Warhammer 40k: Shattered Steel Soul

In the pictures returned by the camera equipment, the entire Devin is slowly being woven and reshaped. Each broken continent is floating in the void along the invisible ocean currents, until it is attributed to some kind of higher existence. In the designed position - like some kind of self-contained celestial sphere system, revolving around the core of the earth according to their own orbits and speeds, casting interlaced shadows on each other's surfaces.

The shadows are sometimes chaotic, and sometimes they form a set of fixed patterns: three parallel cruel slashes, two or more groups coexisting, like the deep carvings scratched by an eagle's claws.

Dantioch stood behind Perturabo, monitoring the conditions on the ground of the Davin 63-8 satellite with his Primarch. Everything happening here was difficult for him to understand, and another one of his colleagues had recently been killed. The words that were whispered in the Cheorwon Masons' Club suddenly came to his mind.

"Chaos," said Kyle Valen, "a threat that requires vigilance. If there is evil sorcery, report it to our father first. I believe you understand what this means, brothers."

He turned his head, and his unhelmeted face met the wrinkled face of the preacher, Keryl Hindman. They once joked to each other that there were two old men walking together on the front line of the Great Expedition, and from another aspect In other words, Hindman's existence has indeed become evidence of the ancient law of Terra, that is, the elderly tend to have extensive knowledge.

Just a few minutes ago, Hindman analyzed the meaning of the coiled snake pattern for them.

"Ulaeus decorated the pharaonic headdress of ancient Terra, representing power and protection," the speaker said, while recording the conversation as material for war records, "In Greece tens of thousands of years ago, Asclepius The coiled snake symbolizes medical treatment, and Ouroboros is related to endless reincarnation and eternal life..."

He goes on to describe the historical origins of Kundalini and Quetzalcoatl, as well as the entangled serpent of the Erinyes, trying to explore the origins of this iconography as it appears in Devon.

Their erudite genetic primarchs proposed a conjecture that the serpent of Eden symbolized knowledge and awakening, and the deception and corruption that followed.

Every explanation is possible, but the truth has long been reduced to black ash by the Word Bearers' flamethrowers.

When more and more visions were reported to the Cheorwon by each company, a serious haze covered the Iron Lord's face. He no longer participated in the discussion, but concentrated on processing the information, his lips moving slightly. , judging the situation by his own calculations. Hindman and Dantioch wisely remained relatively quiet.

Suddenly, Perturabo spoke, frowning and murmuring in a low voice: "My dereliction of duty."

"grown ups?"

"All retreat," Perturabo did not answer him. He did not even need the Iron Lord to speak. A data cable had already sent the command into the communication channel at the fastest speed, "Return to orbit and terminate the counter-insurgency exploration... "

Dantioch began to contact the transport boat to ensure that the subsequent return work was proceeding normally. However, in the sound array, except for the mechanical narration of the iron ring, there was only a subtle buzzing sound of electricity, like the limbs of a beetle crawling through a pipe. His command received no response.

A slight gust of cold wind blew across Dantioch's arms.

Just as he was about to double-check whether it was a problem with the communicator or whether something had happened to the ground combatants, one of the lights above him suddenly went out, and then the second one.

Then, darkness fell.

Within seconds, the light in the room was hungrily swallowed up by the darkness, and everything within reach was as dark as ink, as if they were in an inescapable black hole.

The temperature quickly drained away, and the air Dantioch breathed formed dry ice crystals on the stubble around his mouth. The energy that maintained the operation of the battle fortress was drained out in an instant, and the war blacksmith could almost hear the whine of countless mechanical valves and the piercing scream of the uncontrolled axle.

"My lord!" Dantioch shouted loudly, trying to walk towards Perturabo's position in the darkness, but was trapped by the power armor that had lost its energy.

The pain caused by the loss of years sticks to his skin and pierces the pain nerves. The power armor is no longer a life-sustaining protective device, but a ruthless iron cage.

He panted, suddenly realizing how weak he was.

The war blacksmith's two old hearts accelerated at the same time, and he relied on his muscles to forcefully drive the movement of the armor. He moved slowly towards the Iron Lord's desk.

"My lord?" It was Hindman's voice. Memoirs stood up holding on to the armrest of the seat and called uneasily, trembling from the cold. "My lord Perturabo?"

A beam of light dimly lit up - not a colored light of reality, but a dark, metaphysical light, shining through the porthole in the primarch's office, calling Dantioch to look outside. To observe, to feel the huge shadow coming from behind the curtain.

"Don't look, Hindman." Dantioch immediately warned Hindman.

