PONYHAMMER 40,000. The Warp Incursion.

by Duskrunner

Chapter Fifteen - The Heretic Priests of Eidoline

THE EYE OF TERROR.
THE SILVER TOWER OF THE CULT STYGIAN

Immundus awoke. Waking up was a strange sensation for a Space Marine, their heightened senses and improved physiology meant they need never experience the altered states of unconsciousness or true sleep.

He couldn't move. Either force field technology, psycher restraint or powerful sorcery bound him floating in space.
The room was an irregular shape, a shifting icosahedron from the looks of it, crossed with pillars of black marble joining mismatched corners.

Eldritch flames of bright blue hung from braziers along different faces of each pillar.
No two flames burnt 'up' in the same direction.

The rest of the reality phased in and Immundus found he was suspended over a dais of sorcerous energy.
Suits of power armor painted in deep blue followed, each Chaos Marine holding bolters in a ready position.

Immundus noticed their ornate right shoulder pads first. Two wore carved crocodile heads, a third wore a jackal. In the distance a fourth had an eagle.
The second thing he noticed were the simple linen loincloths they wore.

A voice called out to him.
"Immundus, prophet of the fourth eye, seer of the third way, slayer of the Nurgle Lord Bloatbile."

Inside his helmet Immundus' eyes narrowed.

"The great Immundus."

Immundus growled loudly.

"Irritated so easily? This is other than expected. I was led to believe I could exhaust enough force to render a planet inhospitable and still be no closer to finding a trace of you. Tell me, what happened?"

Immundus wasn't so easily goaded but his humiliation was fresh, his energies spent and after five minutes with Trixie if he never again heard the words 'great' or 'powerful' it would be too soon.
His thoughts were palpable and everything in the room devoured them.

"Not many wield divination; you've used it well. We've desired your presence here for quite some time.
Again. Tell me, what happened to make you fall so low that you were brought here so easily?"

Immundus remained silent as a sorcerer entered his field of vision and his' doubts were settled: he was face to face with a Chaos Space Marine clad in the colors and heraldry of the Thousand Sons. His helmet was a short-beaked eagle's head.
Immundus' eyes went to the Space Marine with the matching shoulder pad in the distance.
Sigils and runes flowed into being on his armor until the Mark of Tzeentch appeared.

Rubric Marines. Sealed power armor haunted by the disembodied soul of it's previous owner.

"Reveal yourself." Immundus challenged.

"I am Horus."

"Absurd." He replied.

"Yes, not that Horus, the Primarch we all know so. I am named for the same deity who gave him his namesake."

"Prehistoric superstition." Immundus said as his eyes darted about, finding other avatar-faced sorcerers and their minions.

"There is power in such ancient superstition."
The Horus' voice answered. His tone suggested he was grinning.

Immundus turned his head up and for the first time he saw what he was under.

A creature hovered above him, one he recognized as a Screamer, one of Tzeentch's magical beasts.
A sorcerer of great power must be at the head of this alliance of psychers.
Immundus considered his prospects bleak even as he suppressed his gifts: if he was fortunate he might merely be faced with a sorcerer lord and a handful of follower-acolytes, If not then he was in the hands of a Warcoven and he would be bound to their service until whatever ambitions they had were satisfied. His head sank in resignation.

there is a fate worse

A whisper in his mind put a chill through his spine. If the warband was enthralled to a Daemonic Herald anything was possible. Against the silenced voice of his judgement Immundus opened his mind to the Warp and saw into its currents to see what he faced.

Atop the ray-like daemon beast he foresaw not a warrior but furnishings; a stack of tomes as large as a man and rolls of parchment stacked and cluttered against a writing desk.
Gibbering upon the stacks a pair of Horrors - whining blue daemons, little more than round sacks for a body filled with mouths and eyes that randomly sprouted limbs, horns and tendrils - carried on with an suspicious task.

One kept pulling tomes and reading through them. Frequently this Horror did nothing more than finish the book and toss it aside but every now and then he would read something that caught his attention. He would gibber unintelligibly before passing the book on to his partner who would then transcribe writing onto the massive tome he was hunched over. The Horror's tome would then be passed on to the reader as the writer chucked the original book.

