350 – A Sister to the Best Noodle

“There you go,” I said with a satisfied smile stretching across my face as I patted the skyscraper-sized tendril in front of me. “All done. Take good care of her, Jeff; she’ll be sleeping for a few days as she digests the implanted knowledge and memories. If all goes well, her soul should also finish germinating by then and come out even more mature than yours.”

The cosmic murder-noodle just grunted, a noise that carried with it acknowledgement and an undertone of more complex emotions. The poor little noodle was anxious about finally getting a sibling, excited, and also resolute to be the best ‘big brother’ he could possibly be. 

The sibling in question looked like a titanic egg made of hundreds of intertwined tendrils and tentacles. She was the size of a smaller moon, like Mars’ Phobos and Deimos. The very core of her being was wrought from the cut-off left arm of my Avatar, reshaped but hopefully intact enough to establish a spiritual continuity between me and the newborn eldritch horror. My hasty initial experiments showed promise, but I’d folded like a lawnchair when Jeff started getting lonely and jumped right over all the due follow-up experiments, getting right into creating this new adorable monstrosity of mine. 

If things went well, she would have a fully realised soul and the capacity for wielding psychic might on par with those Tyranid Megastructures. She’d probably never have finesse, but a Psychic Scream or a Warp Lance that could affect entire fleets or destroy moons respectively would be worth the trade-off. I think. 

If it didn’t work out, I could always turn her into Jeff 2.0, so I wasn’t too worried. 

Before that, I’d done a round of full diagnostics on myself. I had backup copies of my mind, my memories, and I had mind-cores that ran backup minds that were perfect copies of my own. I compared my current thinking and mindset to them in a billion ways, searching for anything out of place, anything that looked odd. 

I still didn’t trust Alex. He was still an aspect of the Emperor, and he’d been in my mind during our telepathic training. Trust, but verify. This was the paranoia that would keep me alive, that would protect me from a slow, insidious erosion of my very self. 

I traced some odd lines of thought I had back to the source, finding either that friendly-aura thingy Alex had during our first meeting … or to my own, suppressed craving for someone I could see as a proper peer. In the end, I let it remain. Nothing was outright problematic, and Alex had dialled that weird friend-aura of his down to a minimum since then, and I’d also set up countermeasures so it wouldn’t affect me anymore. 

That telepathic spar also prompted me to erect some … novel defences. Before, it was just those floating pyramids that represented my mind-cores and the shield around them. Now, those pyramids resided inside a pocket space hidden within a mental palace, which itself was accessible only through a massive, ever-changing labyrinth. I’d devoted roughly 10% of my total processing power to continuously maintain, test and improve all layers. I’d also spent a great number of hours with my primary thoughtstream on the project, trying to make it as challenging as possible to reach the pyramids. 

Another 5% of my overall brainpower went into maintaining an army of autonomous psychic constructs that defended both the labyrinth and the mind palace. Coming up with all sorts of mind-bending monstrosities was, as always, quite fun, though not having to obey physics or biology at all had made my imagination run wild, so now there were things living in my mind that truly lived up to the eldritch name.

The less said about them, the better. Not even Alex could bypass all my defences undetected anymore, or at least he pretended he couldn’t. I wasn’t sure which it was yet, so I resolved to keep improving on … well, everything. I’d still need more time to figure out redundant countermeasures for every type and kind of telepathic assault there was. I was pretty sure I had everything I knew about at the time handled, but redundancies couldn’t hurt, and I wasn’t bottlenecked by processing power. I could always just make more organic-cogitators inside my Realm if the need arose.

With that and my new eldritch monstrosity done, the next item on the list was a short excursion back to the Kroot’s new colony planet I ruled in name only. Well, I guess it was more of a protectorate. They just wanted the freedom to hire themselves out as mercenaries, but otherwise cared little what sort of foreign policy I decided on for them. Once I made sure they were fine, came the other boring things: a circuit through my new holdings to kick the re-establishment of local governments into order and set down some ground rules in person. They would all obey my new constitution, or regret it in death. Sadly, I was the only person who could get that through to them without starting needless fights everywhere I went, like a certain pointy-eared twat whose default expression was a disdainful sneer of superiority.

Alex tagged along with me, wanting to see the ex-Imperial worlds in person, and saying he was disappointed would be akin to calling the sun somewhat warm. He hid it well, but he stopped smiling and projecting his emotions, which was obvious enough. Not to say he saw no reason to restrain himself in private. 

“So, what’s your plan?” He asked.

“What for?” I replied, watching through the panoramic viewing screen as the Vallia System grew ever so slightly larger by the second. 

“Reorganising this mess,” he said. “I doubt you want to leave them to find their footing on their own. Half those worlds will turn into daemon-infested hellholes and the other half will revert into techno-feudalism or some warring states led by techno-barbarian warlords.”

