817.M30, Segmentum Pacificus, Sabbat Worlds, Verghast
Karth Vire was no longer a city it was a corpse being picked clean by its own masters.
The Guilds had officially abandoned governance, their only concern now being the extraction of wealth.
They moved through the reinforced arteries of the hive in armored convoys, leaving the billions below to choke on smog and despair.
Security forces only held their ground where the extraction routes were threatened. Everything else was left to burn.
Jorren Nox walked through the chaos of the final boarding platform. He moved with a purpose that made the panicking crowds part before him.
He was a trooper who had survived the impossible, and in this dying city, that gave him more authority than any badge.
Behind him, Taren followed like a shadow. The war had stolen the boy's childhood, leaving him quiet and hollow.
His hands and feet were blackened, etched with blue-white lines of glowing calligraphy the physical toll of the fire he carried inside.
He walked with a stiff gait, his mind a constant mantra: control yourself. He knew that if he let go, the consequences would be more terrible than the war itself.
Suddenly, a heavy rhythm cut through the screams of the crowd.
Dum… dum… dum…
Heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoed from the far end of the spire. Jorren caught Taren's eye and gave a small, sharp nod and Taren understood.
For years, a shadow had been following them and today, the shadow had found its voice.
The footsteps carried a weight that no mortal man should possess. From the haze emerged a man who looked entirely normal, yet he stood at the edge of the precipice with a gentle, haunting smile.
The Guild security reacted with the panicked precision of a cornered animal. They drew weapons, their voices cracking as they shouted orders.
"Authorization code and transit permit!"
"STATE THEM NOW!"
The man did not answer. He simply looked at Jorren. "I have merely come to reclaim my legacy"
The crowd went silent. The air grew thick and heavy, like the moments before a lightning strike.
"I had hoped the shadow trailing us was merely a ghost, I see I was wrong" Jorren said, his voice steady even as he watched Taren retreat to a safe distance.
"Why did you turn your back on the invitation, Jorren?" Khoras Veyl asked with his voice was soft, almost fatherly.
"The master of the maze offers eternity, yet you choose the dirt instead"
"LAST WARNING! TRANSMIT YOUR ID" a trooper screamed, his finger twitching on the trigger of his slugg rifle, his nerves fried by combat stims.
Khoras didn't even look at him. "The buzzing of insects is so very tiresome," he whispered.
A screeching wail erupted from the corridor behind him. A floating disc, jagged and iridescent, zipped toward the platform.
The sound was a physical assault. Troopers dropped their weapons, clutching their bleeding ears and eyes as they collapsed into convulsions.
"Enough," Jorren said.
Drifting into the air as his feet left the ferrocrete as he began to float, a localized defiance of gravity. With a sudden burst of power, he shot upward into the heights of the spire.
Khoras Veyl watched him with pride. He gestured, and the screaming disc slid beneath his feet. The psychic pressure around him intensified until the air shimmered, and he shot into the sky after his son.
At the summit of the spire, the air ceased to be air. It became a soup of psychic tension.
Below them, billions of souls suffered in the crumbling city, unaware that their sky was about to be torn apart.
On one side stood Khoras Veyl, the changer a silhouette of shifting limbs and iridescent robes, his eyes glowing with the baleful light of the Warp.
Opposite him was Jorren Nox, a man whose potential had finally reached its breaking point.
"You've spent so long hiding, Jorren," Khoras shouted over the rising wind.
"Show me what you've learned in the mud!"
Jorren didn't answer with words. He let his control go. Real-space groaned and cracked around him. A psychic scream shattered every pane of reinforced glass for five kilometers, signaling the start of the duel.
Khoras struck first. He swept his hand through the air, transmuting the oxygen between them into a swarm of crystalline butterflies. Each wing was a razor-sharp shard of malice. They flew at Jorren, their collective humming sounding like the voices of dying stars.
"The world is whatever I say it is!" Khoras laughed.
"Then let it be nothing," Jorren countered.
He whispered a single syllable a sound from a language of pure creation. The butterflies didn't break they were unmade themselves, reverting back into harmless gas.
Before Khoras could react, Jorren compressed that gas into a vacuum and ignited it.
A sphere of white-hot plasma erupted in Khoras's face like a miniature sun. The heat was so intense the floor of the spire began to run like wax, liquid metal pouring down ventilation shafts and incinerating the fleeing crowd miles below.
Khoras banked his disc through the flames, his robes untouched. "Better! But you still bind your mind to the physical!"
He unleashed a wave of pink fire that didn't burn with heat but with mutation. The flames leaped across the gap, coating Jorren's kinetic shields. Where the fire touched the barrier, the shield began to grow teeth and eyes, trying to eat its way inward toward Jorren's throat.
Jorren's eyes became portals to a distant star. He channeled a beam of pure, coherent energy through the pink fire, piercing the corruption.
Khoras folded space to avoid the beam, stepping through the Warp to reappear behind Jorren. At the same time, a psychic shadow lashed out from Khoras's mind, attempting to devour Jorren's soul.
Jorren's own shadow elongated, its fingers turning into claws that reached for his own neck.
"Your own darkness will be your end!" Khoras cried.
Jorren simply stepped into his own shadow, for a second time stopped. A brilliance shone from his mind, burning the shadow-thing away from the inside out.
The battle was tearing the hive apart. Statues began to move, possessed by the leaked energy. Gravity failed entirely, as survivors in the lower levels found themselves floating toward the ceiling or falling sideways.
Holes tore open in reality, and chattering, multi-limbed effigies spilled out, giggling as they turned heavy machinery into living flesh.
"Look at the power we command!" Khoras shouted, his voice echoing from a dozen places at once.
"We could reshape this entire world!"
"Your evolution is just rot with a different name!" Jorren reached down, his psychic grip tightening on the city below.
He ripped an entire processing plant from its foundations and hurled the million-ton mass of metal at his father.
Khoras didn't flinch he only flicked a finger, and the massive plant turned into a cloud of harmless soap bubbles that drifted away in the purple lightning.
They flew through a sky that was now a whirlpool of clouds.
Jorren created a dome of force so dense it could have shrugged off a macro-cannon shell. Khoras countered by conjuring a spear of black light a weapon that ignored physical armor to strike the soul.
Jorren caught the spear in his bare hand. His tattoos flared with a blinding light, consuming the energy of the spear and feeding it back into his own strength.
"My turn," Jorren whispered.
He focused his mind on a single point in time and space. He gathered everything he was, his anger, his training, his discipline and fired a beam of pure black light. It broke the sky as it passed through Khoras Veyl.
Where the light touched, existence was simply unmade.
Khoras staggered, his form flickering. "Why?" he coughed, his iridescent robes tattering.
"Why do you fight the inevitable? You have the gift! Why not accept the Master?"
"Because the price of your 'gift' is the very soul it claims to set free" Jorren said, hovering in the eye of the psychic storm.
"And because I have offered my service to one who is far greater than your master."
Desperation finally took hold of Khoras. The Warp began to bleed through him in a catastrophic surge.
"My Lord! I offer you all that I am!" he screamed. "Complete the work!"
Khoras Veyl gave up his humanity. His body expanded, his flesh bubbling and stretching into a mountain of multi-colored meat.
Thousands of eyes opened across his skin, and a final, terrible scream greeted the ears of everyone left alive in Karth Vire.