9-1 BYRGENWERTH: Revelations

 Djura already knew the shot was a good one.

He snapped off the shot with a proficiency bordering on disdain. Thirty meters downrange, sparking along the edge of a hulking wraith-construct's shoulder and into the chest of the aeldari witch skulking behind them. Djura didn't bother to check the status of his target. It felt right, and there were plenty more witchbreed pirates that demanded his attention.

For instance, the heavily armored things that seemed to have materialized on the Choir battlegroup's right flank. There were five of them, bulky for aeldari in their moss-green armor plate, their oddly elegant chainswords nearly silent. Djura wondered for a moment how the hell aeldari managed to field successful infiltration teams with such unsubtle equipment. Their leader gave an abrupt gesture with a clawed gauntlet and the group charged, directly at Micolash, the Choir's pre-eminent theologian, psyker and ranting madman. Before Djura could act, a blur manhandled Micolash out of the way; Valtr. His selflessness was answered with a savage blow to the temple from the aeldari raid leader.

Djura twirled his Liberators, partly showboating, partly as a sort of physical mnemonic, a warmup routine. Two revolvers were easy, but the third pistol was grasped by a clawed arm Djura mostly kept folded against his back and hidden under a poncho. The alien anatomy wasn't really meant for firing, let alone spinning, the heavy revolvers, but Djura was almost certainly the most skilled pistoleer on the planet. He exhaled, slow, steady.

In the next two seconds, Djura had fired the three auto-revolvers a dozen times, every shot a kill shot. Heavy slugs smashed apart armored joints, shattered helmet lenses, found the gaps between the heavy psycho-reactive plates. He nodded in satisfaction as his one indulgence, a hellishly difficult trick shot, ricocheted off an armored forearm and into the lightly protected space below the aeldari exarch's jaw. The aeldari's helmet wasn't particularly well armored against attacks coming from inside, and Djura watched as the tungsten-carbide bullet blasted through the top of the helmet, shredding the aeldari's war-braids as it went. Unconsciously, Djura twirled his Liberators again before he holstered them.

+++

Skitarius Alpha Wallar limped towards the triage station, his arm hanging uselessly at his side. Again, the combined forces of 9-1 BYRGENWERTH and the xenos cult had bled the aeldari white, and again, had failed to stop the wretched corsairs from achieving their frequently incomprehensible objectives. The remnants of his procession were already being attended to by a mix of BYRGENWERTH adepts and the ...enthusiastic medicae volunteers from the Choir in an abandoned and only lightly damaged train station. He halted, digging into a laceration in one of his damaged augmetics. Steel fingertips sliced themselves open on a monomolecular disc before closing around it and wrenching it from Wallar's leg, which sparked weakly as the aeldari shuriken was removed. Wallar was studying the projectile (a dangerous thing, an impossibly thin disc with three semicircles cut away to create more vicious cutting surfaces) when he heard the sound of broken masonry above him. Perched in a lancet windowframe over the main entrance of the train station (records force themselves into Wallar's field of view; the frame once held a stained glass depiction of smiling labor menials being shielded by the wings of the aquila) was a pteraxius, armored in black, wings folded.

Skitarii undergo regular mental excoriations to maintain a worldview free of emotion, but the PRUDENTIA's cohort had largely given up the practice; another of Willem's experiments to audit and interrogate the tenets of the Cult Mechanicus. Wallar felt the distant, faded ghost of annoyance.

"Pteraxius Alpha Aileyn. What brings you to the surface?" he asked the winged figure as it glided to the ground.

"Provost needs hunters," Aileyn said, folding her wings back. "Who better to hunt?"

The pteraxii were frustrating to talk to. The process for making a pteraxius involved a great deal of neurosurgery, far more than required for a vanguard or ranger. Reaction times were increased, reflexes sped up to rival those of the superhuman Adeptus Astartes, but more than that, the creation of synthetic neural passages to the scapuli superior, limb stumps grafted onto the pteraxius' back to serve as the anchor for their cybernetic wings. This process came at a cost, however, and that cost was higher cognition. To put it bluntly, talking with the pteraxii was a bit like talking to a very large, metal feral child.

"Is that so," Wallar said. It was not a question.

"Lots of moving," Aileyn replied, nodding. "Lots. Cohort PRUDENTIA. Co-belligerent xenos cult. Astartes."

"Astar- Confirm last? Astartes?"

"Adeptus Astartes," Aileyn repeated. "Deathwatch."

+++

Not everyone could talk to their god face to face. But Micolash could. And did.

Micolash and his attendants, masked and silent and obedient as hounds, trudged up the winding stairs to what Micolash and the others in the higher echelons of the Choir called the Orphanage. It wasn't an actual orphanage, of course, it was merely the top of an abandoned tower overlooking the Blessed Avarice. But it only ever had one occupant; an orphan. The Orphan.

Micolash was relieved to see that the Orphan was present and not out hurling itself at the enemies of the Choir. It was perched upon a collection of rubble, arms folded and folded, staring at a point in the night sky, as it often did. As far as Micolash could tell, it wasn't any sort of celestial body the Orphan watched, but the blackness between them. Psychic backwash pulsed through the room, an intense yearning for Mother Kosm, long since gone. It was enough to render the uninitiated catatonic. Micolash approached the debris-throne, reflexively weeping, and mentally reached out.

Communion with the Orphan was both an exultant religious experience, to be celebrated, and the most horrifying thing Micolash had ever, could ever, imagine. Touching the Orphan's tragically vast and inhuman consciousness was a revelation that could, and often did, snap the human mind. Micolash was not the first magus of the Choir. His predecessor had one day, after Communion with his god, begun laughing and did not stop until she died a week later. Micolash took precautions, of course, the iron cage he wore around his head during Communion and the opioids he regularly dosed himself with, but he could never be sure he wouldn't break the way poor Amelia had.

One didn't speak during Communion, not really. It was more an exchange of impressions and concepts, images and sounds. Micolash dutifully reported his prescient dreaming. The beckoning of the Nightmare would fail. The ritual site would be attacked by the insipid Cadians, of course, but the Choir and their benefactors expected as much. What was unexpected were the black armored superhumans, implacable and nearly invincible, scything down skitarii and Choir faithful in their dozens. Sacrifices were expected, of course, but this went further: the Astartes would kill Micolash, and Djura, and the tech-priest Antal, and finally the Orphan itself. The Choir would die, the war would be lost.

The Nightmare must be conjured elsewhere, for everyone's sake.