Warhammer 40k: Shattered Steel Soul

Our Gemo, dirty and desolate, is a gathering of witch spirits who step on blades to dance, and blood relatives who drink fine wine to indulge in the essence of life. The petty fights of power never end, shrines and muse, poisons and curses, Hecate holds the bloody crystal cup, and the long whip breaks the slave's spine.

The sarcophagi are arranged in concentric circles, and the statues are hidden within cocoons and raw red flesh. For dozens of millennia, we have shattered the idols of our old gods and worshiped our sinful poison-lord Shameish as our new idol.

However, today, the age of the gods has long ended, and the emergence of the Muses is buried deep in the muddy past of the Dark City.

When my people lost their lives and lost their souls in the great disaster, I managed to survive due to the great fall.

That day coincided with the birthday of her who was hungry and thirsty. I lay in the sacrificial altar as a sacrifice and witnessed the obsidian dagger falling from my chest without any force, tapping lightly on my heart: the sharp sound of the end of old history. Xiao, happened to absorb the dark soul of my former master.

I look up at the black sun and lament that the current situation allows me to survive, just like the dark muse pities the eternity I will have.

I saw a coming dark age; when in aristocratic palaces and church halls the stupid and arrogant power games of generations were rehearsed and screamed at the absurd and comical petty fights confined within the class, But I saw that the vacuum of power in Gemo and even the entire Eldar clan had been created with the Great Fall.

I will pave my stage with blood, even though I was once nothing more than a lowly slave. My hands are empty, but my stomach is hungry.

In my plans, nothing brews the brew of fear better than the deep kiss of a blade on flesh.

He understands this too. My bloody accomplice, the lover of murder and misery, the blade that quenches the thirst of the blade, the marquis who falls with the twilight from a star higher than the black sun.

Conrad Coates. I'm looking for him.

In this slaughtered family mansion, I stepped over the stumps on the ground and hurried through the corridors with skin and green leather armor on the walls. I cursed the broken bones and limp balls of flesh that blocked the way, and pursued Looking for his scent in the blood spilled everywhere. Blood and guts splattered all over my pointed boots.

That was his style, leaving no one alive wherever he went.

Conrad had an equal hatred for the whole world, and was never stingy in unleashing this intense emotion rolling within his huge and perfect body, releasing it a thousand times into random convulsions in every act of violence. body. The depth of emotion in his chest was enough to astonish any Eldar.

In his own words, there are not ten innocent people in the whole of Comrade. Therefore, when people are feasting, fighting, resenting, and calculating, Konrad Coze does not mind killing every one of them. .

The rare creatures originally imprisoned in the iron cages suspended in the sky of the mansion were released. Leather-winged birds, blood-clawed birds, Eri-winged-winged birds, wasps, rare beluks, shadow crows and Imgar shrike were several meters long. The wings[1] gathered into a violent cloud in the hall.

It took me some time to deal with them, and I returned to the bottom of the zoo in a trance, back to the past when I still had to fight to prove my worth of survival.

I hope this is not Conrad's deliberate attempt to cause trouble for me, but that it means he has found yet another way to provoke or toy with me within the covenant. He knows that I will never allow a rift in the relationship between us. This bloody Marquis is my only fake card at the moment.

I walked through a series of halls, listening to the crunching sound of my own boots among the remnants of onyx, turquoise, amethyst and emerald. I did not deny the pride and joy that rose in my heart when I trampled on my privileges.

I have been groveling, groveling, imprisoned and bound, living on my last breath. So does Conrad.

Maybe that's why we hate each other.

Soon after, I heard a faint sound of water.

As expected, Conrad Coates will not change his unreasonable bad habits.

While we pride ourselves on the finer senses of our species, Conrad Coz's innately sharper senses showed an unabashed innate superiority. He hears my steps, or smells my scent, before I do.

"Victor," Konrad Curze called my name, "you are here, my ally."

——

Asdúbal Victor found the indoor hot spring in the mansion. In the dim candlelight and the hanging black and red veil, he unexpectedly found the figure of Conrad Coates soaking in the cold spring water.

The Blood Marquis stirred up the water and washed his dirty black hair. The ripples of blood slowly spread around his pale muscles.