Satisfied, the reader would read the transcription aloud and as he did the room would come alive with obscure sorceries thought lost to the millennia. The pair gibbered on in frustration, unleashing storms while a long line of Rubicae robotically continued their procession bringing and returning the entire contents of the Warcoven's library for their appraisal.

Immundus' psychic sight sucked back into his head and he exhaled bloody clumps.

The Horus spoke to him.
"Curious, are they not. The gibbering four-eyed reader is Xirat'p and the clumsy four-armed writer is P'tarix.
The Blue Scribes.
For reasons unknown to me they scour existence in search of magic. Curiously, nothing is beneath their notice. I've witnessed psychers who cast as simple a spell as warpfire and the Scribes studied them extensively looking for the most menial differences; one cast it through his left palm, one through his right, one used his fingers, another only the index. One belched fire from his mouth, another did so equally but the source of the fire was born in his lungs and not his stomach.
One adept shot them as lasers from his eyes, another as electricity channeled through a pair of mutated tendrils.
One breathed it from his nose as a breath from his nostrils and another I make no attempt to deceive you shot it from the tip of his nose as if it were a finger."

Immundus waited patiently, guessing the direction his captor was building towards.

"Do you know why Xirat'p is so frustrated? It's not because he remembers he's doing the exact same spell over and over again; despite his repetition he can't actually understand a single word of his brother's handwriting.
He is angry because since the age before time he and his brother have borne this task and they have yet to find this 'new' source of sorcery I suspect they have been hunting for. And for now they spend their hours nitpicking through arcane casting minutia in the hopes of finding it!"

The Horus retreated from Immundus and the dais.
"Yours is the first corrupted human brain capable of determining prophecy I've come across in generations.
I think I will allow the Scribes a respite from tedious academia, to indulge in the pleasure of direct research."

"No!" Immundus screamed.

His words came too late.

A lioness-headed sorcerer crossed into his vision and lay hands upon his skull. Immundus' vision swam with the events of his lifetime. Desperately he tried to fight off the violation.

"It is too late for that."
A third voice broke into the chamber. A jackal-headed sorcerer reached behind him. Lightning coursed through Immundus' body and his resistance shattered.
"You opened your mind to the Warp when you engaged in your gifts for divination. Your secrets are ours to scrutinize."

"You... lie!" Immundus choked.

"I do." The Horus continued. "When we cast our portal we expected to capture, not rescue you. When we turned our eyes upon Noxious we expected to see a Plague world being subverted, not a vigorous invasion by the Prince of Excess.
And when we focused on that invasion we expected to see you and your kind press the gates to the Garden, another run at retaking the Goddess Isha. Instead we surveyed Daemonettes and Emperor's Children alike, pushing aside Nurgle's minions and scouring the wastelands as if you were searching for something.
I'm ashamed to admit, your behavior caught our attention.
We have since tired of imagination and speculation, we want the answer to the query 'what do you seek?' and we expect it to be answered immediately."

The Horus head raised towards the Anubis and that sorcerer applied another surge of Chaos lightning into Immundus' body.

Feeling Immundus' strength buckle the Jackal nodded and the Lioness used his telepath powers to tear his mind open.

Immundus' head fell back, a thread of bloody drool fell out the corner of his mouth as his brain was plundered.
His eyes focused. On either side of the floating Screamer three pairs of eyes, one pair P'tarix's two pairs Xirat'p's, looked down on him.

All at once every surface of the icosahedron became alive with the images of Lyra Heartstrings, Trixie Lulamoon and Twilight Sparkle. The sorcerers observed as the ponies levitated objects, cast illusions, erected force barriers and teleported to and fro.

The Horus spoke.
"Fascinating. Utterly fascinating. Defeated by a band of heavily mutated chosen or a race of sentient power-armored xenos."

The image of Lyra pummeling Immundus through a combination of cybernetic limbs and telekinetic fury competed with the vision of Twilight Sparkle's final assault upon Immundus, battering him with boulders before teleporting him into the sky to fall to his death.

