342 – What’s with this sassy lost child?

We found the medusae after about ten hours of wandering the Webway, starting from that Drukhari outpost and wandering deeper until we stumbled upon one of the fuckers. Then we kept going, I wanted more than one and I assumed more of the floaty brain-eating squids would be around where we’d already found one. 

We had six live specimens stored safely inside spherical barriers when I saw it. The Webway tunnel we were going through was the kind that decided to do away with the illusion that it was anything other than a magic highway tube. The walls were undefined, constantly shifting and never settling on any specific colour. The floor was solid enough to be stepped on, but any piece of the tunnel nobody was touching moved with the energyflow, looking almost unreal. 

But back to the matter at hand. By ‘It’ I’d meant the newly forming rift on one of the walls. The energy flowed to form the boundary split open, a vertical line of void black tainting the ever-shifting colours. The line quivered, then widened into a rectangle in the vague shape of a door. 

“This is usually where anyone with a brain and working self-preservation instincts turns around to run,” Cain noted with a long-suffering sigh and the dry tone of someone who knew we would be doing no such thing. The look he gave me was … rude. It was a look someone would give to a suicidal lemming they saw standing at the edge of a cliff, preparing to jump with a vacuous enthusiasm. It was also paired with some annoyance, because he knew said lemming was going to drag him down the cliff. 

“I’m checking it out,” I said, ignoring him as I stepped forward, curiosity getting the better of me. Not that I tried to resist it all that much, or at all. That’s certainly been a decision, not a good one, but a decision for sure. I mean, I couldn’t sense anything dangerous around it with my aura, the connection felt as solid as any of the permanent tunnel-intersections. 

I flicked a small raven-drone through the door first, and it returned just a few minutes later, confirming what I could see with its own senses. There was nothing on the other side, just what looked to be the long-abandoned cellars of some castle, or what looked like it. Damp, dusty cobblestone floors, walls and ceiling overgrown with withered vines. 

No sounds, no apparent signs of life or anything. The layer of dust on the floor was undisturbed and the only source of light were these weird crystals sticking out of the ceiling, shining in the familiar hues of the Webway tunnel we were currently traversing. My aura flowed through the doorway to fill the space on the other side, examining and searching, but stuff was a bit fuzzy when I was trying to sense things on the other side of portals like this, if I could even send my aura through at all. 

“Seems safe enough,” I said, then stuck a hand through the portal, then a head and then finally when both came back whole, I stepped through. 

I looked around again, spreading out my senses and aura to double check the place now that I wasn’t obstructed by the portal. Again, I found nothing just miles upon miles of labyrinthine catacombs and cobblestone passages. Honestly, it felt like I’d just been dropped into one of those procedurally generated infinite dungeons made for rogue-like video games. All that was missing were the mobs, monsters of some kind, maybe skeletons, zombies, ghosts, a death knight or two, maybe a lich. 

Selene stepped through after me, looking around with a curiosity that mirrored my own. I loved that about her, that endless well of curiosity, the wanderlust, the need to see new things. She had been a Rogue Trader after all, and despite having had the role all but forced on her, she certainly alluded to having enjoyed it infinitely more than being a guardswoman in the Astra Militarum, or anything she had to do as a highborn lady of a prominent noble family of the Imperium. 

Amberley, Cain and Jurgen came next, all of them looking wary and prepared to be jumped by some monstrosity. It was clear that Amberley was the only one who wanted to be there, but she’d dragged Cain along and Jurgen was glued to the retired Commissar’s side like a starving leech. 

It was when Jurgen finally stepped through the portal that I felt it, something that had been crystal clear became ever so slightly fuzzy. Where before I’d been absolutely sure that the spot a few meters ahead of me was empty of anything, now … now I wasn’t so sure. 

