Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

Kaylith had seen some strange things over the centuries she’d spent wandering the stars, first as a lowly Outcast, then as a Ranger and most recently as a Pathfinder. This galaxy was home to many things, some horrible, some wonderful, while others were merely weird. 

Trying to slot the human — or was she even human? — psyker she’d attached herself to for these last few weeks into one of those categories was a fool’s errand. Echidna could be all three, sometimes all at once, or in quick succession. 

One moment, she was walking down the stone path, seemingly carefree as could be, despite the very real threat of a Drukhari ambush — although that wouldn’t worry a psyker of her power, would it? — and the next, she was creating life out of thin air. 

In a figure of speech, at least. Those things had no souls, nothing more than an artificial construct bound to their creator’s will through telepathy. They weren’t truly alive, not in a way that mattered. She had also seemed to create them not out of ‘thin air’, but from her own flesh and blood. 

Kaylith had felt a shiver of dread run down her spine at the sight even as she stoically analysed what she was seeing, and what she could only vaguely sense from the Empyrean. No mutations. No Chaos taint. The creatures were susceptible, not sharing in their creator’s queer nature that made her seemingly immune to the depredations of the Warp, but they were created pure nonetheless. 

An impossibility for any regular Biomancer. They used the Warp, so Chaos taint spread to everything they worked their foul magics on. That meant mutations, Warp corruption, and the touch of Chaos. 

And yet, she sensed none of that here. It was rather strange. Possibly wonderful, possibly horrible, possibly both. 

But it was the same power which allowed her to create new bodies for the fallen Eldar stuck inside spirit stones, so the wondrous part was also very much present. It was a tool, like all things were, defined by the hand wielding it and the purpose it wields it for. Medicine and poison were two sides of the same coin, and this power could heal just as easily as it could create beasts of slaughter. 

And what slaughter it turned out to be. Six of those dark quadrupedal beasts were sent forth, and by the time Kaylith followed Echidna through the unstable portal, she only saw the results. A group of Necron Warriors, the egoless base creatures that had no thoughts of their own, lay scattered about the floor. They weren’t especially dangerous to someone of Kaylith’s skill and experience, not individually. Except, they were never alone, and hundreds of them trying to shoot her would give even a Pathfinder of her skills a good bit of trouble. One single grazing hit and she’d be dead. It didn’t matter how horrid their aim was, how slow and stupid they were, when there were hundreds of them acting in concert. 

“Hmmmm.” The thoughtful hum from Echidna reached Kaylith’s ears and she dared to send a subtle glance towards the woman, who seemed to be examining one of the more intact Necron remains. “Why didn’t they get Phased Out after death, I wonder? The Webway disrupts it, perhaps? Hmmm. Doesn’t really matter, I suppose, but these colours. Kaylith, Veil, are they familiar to either of you?”

“The colours?” Kaylith asked while the human Inquisitor primly stepped over to examine the Necron herself. “I don’t believe so. They possess a higher meaning beyond decoration?”

“Of course they do, the way a Necron is painted reveals the Dynasty they are aligned to,” Echidna mused. “And these ones do not look like any of the Dynasties I am familiar with. Certainly not the Suhbekhar which I know are centered in the Reach.”

“I don’t recall ever seeing this combination of colours on any of them either,” the Inquisitor said after a moment with a frown. “But if any human encountered them before and lived through the experience, I will have data on it.”

“Is this going to be a problem?” The human, the one called ‘Cain’, asked warily. He was a strange specimen, one touched by Echidna’s strange Biomancy for certain. Whether what he had become would be a source of wonder or horror was yet to be seen. 

In Kaylith’s opinion, empowering anyone susceptible to the depredations of Chaos to such a level was a grievous mistake, but it wasn’t her place to say it. She was no advisor, just a guide. She could only hope the woman she was trying to ingratiate herself with wasn’t stupid enough to make something that had the potential to become more powerful than herself. 

That Emperor of Mankind made that mistake, and Kaylith would be disappointed if humans failed to learn from it … disappointed but not surprised. Echidna seemed more intelligent than average, so perhaps there was no cause for alarm just yet. Not that it was a high bar to clear, taking into account the intellect of the average Mon’Keigh. Self-destructive savages that they were. 

“A problem? No, it’s just annoying, it seems this path won’t lead us where it needs to,” Echidna said. “But I suppose it’s not such a bad thing, considering it means there isn’t a direct path between Vallia and the Hollow Sun. I didn’t want to have to worry about Necrons popping up behind my defensive lines all the time. Kaylith, do you know how to close this unstable portal?”

