Chapter Text
If there's one thing I've learned in the course of my long and discreditable career as accidental warlord and reluctant rebel against the Imperium, apart from the fact that the more blatant the lie the more likely it is to be believed, it's that I bloody well hate Necrons. Two of them, in particular.
Things were going as well as they ever did in the Cainite Protectorate, which is to say they were going frakking terrifyingly on a nearly daily basis, but I had managed to foist most of the work off on my absurdly competent subordinates while managing to persuade them against doing anything unwise, like, for example, transposing the whole of Slawkenberg into the Eye of Terror or picking a direct fight with the Imperium and thus reclassifying ourselves as enemy number one instead of enemy number 10 on the long list of existensial threats to that ridiculously large and ridiculously potent polity. Given that my only reliable tool was my charm and my completely overinflated reputation, I still wake up in a cold sweat imagining every possible way all of it could have gone spectacularly wrong.
My general strategy had settled into a weary groove at that point. I settled most of my problems by using one problem as a distraction for another. The Tau wanted to set up an enclave on Slawkenberg? Well, Jafar, my local Tzeenchian schemer, was getting bored so I aimed him at them with orders to find out 'what they were really up to' and 'how to best persuade them to support the cause of Liberation.'' A bunch of orcs show up speaking Gothic, wearing Imperial Uniforms, and generally pretending to be 'fighty humies?' Let them join the army and set the Khornates to training them, with the proviso that the Orks liberate their Gretchen. A bunch of newly liberated Gretchen try to reboot the Slawkenberg underworld and black market? Set the Slaaneshi cults on figuring out how to help the grotlings have fun without stripping an entire human world for buggy parts. All with a smile, a nod, a handshake, and as few a thwaks with my sword as I could manage without losing my reputation for disciplined leadership and heroically leading from the front.
That, and teaching everything I knew about lying, cheating, scammming and every other tool of the political trade to my adopted daughter and heir, Zerayah Cain, the last biological daughter of the assasin Legionstrasse. Zerayah had grown into quite a delightful young woman who probably wouldn't turn into a galaxy eating monster to rival the Tyranids because, so far at least, she was a sweet young lady eager to please and knew her Daddy wouldn't approve if she accidentally, or even deliberately, snacked on a planet. She seemed to like her Daddy's delightfully chaotic peaceful world or Slawkenberg and the larger Protectorate the way it was, thank you very much, and was having more fun secretly dating secret Primarchs and solving the increasingly challanging Cainburg Daily Crossword Puzzle. I should probably stop thinking of her as ‘young,’ since she’d passed her fiftieth year some time ago, and I was approaching my nineties, a venerable age I’d never expected to live to.
Still, I was quite proud of how my schola-honed skills at lying, sneaking off, and never getting caught had transferred to parenthood, and Slawkenberg had turned into a disturbingly healthy place to raise children of any sort. It was more than a bit humbling how many eldrich Powers, vile Xenos, humans, abhumans, ogryns, and the odd tech-priest just wanted a better life for their kids, servitor companions, abominable intelligeneces, and half-human monstrosities, and I had become used to playing that tendency like a fiddle in order to persuade them to not turn whole Imperial worlds in general and Slawkenberg in particular into uninhabited wastelands filled with the screams of the unhallowed dead in order to keep their progeny safe.
The problem with Necrons...and I was to discover later, that that literally is THE problem- is that they don't have kids. They’ve become a bunch of grumpy, bickering old natural disasters because of it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was hosting the Parent's Fifth Annual Slawkenberg No Stakes Tarot Tournament, an event I'd started as a joke and had quite honestly turned into the most relaxing week of the year. Grant you, it involved me playing Tarot with almost every terrifying abomination that had rallied to my standard, up to an including a fully manifested Demon Princess Emeli, my long-term girlfriend and Most Significant Other, but I was feeling very nearly safe. Ah, those were the good old days, when all I had to worry about was the obsessive love of a being fully capable of snacking on my soul if she decided I was no longer good enough in bed.
I had heavily stacked the odds in favor of me being safe, of course, since safety is not a gift that ever happens by accident but instead has to be fostered and managed as carefully as a techpriest moderates an underwater volcano-fusion power plant.
The Tournament was another of Slawkenberg's invented festivals, cleverly sited NOT on famous Imperium Holidays so that when the inevitable Emperorfearing boot came down on our rebellion and they took back our world and our calender, the old celebrations could safely slot right back where they came from, and the clever Imperial Ecclesiarchs would take the best bits of the new ones and slap a new saint on them.