The imagery had drawn a crowd. Sorcerers with the heads of a crocodile, a serpent, a scarab, a Necron and a bull all entered to study the discovery.

A last breath of defiance was all Immundus could manage.
"I count... eight of you. Where is the one missing?"

The Necron-relief sorcerer turned to Immundus and faced him with the lifeless aspect of a machine.
the Sorcerer-Lord's ways are not for you to divine
His thoughts projected into him with the force of a thunder hammer.

Immundus reeled before his skull whiplashed.

"I fail to see what's so unique about these creatures." The Horus resumed.
"This is not telepathy, Immundus himself came to that conclusion. These illusions exist independent of his mind.
Here the xenos themselves moved to avoid them instinctively. There is no benefit to causing illusions like this within the minds of your allies. Is there?"

The Horus turned to the lioness-headed sorcerer, the Bastet. He shook his head in answer, confirming the Horus' suspicions.
The eagle-headed sorcerer turned to Immundus and asked him directly:
"If they weren't in your mind as you first suspected how was it you were overpowered by such a small group?"

The broken mind answered.
"I couldn't read them. I could foresee every round their bolters fired, every projected trajectory of their weapons whether they were thrown rock or their stolen power swords. Only so long as they were already committed.
While their weapons were in their hands, every attack they made including their cursed telekine force was outside by sight.
They are not psychers. They leave no psychic echo and their minds are closed entirely to the perils of the Warp.
Their sorcery is completely independent of it, unbound by the laws of sorcery of our dimension. They call it simply 'magic'."

The Warcoven turned their attention to him and then to the floating Screamer. Upon their living disc Xirat'p and P'tarix bickered and howled furiously at each other.
magic without sorcery
witchcraft without psychers
power without a price
it must be mine
Their voices rang out. The pony images faded to nothing and reality tore open as they created a dozen portals to the Warp.

A legion of pink and blue Horrors burst into the Silver Tower, another dozen Screamers floated in to do their bidding.
Atop the largest of the floating discs rode a Herald, an empowered pink Horror whose body sprout not a giant maw but a goat-like head crowned with warpfire. His appearance fit in perfectly among the Warcoven.

"I am summoned here for a great task. What business have I that the Sorcerer Lord Faro would risk The Architect's displeasure."

The scarab-helmed sorcerer spoke:
"Not our master but yours. He calls you to task and the Thousand Sons offer their services in your aid."
He bowed in reverential diplomacy.

The Herald exchanged glances in inhuman body language with the Scribes.

"Your rewards will be incalculable." He lied.

The scarab sorcerer knew it, and accepted regardless.

The icosahedron temple emptied of Horrors and one by one the sorcerers chose a Warp gate and led the way through it, their personal retinue of Rubric Marines following after them.

Upon the dais Immundus was left, his mind desperately trying to knit itself together
Only the jackal-headed sorcerer remained, his Rubicae taking up the guard stations previously held by lioness, eagle and crocodile.

The Anubis cast a spell and one of the icosahedron walls resumed playing the scenes from Immundus' defeats.
"Look at them, even the darkest heart amongst them is still insufferably bright. Whereto the hatred, the desire and passion, the lust for power? There must be more to them than this. All creatures die, all sentients fear death. Their afterthoughts will give me the answers I seek."

The Anubis looked at his Slaaneshi rival. With a gesture chains of fire and molten rock lashed through his armor to grasp Immundus' soul.

Immundus choked, helplessly raging.

"Accept this sacrifice, great Tzeentch, grant me your favor, that I may add my own pawn in your grand scheme."

IT IS DONE
An omnipotent choir of a thousand voices echoed.

Groaning, Immundus cried his last as his essence was sundered to a thousand pieces.

"Never send the psychers of a lesser god, you who would pluck at the realms touched by true sorcery."
The Anubis declared in lieu of an epithet.

