I only had a tiny window I could use, just a brief instant between the Tomb Ship’s energy shield getting torn to a new asshole and the Phase Out contingency activating. Sothing in my bones told that even if the captain of this vessel was willing to sacrifice lesser ships in hopes of slaying , the mont he himself ca under real danger, he’d waste no ti escaping.
So I didn’t stop to charge up an attack or send myself into the ship like a missile. I lashed out again with my blade, tearing a long, jagged wound upon the necrodermis hull of the ship. Then Atiesh slamd into my palm, and a beam of energy bored into the wound, deepening it until I could see an open space on the other side.
The mont before the ship Phased Out of existence, a single Draugr launched itself out of my body, through that hole and into the ship. When the ship fizzled out of existence like a bad mirage a brief instant later, I couldn’t help but grin despite the fact that my quarry had managed to run away again.
Why? Because that Draugr had been carrying a beacon, a beacon I could still fairly sense at the edges of my perception. I had a direction and a rough distance, perfect for triangulation. I wasn’t sure how long that single drone would last, even though it was my most powerful and latest direct-combat design.
Not that it mattered; it just needed to last long enough. I Blinked back onto the Sovereign’s command deck just as the cataclysmic gravitational storms all around us rushed in to consu our little bubble of safety. Without the Spaceti Dampener, nothing was stopping them, but with it gone, nothing was stopping either from teleporting away. Which is exactly what I did.
The Sovereign skittered across the Veil, on that thin fabric of in-between that separates what is from what isn’t. It slamd back into realspace a dozen light-years away, and my mind-cores jolted again at the inflow of data, combined it with what I’d gathered before, and a second later, I had the approximate spatial coordinates of the Hollow Sun. At least, I hoped it was the Hollow Sun where that Tomb Ship had escaped to, because I was really aching for a prize that couldn’t run away by now, and a simple Tomb World just wouldn’t cut it after I had my prey slip through my fingers so many tis.
Now I knew where their base of operation was. If I attacked them there, they couldn’t run away. Maybe there would be a Doln Gate that allowed a few of them to escape, but the ships? The Throne World itself? Those wouldn’t be going anywhere. It would be disappointing, but there would be enough consolation prizes to make up for it.
However, I realised it would be better to go alone. Had I not been worried about my guests and … family on the Sovereign, it would have been slipping inside that Tomb Ship. But if I did that, the Sovereign would have been left behind to weather the gravitational storms and spatial anomalies. Maybe the barriers would have held up, maybe it would have co out unscathed, and none of them would have been hurt. Maybe.
But ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough when it ca to Selene and Cat’s safety. Which was why they would be staying behind in an interstellar place, hidden aboard the Sovereign. Throughout this entire fight, having to keep the Sepulchre’s effects off of them had been the thing holding back the most after the Spaceti Dampener. I could have just torn through the Tomb Ship with my Witchblade, but that would have left them undefended, so I had to wait until I could get the ship close enough that I could do both.
I could maybe stomach taking Selene; she was stubborn, willful and a reasonably powerful psyker. She’d likely be able to shrug off psychic effects with little effort. But not my guests and Cat.
With that decided, the Sovereign started shifting again, warping back into the stealth template I’d made, and another teleport took it back into the desolate Freya system. There, I used the trick those sneaky Tyranids did and the ship was inside a massive hollow asteroid inside the dense Oort cloud surrounding the star system. It would remain as hidden there as reasonably possible. Still, I left it on high alert and ready to respond to any hostile force showing up. I even popped down a few Void Krakens nearby on the off chance that anyone ca to investigate what the massive surge of psychic power in this dead system was. With those monsters and a quarter of my bio-energy reserves left behind for an ergency to be used freely, they should be fine. The odds of anyone trying to gank them are low, but not zero. Never zero.
