344 – Curious Talks

Amberley watched the child hop and skip down the street in front of her, looking around curiously at the buildings all around them. Echidna’s architect worked fast; that was for sure. This capital city of hers was no true Hive City, but it was still massive, capable of housing millions of souls. The fact that months ago there had been nothing but forests and wilderness in its place was bewildering. 

The Arcologies were one thing, those Echidna made herself with sorcerous power and archeotech artifacts, but the sprawling city around it was built by hand, brick by brick. 

“You’ve outdone yourself, Bob,” Echidna said, speaking to the gruff human who walked beside her. The man puffed out his chest a little in pride, though his wariness showed in that he kept both her and Cain within his sight at all times.

For a good reason too. In any other place, in any other time, it would have been her job, her divinely ordained task, to put a lasbolt through the Xeno-loving, treasonous worm’s head. Ciaphas likely wouldn’t have hesitated to do so either, and despite lacking his Commissarial sash, his face was on every other recruitment poster in the Damocles Gulf and even in some places beyond. 

Amberley barely paid the builder any mind. Or to Echidna, Cain, the towering buildings or anything else, really. She only had eyes for the child.

The Starchild. 

Could it really be? Even now, even having seen that golden light, heard Echidna’s certainty, and heard the words they exchanged, she still couldn’t quite believe it. Not for any specific reason, just because of the sheer impossibility of it all. 

She didn’t really believe in prophecies. Centuries she’d spent serving the Imperium as an Inquisitor, dealing with just about every flavour of trouble the galaxy could come up with. Not once had she encountered a single prophecy she could claim with absolute certainty to have been proven true. 

But this was different. The Prophecy of the Starchild was one of the scant few officially accepted and verified prophecies among every last branch of the Inquisition. There were contingencies in place, dozens of them for every possible manner in which the prophecy could materialise. 

Too bad not a single one of them predicted this. Most predictions supposed the Starchilde would be an avatar of the God-Emperor, born anew in a mortal body and without the Emperor’s memories. A messiah. A saviour. 

That was the most popular interpretation, probably because it was the one both the Inquisition and the Ecclesiarchy hoped would come true. 

After all, how were they supposed to handle a reborn God-Emperor in the body of a child, armed with all his knowledge and with enough Empyrean might to devastate armies? How were they supposed to handle it when the Starchilde all but called them incompetent, unreliable and unable to keep him safe while he was still coming into his power? 

He is a child. He really is. Amberley thought for what felt like the millionth time. It could all be an illusion or an act; ancient records stated that the Emperor could become whoever or whatever he wanted. He would appear differently to everyone who looked at him. Some scrolls even claimed he had no true form, only that of a pillar of golden light that he shrouded in a human guise to better interact with his subjects. 

But Amberley’s gut instinct and extensive experience in reading people told her it wasn’t an act. The Starchilde was just a boy burdened with memories of another life, immense power and an even greater destiny. But just a boy all the same. A boy who got bored, curious, annoyed and angry, bouncing back and forth between them like any regular mercurial young teen. 

It could all be an act. To make Echidna underestimate him, the same Echidna whom the supposed Starchild has claimed to rival the God-Emperor as he was at the height of his power, at least in raw sorcerous might, if not in finesse or skill. It would make sense if it was an act, and so Amberley decided that the prudent thing to do was to go along with it, but not so far as to ever offend the man underneath the guise. Play along with the charade, but not to the point where the maybe-Emperor might think she was truly treating him as a child. It was a precarious balance. She wished she could go with Ciaphas’ plan: to tuck her tail in, shut up and act like furniture. 

That was what he was doing. She was sure the man would have been on a ship out of the sector had he not been worried about how that might look to the powers that be. Echidna, the Inquisition and even the Emperor himself might take issue with his flight. So here he was. Acting like a mobile, ruggedly handsome piece of the landscape as he trudged behind the small procession with Jurgen following behind him like his ever-faithful shadow. 

“This entire city is like a museum!” The Starchild, who insisted they refer to them as ‘Alex’ — which seemed to be an inside joke of some kind — exclaimed. He turned back to Echidna with some excitement visible on his face. “If I give you my memories of how architectural styles developed from the 21st century onward, could you include those as well? It would be magnificent.”

Amberley saw how Echidna’s eye lit up in delight at the idea. If the Starchild really was just putting on an act, she could only admit that it was a masterful one. In just a few hours he’d managed to slither into Echidna’s good graces, and she had little doubt he would have the powerful psyker counting him as a friend if he was given a few more days. 