Immundus' spirit lingered in the air, the Anubis turned to the imaging screen as the mist settled over the inert armor.
The jackal-headed sorcerer's ritual had ripped all of Immundus' runes of power and defensive wards right off.
The armor then fell to dust and joined with the vapor that had once been Immundus.

The Anubis watched his screen, waiting for an answer that would not come.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Away, far away, deep within the core of the Warp at the heart of the Eye of Terror a primal force moved.

But it was not the Chaos God Tzeentch.

The power turned its face towards the Anubis, tapped into a primal source within itself and without opening its eyes bestowed its gaze upon the ritual it was intruding upon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Behind the Anubis a red horn pierced the air and a beast began to appear, his body congealing from the fog.
He was cruelty, hatred and myth made pony; King Sombra emerged from the shadows, his crown intact, his royal cape flowing, and the armor he wore when he had ruled over the Crystal Empire replaced by the transmutated pieces of Immundus' power armor.
He was every inch the dark mirror of Twilight Sparkle's band.

The Anubis turned as he felt the presence in the room. Despite his surprise he was pleased.
"Is this the result of your efforts, Architect of Fate, or is the history of these sickeningly innocent creatures filled with such shadows? Come, you, tell me more."

Sombra examined his hooves, astonished to come from nothingness into being. He snorted heavily.

The Anubis dismissed the gesture as being the limits of the creature he had resurrected.
"No matter. Come my little pony, we shall go-"

The Anubis got no further. With a guttural roar Sombra lashed out at the sorcerer and a blizzard of black crystal shards blew into being; dense, saturated, the shards showered him like rain, as unavoidable in the confined space as a tidal wave.

"Mindless. Incoherent. BEAST!"
The Anubis muttered through the violence that assaulted his body and his ears, his words completely drowned out by Sombra's primal roar 'GRAAAH!'.

He raised his hand and paused in a panic. His psychic powers weren't working.
His power armor had resisted the brunt of Sombra's attack but crystal shards had lodged in the ceramite and pierced the exposed joints, digging into his skin and runes.
His sorcery faded, the Warp energies that flowed through his body fizzled as they interacted with the crystal fragments.
Shorted out and entirely reliant on the power of the Warp to fuel his every weapon all the way down to his bolt pistol's ammunition. At range the Anubis was entirely powerless.

Sombra bared his fangs, making ready to attack head on just as he always did.
Something stopped him. His jaw closed, his eyes narrowed as he beheld the helpless sorcerer.
The Anubis got to his feet raising his force staff high. Without his psychic powers his blows would be robbed of the power that could fell the most monstrous lifeforms the galaxy had produced. Even so the staff was a formidable power weapon he gambled would slay the xenos.

The magic flowing from Sombra's eyes flared and a hundred jagged spikes burst from the Anubis' armor as the embedded crystals expanded instantly.

The Anubis gurgled his words, a disembodied voice heavy with regret and anger at the one obviously correct course of action left untaken, and commanded: "Kill him."
And he died.

A dozen Thousand Sons Rubric Marines turned their bolters on Sombra and fired.
A hail of inferno bolts tore through the body but Sombra laughed as he transformed to mist.
As the magical munitions passed through him Sombra noted the power of the magic within each bolt. That and the way the power of his new armor reacted to it.
With a gesture Sombra decided he had had enough. The entire summoning room exploded with dark crystals.

Sombra stood victorious then slumped. Not a single face of the icosahedron, not one obsidian pillar remained unshattered.

He was tired. Resurrection, the magical munitions that passed through him and the aftereffects of whatever ritual it was that bound him to this strange new realm had taken their toll.
That and the possibility that he was mortal now. Sombra grimaced.

Looking about him he saw that a number of Thousand Sons remained struggling even while impaled in crystal.
With a start Sombra realized that even the Marines completely entombed within the great crystal pillars were not dead; their bodies were simply rendered immobile.

Peering through the transparent crystal Sombra began to examine them more clearly. He was surprised by what he discovered. Within the armor there was no flesh to be pierced. Indeed, the defining aspect of a Rubric Marine was its origin as an ordinary Space Marine whose body had been reduced to dust by sorcery, his spirit reduced to the simplest intelligence and bound to animate his suit of power armor for all eternity.