The Warsmith turned his back to the porthole, carefully controlling his perceptions. His gauntlet was blocked by a heavy iron object. Dantioch carefully followed the edge of the table, tentatively searching for the Iron Lord's arm. The chill gradually penetrated into his aged bones, making them ache faintly within the flesh.

"Father..." he said hoarsely.

This call was eaten away by the black sun, becoming broken and hollow, as if echoing in the distant place. Time was stretched for an extremely long time, a moment-like point stretched and contracted into an eternal line, and then rebounded suddenly, hitting Dantioch in the chest with a blow.

He lost strength in an instant, his legs went limp, and he fell beside Perturabo's table, his armor clanging against the ground.

Then, light and time return together.

The light was turned on again, and after a few flickering flickers, it once again emitted a steady cold light.

Fuel resumed flowing and burning again, and electricity supported the operation of thousands of ship components. A steady and reassuring flow of energy ran through the lines buried in the walls, like mechanical blood vessels, providing power for this huge fortress. Deliver the energy they need to survive.

Thousands of automatic alarms turned the short warning bells into a continuous scream. Resources were destroyed, the freezing chamber leaked, the sealed pipelines ruptured, the pharmacist's experiment was ruined... one after another, damage or destruction warnings were displayed on the holographic screen. Scroll like crazy, reporting the countless consequences of this brief lack of energy.

It can be imagined that in the next month, the Iron Warriors will be fully focused on recovering the losses caused by this accident.

But above all this, there is one thing that is more urgent.

The specially made power armor fit Dantioch's skin again, giving him the strength to stand up again. The War Blacksmith got up from the ground anxiously and even embarrassedly, restraining himself from jumping directly on the Gene Father.

Perturabo leaned back on the iron chair, his right hand hanging down on the edge of the iron chair, and his left hand resting on the edge of the table, as still as an Olympian stone sculpture. The nerve cables extending from the back of his head were like a black net, holding his head hanging forward like a sling holding a falling stone.

"My lord?" Dantioch said softly, raising his hand to gently touch the Iron Lord's left hand.

Such a slight force was enough to make Perturabo's uncontrolled hand slip away, bump on the armrest, and then dangle on the outside of the seat.

The internal communications of the Cheorwon were reconnected, and each war blacksmith urgently sent in inquiries, wanting to know the cause of the temporary abnormality just now, and whether the Primarch had made any relevant requirements that they needed to implement.

Dantioch was distraught. While observing the Devin satellite outside the window - it still looked broken, as if nothing had changed, he methodically gave answers to the questions one by one, and called the ship he was on to approach the Cheorwon, or he was on the Steel All the fellow war blacksmiths of the Warrior Flagship rushed to the office to meet and discuss the next situation.

He had never been so filled with panic, and every time he spoke a word, he felt his lips and tongue were extremely numb. The companion's voice seemed to be blocked by the electronic system, and the clear words were as vague and distant as sinking in deep water.

Keryl Hindman seemed to be nailed to the spot and even gave up his duties of recording and preaching. He stared closely at the motionless Primarch, coughed tremblingly, and then asked: "Lord Perturabo...?"

Dantioch turned around and said, "It's okay. The Lord of Iron is just unconscious. If not, as his descendants, we must have sensed it."

He opened the drawer at the lower edge of the iron table in front of Perturabo, found the set of small iron tools, and began to untie the nerve cables from the back of the Primarch's head one by one. They had been personally trained by Perturabo and knew how to deal with the unique cables modified by the Iron Lord himself under special circumstances.

The interval between unlocking the two neural cables should be more than five minutes, otherwise the mutated thought connection will cause damage to the original body's nerves. Every war blacksmith will keep these details in mind...

"Ask the pharmacist to come, prepare the infirmary, bring the sliding stretcher, and contact Terra. No," he whispered to help organize his thoughts, "first...contact Craftsman Morse's Cliff Number..."

Within thirty minutes, three other warsmiths arrived at the Primarch's office. After a brief moment of shock, they began to surround Perturabo, trying to wake him up.

Dantioch drew aside his worried colleagues to make way for Titus, who was hurrying up. The medical symbol on the Chief Apothecary's armor stung his eyes, and the faint breathing of the Primarch echoed faintly in his ears.

"The condition of the original master is stable," Titus said quickly, "This is a coma, he will be fine."

The senior officers nodded.

"The condition of the Primarch is being kept secret for the time being," Dantioch said. "What's going on over there with the Astropath?"

"No response yet - no," War Blacksmith Haco frowned deeply, "The astrological transmission was interfered with and the message could not be sent."

