Hozzászólások

The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.
To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.
Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.
On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloudburst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.
And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.
Behind the veil, there is no when and then. Everything is now. Always and eternally now, in the shifting tides of an infinite malignance.
Lights shine in that malignant black: the lights of sentience that draw the darkness closer. The same lights flare and shriek and dissolve at the merest touch from the forces around them. Dreams and memories take shape only to shatter amidst the claws and jaws manifesting within the nothingness.
The scream plunges on through every whisper of hatred that will ever be spoken by a human mouth or thought by a human mind. It cracks like lightning above the sky of a dying civilisation that will expire before ever grasping the wonder of space flight. It breaks the stone city-bones of a culture gone to dust thousands of years ago.
From its genesis in breath and sound the scream becomes acidic nothingness, then fury and fire. It becomes a memory that burns, a whisper that rends and a prophecy that bleeds.
And it becomes a name. A name that means nothing in any language spoken by any species, living or dead. A name that carries meaning only in the strangled, misfiring thoughts of humans breathing their last breaths, in that precious and terrifying moment when their spirits are caught between one realm and the next.
The name of a creature, a daemon born from the cold rage of one traitorous soul in one treacherous second. Its name is the deed itself, the first murder and the death rattle that followed.
In the creature’s shrieking journey across the warp, it touches the minds of every human who ever was and will ever be, from the long dead to those yet to be born. The daemon is tied to the species with such primal intimacy that every man, woman and child knows its caress – deep in their blood and bones – even if they know nothing of its name.
Billions of them stir in their sleep across the many ages of man, writhing against the unwanted touch of the creature’s birth back in the mists of time.
Millions of them wake, staring into the darkness of mud huts, palatial bedchambers, housing complexes and any one of the countless other structures that humans build for themselves across a million worlds and thousands of years.

Kora bronzkori emléket mutat:
"This is where it all began, Ra. Here, on the banks of the Sakarya River." "This is where I spent my youth, working the soil and bringing life from the ground."

‘The one we speak of now is the entity born from the first murder, when a human first took the life of another outside of the need to survive.’
‘So many minds look to the taming of fire as the moment humanity tore itself apart from the melange of biological life on Old Earth, elevating mankind above the level of beasts. They point to many such moments and no two insights agree – fire, the wheel, gunpowder, jet propulsion, the Navigator gene… All wrong. It was that moment, Ra. A deed that even false, inane, insane religions have cursed throughout history. That one act set humanity irrevocably apart, feeding the beings of the warp, putting us on the first step of a long, long path. And here we are, so much
further along the path. Still seeking to leave it.’
‘Drach'nyen. That is what the entity’s name is. It means The End of Empires.’

‘The warp rarely makes itself known in manifest form. The damnation now flooding the webway is the crescendo of its siren song. Its immensity and physicality is what makes the threat so unprecedented. But far more often, the warp seethes behind the veil, it curdles thoughts inside a skull, it inks the blood in men and women’s veins. And that is enough. More than enough. It brings us to moments like these, in the company of ambitious, faithful men, too proud to see their own deception.’ (egy legyőzött varázsló-főpap-hadurat végez ki éppen a Császár Terra egyesítése közben, a seregében elég fura elfajzottak meneteltek, maga a hadúr meg volt győződve róla hogy a népe javáért élő szent ember, de az árnyékában férgek tekeregtek...) ‘As a holy man he had begun with offers of food and the promise of survival. Sensing his susceptibility, the warp darkened around the candle flame of his life’s light. He prayed, and the warp answered.’
'His life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the
lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence.
This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.’

(A Császár Arkhan jelenlétében megállapította, hogy a műtőasztalán fekvő Angron folyamatos kínban él a Butcher's nails miatt, de nem mutatott különösebb érzelmet)
‘A compromised primarch is still a primarch,’ the Emperor mused, still distracted. ‘What is it, Arkhan?’
Land hesitated. ‘You are more sanguine than I would have imagined in this moment, even knowing of your holy detachment from emotion.’
‘What would the alternative be?’ ‘That I might mourn the Twelfth
as though it were my injured son, and I its grieving father?’
‘Never that, Divine One.’ Arkhan chose his words with care. ‘Though some might expect that.’
‘It is not my son, Arkhan. None of them are. They are warlords, generals, tools bred to serve a purpose. Just as the Legions were bred to serve a purpose.’
Arkhan looked down at the sleeping demigod, watching Angron’s facial features twitch and tense in painful harmony with a ravaged nervous system.
‘With your blessing, Divine One, I would ask something of you.’
‘Ask.’
‘The primarchs. It is said they have always called you father. It seems so… sentimental. I’ve never
understood why you allow it.’
‘There was once a writer,’ he said, ‘a penner of children’s stories who told the tale of a
wooden puppet that wished to be reborn as a human child. And this puppet, this automaton of painted, carved wood that sought to be a thing of flesh and blood and bone – do you know what it called its maker? What would such a creature call the creator that gave it shape and form and life?’
Father. Arkhan felt his skin crawl. ‘I understand, Divine One.’
‘I see that you do.’ The Emperor turned back to the body on the slab. ‘The Twelfth’s lifespan and tactical acuity may be reduced but the pain engine amplifies its effectiveness in other ways to compensate. I believe I will return the Twelfth to its Legion.’
(vegyük figyelembe hogy olyannal beszélt, aki őt az Omnissiah-nak tekinti, gyakorlatilag a pragmatizmus istenének, ezért lehet az érzelemmentessége megjátszott is, nem tudhatjuk...)

