Getting Warhammered - [ 161 ]

The Eternal Queen had been ruling the planet of Kazathor for the last two centuries, slowly tightening her grasp on power and eliminating all of her political opponents or limits on her power, but only a decade ago had she proclaimed herself the living Herald of the Goddess.

That had made a stir the population was still reeling from. The Church and its preachers had been growing in power and much of the population lived and breathed their every word, but even among them, many were less than pleased with the Queen’s megalomaniacal proclamation.

Others, like Clementine, for whom religion played little part in their day-to-day lives, had taken to news even worse. Some were apathetic, just shrugging as they talked about how the Queen and the Church could go to war at any moment, Clementine was just worried.

Change was coming, she could feel it in her bones, tension was thick in the air and her old bones felt it thicken with every passing month. Something cataclysmic was just beyond the horizon, something that was about to turn the whole world on its head.

Clementine was just a common middle class woman satisfied with her regular job serving as the secretary of a local construction company’s regional manager. She had no greater insight, or hope of ever changing the course of civilization as she knew it was heading in.

All she had was a gut feeling, and little else. 

Clementine had just one wish, one hope that she had prayed to the great Goddess for every evening before she went to bed.

‘Just another day of normalcy, just push back what’s coming by one more day.’ She would say, and as far as she knew, her prayers had been answered.

Until today. 

The day had started out simply enough, and Clementine was just on her way to the office for another day of hopefully boring work when it happened.

The people mulling about her pointed at the sky, shouting and exclaiming in surprise as they did. It took a few seconds for Clementine to notice their strange behaviour, then another few seconds for her worsening eyesight to make out just what they were pointing at.

A man was floating in the sky, wreathed in flowing dark robes with white highlights that seemed to flow around him like he was underwater.

Clementine remembered the surprise she felt, even with her glasses on, she should have barely been able to see a vague dark shape in the distance. But she could see him. Oh, she saw him like he stood a mere metre away from her.

When her eyes fell on the man, reality seemed to flake away and only he seemed to be the sole real thing in the whole wide world. Nothing else existed, just him, for a single lengthy second.

From somewhere in the distance, came a crash and Clementine’s confused mind barely noted that the Royal Palace where the Eternal Queen resided was in the same direction.

Then a monster appeared before the man in the sky, a terrible monster that had Clementine’s poor old heart trembling with a strange mix of utter revulsion and adoration.

It was both the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and the most repulsive abomination she had ever had the displeasure of laying her eyes on.

The man’s eyes were on the creature, and Clementine had the vague impression that those amethyst eyes hid an intense loathing in them mixed with a sense of malicious glee that sent shivers down her spine.

“I am going to enjoy this, Daemon.” The man’s voice reverberated in Clementine’s ears like a thunder strike, sending her stumbling. People around her fell on their knees, screamed and covered their ears in fear. 

The monster, a ‘daemon’ apparently, opened its sinuous mouth with a mocking grin, readying for an answer. The man cares not one whit for its words though.

The sky lit up with an intense bluish white glow and Clementine’s hair stood on end. Lightning gathered around the man, writhing through the sky like a thousand serpents and then he sent the all at the monster without even an iota of hesitation.

The shockwave hit Clementine, sending her sprawling and knocking the air out of her lungs. Then came the sound, a reverberating thunder that made her ears ring and shattered every single pane of glass within visible distance.

A scream of revolting beauty tore through the ensuing sound of chaos, and Clementine caught sight of the abominable creature flying through the sky on a pair of leathery wings. 

Clementine’s fight-or-flight instincts finally kicked in then, and unsurprisingly, they decided on the second option. 

She just hoped it wasn’t too late to escape the battle of those two … Gods. There was nothing else she could call a being who could control the primal forces of nature and one that lived through getting struck by them.

Gods had descended on the world. 

This was worse than even her wildest expectations. So much worse. There may not even be a world by the time one of those Gods became victorious.

This might just be the end of Kazathor.

*****

Power coursed through Valenith like an unstoppable tidal wave coming to crush reality around him under his heels. That’s what it felt like at least, like the whole world existed at his mercy. He had thought only the Warp had such an insidious method of killing it wielders, hubris, overconfidence, but it seemed not … or perhaps that was the wrong way to look at things.

Selene didn’t exhibit any sign of going through the same thing he did, and neither did the Mistress for that matter. 

It stung Valenith’s pride to admit it, but he knew the problem likely stemmed not from the Mistress’ purified energy, but from himself. He had lived his whole life fearing the use of his powers, knowing that to use them meant to tempt death and the very end of his soul. Removing all that weight had been exhilarating. It made him feel like those powers were his own for the first time in forever, and not just a double-edged sword that was just as likely to harm him as his enemies if he wasn’t careful.

Val sneered down at his foe, the pathetic minion of the deplorable God she served. The Mistress had been kind enough to share with him her few encounters with Greater Daemons, and he had to admit, he had been expecting this to be an uphill battle.

Alas … 

“Is that the best you’ve got?” He empowered his voice, letting it reverberated for miles around him as the Daemon Prince leapt at him again, only for a bolt of lightning to strike it in the side and send it crashing through a skyscraper. “I’ve been expecting more. This is pathetic.” 

