by C. S. Goto
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
ELDAR PROPHECY
С. S. Goto
For the monster that follows the path
of Ihnyoh around the garden.
IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred
centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden
Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the
will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the
might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass
writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of
Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for
whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that
he may never truly die.
YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues
his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the
daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route
between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican,
the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast С. S. Goto « Eldar Prophecy»
armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds.
Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes,
the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their
comrades in arms arc legion: the Imperial Guard and
countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant
Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus
Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their
multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the
ever-present threat from aliens, heretics,
mutants - and worse.
TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold
billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody
regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much
has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the
promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim
dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst
the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and
the laughter of thirsting gods.
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ANCIENT AND MYSTERIOUS beyond the comprehension of men, the eldar are enigmatic aliens who stalked the stars when mankind's ancestors were crawling from the primordial seas of Terra. Their magnificent empire spanned the galaxy: their whims decided the fate of worlds and their wrath quenched the fiercest suns. But many millennia ago, these Sons of Asuryan fell prey to pride, decadence and depravity - this was the Fall of the eldar. From the miraculous potency of their degenerate dreams, a sickening and obscene god was born - the Great Enemy. The psychic implosion of its birth-cries tore out the heart of the eldar empire, leaving a pulsing, bleeding afterbirth of pure Chaos in its place - the Eye of Terror.
AND NOW, IN the time of the Imperium of Man, the eldar are all but extinct - the last fragments of a shattered civilization plunged into constant warfare as they flee the ever-lustful reaches of the Great Enemy, struggling to suppress the deathly light of their fiery emotions lest the Enemy find them again. Those who managed to escape before the cataclysmic Fall did so on mighty living vessels called craftworlds; it is on these world-ships that the last remnants of the eldar civilization drift amongst the stars as a scattered and nomadic race.
ONLY A FEW of the wisest eldar farseers know how many craftworlds escaped from the Fall. One such craftworld, which fled out into the darkest reaches of the galaxy, hiding in glorious isolation from the Great Enemy in the blindness of nowhere, was Kaelor - the Radiant Eye. It drifted far from the touch of civilization, turning in on itself and incubating its own psychoses until the gravity of its intense psychic resonance gradually drew the attention of precisely those eyes from whom it sought to remain hidden. This is the story of Kaelor.
С. S. Goto « Eldar Prophecy»
PROLOGUE: ABOMINATION
SHE BLINKED AND the congregation flinched involuntarily. The flash of sapphire from her radiant eyes shimmered through the darkness, touching the soul of each of the Yuthran sisterhood as they stood in ceremonial attention around the perimeter of the Ring of Alastrinah. The long, red robes of the seers floated like veils of lost innocence, caught in the eddies of a swirl of faerulh - the ethereal soul-wind that breathed out of the very spirit of Kaelor.
The little abomination sat in the centre of the fluttering, diaphanous circle. Her head had been freshly shaved, making her peaceful, smooth and uncreased features appear to gleam like a white pearl. Her face was elegantly elliptical, and her youthful cheeks already betrayed the signs of a resolute jawline. She looked to all present like a statue of exquisite artistry - worthy of Vhaalum the Silver - only her startling blue eyes seemed to radiate life from deep within her, like the light of Isha herself. Little Ela blinked again.
Watching from her position in the circle, in the shadowy Alastrinah Sanctum of the ancient Seer House of Yuthran, Cinnia caught her breath and leaned forwards, as though afraid that even the slight motion of breathing might be enough to extinguish the painfully pristine sapphire light in the sleehr-child's eyes. For that moment, the seer saw the infant's gaze as a solitary candle in an infinite darkness.
Cinnia's red robes rippled faintly with her aborted motion, betraying her concern to anyone who might be watching. But all eyes were trained on the vaugnh - the abomination, as Cinnia called the eerie child seer under her charge. The infant's eyelids closed for a moment and then fluttered open once again, defining starbursts of blue in the shifting nebula of red robes that surrounded her. Despite their disdain for the childling, the seers of the Yuthran sisterhood sighed almost inaudibly, each of them transfixed by the vision of the little female, who sat in such captivating tranquillity before them. Each of them was caught in the discomforting space between awe, revulsion and fear. Little Ela appalled them.
Very slowly, the perfect and beautiful face turned, as though independent of its neatly seated body. Its sapphire eyes twinkled like diminishing stars as their gaze swept around the crimson circle, scanning past the faces that had become so familiar over the last several years. Ela looked through them as though the Yuthran were ghosts of nothingness. Cinnia watched Ela's brilliant gaze patrol the ring, touching each of the sisterhood with a dab of her radiance. Not for the first time, the young Yuthran seer felt that she was merely a spectator, standing around the margins of this little abomination's life, meaningful only when beheld in those glittering sapphire eyes. For a moment, Cinnia remembered the first time that she had seen the tiny sleehr-child, wrapped in the luxurious robes of Lady Ione, as the matriarch of Yuthran had brought her into the sanctity of the great seer house. In some ways, Cinnia's own life had begun on that day At the very least, it had changed forever. Ione had presented the wide-eyed childling to her, as though entrusting her with the greatest treasure of Kaelor. From that moment on, despite her own youth, Cinnia had devoted herself to the training of the girl, placing herself into the shadows of the tiny abomination. Ione had never even said where she had found the childling, but Ela's origins seemed clear to everyone. The memories sparked a feeling of profound marginalisation in Cinnia's dhamashir-soul, sending a shiver arcing through her spine. Not for the first time, she forced herself to disregard the deep unease that Ela provoked in her thoughts. The childling was under her tutelage.