——

Ever since Perturabo opened his eyes, he had to overcome the sensory warnings that exploded in his brain to convince himself that he was not really standing in the sky, but on some invisible plane that could support his body. .

He lowered his head and looked past his feet in Olympia sandals - which didn't seem like the shoes he should be wearing at the moment. But where did he come from? He vaguely remembered a black shadow, that dark, nightmarish illusion of destruction...

Yes, he is Perturabo, where is he... now?

At his feet, the world was divided into two parts by an unclear boundary.

The world on the right is shrouded in gloomy black fog. Broken streets connect buildings with huge cracks. Thick fog pours out from the depths of the cracks, intertwining into afterimages of human behavior during life. The image stays in the scene before destruction. At the last moment, the distorted faces and limbs in the haze are close to each other, and they are fleeting in actual contact and finalization. The dark sunlight shone through the gaps in the clouds to the earth, like strips of light coming from between the ribs.

The world on the left was colorful, with snakes and flying insects making shadows come alive, and the singing of the dancers floating gently, flowing along the winding blood river until it reached the edge of the dark world. The colorful gas hissed and made a harsh sound, and too many colors made everything turbid and unclear. Faintly, there was a twisted shadow of some kind of entangled and swirling multi-headed creature on the ground.

The worlds on both sides were ready to move, and the colorful mist and the black shadows competed for that boundary, launching an invisible war.

Perturabo squinted his eyes, and he noticed that in the colorful world, there seemed to be a person with a blurred face standing on the top of the projection of the twisted multi-headed snake, guiding the movement of the giant snake.

Before he could see the person clearly, the unknown plane under his feet suddenly began to surge, turning into soft mist-like quicksand, causing him to fall down. In an instant, his mind was filled with giggling low laughter and silent emptiness at the same time. He could hardly breathe, waving his arms that could not find a foothold, and fell painfully.

"No..." He squeezed out a word from his teeth, and blurry images rolled through his mind. None of the faces were clear enough for him to remember their identities. An empty confusion threw him to the ground, and then a heavy blow hit the back of his head, knocking his consciousness out of this soul-like body.

After an unknown amount of time, Perturabo opened his eyes again and found himself leaning against the cold surface of a flashing door, on which an unknown pattern was engraved.

His head hurt so much that his thoughts became intermittent. The two worlds were still fighting, but the black sun seemed to be retreating, and the crazy colorful colors were even more rampant.

The light-colored dust swirled on the street, and the discolored skeletons were dyed into a conspicuous dark green or dark copper color the moment they entered the colorful world. The blazing purple flames began to burn from the top of the building where he was, like reverse lightning piercing the sky, and the darkness was burned away layer by layer, turning into a broken and terrible black cloud, gradually dissolving into the multi-colored energy.

However, there was still a dark force fighting back. The malicious and poisonous force extended its needle-like tentacles. Wherever it touched, the grass turned into iron filings, and the beasts turned into charred bones in an instant. The emotions of despair and fear almost became physical. Just by looking from a distance, Perturabo felt that he was burned through by a sharp burning pain again.

Perturabo ignored the discomfort of his body and stood up by the pillar beside the door. The scales carved on the pillar stung his hand.

He looked around and saw that he was standing at the door of a temple. In front of the temple, a pool of clean water was rippling slightly, reflecting the shadows of the surrounding trees. The sculptures of coiled snakes formed a fantastic optical illusion geometric pattern, which was decorated in the center of the pool. The three-headed snake spit out flowing water reflecting clear colorful light, forming an ingenious fountain.

He turned around and saw a huge tree of life carved on the bronze door of the temple, with lush branches and leaves and abundant fruits. The roots of the tree extended outward and went to the pool outside the door. The giant snake was vividly wrapped around the tree of life, two of its heads were hidden in the green leaves, and the third head was facing a plump fruit on the tree, intentionally guiding Perturabo to reach out and pick it.

He noticed that the fruit was the exquisite and unique door knocker of the bronze door.

As he looked directly at the fruit, the pain in his body quietly left, and the cool breeze with a wisp of sweet smell brushed across his forehead, then went down along the soft golden white robe on his body, around the golden wristband engraved with Ulphonic language, took his finger, guided him to knock on the door knocker, entered the temple, and received selfless protection.

Perturabo stood still.

The breath of destruction behind him was coming back, and the shadow of death once again took the upper hand. The dangerous fear swept across the edge of his soul, tearing his shadow with insatiable greed. The colorful half of the world was retreating, as if the guiding force that supported the advent of this complex power had burned out.

It won't be long before he is completely swallowed up by the shadow behind him.

Unless he pushes the door open and goes inside.