With that in mind, I had set about creating a holiday to the restful comfort of playing with friends. 'Friends' gave me the perfect excuse to delegate to the bored Slaaneshi Handmaidens the huge logistical task of shipping off every juve in Slawkenberg to some tailor-made mischief they could get into with their respective gangs of age-mates, leaving all parents at loose ends and free to indulge in some adult mischief with their friends. Between the comprehensive childcare and Slawkenberg’s constellation of resorts, camps, hideouts, and getaways, the Festival was designed to truly give parents few days off from parenting and indulge themselves. And, as the Liberator, I was expected to lead the charge and set a square-jawed, stirling example. I was good at setting examples, although usually the example I am condemned to set is how to charge fearlessly into battle. Trust me when I say I far prefer to fearlessly nap, sip amasec, and play no-stakes tarot.
In stark contrast to my younger days, I was getting rather fond of no-stakes Tarot. After all, the last time I had flexed my tarot skill and really took someone to the cleaners, it had been that Administratum clerk I'd put in my debt- a debt I'd generously forgiven for the low price of editing some paperwork to ship me to an obscure backwater vacation world called Slawkenberg to live out an obscure commissar career occasionally filling out paperwork. I'd thought it had been a win at the time, and not the choice that condemned me to becoming a traitor to the Imperium and reluctant leader of a horde of Chaos-worshipping loons.
In any case, I'd rather lost my taste for leaving opportunities for the Galaxy to screw me via cards, which is why I preferred simply to play to win without sullying the game with bets. It had taken a metric ton of propaganda. I’d paid several authors to write 'the opposite of a war story: the comfiest, coziest, friendliest tale where the stakes are low, everyone lives, and everyone has a mildy good time.' I’d sponsored dozens of artists to create the sort of music you would want to listen to in a recaf house or when riding an elevator. It involved setting every Chaos cult novitiate to casting minor cantrips specifically designed to encourage limits, boundaries, and velvet-roped barriers to blunt emotions and hedge against the sort of soaring, transcendant emotions that are key to all of the most damaging aspects of the Chaos Powers.
It was all worth it. By dint of a year's worth of focused preparation, I'd...genuinely succeeding in having three extrmely boring days and was dilligently beavering away at carrying the gentle lassitude of utter relaxation into the evening of the fourth.
So there I was, playing cards with the most parental of my terrifying collection of subordinates. Jafar had shipped his equally twisty offspring to the beach. Suture, the beat-up space Marine who seemed to be on nobody’s side but his own, claimed that even though his gene-sons were dead he still counted as a parent. Areelu despite celebrating the recent complete curing of her demon-daughter, was still learning and mostly failing at the fine art of not becoming a beloved smother. Grand Admiral Lady Dame Marlow Cloris’s children were evenly split between following her defection to my side and denouncing their parent as the greatest traitor since Horus. Vice Queen Regina Kasteen appeared to be compensating for the Adumbrian Plague by attempting to repopulate the world herself with a squad of admirable men of all ages, creeds, and classes of Adumbrian society. She told me she'd picked them on the basis of being excellent fathers able do to the majority of the childcare while Kasteen ruled a planet. Not that she was an uninvolved parent, not by any means- this was the only day she granted herself entirely free of parental responsibilities as well, and her dad squad was living it up at other tarot tables scattered around the ballroom while their mob had all set off with their nursemaids, aunts, and cronies and taken the day to make a concerted assault on the Slawkenberg Zoo. I'd picked each of these folks to play with because, although every one one of these people scared me to the bottom of the shriviled lump of cowardice and self-interest I call my soul, they had two essential virtues. They were the very best at turning off their innate menace and their desire to talk shop, and twisty enough to give me a really good card game. My faithful aide, Jurgen, hovered around the table, plying everyone with refreshments. I wish he was good at cards to, but since he was the ideal aide in nearly every other way I forgave him his lack of Tarot skills.
I didn't really feel like socializing at that point, mind you, what with the next campaign gearing up and me having to go gallavanting off with the fleet to do the usual unicycling along a high-wire juggling chainswords dance of defending billions of lives from the ravening tyranids while preventing my subordinates from overreaching into the immaterium and feeding us all to the Chaos Gods, or, Emperor help us, poking the Imperium into reprioritizing us to the very tip-top of their endless to-do list. Granted, we numbered some hundred planets, but the Imperium had single planets whose entire population outnumbered the entire Protectorate. The imperium had more than a hundred such planets. No, our best strategy was to keep ducking, covering, and riding to the rescue of settlements while the Imperium was too busy sucker-punching whole hive fleets to bother with our little rebellion. Maybe the Emperor wouldn't destroy every last remnant of my soul if I ended up at the foot of the Golden Throne having saved a hundred of His worlds from the Great Devourer.
