From the journal of the Burned Man.
4 March, 1013 AC
At the time of this writing, I am sitting on the Skyward Valkyrie's bridge, and I am using English to avoid detection from Delphine's prying eyes. We met minimal resistance on our way here; I assume whatever cruel intelligence the genestealers possess is still subject to the loss of morale honest being experience when their command is slain. On the whole, we lost eighteen inquisitors and forty changelings. Their passing saddens me, but crystallizes the necessity of the task ahead. To be brief, Equus is in grave danger, and not even the physical gods the princesses and Discord are can stop the monstrous powers waged against us.
I speak not of the Tyranids; their cunning can be defeated, their genes can be tainted. I speak not of the Eldar nor their dark cousins. I speak not of the Tau and their allies. I speak not of the war-hungry Orks. I speak not of the mechanized, soulless Necrontyr and their shattered gods. I speak not of the uncountable lesser civilizations across the blood-soaked Milky Way. I speak of the Imperium of Man, and of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos.
The Imperium is a religious culture of the worst kind, drawing inspirations from the worst points of humanity's various faiths throughout the eons of our existence. It is corrupt and on its last legs, a dying beast intent on taking the stars themselves with it. The God-Emperor would be appalled by what he would see, or would put a stop to it if he were in any state to do so. If we approach them on a small scale, we can turn entire sectors to our favor before they catch wind and stomp us. We'd need a vast network of Doorframes, and I grow anxious thinking about it. They are zealots, but they are human; they can be reasoned with.
Chaos, on the other hand, is something I cannot wrap my mind around, and I trust that anyone who finds this journal either lives in an age without fear of the Warp, or will at least learn from my failure at saving Equus from it. Either way, imaine every horror, every torment, every sliver of anger and hate and hope and love and lust and friendship and despair and sadness and death and insanity, now imagine all that madness, all that raw emotion, coalescing into four supreme beings. I apologize if my writing gets a little shaky here; even thinking of the symbols of Chaos will turn an honest man's stomach.
Khorne is the Blood God, though he is also the least likely to send his forces to Equus. He detests psykers, and unicorns seem to count so far, but he doesn't have much of a penchant for indiscriminate slaughter of the defenseless. Unless Kharn the Betrayer shows up alongside other World Eaters berserkers, you should be kind of safe. Just use ranged weaponry; even Khornate Chaos Marines only use bolt pistols so they have a free hand for a melee weapon. Overall threat level: Low, but High if berserkers are present.
Slaanesh is the Prince(ss) of Pleasure, and he/she/it is near the top of my four-god shitlist. Its aspects are perfection, pleasure, sensation, lust, and romantic love. It also has a thing for tentacles, fair warning. Slaanesh is tied with Tzeentch for Most Likely to Mutate Followers, and you can probably tell the cultists by an enlarged breast somewhere on the left half of their bodies, roughly in the area where one would expect to find a breast. This includes males, and I wouldn't tempt Slaanesh by not having nipples for it to identify where to put the breast. Overall threat level: Medium, but High if Emperor's Children Chaos Marines are present.
Nurgle is the Prince of Disease and the oldest of the Chaos Gods. He is also an affable sort of guy and I kinda respect him; I'll still kill any of his cultists, but knowing how he feels about them and being a father myself, I can see where he's coming from. His aspects are disease, decay, despair, death, and familial love. His cultists are some of the nicest and most caring individuals in the galaxy, and they really want to give you gifts. The only problem is these gifts are diseases that will rot you from the inside out, making you nigh-immortal but eternally suffering from so much pain everything else numbs out, except your ability to love others. With plague. Overall threat level: high. I would make sure Cadence doesn't fall prey to either of these two; she seems especially vulnerable to their whispers, given her role on Equus.
(Note to Scipia: because I know you read this journal even though I've told you not to, if Daddy ever bloats into a corpse that walks and talks, get in Leviathan and drive to Canterlot. There's a big, red button on my desk at the Temple. Press it to trigger every high-yield nuclear device on the planet; it's the only way to be sure. The code is your birthday.)
Tzeentch is at the top of my four-god shitlist. His aspects are plotting, warp-magic, betrayal, and hope. If you're reading this, it's because Tzeentch wants you to. He is one of the biggest reasons the Milky Way has gone to shit, but he is also one of the most fragile of the four Dark Gods. If any of his grand schemes comes to fruition, everything in the galaxy will die soon after, though I use soon on a cosmic scale. His sorcerers are powerful, some of them can top Celestia's magic on a good day. Luckily, most of those don't live long because they've made so many deals with various daemons, and one of them is bound to cash in before the others. Overall threat level: Extreme. I recommend pressing the red button just to make sure he doesn't trick us into being weapons; the code is my oldest daughter's birthday.
(As of this writing, I am only assuming I have more than one daughter when you find this.)
