story/