Sombra realized he coveted such an ability.
He attempted to match the feat through sheer power and impose his command over the Rubric Marines.
While his mental powers were formidable the automatons' wills were objects far removed from the operation of living minds. They refused to obey.

With no other subjects to experiment on Sombra turned on the Anubis' corpse. The body withered away to dust and his power armor tore and morphed until it was in the shape of a pony, mimicking Sombra's own. Unable to bind the sorcerer's soul to the suit Sombra fashioned a crystal horn that echoed the most elemental parts of his personality and telekinetically thrust it into the pony suit's head.

The optic shields glowed to life.

JUST AS PLANNED
the thousand voiced cacophony echoed.

Sombra turned about him, his eyes searching for the source. His mind echoed with another growl but his mouth opened instead with the word: "TZEENTCH."

I AM

"How do I know all this? Your name, your world, your weapons and armor."
Sombra's eyes fell to a libram chained to the flank of his armor. He realized a familiarity with it he shouldn't possess, a feeling he knew every eldricht secret contained within it.
"This spellbook."

YOUR BEING HAS BEEN RESTORED THROUGH THE FLESH OF IMMUNDUS TO RESTORE YOU TO CORPOREAL LIFE
YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS BLESSING AT A PRICE
YOU SERVE ME

"No."
Sombra glared at the ceiling defiant.
"I know enough about you to know you only speak in lies."

YOU WILL DO AS I COMMAND AND BRING YOUR CRYSTAL CURSE TO THE LEGIONS

"No. You brought me here, a unicorn, to a world without unicorns. You did so because... "
Something gnawed at Sombra's mind, something in the back of his consciousness. He paused as he tried to remember and the electric afterimage of a thought within the gooey mass that was originally Immundus' brain asserted itself and made his emotions jolt.
"Ponies are here. My enemies are here
She is here!
You have brought me here for revenge."

He formed a crystal ball and found them, away from the Eye of Terror, growing ever more distant.

"Twilight Sparkle."

Away and en route to-
"Terra.
You offer me vengeance and you desire chaos in my wake.
Your machinations would see me forced to overpower a dozen worlds to get past the blockade on your part of the galaxy."

Sombra considered his position, weighing his options with no voice in his head but his own.

"Stay out of my way and you will have what you desire."

The fabric of space tore apart and a portal opened. Sombra did not know whence it would lead and he did not care.
He had a path to follow, to remain there was to stand still.

With no further thought to the Thousand Sons he stepped forward, the first of the Rubicae Ponies following in his hoofsteps.

Comments

[Duskrunner]

I'm upset at myself that it took almost three weeks but here we are. THREE chapters uploaded at once. I hope you enjoy them and the semi-new format. I'm trying out fewer longer chapters which means this should end at 25 instead of 30. Like always, please leave a comment, your feedback means a lot to me.

[FluffyPanzer]

The plot thickens as they say

[FluffyPanzer]

3943518 Your too kind and as far as that Back Library trivia question of yours all my research came up with was the word Kronin lol

[Duskrunner]

3946051 WE HAVE A WINNER!

Kronin is the right answer, and appropriate coming from a Tyranid-empathizer. Kronin was a penal legion Lt.and a Last Chancer whose squad was butchered to a man while their company guarded an imperial outpost. Stationed inside an Imperial temple, when the dust cleared he had to dig himself out from underneath a mountain of guardsmen and gaunts. The experience shattered his mind and afterwards he could only speak quoting passages from devotionals, hymns and passages of the imperial Creed - Chapters 1-10 were all single word summaries. Chapters 11-20 are summarized paraphrasing one of Kronin's quotes. Maybe not perfectly but hopefully they get a message across

[MARINEav8r]

Overall, the story is good, but you seem to be going off topic a lot. Perhaps that chapter in which Celestia and Luna fight the 'nids was unnecessary (albeit entertaining), but I look forward to how Sombra will come into play, and the Derpy incident seems like a cliffhanger. It sounds like she was hit by the sniper, but did the crystal protect her? Looking forward to what happens on the ship, earth, and wonder how the Imperials will react of they are caught.... Looking forward to the next chapter.