Just before Ela's gaze reached hers, she lowered her eyes involuntarily, as though suddenly self-conscious, letting her gaze drop to the immaculate, polished, wraithbone floor that had defined this sacred space for generations. Subconsciously, she sought a haven in the ancient, unchanging materia
l structure of her house, hoping that her gesture would appear as deference to the others. There was no hiding from that gaze. It did not bridge merely the material space between Ela's eyes and Cinnia's bowed head, but rather it breached the materium itself, cutting through the unseen dimensions in a parallel course directly into the seer's mind. In that moment of psychic contact, during which Cinnia steeled herself against the gaze that seemed to pierce to the very depths of her being, rapidly closing off her thoughts lest the little abomination would see too much, an image of Ela appeared in her mind. She was older, but recognisably the same. Her hair was suddenly long and white, like a mane of Mhyrune psychotropic silk, but her sapphire eyes were gone. In place of her gleaming stare there were two caves of darkness set into her perfect skin, and a cascade of blood poured out of the sockets like a river of tragic tears. Yet, even in the image, Cinnia could feel the touch of the sleehr-child's gaze in her mind, as though the loss of her eyes had made no difference to her sight: it was wraithsight. Was Ela the ehveline? Was that why Ione had saved her? In that instant, just as Cinnia became conscious of her own wandering thoughts, the infant abomination in the centre of the ring of seers let out a cry of anguish, as though she had shared Cinnia's appalling vision of her future. Lifting her eyes from the twinkling depths of the wraithbone floor, Cinnia saw Ela's radiant but unfocused eyes flash and flare, as though the child had seen something startling in an indefinite space before her. She was sitting bolt upright with her eyes wild, staring directly towards Cinnia, but her gaze neither focused on the seer nor passed through her. The line of sight was simply impossible to discern, as though little Ela was looking at an entirely different world from the one around her. None of the Yuthran sisters moved to offer assistance or strength to the suddenly tortured childling in their midst. They stood with a tensely maintained calm as the breeze of faerulh continued to dance through their gently billowing robes. They watched, intrigued, repulsed and transfixed by the unusual event that transpired. The Rite of Alastrinah had never been performed by one so
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young, and had never been permitted until the Farseer's Court had pronounced an initiate ready by passing her through the Ritual of Tuireann.
An unspoken understanding swept around the ring of seers, like a sickly emulsion of sympathy and revulsion. They were not insensitive to the childling's suffering, but there was something about her very existence that they found offensive. She was dangerous. She was unbalanced and unnatural, and more than one of the Yuthran sisterhood agreed that it would have been far better for everyone if the Lady Ione had let her be executed with her father at the end of the House Wars. However, the Lady had never done anything without good reason, and none would dare to question her farsight, even now. Another anguished cry twisted into a scream, and the wraithbone floor pulsed and crackled with energy. Ela's eyes widened suddenly as threads of sha'iel radiated out from her, rippling through the floor and sparking into tiny stars of light as they tore through the psychically bonded tropes, leaving ghostly veins shimmering just under the polished surface. The wraith-tendrils quested through the deck, lashing and flickering as though reaching for the feet of the seers that stood ringed in awestruck curiosity. None of the sisters of Yuthran moved, rooted by their own trepidation. Not in thousands of years had anything like this been recorded in the seer house. Images began to ripple and flow through the floor, dropping away from the reflections of the seers, intertwining and intermingling with the veins of sha'iel. They were vague at first, but compelling in an incomprehensible way, dragging the reluctant gazes of the seers down into them as though soaking their minds in a heavy liquid. The abomination, the warp energy, and the hall itself were an intoxicating and lethal mix. Still standing around the perimeter of the ring, Cinnia stared at the scene in uncomprehending disbelief, feeling the atmosphere in the chamber swirling and condensing around Ela. It was as though the circular chamber was a cauldron, boiling the emotions and psychic energies of the seers inside. The circular hall of the Ring of Alastrinah had been constructed in the Radiant Age of Gwrih the Founder, and its architecture was unique in all of Kaelor. The wraithsmiths and bonesingers of the day had worked closely with the farseer to fashion a perfectly psycho-conductive space, modelled on the fabulous ring that the farseer had once presented to Alastrinah. Although the chamber served to amplify the power of those within its centre, it also focused that power into the centre, containing it like light within a reflective sphere. Because of this intriguing and elegant design, the farseer had been able to give the Seer House of Yuthran an exquisite gift without also giving them any power of practical use beyond their own walls. Cinnia saw the fire before the others did. It started as the merest hint of an ember, smothered under the hidden darkness of the floor. Then the ember flared into a spark of gold, and a breath of faerulh seemed to ease into it, fanning the spark into flames. After a matter of moments - no longer than the wing-beat of a tiny aereb-beede - the flames billowed into an inferno, unrolling within the floor with such vivid ferocity that Cinnia had to control her instinctive urge to lift her feet away from the non-existent heat. She forced herself to remember that this was an illusion, merely the projection of Ela's vision into the perfectly conductive floor.