How the fuck are we going to win against an enemy like this, you might ask. Sitting here, on a spaceship, knowing the genestealer brood is the absolute least of the enemies I and the others will face, I have no idea. After we turn in Dahl and Ophidia, we might bum around the galaxy and make friends. Hell, maybe we can get a few Imperial contacts. Maybe my vision involving Cadia and Bjorn the Fell-Handed will come to pass; maybe it was a trick by Tzeentch. I'll find out in the coming days. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. Millennia.
Note to self: figure out a way to extend the natural lifespans of Jay and the Elements, and any offspring of theirs; it will get lonely in about eighty years otherwise. Sometimes, I hate this black armor, but I realize the Deceiver did not give me a gift. If, through some Doctor Who, stable time-loop bullshit, the man who will become the Deceiver is reading this, fuck you. Fuck you and your white-haired race of humans. You know who you are.
@#@#@# Amos's POV @#@#@#
Taylor looked a sad sight, sitting next to his sleeping wife as the rest of the ship vented into the void. He scribbled in a small, black notebook, a relic one of the inquisitors told me was his journal, which he carried with him whenever he went on a mission. Apparently the entire Equestrian Inquisition was under orders to return it to his family if he was killed, just in case it contained information they could use against the enemy. Chrysalis had apparently given him some good news, and he brightened up until she fell asleep; he just seemed truly depressed afterwords.
The servo-skull was damaged during the final charge to the bridge and lay in a small pile of junk and bone. Personally, I was glad for it. The xenos were alright by me, but sometimes I didn't like the idea of them knowing what I was saying. The Linguist had the busy task of relaying Delray's words to Princess Celestia via vox-caster. So far, judging from the unicorn's reaction, the princess was relieved we were alright.
“Amos,” she called, “I need a word.” I supposed there was no issue in me walking over to her, so I went. She didn't seem all that happy to need me, and for the life of me I could not figure out why. However, as soon as she spoke again, I understood. “What do you know of the device your people call the Emperor's Tarot?”
“It's something psykers use to predict the future, why?” I asked, genuinely curious. I'd seen Dahl play around with a deck once or twice, but he didn't seem to trust it too much. I knew enough about what it was for, but nothing of what the cards meant. “Someone see something bad?”
“Possibly. Your, I believe the term is astropath, seemed rather worried about it.” She removed her visor, and I saw that her eyes were a stunning magenta, the same shade that hinted at Cadian origins. She smiled sincerely and folded the silvery lens so it hung from her jacket's collar. “Specifically the fifth card. What does it signify? I mean just the fifth card in general, not a certain drawing.”
“I think it ties the whole divination together, but I could be wrong.” I thought for a moment, trying to figure out what could have been drawn to warrant something so terrible. “It didn't show the Terra being sacked or something eating the galaxy, did it?”
“No,” she replied, her voice even. She spoke into the caster again, trying to get her facts straight, I suppose. She looked a tad troubled as she absorbed the alien chatter from the vox's other end. “What if the fifth card is blank?”
“Maybe it means the card has gone bad; maybe it means the divination is worthless. I can assure you that it is either nothing to worry about, or the end of the universe is upon us. Either way, there's either nothing we need to worry about, or nothing we can do.”
@#@#@# Taylor's POV @#@#@#
I set my pen down and closed my journal, using my free hand to stroke once over Chrysalis's side. This close to her, her dreams were very visible; I did my best to make sure they were pleasant, replacing the genestealer nightmare with a memory of us taking Scipia to Canterlot to see the Hearth's Warming Eve play when she was a few months old. I smiled as I thought of the day and compared it to my old self. I looked to my other hand, still wreathed in the Deceiver's void-black armor, and realized precisely how much I had changed.
I had come to Equestria when I was sixteen, mad the world and slightly mad in a mental sense. I loved the chaos I caused, reveled in the bits of bedlam I sewed whenever I was commissioned by some foreign leader who needed a problem swept under a rug. I learned a lot in the year between taking the armor and Chrysalis announcing her pregnancy, but nothing I learned was pleasant or even slightly practical outside the cruel reality of a contract. I once said the only reason I wasn't a supervillain was my inability to think of a cool name, or something to that effect. I once fried every neuron in a minotaurs brain without so much as blinking.
Truth be told, before Scipia came along, I didn't value my life. I still don't; the only value is that others have placed upon it. I live, I fight, I raise my daughter, all because my life has a value to people other than myself. The old me wouldn't have done that. The old me, given my current abilities, would have become a monster, and heaven forbid he follow the same path I did without falling in love. Trixie's death brought the old me back for a short while, but even after I pushed him down, it took months for him to fully leave. In many ways, the anger, the rage of my former personality was my only demon.