If it was an act. She wasn’t so sure. Then again, an act that could fool someone like Echidna would have to be superb, and by definition more than enough to fool her as well. 

“That would be wonderful,” Echidna said, then turned to her architect. “Although, it’s going to be a challenge to make it so the city doesn’t look like a hodgepodge mess. Do you think you can make it tasteful?”

“I have managed so far, I believe.” The man scratched his stubbled cheek. “I think the … continuity lends it cohesion. One can see how new styles were born from the preceding ones. The cohesive colour scheme also ties them well together. I’ll give it my best, but I can’t really promise anything.”

“That’s fine,” Echidna said, waving him off. “It doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect. A bit of inconsistency will just make it seem more real.”

“I see. I will see what I can do,” the man said, then looked between the Starchilde and Echidna, his gaze holding more than a smidge of curiosity. After all, in his eyes, a child had just offered to give his Sovereign a memory describing historical architectural styles long thought lost during the Age of Strife. Anyone with a brain would be curious, but he was tactful enough to keep his curiosity to himself. 

The Starchild just nodded, and she saw Echidna’s eyes glaze over for a moment. “Don’t panic, Bob; it’s harmless, but the memory transfer may be a touch uncomfortable.”

“Wha-“ He winced, a hand coming up to rub his temples, but then he blinked owlishly. “Ah.”

“That was-“ the Starchild started, looking on with a slightly miffed expression. He cut himself off, chewing his lower lip in thought. “How long have you been alive, in your current state? As a psyker, I mean.”

“A little more than a year now,” Echidna said after a moment of thought, huffing slightly as if saying that somehow ruined her fun. Why would-

She’d been pretending to be some ancient, mysterious immortal psyker. Which would have made sense. Amberley had taken the ruse because it was the simplest explanation for everything she’d seen from the woman.

Her being only a year old made no sense.  

‘In your current state’

‘As a psyker’

So she wasn’t a psyker before that? What did that mean? Things were starting to make even less sense. Amberley knew she was missing something, something crucial. 

“Ah, I see,” the Starchilde nodded. “I guess it makes sense then why your telepathy is so … “

“Crude?” Echidna snorted. “I know. I’ve been practising, but I’ve mostly been practising it for interrogation, so all that mattered was that I could extract memories carefully enough not to damage them or shatter the victim’s mind. It’s not like any of the actual psykers whose memories I stole ever bothered to be careful. Everyone only uses telepaths for interrogation these days. Implanting memories is very much a skill I’ve had no great deal of practice in, though I’ve managed to make it merely uncomfortable instead of actually painful or dangerous.”

“I suppose that’s impressive considering you are mostly self-taught in that skill.” ‘Alex’ nodded, then winced. “That sounded really condescending, didn’t it?”

“Backhanded compliments are like that, yes,” Echidna said wryly, looking more amused than anything. “I’ve been mostly focused on honing the aspects of my powers more directly useful for combat.”

“Everything can be useful for combat,” the Starchilde said, sounding like he was quoting something. “You’ll see that in a fight between equals, the one with more tricks up their sleeves usually wins. These kinds of more niche abilities make for the best of tricks. An implanted memory, or sensation, if done subtly enough to slip beneath the notice of the target, can be … potent.”

Echidna looked thoughtful at that, then nodded gratefully for the … advice. 

The Reborn Emperor is advising her how to be a more dangerous Psyker. Amberly realised, and the thought left a distinctly sour taste in her, well, everything. If — and it was still a massive ‘if’ — this truly was the Starchilde, and he truly had all of the Emperor’s memories until his fateful confrontation with the Arch-Traitor, then … then Amberley wasn’t sure what to think. Denial was her shield for the moment; that fragile barrier of disbelief was the only thing keeping her on the right side of sanity. 

Amberley had always thought herself a realist. Unlike her radical colleagues, she remained devoted solely to her task of opposing Xenos' influence, rather than chasing prophecies or trying to bring about some great change or salvation. She knew what her job was and did it, aiming to do it excellently but without going beyond its original scope. That's how Rogue Inquisitors happened, and how you got a kill-squad sent after you. Never in her centuries of life did she ever truly believe it possible for the God-Emperor to be reborn, then again, nor did she ever think a Loyalist Primarch would walk the stars once more. 

This was a century of miracles. A time when the impossible became possible. 

What if it’s true? 

What if.

What if.

Amberley didn’t know what to do, what to believe, and so she decided to take a page out of Cain’s book for a change. She would sit back and watch, observe, play along and try to survive long enough to … to do something. 