The suggestions of figures squirmed and writhed between the flames in what might have been agony or ecstasy, or both. They were dark, like silhouettes or the negatives of ghosts, flitting through the flames like lost dhamashirs, or like daemons. The realisation struck the sisters of Yuthran all at once. As one, they gasped at the images that were pouring out of Ela's young mind. The little abomination was unleashing a torrent of visions into the Ring of Alastrinah, flooding it with scenes of death and carnage, of daemonettes of the Great Enemy dancing in the burning boulevards of Kaelor. The images seared into their minds even as the raging flames licked ineffectually and coolly at their feet. Cinnia shrank back, staggering slightly under the force of the sensual barrage. She had never before seen images of such violence unleashed in that sacred chamber, and certainly never before during the Rite of Alastrinah. She could feel her own thoughts heating insistently until she no longer felt that she could keep hold of them. It was as though the flames in the floor were simultaneously in her head. Her thoughts burned at the inside of her skull, boiling her mind like a soup. They started to melt, curdling together until she could no longer tell one from the next, rendering her mind into a swirling psychic emulsion.
For a moment, and for the first time since she had passed through the Trials of Menmon a number of years before, Cinnia felt genuine horror grip her soul. It was as though this childling were actually burning away her identity and filling her mind with flames and daemons.
In a sudden flash, Cinnia saw the image of the sleehr-child once again, sitting in calm stillness in the heart of the fury. Her eyes were vast caverns of darkness from which all the flames were erupting. Rivers of blood gushed out of them, cascading down her blistering and singed skin. She was not alone. Behind her with his arms outstretched to his sides, as though wearing the daemonic fire as a cloak around him, stood Ela's brother, Naois. His hands were thick with blood and his eyes glistened with an impossible, maniacal darkness.
The picture of the appalling siblings flashed for the briefest of instants, like a subliminal pulse, but there was no way to tell whether it had been real, whether it had been seen by the others, or whether it had been entirely within Cinnia's own mind. Her grip on the boundaries between these dimensions had failed almost completely. Another wail of anguish washed out from the seated figure of Ela, but this time its pitch rose instantly into a whistling scream, just on the edge of hearing. The noise seemed to shatter the images that filled the hall, like a streak of lasfire slicing through glass. As the roil of pictures and visions vanished from sight, leaving the hall suddenly cool, calm and silent once again, the abominable child in the centre of the ring collapsed forwards onto the ground, spent and exhausted. Her eyes were closed at last.
O
ne by one, the sisters of House Yuthran turned away from the childling and walked quietly out of the chamber. The initiate was supposed to be left to recover using her own resources. That had been the tradition since the time of Alastrinah herself. As they left, the seers attempted to effect an air of normalcy, as though this was how they had expected the rite to transpire, as though nothing exceptional had happened at all, but none could hide the unsteadiness in their strides.
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After only a few moments, the Ring of Alastrinah was empty except for two silent figures. Little Ela lay motionless on the wraithbone. A tiny trickle of blood eased out of the corner of her mouth and began to pool on the floor next to her pearl-white cheek. Cinnia remained standing in her ceremonial place, somehow unable to turn away and leave the abomination on her own, yet unwilling to stoop forwards and go to her aid. The same question tumbled over and over in her mind until it made her nauseous.
Is this the ehveline?
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PART ONE:
THE MISREMEMBERED
CHAPTER ONE: IONE
THE GOLD AND green banners of House Teirtu fluttered proudly above the heads of the warriors as they dashed out of the Sentrium and fell into formation before the Rivalin Gates, the last great barrier between the primitive styhx-tann and the cultivated Knavir eldar of the court. Dozens of Teirtu House Guardians filed into perfect, disciplined lines as though performing a drill. In the gathering darkness of this sector's down-phase, their polished armour burst with reflected light from the Farseer's Court behind them, silhouetting them to their foes amidst a flood of radiance, as though they rode the grace of the farseer himself, while the icon of the Serpent of Iden glistened in the heavy shadow that fell across their chests. Yseult did not need to push her way through the lines. They parted automatically as she strode through the gates towards the front of her troops. As a passageway opened up before her, a shaft of light rushed past her through the gap, carrying her long shadow out into the battlefield beyond. The head of the giant, elongated shadow reached almost to the feet of the crimson enemy's front line.