There I was, damn near twenty-seven years old, a father of one, the leader of what was arguably the most feared and respective organization on the planet, and I was worried over the ghost of my former self. I had bigger things to worry about, like Chaos, or the Imperium, or reproduction. I'm not going to lie, I was mostly focused on reproduction. Some old habits didn't fade with my demon. But, thinking of how the Warp, the universe where emotion was made manifest, could twist and addle even the strongest of minds, turn the greatest of men into blathering, half-sane shells of their former selves, I could help but let a single, sour thought pass through my mind as I curled up next to Chrysalis for a brief rest.
Could my demon become a daemon?
@#@#@# Amos's POV @#@#@#
It was strange, looking at the amassed xenos as they walked about the bridge, checking what Delray said to check. When we first arrived on this backwater rock they called home, I wouldn't have wonder more than where best to put a las-bolt, yet I now considered them allies, at least in part. The Ecclesiarchy had taught me much back on home, and I felt no love for the aliens, but I also failed to feel the rage I would have at the sight of them. Even Jay and Taylor, who were both heretics, xenophiles, and it was possible both were psykers, if Jay's too-hot flames were anything to go by. Every faithful bone in my body should have been screaming to kill them, or to at least lay a trap to be sprung when we turned Dahl and Ophidia in to the Inquisition. Some feeling deep in my gut kept me from making that call.
With this calm, this lack of threats from among and beyond the stars, I was able to finally think on what had transpired over my time within Dahl's retinue. As they say, hindsight is perfect, and I should have been alarmed long before he shot me in the leg and left me to die. All the little heresies, which he claimed the Emperor had already forgiven him for, added up to a closeted Chaos worshiper. Our time operating in the sector had been one big spree of crimes against our peoples. To make matters worse, we all helped him.
Martellus had committed tech-heresy by working the Tau-made weaponry our old Kroot mercs used, a crime for which the Mechanicus would have him executed. Oleg, Alexander, and I were directly involved in his crimes, which ranged from smuggling of xenos tech to... Son of a whore. Those cultists we had captured on Profliga, the ones who escaped shortly after we docked at a fueling station, we must have just been some perverse ferry for them; I have no doubt Dahl released them. I shook my head and realized I'd probably burn alongside the bastard, but I knew Delphine would have it worse.
If she was allowed to live, and that was a bit of a stretch, the Sororitas would have her stripped of her rank and armor, maybe even her augmetics. They would dressed her only in scrolls bearing prayers of redemption, nailed into her flesh, and giver her an Eviscerator chainsword. Then they'd stick her at the front and let her earn her place in the God-Emperor's watchful eyes.
We had been played, all of us. Former Inquisitor Reglan Dahl of the death world named Farmer's Hope was going to burn at the stake for his crimes, and though I would be right next to him, I'd make sure his name, reputation, titles, awards, commendations, his everything was ruined, tossed in the mud, blood, and filth he had created and spread wherever he went.
“The Emperor protects, Amos,” Delphine said as she walked up to me. She looked no worse for wear, though she seemed ready for the replacement eye Martellus had been urging her to get. “We had no way of knowing what he was doing, what he had become. We just followed orders as he gave them.”
“How many men have said the same?” I asked, looking in her eye. Those words seemed like something a machine would say, something a terrible, speaking machine would say when asked why it murdered an entire world. Maybe that was what we had become, fully-living servitors marching to Dahl's drum. “Ignorance is nothing, we are not innocent in this.”
“And we are also not guilty,” she replied, putting an armored hand on her hip. “The Inquisition will know this; they'll understand.”
“And what of the ponies? Of Jay and Taylor? What about when the Inquisition finds out about them?”
“I'm sure they'll put Taylor on a Black Ship and assess him as they would any other psyker.” She thought for a moment, and I recalled her stories about her time on Holy Terra, before she was sent to her current Order. Psykers were not treated very well, but they were dangerous. The Black Ships ferried them to Holy Terra, where they were tested and and searched for the taint of Chaos. If they passed and were strong enough, they were sanctioned and allowed to fulfill any number of roles in the Imperium. He could end up in some Imperial Guard regiment or some such, or maybe as an astropath. Or maybe he'd be found wanting, and fed to the Golden Throne along with nine-hundred-ninety-nine other poor souls. “They'd probably send him back to the Inquisition, truth be told.”
“You still haven't answered my question about the ponies, Delphine.”
“We came here by accident, a freak Warp-current; it is unlikely to happen again.” She looked out the massive window and gazed at the unfamiliar stars. “If the Doorframe were powered down, there'd be no way for anyone to find this world, save another freak accident.”
“Or Chaos wanting us to find it.”
I liked this idea, and had I not found Delphine sexually repulsive, I would have kissed her there and then. I instead gave her a friendly, grateful hug. I already knew how to pass off the colorful xenos while maintaining their hidden ways. I smiled for the first time in what felt like centuries.
“All those colorful, talking equines seem like those Warp-spawned hallucinations rogue psykers use to cover their tracks, don't they?”