Grant you, feeding them into heresy might count against me. The Chaos Gods weren’t called ‘the Great Enemy’ by the Imperium because of a few minor theological differences. However, in my defense every world in the protectorate still had a sizable minority of emperorbotherers whose legal right to practice worship of the Golden Throne was enshrined in the Protectorate constitution, and they had quite a large voting block in the Protectorate Commons.
Fortunately, Jafar interrupted my ruminations before i could be the one the slide into shop talk. "Two steel. Ante up." He purred, grinning sinisterly over the top of his cards. Jafar truly had a marvelously sinister grin, which was part of how I could tell he was genuinely kicking back and having fun. He went out of his way to look like the serious high civil servant he was, dependable and clever, when he was truly up to something dire. We were playing with nuts. Ordinary Mechanicus clockwise turning nuts, of the sort to bolt together millions of everyday items. It was in part my nod to the participation of the Mechanicus, who asserted that their apprenticeships were similar enough to parenthood to qualify and they deserved a break too, and in part my effort to find the most boring, cheap, ordinary thing imaginable to truly lower the stakes. Of course, a hierarchy had immediately evolved about which nuts were 'more valuable' than others, based entirely on the silly schema evolved by the characters in the most popular series of cozy novels.
I smiled rakishly back. "Call." I said, tossing in my bet. I had a nothing hand so far, a psyker and an artisan, but I raised my eyebrow with the ease of a born dissembler...before eyeing Kasteen. "Fold." She smiled. She really was a bit too forthright as a player, and I wondered if this were a way to help train her in the essential capacity for lies and deceit any ruler needed. Then again, she was perfectly capable of feinting on the battlefield, so maybe she was just relaxing too, and following my ban on shop talk. Admiral Cloris folded and Suture raised, raising his scarred brow at me with an even more sinister grin than Jafar's. Areelu debated visibly with herself, then matched the raise. Jafar raised his eyebrow at Sutre, and matched the bet. I grinned even wider...and folded. "Getting a bit rich for my blood." I smirked. Sometimes it was more fun to sit back and let others do the bluffing. I was pretty confident Jafar had this hand, though I had yet to get a decent read on Suture through all the scarring. He did seem like a fairly steady player who only ran the occasional bluff, and I was willing to bet this wasn't one of them. Besides, if I let them duke it out I could make eyes at Kasteen and Admiral Cloris. Neither of them were exactly to my taste, but both were...fairly tame and comfy in bed, especially compared to my Demon Princess girlfriend, who had decided dematerialize and find her own entertainment in the Warp tonight since 'cozy' and 'comfortable' was...just about the opposite of her preference for flaming, obsessive, incredibly intricate love. But I'd convinced her of the benefits of balance, and her obsession with my 'ascension as her equal' was even stronger than her desire to shag the ever living daylights out of me in ever-more-complicated ways on my carefully orchestrated days off.
Kasteen smiled back, and winked at me. Admiral Cloris smiled back at me, and turned aside to make eyes at Jafar. Well, that narrowed down the odds considerably. Still...I thought to myself, while loading up the opening line to a light flirtation, an unfamiliar feeling of warm safety settling into my body, I wish this night could last forever.*
The room froze. The feeling froze with it. My hands didn't tingle, my bowls didn't turn to water, no frission of ice crawled it's way up my spine- and that's how I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong.
"No need to fear." The wizened old man said. "All my grandchildren are elsewhere. Your rules were very specific...no children allowed." He smiled, revealing a mouth of rotting teeth. "So I came myself."
My hand tried to dive for my sidearm, the ceremonial bolt pistol I kept with me day or night, but my motions were slow, as if diving through thick sludge.
"You're in no danger from me today, boy." The old man's breath smelled, but no more so than any underhive geezer. The old man's skin smelled, but hardly more than a room full of oldsters at the veteran society bingogammon hall. His clothes were shabby, threadworn, but no more than those of a comfortable old man lounging in comfortable old clothes.
He pulled a chair out from under Sutre and sat himself down, leaving the hulking marine suspended in time and in air. He availed himself of one of Sutre's copper nuts, as well. "Care to play?" He grinned even wider. "The stakes are very low."
"You're looking...almost civilize, Nurgle." I bit out. I had bought peace and unity between the followers of three of the Chaos Gods by convincing them all their Gods wanted them to declare war on the forth. Nurgle had been trying to kill me for it ever since.