It was fast. He had to give it that much, but lightning was faster and his lightning even more so. He had no doubt those vicious claws on its limbs would cut him to shreds if they touched him, or that the dark flames cloaking the creature would do anything short of obliterating him from existence, but the creature was hardly fast enough to make any of its attacks connect. It was almost a letdown. Clearly, this Daemon Prince had not caught the Dark Prince’s attention by pushing its martial abilities above and beyond what would be considered excessive for the regular masses.

Tyranny perhaps? Valenith mused, letting his power wash over a portion of the planet and survey it as he batted away the screeching monstrosity. No, the citizenry was far too … normal for the creature to have ruled them with an iron fist. What then? Ambition? Scheming?

The latter might have been technically possible, but he doubted the creature before him would be so bereft of any feathers if it thrived on schemery and backstabbing. That was the way of the Lord of change, not the Dark Prince.

The creature shifted, the half-human half-monstrous form it had now cracking at the seams as it abandoned all aspect of its once mortal self it had kept. It also sped up, its body blurring as its claw-like limbs wreathed in dark flames tore through the air.

Val put on a shocked expression, belatedly ambling vaguely backwards as the creature shot for him and a pair of his lightning bolts struck nothing but thin air as his foe’s increase of speed made him ‘miscalculate’ where to aim.

The Daemon Prince was upon him, a gleeful snarl on its far too wide mouth as a long serpentine tongue flicked out to lick its lips. The blades shot forward, and at the very last moment, Val disappeared, leaving in his place an after image wreathed in lightning.

His Blink took him half a kilometre away from where he watched his own afterimage explode with lightning, like a bottled thunderstorm finally breaking containment. The creature that had been gleefully drinking in his ‘terrified’ expression now wailed in agony and rage as its battered body shot down from the sky, lightning still curling around its form and ravaging whatever flesh such creatures had.

“Pathetic,” Val said with true disdain. He had been afraid of this creature? He lived centuries in fear of this? These were the creature young Eldar were told horror stories about, that their elders warned against? He knew this creature was likely the bottom rug, the living example of what the weakest of the weak within the Dark Prince’s endless armies were capable of. Still. “Never fought anything even mildly capable of fighting back, have you, Oh Eternal Queen?” 

The delicious shock that spread through the still gawking onlookers and the wider citizenry of the capital below them was truly something spectacular. He had heard the obnoxious title they had been referring to their ruler by, but apparently they weren’t aware they were serving a Daemon Prince.

They might just be salvageable. Val mused. The Mistress would be pleased, she’d wanted a citizenry for her planet and these lost fools might just be suitable candidates.

Returning his attention to the mangled body of the Daemon Prince, Valenith roused his powers once more as his eyes narrowed with predatory malice in them. He could have killed the creature a while ago, but he had wanted to relieve some of the pent up stress he’d incurred in his centuries spent fearing the Dark Prince and his minions. 

There was also another, more pragmatic reason for the Daemon Prince’s continued existence. He could not kill it, sure he could banish it, but that was not a true death. No, true death was something only the Mistress could deal to these misbegotten creatures.

I hope she won’t be too annoyed with my interruption of her experiments. Val mused, landing before the stumbling Slaaneshi abomination as a blade of living lightning formed in his outstretched hand and a sheet of dimensional sorcery wrapped around his body just in case. If he were to present the Daemon Prince to the Mistress for a final sendoff to oblivion, the creature had to be properly … subjugated.

It wouldn’t do for it to cause trouble for the Mistress, after all. 

I think I will cut off all of its limbs and its jaws, then break every bone in its abominable body. That should make it docile enough to be presentable. 

Nodding to himself, Valenith’s blade flashed out and seared right through a shoulder. An agonised screech tore its way out of the Daemon’s throat and many of the humans close enough to hear it echoed with screams of their own as they frothed at the mouth and bled from every orifice on their bodies. 

“Silence,” Valenith snarled, his next strike searing whatever went for vocal cords in these creatures and then melted its jaw into molten slag. The screams fell silent. “Better.”

A minute later, the once ‘mighty’ Daemon Prince lay broken at his feet, just barely intact enough that it wasn’t pulled back into its home in the Warp. 

“I have someone who’ll likely be wanting to meet you,” Valenith said to the broken body of his foe, receiving only a gurgled groan in response that his mild telepathic reading of the creature took for a curse. “No, none of that. Be silent and you might just be relieved of having to suffer the displeasure of your depraved God. You will have absolutely nothing to worry about ever again. My Mistress will take care of it all.”

Patting the mangled creature, Valenith cast a final gaze about himself. The city centre was a mess, buildings reduced to rubble, fires consuming whatever flammable material they found and the smell of death from the hundreds of unfortunate bystanders who couldn’t get away fast enough painting a grim picture.

Still, Valenith cared little for the collateral damage. A Daemon Prince of She Who Thirsts would be wiped from existence today. The mere few hundred human lives and infrastructural damage was a price anyone would have gladly paid for that goal.

Planets had been wiped of all life for less. Valenith knew Master Eldrad would have consigned millions, if not billions, of humans to a horrible death without a blink of an eye if it meant achieving just a fraction of the results he had today. Not that the Imperium was any different. 

Feeling thusly justified, and more than a little pleased with himself, Valenith Teleported himself and his mangled opponent up to a room close to Mistress Echidna's current location.