I left Cat as the ‘admin’ of the ship while the onboard mind-cores downloaded into the organic cogitators would handle the actual tasks. She’d be the acting captain, though … and just to be safe, I teleported her into another safe room far away from the bridge where my guests would be. I trusted them not to try anything stupid while I was there, but leaving harmless little Cathrine right in front of them, who held the controls of the Sovereign in her hands, might prove to be a bit too tempting for the Imperials.
A quick flash of telepathy inford both her and Selene about what I’d done and my plans for what was to follow. They both responded expectantly. My daughter promised to look after the ship, while Selene confird that she’d like to tag along if I would have her.
I spent a few hours remaking my entire soulbone skeleton, pushing a tiny bit more of my own essence into the material as I brought it into existence. It was a slow, draining process. The art of making Soulbone, originally called Wraithbone, was called Bonnesinging, but it rarely involved any actual singing. According to Val, you had to make your soul sing, pour it into the Wraithbone. For so, that was most easily done by singing beautiful Aeldari lodies and ballads about their history, heart-wrenching songs that resonated deeply with their own souls and emotions. When emotions flowed freely, and the soul itself sang with them, only then could most Bonesingers craft Wraithbone.
It was a dangerous art, considering Eldar felt every emotion more intensely than humans and letting themselves actually feel again was always a danger. She Who Thirsts was the Prince of Excess, and it was oh so easy for the less experienced Bonesingers to let themselves feel too much. They always danced right along the edge of excess; that was where their art was the most powerful and where their greatest works ca from.
They could make do with fewer emotions, play things carefully, but that produced subpar Wraithbone. It would work, but it would be no powerful relic, no artifact fit to be wielded by a Phoenix Lord. Those were born when their makers danced at the edge of ruin.
My first skeleton was made when I barely understood those concepts and the art itself. The Path of Shaping was deep and dangerous, and I didn’t even have a surface-level understanding back then. I just brute-forced it with sheer willpower and psychic might. Turning every single bone in my body into a Force Weapon was out of the question, but I could do better now.
I spent those few hours swimming in my emotions, letting my mind and soul experience them in their entirety. I had lots of able material for intense emotions, my love for Selene, Cat and my other daughters, my fear of losing them, my pride at seeing them grow, my grief and rage at humanity’s wretched state, my hope for a better future. My soul sang, its discordant song ringing out across my Realm as I poured soul energy into realspace, and it took shape. The slivers of my soul’s own essence that flowed into my avatar were the seed, and the soul energy was the nourishnt. From them grew bones, one after the other, vibrant and strong, still echoing my soul’s discordant song even as I finally finished it hours after I first began.
I had a feeling I’d fucked up sohow by channelling so many conflicting emotions. That song should have been a symphony of a dozen resonant songs coming together into a greater whole. It was not, but it would do for now. My next work will be better. I’d already sacrificed a week’s worth of soul growth on this so I wasn’t about to throw it out in the garbage.
Once it was inside my body, I threw the old, cracked and partially shattered skeleton into my Realm, leaving it to dissolve or just float around as it wished. Maybe I’d use it as a Daemon lure if it refused to dissolve.
After that, Selene joined through a portal, already decked out in full gear and her mind thrumming with psychic power just like Val had taught her. Hopefully, it would be enough to ward off any psychic attacks.
“Ready?” I asked, my voice travelling through the void of space by sheer willpower despite the impossibility of it. Selene just nodded seriously, her burgeoning thrill of excitent tempered by years of combat experience. I could feel her mind, body, and even soul all harden, tensing up in preparation.
The first teleport sent us a dozen light-years away, well into the Slinnar Drift star cluster. I reoriented myself, breathing a brief sigh of relief when I found the beacon still going strong, then ran so quick calculations to narrow down the exact star that had to be hiding the Hollow Sun inside its empty core. The next teleport narrowed it down to four, the one after that to three, and the next one after that finally gave a single star system.
It was extrely energy intensive, but it was worth it when I earned ti in return. In front of us was a rather mundane-looking star system with five planets orbiting the local primary star.