Atiesh slammed into my hand as I went into damage control mode. It was then that the mind-core responsible for watching my emotions and thought processes for irregularities noted something else. For the last minute, my curiosity had been inflamed just a tiny bit and my paranoia had been soothed, just enough for the curiosity to overwhelm it. The change was so minor that even the mind-cores only noticed it when the incredibly subtle manipulation vanished. 

I assumed the worst: that this was an incredibly old and devious Greater Daemon that’s just managed to lure me into a trap. Maybe a Lord of Change or a Keeper of Secrets. I reacted accordingly, filling my body and mind with argent Smite-infused flames, which then I channeled into Barriers and Wards I layered atop the others. Inside my Realm, my soul extended its will and laid its metaphorical hand on the even more metaphorical big red button. With a flick of my will, Selene’s mind would be yanked into her soul and her connection to her body would be severed. 

So you might understand that I my mind got the equivalent of a blue screen when what had to be an illusion faded away. A child floated in front of me, grinning innocently as he waved at our group. His presence was still mostly concealed, but it was vague. I couldn’t tell his strength, only the flavour of it, and it was the most immaculate I’d ever felt. He was void of the taint of the Warp almost entirely, if what he was showing me was the truth.

“Hello, friend and company,” he said, his voice squeaky and youthful though tinged with exhaustion, probably from the effort of shielding himself from my senses. The language was Low Gothic but in a strange dialect I wasn’t familiar with. He looked to be twelve, maybe fourteen at most with chubby cheeks, a messy mop of dark brown hair and large, soft brown eyes that seemed to know far too much for one so young. “It is fancy seeing you here!”

I stared at him, at this … creature masquerading as a child. Whatever he’d been doing to shroud his presence and soul faded away when he opened his mouth. He — if he even was a ‘he’ — had the presence of a powerful psyker, more powerful than even Valenith in his current state, and while he looked human enough, both visually and anatomically, I knew better. The body was perfectly human, but the soul bound to it was in no way that. It reminded me of Daemonhosts, or if I was being honest, myself. 

This was a psychic creature of the Warp that probably managed to slot into the mortal body of a stillborn child to anchor himself into the Materium. The strange thing was that I could sense not a whiff of Chaos taint on him, not even the slightest hint of it even now that he was baring it for me to see. Other than myself and those in my Realm, he was the only other being I’d ever encountered that wasn’t at least somewhat tainted by the corruptive nature of the Warp.

“And who might you be?” I asked, and my companions noticed my wariness. They too stilled, all of them now taking in the ‘child’ once more like they were seeing him for the first time for the threat he was and not just as a harmless curiosity they’d stumbled across.

Must have been a passive aura, even I was feeling strangely disarmed around him, reluctant to even consider him a threat, or worse, an enemy. Only the fact that I’d come across this ‘child’ in the depths of the Webway kept me wary, this was absolutely no place for a child, even a psychic one.

I tried to find whatever was causing that feeling, but I found nothing alien in my body or mind. The effect was there, almost impossible to miss for a telepath like me, but the source of it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was external? A cognitive or memetic effect? Maybe he himself was a cognitohazard of some kind, designed in a way to induce instinctive trust and amiability in any who looked upon him? The Old Humans of the Golden Age were supposedly capable of weaponising such effects. 

Counteract the effect then. Measure the influence and manually negate it through the fermenting of opposing emotions. Counter trust with distrust, friendliness with wariness, compassion with apathy.  

“You can call me Alex, friend,” he said, beaming up at me as he landed softly on his feet and stepped closer. “I’ve been waiting for you. It’s been so long but it seems things are starting to heat up! Would you mind if I joined your motley crew? I’m quite handy to have around and I won’t cause you any trouble, promise!”

“Alex,” I said, unimpressed. I quashed the strange, instinctive urge to accept him. He was radiating such childish, human, genuineness that it was hard to keep doubting him. “Is that even your name?”