“I’m taking it slow,” I said with a shrug. “The rules are set, and they will learn they are not to be messed with in the coming months. Once they grow used to that, I’m coming in with the next step. Temporary governors will set up a provisional government, then systemised, obligatory education. I’ll let them vote on sending people into a senate of sorts once the educated generation grows to majority. I’m playing the long game. First, I’ll have to produce trustworthy and competent governor-material people, which is still a work in progress.”

“And what of religion?” He asked.

“The government will be strictly secular, and no religious authority will be allowed to hold political office, or power,” I said. “I’ll sideline them, and discourage them at every step, sometimes overtly, sometimes through simple bureaucracy. I’m hoping people will grow apathetic to religion in a few centuries if I keep it up, like they did when humanity took its first steps into the modern age back in the 21st century.”

“Hmmmmmmm.” Alex frowned, then shrugged. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. We’ll see, I suppose.”

*****

The man sat still as a statue, eyes closed and angular features drawn into a serene expression. Outwardly, he looked the picture of perfect, stoic serenity, millennia of practice hiding the effort it took for him to merely exist. Year after year, the effort grew and grew, mounting as the decades stacked on.

He couldn’t die yet, though. There was so much left to do. He was one of the primary pillars keeping Aeldari society—what little remained of it—afloat. 

He couldn’t join his kin in the Infinity Circuit, much less in the solemn garden of crystalline statues that many of his friends, comrades, and even students now populated. It was only his colossal will and unwavering focus that kept his destined fate as a crystalline statue at bay.

A minute of inattention could cost him a limb, or all four. The fact that he was still whole after more than ten thousand years spoke of the fact that his focus never once wavered in that time. 

“We are ready, High Farseer.”

The voice reached him, the words registered, and he breathed a soft sigh. He had seen the words coming; he knew they would come, just not when. 

Now they were here, and it was time to take a leap that would rearrange the strings of fate woven through his own destiny, and that of Craftworld Ulthwé. 

Slowly, concealing the laborious effort even such a simple action took, Eldrad Ulthran rose to his feet with the same grace he’d long left behind along with his erstwhile youth. 

“There were no complications, I assume?” He asked casually, fingers curling around his stave. It would be so easy to lean on it for support, but he didn’t. He couldn’t project weakness. Not now. 

Some strings of fate he’d scried led to some complications. An Archon or another Farseer interfering. Not all of them agreed with his vision. Not even close. 

Still, they’d agreed to the journey at the very least, and that was enough. He’d even made sure his exile wouldn’t come just yet. Had that fateful message from his erstwhile pupil not arrived, Eldrad would have been at the side of the Ynnari by now, long exiled from his Craftworld.

But a risky gamble was no longer the path with the best chance of survival, and so he did not make it. He kept his options open. His current position lent him much greater sway over a large number of Aeldari. The Ynnari were promising, but not numerous, and seen as strange outcasts by most Craftworlds. 

Hope existed there, but perhaps it was a trap. He’d traversed all the threads of fate that branched from the event where he lent his aid entirely to the Ynnari, and he could not find a single one where that hope wasn’t dashed.

Dispiriting as it was, he saw no path where they successfully managed to retrieve all of the Croneswords. One of them always, inevitably, ended up in the deepest depths of the Realm of She Who Thirsts, forever out of reach and yet spreading treacherous hope to lure in the foolish. And indeed, the foolish would come to her.

That could not be allowed.

Besides, he’d been sensing strange things from the Eastern Fringe. The place where he’d dispatched one of his erstwhile apprentices on little more than a hunch and a half-forgotten precognitive dream. In the time since, he’d grown certain there were events of great import happening there, their echoes rippling through the Immaterium far and wide, perceptible only to those who knew how to listen. He couldn’t see anything directly, but even just the echoes were enough to draw his attention. 

Something was shrouding his sight, trying to hide. Or perhaps it was just a side effect of that accursed ‘Great Rift’ that tore through reality in those regions.

All the same, he would have to see for himself. 

*****

I went still when Alex’s entire focus snapped away from me, those brown eyes of his speckled with gold turning skywards with a sudden intensity. He entirely ignored me showing off my ‘Woe, Sun be upon Thee’ trick, which miffed me a bit, but I was also curious about what had grabbed his attention like that.

“What’s up?” I asked, and he almost seemed to jump, shaking himself.

“Something just happened,” he said after a moment, a thoughtful frown tugging at his features. “Something … significant.”

I focused my perception, plunging it into my soul-sight to peer at the currents of the Warp. I cast my gaze afield far and wide, looking for anything that could have drawn his attention. 

At first, I found nothing. It was only three weeks later that the answer arrived, carried by a harried courier ship that raced to Vallia as it ought to when something triggered the emergency alarms in a deep-space surveillance station. 

One of the Webway Gates in the far-off corners of the Jericho Reach had just spat out a continent-sized spaceship wrought of glimmering Wraithbone and arcane metals. Somehow, for some reason, a Craftworld had just landed at the fringes of my Astral Dominion.