He turned around in the water, lay on the edge of the pool, and propped up his thin face. Those dark eyes with oversized pupils were strangely embedded in his quiet expression, exuding an indescribable cold concentration.

"Your hatred is turning into blood in the way, Konrad," the Eldar said, fiddling with a bulbous skull he had picked up from the display case, and tossing the Primarch a bottle of bloodwine he had picked up from the table.

The corners of Conrad Coates' mouth twitched nervously.

"I don't hate you," he hissed softly, breaking the neck of the bottle and tasting the blood that flowed from his thin, slashed lip as he drank. "Pain is the only way to wash away sin."

Victor didn't smile, he didn't bother to refute Conrad's self-defense. "Why don't you come out of your favorite bath, Blood Marquis?"

"Can't you see, Asdubar? The dirty blood of your kind is stained on the tips of my fingers. Coz shook his fingers in distress, even though there was no trace of dirt in the long nail gaps. "I Must wash my hands. And hair, hair is hard to clean, you should know. "

"Shave your head, Blood Marquis." Victor walked around the bathing pool, found the side with the bathing stairs, and stepped directly into the cold water. Blood quickly spread from the soles of his boots.

Konrad Coates jumped out of the pool angrily, and the mania on his face instantly turned into a condescending contempt: "You dirty slave, chirping strong-brained cat, take off your sin-stained boots. !”

"You're the savage Mandela, the venomous Ugul, the Lilith who takes ten baths a day," Victor frowned and dodged the half bottle thrown by Kurtz, "I'm here You worked hard to defeat our enemies and drown the nobles who stood in the way, but you came to slaughter an unplanned family name just to borrow their bath. "

Curze leaned down and stared at the Eldar's equally pale face, and suddenly chuckled.

He retreated behind the gauze and retrieved from the darkness the handmade tunic that he had stitched together with dozens of pieces of extremely well-tanned leather. He tied the laces slowly until the scarred skin of the original was replaced by the warm skin of another species. Package covered.

Water flowed from the long black hair of the original body after careful cleaning, soaking the leather on its shoulders and back.

"Sooner or later, this castle will be ruined by our plan. It just so happens that there is a very good bath here, Victor." Cozz said casually, "Didn't you take a bath the day you rolled off the altar?"

"I want to eat first." Victor did not shy away from his past experience as a slave. He regarded his behavior of resisting whipping as evidence of pride. A snake-like smile hung on the corners of his lips, "The thirsty one It brings the soul's desire for a gluttonous feast, but my flesh and blood is also in urgent need of food. I didn't take a bath, so what's the impact?"

"Hunger cannot be satisfied with blood, and pain cannot eliminate the consequences of the curse." Cozz half-singed and half-hummed briskly, "Death does not exist and is isolated from our world..."

"Death is rare for nobles. They have defeated death and regard death as a unique transit." Victor said, walking out of the water. Curze never minded being interrupted from humming, either stopping to answer or pretending to be deaf. "It's part of eternity."

"This makes real death full of fear. And fear can only be carried by living creatures. Extending the period before real death is a good recipe for fear... How is the progress of your great cause, ally?"

"We found a new racial self-identification to strengthen the cohesion within the ethnic group." Victor simply explained his idea.

He does not need to describe all the sense of belonging and social isolation and group antagonism that proper names can bring. Konrad Coates clearly understands the prejudice and conflict that defining the boundaries of "us" and "them" can bring about.

"What is it?" Cozz said softly.

"Eldas Aeneas," Victor replied, running his fingers over the sharp shadow lines of the skull's eye sockets. Dark Eldar, that's what the words mean.

"Darkness, the ghosts of the night spread fear in the darkness, the night ghosts gnaw at sin, and the coward makes the more coward surrender. Dark Eldar," a calm smile appeared on Curze's face, "The best pseudonym for the Slayer, The name for the unparalleled criminal."

"We are alien to each other," Asdúbal Viktor said indifferently, "and you are even more alien to our world. That is why the Haemonculus, Hexakaris, captured you."

"Hexakaris is not dead." Curze said suddenly, his dark eyes unblinking, and the facial muscles that often twitched nervously remained silent, which gave him a rare dignity.