"Civilized? Yes. It's the rules. Your rules." The Chaos God of Decay tried for a grandfatherly grin, and the fact that it came so close to being exactly right made it all the more hideous when it came out wrong. His eyes glowed, very briefly, leaking puss, and every minor cantrip in the room flared in warning. The puss vanished, and the wards settled back down. "Nothing exciting. Nothing overwhelming. No flourishing. Just a nice, dull, moderate, stagnate evening. Very restful. Very like my Garden."
"Your Garden is nothing but dispair." I ground out. I still felt very nearly safe, and the utter wrongness of the emotion when in proximity to my greatest enemy set klaxons ringing in my mind.
"My Garden is persistence." The old man wheezed. "And there is very, very little more persistent in life than dispair. So, the majority, yes. But not all. Not like your charming little party here." He lifted a wineglass to his lips, and some distant part of me noticed that he had stolen it from Jafar. He raised the glass to his lips, and took a sip.
"Release me." I demanded.
"Oh, soon enough, if you truly wish." He said. "You cast your spell with a great deal of power, my Lord Liberator. Great enough to summon me, certainly. But not great enough for me to grace your party for long, unless you choose it so." "I don't cast spells." I said. "I never cast spells."
"Oh, yes you did, boy." His face grew far less friendly, and far, far more sour. "Didn't you get your Tzeenchian pet sorcerer to explain it to you? You very much did. You set the rules for this party. You set the example. You reshaped the thoughts and feelings of a whole world to accommodate your desire for a day off. The whole of a world, striving to achieve your ideal: a day of pleasant rest. You created a brand new HOLY day. And then, on the last, liminal, most powerful night, when the old dies and makes space for the new, you wished it could last forever." He smiled. "And I am the God of Perseverance."
"Jafar did explain it to me." I said with that horrific feeling of pleasent well-being stretching out like taffy. "Nothing about this holiday feeds any ritual of any of the Powers, much less anything of yours!"
"Oh, it does, child." He snorted. "Perserverence, senescence, aging gracefully, surrounded by supportive love...in this grim dark galaxy, that hardly happens, and all of Jafar's lore? It comes from a place and time of war. I'm not often called to come like this. Not in peace." He waved a wizened, liver-spotted hand at his body. "But that's not to say it's not possible. Probable? No. But clearly possible."
"So you could be a loving Grandfather." I said. "And you're choosing not to be?" He smiled an even and even older, wiser, sadder smile. "Choice? I am Entropy, the comfortable, easy slide into rest. Entropy is not a choice. It is an inevitability."
My emotions weren't working right, but my brain has always been a fast learner where my survival is concerned. Whatever he was doing to me was preventing the surge of blackout rage he usually spurred by his claim to 'inevitability.'
Since my emotions weren’t working, my logic did sterling work covering for those absent instincts as I picked apart what he said with the ease of somebody who has to deal with the Byzantian plotting of Jafar every single day.
“You're saying you showed up like this because it was easiest thing to do?" I snorted. "You put a lot of work into killing everyone on Adumbria, and in harrying us ever since."
"Grandson Adrian made that the easiest thing to do." He shrugged, and drained the rest of Jafar's wineglass. "Shame it didn't work out, but you have a way of making certain things...harder." He raised an eyebrow at me. "But yes. You made this easy. You set the scene, you created the rite, and you cast the spell. You made the wish. So. I am here." He bowed. "If it truly is your wish, this moment could last forever."
"No." I said. My hand was still diving towards the grip of my bolt pistol with all the speed of a grox wallowing through a tarpit.
"So immediate." He snorted. "Not the least bit curious about the price?"
"We're at war, and you're going to ask for my soul in exchange for damning everyone that ever put their faith and trust in me."
"I can promise your people a better eternity than most get." He added, not bothering to disagree. "An eternity in a worldwide festival, where everyone is cared for, accomodated, having fun, all the children off on their own vacation, everyone sitting down, taking a nice rest..." He raised another elderly eyebrow. "Is it not your duty, to choose what is best for your children? Why have them suffer, when you- and they- could have...this?"
His spindly arm waved to take in the rest of the room.
"No." I said, still with that unnatural feeling of near-safety in the presence of my greatest enemy. The thing about completely crazy entities with almost infinite power is that they like to play with us mere mortals like we are toys. The whole conversation was a game to him- a game where, if he could draw me in, if he could make me play by his rules, then he could win.