Also, may I make a screenplay of this or feature the eagle familiar in one of my own screenplays? You will be credited.

This is, by far, the best 40k crossover yet.

[Duskrunner]

4153237

"Overall, the story is good, but you seem to be going off topic a lot."
Definitely guilty as charged. The basic outline for the story could have been fulfilled in ~ 15 chapters but that would have reduced all the background ponies to background ponies, the conflict to one lead character against another lead character, and the universe to 'just the Imperium'. In short, everything I can't stand about current 40k writing (including codices) in general. The underlying narrative is there but I'm happy to let everypony take their time getting to the end and writing about what happens as it goes along. I'm writing as much fun into the journey as I can in case the conclusion isn't (can't be?) as satisfying for everyone as I'd want it to be. Hopefully the style works for everybody

I'm glad despite concerns you still enjoyed seeing the Princesses in action. 'The rule of cool' wins a lot of arguments with me when deciding what I leave in & edit out but I try hard to keep 'cool' parts from being gratuitous... in the end at least. Admittedly at first I just really, really wanted to write in Tyranids; they define the Eastern fringe. When you combine that human universal fear with Luna's dream-hopping to get information and the sisters' knowledge of astrophysics I hit a 'What Would Celestia & Luna Do?' moment and from there the chapter wrote itself. The idea of Celestia as meticulous star engineer passing on those personality traits to Twilight became headcanon for me and I had to include it. She's a princess not because she's a goddess but because of personal merit and I took the chance to predict the shape that merit takes (and if the show canon ends up echoing the idea I will be thrilled)

"Also, may I make a screenplay of this or feature the eagle familiar in one of my own screenplays? You will be credited."
Goldwing is based on Torquemada Coteaz's psyber-eagle so you don't need my permission to feature one . Go nuts and have fun. wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/c/c6/Tormequeda.jpg/800px-Tormequeda.jpg Fun facts
*Goldwing lost the mechanical head when it was damaged reducing most of its utility, which is why the Inquisitor Lord discarded it at Repentia Point.
*I originally wanted to roboticize Owlowicious to serve in Spike's role in 40k. My motivation being that I'm converting Pony Marines even as we speak and I'm supposed to receive this little guy from Kickstarter soon: s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/698/490/4ce979bd84e1cb99726bd7a094875491_large.jpg?1372131914
While the miniature will happen I couldn't do it in story because a) there was 0 reason for the owl to be there and most importantly b) the 40k universe is like that but Twilight isn't.
I'm not J. Abrams.

Thanks for taking the time to write and especially thanks for the kind words. I hope I'll have the next few chapters up soon.

[Duskrunner]

4246933 Deface, modify, re-purpose AND improve

[Devastor]

This story had lot of potential, but I'm not going to waste my time with this, if the next chapter doesn't manage to change the opinion I currently have.

[Duskrunner]

4326299 My apologies to you and everyone else reading for both the delay and the current 'cliffhanger' status. I also appreciate and thank you for your comment that my story has (or had) potential.

For everyone interested the current situation is thus: the story outline failed to meet the goals of the 'bible' I wrote up. As I hope you all see we're deep past the introductions and entering the stages of building up and resolving certain character arcs. When I looked at what I have and compared it to the motivations I realized I had some hard choices to make.

Choices that included the cliffhanger, and believe it or not the cliffhanger isn't the problem: it's the fact that the personalities, characterization and above everything else the lessons that needed to be learned weren't expressed to my satisfaction.
So I'm fixing that and it's going to take a little more time.

I thank you all for your support, casual and dedicated both, and hope to reward it soon with something worthy of the grandeur both of these series deserve.

-Duskrunner.

[Devastor]

4326790 Just don't have ponies go apeshit near the Golden Throne.

[Starlight Nova]

When is the chapter coming out? This story isn't dead, is it?

[NAH223445566]

Necesito más.