"I heard the brightest star among the Haemonculi, Bloodlord Conrad Curze, admit that he had rescued his hated enemy from the webs spread by her thirst."

"I don't want to hand him over easily to the torture of Ms. Thirsty. Even if what he will encounter is not necessarily different, the person who performs the thing itself is also different."

Conrad Coates's speech became extremely clear, and the cool madness burst out in his dark eyes with astonishing deterrence.

"I will complete my work personally, peel off his flesh and blood, gnaw at his bones, infinitely extend the last millisecond of the eternal torture he will face, taste his fear, prey on his madness, and tell him that this is just what he will face. Experience the most trivial prelude to the meal, study his convulsions, analyze his nerves, explore where the means of inflicting pain will reach the most exquisite perfection. How can I bear to let this sweetness fall into the belly of others, Asdu. Baal Victor?"

"Narrow-minded, cold and violent," Victor praised sincerely, "Ambitious, greedy and selfish, a blood prince."

"And I don't hate this city, Viktor," Curze said, eyes narrowing, emphasizing his emotional state a second time, "I love it."

Victor threw the skull he was playing with into the bath. "Whether you hate it or love it, our road to rule is still long. We are weak and unknown, and your normal actions will be interrupted by sudden hallucinations. This is a fatal weakness."

"You are hinting at an external force." Cozz pondered for a moment, then pinched a thin rectangular card from the sewn leather pocket with his fingers and threw it accurately into the hands of the Eldar.

It was a beautifully painted card, with no words written on the front and back, only corresponding masks of crying and laughing, as a foreboding hint.

"This thing was in the same envelope as an invitation to a public banquet of the Church of the Sun, and was sent together to the side of the breakfast table of the owner of this mansion." Koz said with a low laugh, "You may need it."

--

"I have imagined many different situations," Morse said, and he conjured up a recliner made of vines and sat down in front of the Eldar who had just decided to call himself the head of the troupe a few days ago. "But I didn't expect that you would borrow the name of a young Eldar who had just joined the troupe to send a letter to Nukelia."

When he was told that Aman Laroni was just a young Eldar who had just been born in the amniotic tube of the breeding wall for a few years, Morse couldn't help feeling amused and ridiculous - he had previously thought that this was the name of the head of the troupe.

"Avatar, my name." The head of the troupe replied, outlining the mask pattern on the surface of the card stroke by stroke.

The troupe's first performance was arranged by these fancy-dressed Eldar at a ball that was originally to be held by the Church of the Sun of Gomor, and most of the invitations have been delivered to the guests.

Now Avatar is painting the last batch of invitations to be sent to small churches and noble families, such as the lower-level Church of Gnosis, the Church of the Awakeners, the Church of the Poison Heart, and the Smega Family, the Eli Family, etc. These small organizations are not very important on the stage of Gomor, but their collective arrival will be a symbolic announcement.

After changing out of their holographic combat suits, the Eldar on the spacecraft generally changed into their own boldly colored patchwork floral clothes.

In theory, this kind of dress may just mean their personal preference; however, combined with the actual situation, these guys have different styles all over the spacecraft, such as the rough orc sofas, small human chairs and red and blue fiber soft couches used by other alien races that were transported from different places, Morse began to wonder how these Eldar can continue their lives in a pathetic state of suspected zero income.

Through the curved observation window behind the Avatar, Morse could gauge the shadow that the floating Tuchucha must have cast on the physical universe. The gigantic machine could only present a fraction of its immeasurable size to the races of the physical universe.

Behind the Tuchucha engine, the huge webway portal glowed with rainbow light. They had arrived here through the complex webway outside the portal, which was swaying with excitement as the souls of the Eldar carried on board were echoing.

And below the ship, a faint shadow was lurking outside the webway, like a dying python, hungry.

"The Void ..." the Avatar said.

"I have a name," Morse said. "Call me Morse."

"Okay, Morse. Do you want to join us, Void?"

Morse turned his chair and faced the director again. "I don't mind going to the audience to watch your debut, but you should call me human. I think I look quite human."

[1] The animal names are just translated casually.

Also, if you find anything you don’t understand or find a bug in the settings, please call me (.)