And you don't ride heard on a massive collection warp-tainted heretics for years on end without getting briefed in excruciating detail how it all works- which is to say, the powerful can ignore the rules only so long as there's nobody around with the power and will to enforce them. And here, on my home ground, on my day off, in the middle of what Nurgle himself acknowledged as my rite, I had that power.
"My house. My rules." I said. "You broke them. Get out."
"Make me." he said.
The minute he said it, my hand stopped swimming throught the air. An entirely appropriate and comforting level of sheer terror jolted through every nerve, synapse, and vein in my body. The world unfroze, and my hand snaked to my bolt pistol with lightning speed.
I shot him in the face. A tendril of power snapped out from Jafar- not at Nurgle, but at the barrel of my gun.
I shot Nurgle before Jafar could complete his sudden but inevitable betrayal.
"No" Jafar shrieked. The world slowed again then the scene stopped at the moment my fired bolt began to dent the old man's skull.
"After all these, years, Grandchild, such a childish mistake." The Chaos God of decay smiled, and behind that rancid grin I could feel the looming pressure of the stupendous God’s true form beginning to burst through like the first overpressure wave of a nearby nuclear bomb.
"You should have simply walked me out. Now you have to move the body. And my body is so very, very large. Shall we take bets on how large?"
I felt my face contort in horror as Nurgle's eyes flared yellow in anticipation of the shot that would release him from the rules of the my rite. "The palace, perhaps? Or maybe the world? Or...shall we see if my corps can rot this whole Protectorate?" I could see him, savoring my despairing cry, as it abruptly dawned on me that Jafar had been trying to save us all.
And I had doomed us all.
And then everything froze again, and the world turned a radioactive shade of green.
A spindly metal hand that looked nothing like the BORG’s Mechadendrites reached out and snatched the bolt out of air.
Nurgle's face turned abruply enraged, but there was a quick waggle of metal fingers, and an irritated voice said, "No. None of that!"
The Grandfather froze with a snarl on his face.
My bloody tried to drain from my face.
Necrons.
"Exquisite! Marvelous! The Liberator's Last Stand against Nurgle- the only known lone manifestation of a Chaos God in the Materium, and the mortal who tries to send him packing! Oh what a magnificent tableau! It's everything you promised, my dear Orikan!" Said a mechanical parody of a human voice.
This time when time froze, it was completely different type of freezing. This time, terror still thumped its way through my body, though I could somehow still feel the arrested impulse of my own, it was almost...mechanical. Sharp in the same manner as a mechanicus shrine, instead of the blurred emotions of warpcraft. I managed to roll my eyes, far enough to see the towering, glowing green mechanical monstrosity that belonged to that voice.
"Yes, yes, yes, Trazyn, as promised, now give me that biotransferance prototype-" another voice broke in, belonging to a snakelike robot even taller than the first.
"My dear Orikan, you must take some time to appreciate history, especially as it unfolds in front of you! Do you not appreciate the unprecedented nature of this? Chaos Gods do not simply stroll into a party in the Materium. Nor do humans simply shoot them in the face. I'm sure you have a far, far greater grasp than I do of the sheer improbabilities involved!"
"Yes, yes, of course I do, I've had to recalculate them twice already. The first time we looped around it leveled the palace, the second time it cracked the planet, so if you want to get your theiving hands on this paltry God, do it right this time, and then give me that biotransferance prototype!"
"You have no appreciation for the historical record." The hideous mechanical thing sniffed like a dowager tutting over an unworthy suitor for her unmarried daughter. "But yes, I'm sure I've got it- ah, yes, in you go!"
The little old man that was Nurgle abruptly dissapeared in a flash of green light, and, Emperor strike me dead if the if I'm making this up, the immovable robot mask of the towering mechanism somehow radiated a smug smile.
"You got him this time, let's go." The one called Orikan snarled petulantly.
"Oh, no, no, you know I'm here for the whole set." The one called Trazyn loomed above my frozen eyeline, and I wondered, abruptly, why he was speaking in flawless Gothic. Why they both were, for that matter.
'You can't take them all!" Snapped Orikan. "There's a limit to how much mass you can remove from the chronostream without triggering another feedback loop-"
"I need the whole tableau, Orikan, the exhibit will hardly be the same without it-"
"I can't change the laws of Chronomancy to support your keptomania, you ridiculous jumped up docent! Pick two and let's get OUT of here!”
"Oh very well." Pouted Trazyn. "Ciaphas Cain, the Liberator himself, of course, but who else? Any one of these is exquisite, an excellent supporting sculpture, although I suppose I can circle back for the others later, so it really doesn't matter which-"
"Then grab this one and let's go!”
And my world disappeared in a flash of green light.