//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Fists of the Evening Star 
// by Vermillion Prose 
//------------------------------//

Warp. Empyrean. Sea of Souls. The Great Ocean. 

Many names, in many cultures and societies, for the realm beyond the material veil.

Neverborn. Enslaver. Warpspawn.

Daemon.

Menageries of names for creatures made of the unreal stuff of the other-realm, raw emotion and will given form, more often than not nightmares born from the stygian depths of the mortal psyche.

Through it all, the wisps of life lived on the physical plane, vasts distances a blink away in the illogical tides of the immaterium. For those who could project their essence, their psychic might and sense of self, across this fickle expanse of roiling impulses and fever dreams, it was a perilous journey at best, and a swift and terrible damnation at worst.

The conscious eddies prowled in the wake of one such daring soul, a body of light languidly soaring through the currents of wrath and lust, searching for the incongruous pools of calm that it sought diligently. When half-formed impressions of fangs and claws closed on the astral traveller, a gesture of thought lit them aflame, impossible hissing screeches sending ripples out and away, dissuading the lesser and drawing the predation of the greater.

The lone soul was unphased by such notions, swiftly soaring past and searching onwards.

There. Something inconsistent. Not the pool of calm he was looking for, but rather… a hole, in the very fabric of the warp. Impossible, yet there it was. Its pull was not evident until it had all but swallowed the traveller, who only managed to reel away with a supreme effort of will that blitzed the surface and tested the veil between realms with its raw impulse.

Yes, this is where it had happened. This was the gap in understanding. With a thought, the body of light recoiled the way it had come, soaring out of jaws the size of cities closing around it, meteoric as it returned from whence it had come.

With a snap of dislocation, psychic meshed once more with physical, and hoarfrost cracked across the surface of ornate powered plate. Sapphire and gold was adorned with images of scarabs, and the mark of the ouroboros marked a heavy-set pauldron. Bronze skin colored with dark stubble characterized the wizened face of a man kneeling in meditation, sweat rolling down his brow and stinging his eyes. The drops steamed away with a small effort of will, and the man groaned as he stood, sympathetic pains from his sojourn taxing his physical form.

“At last, my fellow sons. I have found our missing brothers.”