Kaylith did, in fact, know how to do just that, but sharing the knowledge was another thing entirely. Or even revealing that she had it. If the humans got their greedy little hands on the method, they could do irreparable damage to the Webway as a whole by closing off sections, practically tearing it into pieces and making large swathes inaccessible.

No Eldar would do such a thing, not even the Drukhari. They only used the method to close off sections of the Webway overrun by Daemons or other horrors. Kaylith had taken part in helping the process along more than once as a Ranger and ex-Warlock. 

“I can do it,” Kaylith said with some wariness. Alienating or disappointing the woman was not acceptable. This was a risk, Echidna could insist or try to pry the knowledge from her mind, but perhaps she wouldn’t. She had a strong, if strange, sense of honour. 

“Wonderful, then let’s get to it.” Echidna rose back to her feet and nodded, leading them all back over to the other side. “Do you need any help, or can you do it alone?”

“I can close an unstable Webway intersection by myself,” Kaylith said calmly, and suppressed a sigh of relief when her rescuer just nodded and stood back, though her eyes remained fixed firmly on Kaylith and what she was doing with an intense curiosity shining within them. 

Well, she could watch all she wanted. It wouldn’t make a difference. Even if she figured out how Kaylith was doing it, she would only know how to close portals that weren’t supposed to be. Unstable, temporary portals formed where tunnels intersected where they shouldn’t have. 

Thankfully, closing anything other than such portals was well beyond Kaylith’s abilities. Such a thing required a cadre of Seers to accomplish. 

*****

I watched with extreme care and interest as Kay got to work. After all, closing Webway portals was a skill I very much wanted to add to my repertoire. Even if I couldn’t truly resurrect Big E due to the rather severe strains his soul was under, I could still heal his body and ease his burdens. 

This new skill would help with the latter, after all, a substantial fraction of Emps’ power and focus was dedicated to forcefully keeping the Webway Gate right under his fancy throne shut. It was a constant, permanent drain on him to keep the Gate from snapping back open and releasing the mother of all Daemonic incursions right into the basements of the Imperial Palace. 

So solving that problem could go some ways towards buying brownie points with the two Loyalist Primarchs if healing Emps’ soul ended up being a bust. Sure, I only promised to heal his body, but I was sure tempers would run high if we failed. Even if I did my part perfectly, who knew whether they would throw a hissy fit? So yeah. Why not learn the skill? 

I knew Kaylith was trying to keep it to herself, but I could learn much just by watching her. Hopefully, it would be enough. If not, I could always find some Asuryani I found less than agreeable and get the answers I needed from them. 

Eldar were assholes. I was sure there were more than enough of them that I wouldn’t feel the slightest bit merciful towards. Kaylith wasn’t among them, though, and she was my guest, helper and minion — though she didn’t know it yet — on top of that. 

I blinked, then tilted my head slightly as I focused my attention on everything Kaylith was doing. Everything from the slightest fluctuation of her soul, to the tiniest slivers of Warp energy she called on, all the way up to the specific way in which the neurons fired in her brain, or the exact lilt of the strangely musical notes that left her lips, was recorded. It was all raw data, saved and stored for later analysis. 

The effect was simple enough, however, appearing as if the slightly wobbly distortion in space started shrinking until it winked out of existence. It was like the Webway itself healed, its walls growing back over a wound. Kaylith continued, focused, eyes shut and lips moving until the final, most minute spatial fluctuations that lingered minutes after the portal itself disappeared. 

Afterwards, we continued down the original Webway path right up until we poked our heads out of the Gate found at its end. It was on some arid desert world that was nonetheless mildly habitable — though you had to be off in the head to want to live in that scorched hellhole —and we spent only a few minutes there so I could triangulate our location. With that done, the location of this Webway Gate was added to my mental map of the galaxy. 

Over the following hours and then days, we — or rather I, once it got boring, and I started feeling bad about dragging the others along on pointless, hour-long treks — explored the other smaller Webway tunnels connecting to the erstwhile Drukhari outpost. I started building a map of both the Webway and where each tunnel led. When they connected back to realspace, I added the Gate’s location to my galactic map. Sometimes they were dead ends, or connected to regions where there was a heavier Drukhari presence; these paths I either abandoned, filled with enough traps to drown an army of Dark Eldar, or just straight up filled up with thousands of tonnes of hard organic carapace. Let them play Miner for a few decades if they want to get through that.