“It is … if you squint hard enough, and look at it from a certain perspective," he said, wilting a little. “I can tell you will not accept me as is, which is probably wise. Naivety and blind compassion are as deadly in this day and age as a las-bolt to the face, as sad as that is. I was worried you’d suffer from it, or cast your humanity away entirely … but it seems I am in luck! How about this then? Would you be willing to accept me as Alexander the Not-So-Great-Anymore?”

I sucked in a sharp breath, taking a step away from the ‘Child’. “Prove it.”

“You got my letter, didn’t you?” He tilted his head.

“Any Lord of Change could have figured that out,” I retorted. 

He frowned, chewing on his cheeks in apparent frustration. I was thrown for a loop from sheer bewilderment when he stomped his small foot and crossed his arms, pouting. “Check this out then!”

He threw a memory at me, a telepathic memory that I caught but only took in after checking it over for any nasty surprises a few hundred times in dilated time. I even fed it to a fake brain first to eliminate any cognitohazards, threw in some chaff to make it even safer, to blunt the perfection thing like that needed to work, and only then did I view it myself. 

The memory unfurled before my mind’s eyes, and I was suddenly in the skin of a man staring into a mirror. He looked like an older carbon copy of ‘Alex’ and he gave me a smile that was also the same, though weighed down by the aeons he must have lived and witnessed. He wore … a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts.

He turned, his gaze travelling to the window and peering outside. I’d have gasped if I could, because the sight that greeted me was a familiar one: the Statue of Liberty in New York. 

The memory ended right then and there, and I blinked, my focus returning to ‘Alex’.

“You’re aquainted?” Cain asked, which was surprisingly courageous of him. 

“If he is who I think he is-“ I started, which was interrupted by a petulant “I AM!” from the boy, which once again made my mind short-circuit for an entire second. I continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Then … vaguely?”

“We’re pen pals!” Alex said cheerily, hopping over to Cain and peering up at him. “Hello. I see Big Me likes you quite a bit. You’re a lucky one.”

Cain gave me a confused, beseeching look, begging for help. He was at least observant enough not to treat the weird child that popped up out of nowhere in the depths of the Webway like he was just a random kid. Or maybe his closer proximity to Jurgen was blunting whatever strange aura ‘Alex’ was emitting. 

“You writing me a letter hardly makes us ‘pen pals’,” I huffed, crossing my arms as I watched him warily. “And no, I just know of him.”

“More than anyone else these days,” Alex said forlornly, and for a moment I saw the eyes of a being that had lived through more horrors than any other. Those were eyes that had witnessed history unfold, saw humans grow from primitive hunter gatherers into the predominant force in the galaxy. Then it was gone, replaced by the innocent brown eyes of a child. “Can we be friends?”

I considered that, and ran through a thousand simulations while thinking over the implications of this in my head. “On one condition: shake my hand.”

I held out my hand and it lit up in a silvery glow, ethereal argent flames licking at the Materium. Alex grinned and stepped up to me, holding out his own hand which lit up with a soft, brittle golden light. He shook my hand, his tiny palm barely large enough to wrap around three of my fingers, but it was enough. Our psychic energies melded and I felt Him, he was freely showing me who He was. 

My intention had been to check whether he was a Daemon. The Changeling could have pulled this charade off, it could have fooled my senses, done everything Alex had done, but it would have burned when coming in contact with my silver flames. I let go of his hand and looked at him seriously, far from done processing the sheer complexity of what I’d just been shown.

“A deal is a deal, isn’t it?” Alex asked, a cheeky smirk on his face as he was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. 

“It is,” I said, letting out a soft breath. Most of my doubts were vanquished, but many more had now taken their places. “Friends, I guess.”

“Honey?” Selene was giving me a strange look, looking between me and Alex. “An explanation please? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s mighty confused.”

The remaining members of our ‘motley crew’ seemed to share her feelings on the matter, so I just shrugged and hooked a thumb over my shoulder and pointed at Alex. “He is the Starchild.”