I stared at it for a mont, my body slightly unwinding to expose half a hundred different types of sensors to observe and analyse the star. It was an orange dwarf, a K-type main-sequence star according to Earth’s classifications. It was roughly 0.8 solar radius, 0.6 solar mass heavy and just marginally dimr than Sol. The surface temperature was also maybe four to five thousand Kelvins, twenty to thirty per cent cooler than Earth’s surface.
At first glance, its gravitational well, mass and other such things matched up to expectations. To a superficial survey and observation, it really was just a regular orange dwarf star. Nothing extraordinary beyond the fact that such stars were the most stable ones and most suited to support life on the planets orbiting them. It was when my senses burrowed deep and brushed upon what should have been the core of the star that the strangeness began. There was a kilotre-thick layer of stellar core where nuclear fusion occurred under extre pressure, but beneath that? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. Not with my sensors and not with my aura, it was just a void of nothingness that I would have believed to be due to the imnse gravitational pressure in the core of a star, were it not for my aura.
All my other senses gave back largely expected — for a regular star — readings, but my aura just went dark, cut off very suddenly and unable to feel a single thing inside the core. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that there had to be sothing fucky with the perfectly spherical void. Still, sneaky Necrons, they sure as hell went above and beyond with this thing. A Dyson Sphere like Trazyn’s Solemnance was one thing, humans even in my ti theorised that it was possible, but hollowing out a star’s core and building a world inside?
I felt my lips curl into a grin as I stared into the star, space bending around . What had been a distant dot of light amidst a sea of deep darkness beca a titanic ocean of fire and heat. Waves of molten plasma the size of mountains roiled and clashed across a landscape of liquid fire stretching on and on seemingly without an end. I couldn’t hear the sound it made; there was no atmosphere on a star, but I felt the weight of the planet. I felt each crashing wave of plasma large enough to bury the Himalayas in my bones.
There was sothing awe-inspiring about sothing so massive, sothing so dangerous and wonderful that even all my new powers couldn’t dim.
I dismissed that thought with a shrug, refocusing and trying to find a way- The Space Ti Dampener was inactive. Space was denser here, tougher and more resistant to manipulation, but it lacked that artificial smoothness.
So with a single teleport, we zipped past hundreds of kilotres of thick plasma, and-
I felt like soone grabbed mid-transit and yanked off my chosen path, pulling towards a specific spot inside the Hollow Sun. Maybe I’d have allowed it once, but I was wary of the Necrons and their tricks. I fought it, wiggling out of that grip just enough to displace myself a few hundred tres away from the spot the weird pull was trying to take .
Must have been a teleportation counterasure. Let the stupid teleporters think they could sneak inside and bypass the security, only for them to end up in a kill zone or in a cell prepared to neutralise them. Nasty.
Anyone else would have been helpless against the pull; teleportation took re nanoseconds, and that pull latched onto in the last mont of even that tiny tifra. Even my own perception speed had to be sped up near the limit of what my avatar could bear to slip free of the trap. Nasty indeed.
I took in our new surroundings in an instant, my senses and perception unfolding to map the place. My aura was still suppressed, stifled to the point that it was life covering my skin and barely able to push a few inches beyond it, so I was left using mundane avenues of perception.
Large empty hall, high ceiling, dreary necrodermis constructs and monolithic brutalist architecture. The darkness was broken up only by lines of eerie green energy flowing in rivets, and the silence was interrupted only by the distant clanging of tallic feet on the stone floor.
The walls were difficult to penetrate, but echolocation, combined with so of my more unusual senses, allowed to create a reasonably accurate 3D map of the surrounding halls and the twisting tunnels linking them. I had a spherical map with us at the centre and nearly two kilotres across diagonally.
The map clearly showed a horde of Necron warriors marching towards us from every tunnel leading to the hall we crash-landed in. Well, it seems like they’ve sent a welcoming party. How nice of them.
If you want to support , I have another original story up on RoyalRoad. It's a System Apocalypse kinda thing, with a lot of magic and wow. Go give it a shot, or just click on the Link-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Nad on its site if you feel like I deserve so pocket change. Arcane Apocalypse
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