She would figure it out. She always did. 

*****

“What are you doing with those?”

I turned to Alex with a raised eyebrow. He was … not at all what I would have expected of the Emperor Reborn. There were moments when his true nature showed, when that wisdom gathered through the ages became evident. But that was all they were: moments. 

He could go hours without any such ‘moment’, and for those hours the illusion held. The illusion that he really was just a kid. A curious, energetic and genuine kid. 

Even now, as I looked into his big, brown eyes upturned at me with the innocent curiosity of a doe, I couldn’t see even a hint of the Emperor in him. 

“You know what they are?” I asked.

He tilted his head slowly, eyes flickering between the Medusae I’d been carrying around in their spherical barrier-prisons like a bunch of balloons. 

“No,” he admitted. “What are they?”

“Medusae, psychic creatures native to the deeper parts of the Webway,” I said. “They have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the Drukhari, though I’m sure the Dark Eldar consider them little more than tools or pets.”

“I see,” he said, his lip curling in distaste, and I lifted a brow.

“How do you even know of them? If you’d been sundered from the whole during the Heresy and spent the time since struggling with sanity, you should have had little chance to encounter or even learn of the Drukhari.”

“Foresight, divinations.” He shrugged. “It was all but inevitable that they would come about. Excess’ grasp didn’t extend into the Webway, and the Eldar of Commorragh were always the most depraved. It didn’t take much skill to see what would happen, with all those facts long known to me. Then, during the Great Crusade, scrying them was possible, and I had an … accord of sorts with a Farseer. I learned more of what became of the Eldar from him.”

“Eldrad?” I asked.

He blinked at me with something bordering on surprise. “Yes … so what does the squid do?”

“We will have to deal with him again; one of his proteges is my chief enforcer, and I doubt the old Farseer will remain away for long after what I’ve done,” I said, not willing to let him change the subject without getting the last few words in. “As for the medusae, what they do is ‘feed on mortal nightmares’ in their passive state, but they can wrap around a victim’s head like a face-hugger and then feed on the poor sod’s every emotion.”

Alex’s face curdled in disgust. It seemed genuine; everything from him so far had seemed genuine … but I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he was just skilled enough to feed false emotions to my passive empathy and project whatever he wanted into his aura. I remembered reading the duel between the Emperor and Horus, and it always struck me just how downright dirty the Emperor fought.

Horus was a brute, direct, blunt and easy to see coming, if very challenging to stop. He’d been juiced up on that Chaos mojo near the end. In contrast, the Emperor fought like he’d spent his entire life as the underdog in every battle he got into, pulling card after card from his hidden bag of nasty, subtle tricks. 

The possibility was there. But what could I do? He’d extended a hand in friendship, and while I wasn’t exactly an expert in reading souls, he’d bared his own for me to see and feel and experience. Even that could have been false, but I just didn’t think it was. Maybe I just didn’t want to, but there also was the fact that my gut told me my paranoia was misplaced for once. 

We will see. It’s not like I’m giving him anything other than shelter while I pick his brain about stuff. It’s a mutually beneficial agreement. 

“Why did you capture them?” He asked, still looking as if he were ready to call for a heavy flamer. 

“I’m hoping they’ll grant me a baseline, a foundational organic template to start from with a new project, and if not that, then I’m hoping for some inspiration,” I said with a careless shrug, gesturing superfluously with a hand as I tugged one of the captured Warp squids towards me. “I want a safer, reliable method to passively siphon Warp energy and funnel it into my Realm. I don’t want to always have to play ‘whack-a-mole’ every time I need to refill my stores of energy.”

“That realm of yours is … truly wondrous," Alex said, and I caught something between envy and awe. “Can I ask how you managed it? Separating yourself from the Warp?”

“You can ask, but I doubt my answer will please you,” I said. “My soul has always been like this, for as long as I can remember being able to perceive it. From the first moment I regained consciousness after death, my soul was separate … above the Warp. My realm is just an extension of it, a sea of energy that clings to my soul as oceans of water cling to a planet.”

“And those waters are finite.” He nodded. “I see. So you want to see whether you can also feed on nightmares and transform that into energy?”

“I think this ability to feed on nightmares and emotions is just a flavour of feeding on Warp energy; it’s just that only specific aspects resonate with this thing,” I said, turning back to the squid. “I don’t specifically want to feed on nightmares; a more positive emotion would be preferable, even if the best-case scenario would be if it could just act as a filter, or buffer of sorts, for Warp energy. Let the energy through, but not daemons.”