Once that was done, Kaylith led us to the next closest Webway Gate she knew, then the next one after that, and continued on for the next few weeks. My map of the local Webway grew, a handful of new arterial paths and dozens of smaller, labyrinthine capillary ones added to the whole. My realspace map also showed a scattering of Webway Gates all over the galaxy, though half of the paths didn’t lead out of the Jericho Reach, just connecting distant parts of it. 

There was a single Gate I destroyed outright, and even just thinking back on it sent a shiver down my spine. The further along that path I went, the more a distinct sense of wrongness seemed to grow within me, and I turned us right back around before we got too far. After interrogating Kaylith about it, I figured out the reason: the path probably terminated inside the Hadex Anomaly. 

Considering that the Eldritch phenomena that was the Hadex Anomaly freaked me the fuck out — because it was one of the finest pieces of Eldritch Existential Horror in Warhammer 40k — I think my reaction was perfectly rational. Selene whined a bit about the destruction of a perfectly inhabitable, though barren, mining world, but I digress. It had no people on it, and wasn’t that fortunate? I wasn’t sure I could have accepted allowing an entire planetary population, maybe corrupted by the Hadex Anomaly’s influence, to live. 

That thing was an absolute menace, worse than some Chaos Gods, at least when it came to matters within its small sphere of influence, and worse, I didn’t understand it. It was left intentionally nebulous in the lore because Cosmic Horror was the most terrifying when your feeble human mind couldn’t comprehend it. Fear of the unknown and all that. Stupid writers. Why did they have to leave things so nebulous? As things stood, the best I could do was ignore the damned thing, keep well out of its vicinity and hope for the best. Fuck me sideways.

It was anticlimactic. Our search yielded no result- No, that was a lie. It yielded many boons, but not the one I set out to find in the first place. We didn’t find the Webway Gate leading to the Hollow Sun and never once encountered Suhbekhar Necron forces. 

It made sense, in retrospect. Why would Kaylith know about a Webway route and Gates that the Necrons had taken for themselves millions of years ago? She only knew the Gates and paths her people made use of to this day, and considering the Necrons were never really happy about anyone else being on their ‘lawn’, it wasn’t a surprise the Eldar didn’t even know those ancient and long forgotten routes. 

As I said, it was a pretty anticlimactic end, at least for me. Poor little Kaylith — who was probably centuries my senior, not that she knew it — was stressed out of her little Aeldari mind about not being able to live up to her part of the bargain. She’d promised to lead me to the Crownworld, and not even with the majority of her Asuryani friends I had as captives, adding their own help into the mix, did I manage to achieve that. 

So here we were. ‘Renegotiating’. I was satisfied with her part and what she’d put into our deal. She had tried her best and didn’t lie to me. But that was just the emotional part of it, and it still stood that she hadn’t quite managed to live up to her promise. It wouldn’t do to just wave her off and say ‘whatever’. Not when Val had spent a substantial amount of his time over the last few weeks talking my ear off about how useful it would be to have a cadre of elite Aeldari restored to their true potential under my command. 

Which is what brought us here. Back to Vallia Prime. The Eldar milled about, gathered vaguely around me but keeping a wary distance, the more combat-minded of them making sure they were standing behind me in some silly hope that it would give them an advantage if a fight broke out. 

With a theatrical crackle of broken space and the hiss of displaced air, Valenith teleported in. He could have done it silently, but being a drama queen was ingrained in him at a genetic level. Hands clasped behind his back, spine straighter than an arrow and chin raised in that haughty arrogance only true Eldar could pull off so perfectly. 

His presence followed a moment later, flowing into the air around us and thickening it like molasses. It was a heavy thing, massive and unyielding and yet masterfully controlled. More importantly, it practically broadcast the fact that Val didn’t suffer under the same constraints as every other Eldar since the Fall. 

As even the ever-stoic centuries-old Eldar gasped, eyes flying wide open as the realisation fully settled in, Val put on a small, smug smirk and basked in their incredulous yet awed stares like a peacock. 

“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” he started, his voice never rising above the conversational level, and yet it echoed through the wide open space of the newly built auditorium. “To Vallia. The place where you, as well, may be reborn and shed the shackles our kind has been forced to operate under ever since the folly of our ancestors damned all our souls! Gather around and listen, for I bring to you the hope of salvation.”