Megmutatja neki, hogyan történt az Eldák Bukása, és elmondja, hogy minden értelmes fajra ez várhat, amikor pszionikusan aktívvá fejlődik.
+I have conquered humanity’s cradle-world. I have conquered the galaxy, in order to shape mankind’s development as it at last evolves into a psychic race. No isolated pockets of our species may remain free, lest in their ignorance they invite destruction upon us all. I have shattered the hold of faith and fear over the human mind. Superstition and religion must continue to be outlawed, for they are easy doors for the warp’s denizens to enter the human heart. This is what we have already done. And soon I will offer humanity a way of interstellar travel without reliance upon Geller fields and Navigators. I will offer them means of communicating between worlds without reliance on the warp-dreams of astropaths. And when the Imperium shields the entire species within the laws of my Pax Imperialis, when humanity is freed from the warp and united beneath my vision, I can at last shepherd mankind’s growth into a psychic race.+
The primarchs, thought Ra. The Thunder Legion. The Unification Wars. The Great Crusade. The Space Marine Legions. The Imperial Truth. The Webway Project. The Black Ships, with psykers huddled in the holds, watched over by the Silent Sisterhood. It is all about–
+Control. Tyranny is not the end, Ra. Absolute control is but the means to the end.+
The hubris… Ra couldn’t fight the insidiously treacherous thought, to see the hidden depths of his
master’s ambitions. The sheer, unrivalled hubris.
+The necessity.+ The Emperor’s voice was iced iron. +Not arrogance. Not vainglory. Necessity. I have already told you, Ra. Humans need rulers. Now you see why. A single murder is on one end of the spectrum, for rulers bring law. The hope of the entire race is at the far end of the continuum, for I – as ruler – bring salvation.+

‘Why, sire? I never asked it then, and I have always wondered since. Why all of this?’
‘For glory,’ the Emperor replied. ‘To honour the creatures that call themselves my sons. My necessary tools. They feed on glory as if it were a palpable sustenance. Their own glory, of course, no different from the kings and emperors of old. It scarcely crosses their mind that glory matters nothing to me. I could have had a planet’s worth of glory any time I wished it when I walked in the species’ shadow throughout prehistory. Only three of them ever thought to ask why I timed my emergence as I did.’

I prepared them all, this pantheon of proud godlings that insist they are my heirs. I warned them of the warp’s perils. Coupled with this, they knew of those dangers themselves. The Imperium has relied on Navigators to sail the stars and astropaths to communicate between worlds since the empire’s very first breath. The Imperium itself is only possible because of those enduring souls. No void sailor or psychically touched soul can help but know of the warp’s insidious predation. Ships have always been lost during their unstable journeys. Astropaths have
always suffered for their powers. Navigators have always seen horrors swimming through those strange tides. I commanded the cessation of Legion Librarius divisions as a warning against the unrestrained use of psychic power. One of our most precious technologies, the Geller field, exists to shield vessels from the warp’s corrosive touch. These are not secrets, Ra, nor mystical lore known only to a select few. Even possession by warp-wrought beings is not unknown. The Sixteenth witnessed it with his own eyes long before he convinced his kindred to walk a traitor’s path with him. That which we call the warp is a universe alongside our own, seething with limitless, alien hostility. The primarchs have always known this. What difference would it have made had I labelled the warp’s entities “daemons” or “dark gods”?’

Zephon’s pale eyes narrowed, his concentration absolute, taking in the ballet of violence unfolding before him. He had seen the warriors of the Ten Thousand fight before, albeit only in grainy pict footage. He had heard the countless unpoetic comparisons describing their uniqueness as the perfect exemplar of a process that became diluted and rushed to mass-produce the Legiones Astartes. Yet he had never seen them in battle against Space Marines. This warrior reaved through them – reaved through Zephon’s cousins from the rebellious Legions – cutting them down, butchering them the way Zephon himself had massacred his way across human and alien battlefields. How easy, all of a sudden, to see how Constantin Valdor, the Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, was considered an equal of the primarchs themselves in matters of blade-work, when any Custodian could be as skilled as this.
Had the Emperor foreseen this? His thoughts curdled, growing gravid with treason. Is this what they were made for? This annihilation? This slaughter of legionaries?
Aztán Zephon persze elhessegeti ezt az eretnek gondolatot :-)