“The fact that it only feeds on a specific aspect, as you call it, is likely what acts like a filter,” Alex said, squinting at the Medusae. “The thinner the scope of energy it can draw in, the narrower the focus, the better. Daemons aren’t so narrow in scope. There are no daemons that are purely nightmares, and so the Medusae have no metaphysical link to them that they could use.”

“I see what you mean,” I said with a thoughtful frown. “Which would mean their need to be physically connected to a host to feed on all their emotions might just be arbitrary. They only need such a direct connection to keep anything alien from slipping through, with the filter being much looser. Right. Emotions in general, that’s what daemons are born of. Makes sense they would be able to slip through if the squids weren’t so careful. Crafty little buggers.”

“It should be possible to use the principle this creature uses to learn how to draw in energy from more positive emotions,” Alex said, then gave me a strange look. “Especially if those emotions were already connected to you in some metaphysical way.”

“You are saying I should use this to figure out how to feed on … what? My citizens’ gratitude?”

“And faith,” he said, though having to say it seemed to visibly pain him. “It would be the simplest route. Faith is freely given, and given directly to the object of one’s worship. Happiness is their own, love is also their own, gratitude would be the middle ground, but that too is something they feel, not something they give freely to you.”

“Faith,” I repeated sourly. “Why does it feel like everyone wants to keep kicking me down the road to divinity?”

“It was just a suggestion; I’d be the happiest of all if you did not take it,” Alex said. “It’s just … the easiest route. I didn’t want to lie about that, even by omission."

“I’m trying to build a secular state; I will not become reliant on faith.” I shook my head. 

“I noticed you have a few who worship you already,” he noted curiously.

“I will not stop them, nor burn them or something.” I shook my head. “They are free to believe whatever they wish, so long as it has nothing to do with Chaos. But I’m keeping preachers and evangelists from becoming popular or converting people. Religious figures won’t ever be allowed to hold any power either.”

“That’s how it began for Big Me as well,” Alex said sourly. “He punished Lorgar, but got too busy later on during the War to really keep an eye on the growing worship of him. The seeds of the Imperial Cult were sown during those final years. If you don’t want to be worshipped, tear it out by the roots and stem now.”

“I will not.” I hated the hint of uncertainty I detected in my own voice, that moment of hesitation before my answer. 

“It was just a suggestion.” Alex shrugged. “I’ve been told once that humans crave a higher power to worship, that they will always have a desire for the delusion that there is a God, that there is a reason for their suffering, that someone is out there and looking out for them at all times. I didn’t believe it then; I do now.”

“That delusion lends power to the weak-willed, and to the weak in general,” I said with a small scoff. “I suppose there are few who can accept that life has no inherent meaning besides what we make of it. They need a God to give them meaning, to make them feel safe in this horrid world we live in. I won’t deny them that, even if I find it distasteful. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have become desperate enough to turn to religion for some measure of solace if I ended up reborn in this age without any real power.”

It stung to admit, and I could never be sure, but if I sometimes felt terrified of the ‘higher powers’ even as I was now, who was to say what being a powerless mortal schmuck on some shithole of a world would have done to my mindset? How long would it have been before I started praying for something, someone, anyone for my miserable life to get better? 

If I had no power of my own to change my lot in life … I couldn’t be sure, but I understood intellectually that my current mindset was a privileged one I was allowed to have only because of my immense power. 

“It would seem you are wiser than I was,” Alex said.

“I lived a life before this one,” I said. “I was … no one. Nothing. Just one woman out of billions. I remember what that feels like. I doubt you ever felt like … average, normal. Just another, regular, powerless human struggling to pay the rent month after soul-crushing month. It gave me perspective, I suppose.”

“The priest said the same thing,” Alex said, looking somewhat forlorn. “That I was too powerful to understand the common man’s need for religion. He was right in the end. He said that if I forbade worship and religion, then I would become their object of worship. I didn’t believe him then, but now … “

I looked lost in thought for a moment, and I decided to leave him to it. He had thousands of years of trauma and regrets, most likely. I wasn’t sure how I would have felt in his place.

He had been torn off from the greater whole of his being and imprisoned inside the soul of the man he used to be a part of. Then he’d been forced to watch the hollow shadow of his former self walk around and commit things he would have never done himself … all that was just speculation, of course, extrapolated from what he’d told me, but I doubted it was a fun experience to be the Starchilde all the same.