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rotworld · 1 month ago

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8: Forgotten

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

your small band of refugees has finally found a safe place beyond the imperium's reach, but this paradise does not come for free.

->warhammer 40k. original necron/reader. contains graphic descriptions of violence, corpses, torture, (robot) insects going into orifices, coercive relationship, possessive/controlling behavior, mentioned memory issues, brief mention of self-harm.

At sunrise, little legs come scurrying into your quarters. Pinprick footsteps tiptoe up the side of the bed and perch on the pillow beside you. Something beeps rhythmically. You groan, rolling away from it. Thin, spidery limbs climb the shape of your body beneath the blankets and perch on top of you like a persistent cat seeking attention. It beeps louder. It wobbles back and forth.

“I’m up, I’m up,” you mumble. The beeping stops. The thing crawls down the bed and creeps up the windowsill, the morning light glittering on its metal carapace. This canoptek scarab is specialized for delicate tasks, the grooves in its tiny, rounded paws intended to slot against circuitry and gently rewire damaged internal processing centers. It was a gift, the first of many. It wakes you in the morning and skitters after you throughout the day.

The smell of food chases the fog of sleep from your mind. Someone has been here recently. Breakfast waits in a silver tray on the bedside table. It’s not a stale rations bar or a cracked tin of corpse starch but food, fragrant and fresh and still hot. Hard boiled eggs from a local avian species, diced greens and fresh fruits, spice-seasoned beans drizzled with sauce and topped with leaves of garnish. It feels like a dream but it can’t be. You’ve never seen anything like this, couldn’t have imagined it even at your hungriest and most desperate. Your eyes burn with tears as you slide the tray onto your lap. You never knew beans could taste like anything more than soggy cardboard and rust.

After breakfast, you get dressed. A robe has already been selected for you and folded neatly in a chair along with the accompanying sashes, cords and jeweled accessories. Each layer is light and airy so you aren’t overwhelmed by the pleasantly warm weather, but you still feel weighed down by all the thick gold bands and layered bead necklaces and jeweled brooches. It feels absurd to make so much noise while you move, everything clinking and clattering together. You wonder if you’ll ever get used to it.

A pair of intimidating gold and silver figures guard your bedchambers, standing just outside the door. Each holds a shield the size of their towering body and a monstrously large blade. They do not move. They do not breathe. You could easily mistake them for statues if not for the soft hum of their internal machinery. “Good morning,” you say quietly. Expressionless skeletal faces stare back. In perfect unison, they tuck their blades behind their backs and bow deeply—a traditional expression of submission to your authority. You hear them fall into step behind you, marching at your back. Your scarab struggles to keep up and scurries up to your shoulder, clinging gently to your robes.

The palace is still under construction. There are large slabs of unbroken stone lying around, half-carved pillars and unfinished sculptures, the intricate tile patterns leading to the courtyard in the midst of meticulous assembly. A row of enormous statues marks where the gates will be someday, a looming wall adorned with the symbols of the Runaadi Dynasty. For now, there are only rolling green hills speckled with shrubs and wildflowers. The lychguards remain here at your urging, standing sentinel in the shade of towering trees flushed with spring blossoms. They stand so still that the delicate pink blossoms falling from the branches land on their bodies and sit undisturbed.

As you descend into the valley, you start to hear voices. Chatter and laughter and the playful shrieks of small children. Unlike the scrap metal shanties and toxic ooze lakes of your youth, this is a gentle world of crisp, clear air and blue skies. Small huts with thatched roofs form a modest village, the grass thinning into what will someday be common dirt pathways. The fields are colorful and sweet-smelling with flowering crops. The storehouse is filling with grains. Furry, four-legged beasts graze on grass at the outskirts. There are no munitions assembly lines and backbreaking quotas, no Arbitrators stalking the streets with scowls and shock batons. There is no squabbling for the last ragged, moth-eaten blanket in the frigid shadows of the Underhive.

People wave and smile. A few children rush over to give you freshly picked flowers. Tryphena comes to see you with a grin on her face and grass stains on the knees of her trousers. There are small, prickly seed pods and leaves sticking out of her short, white hair. “Come to see the common folk?” she teases. “I’d give you a hug, but I might stain your outfit with my dirty peasant hands.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say, rolling your eyes. She smells like damp soil and leather. When she wraps her arms around you, she squeezes tight like she’s afraid she might not have another chance. “How are things?”

“Good.” She says it hesitantly, glancing back at the village in something like disbelief. “Everything is good. Dayn got that hole patched in the tannery’s roof. Gellora’s baby is due any day now. We’re building a library, too.” She points to a new structure just past the well, several people dragging wagons of lumber and stone over to build the foundations. “Hardly have enough books to fill it, but that could change someday. Wouldn’t that be something? Talis said I should write a book about we got here.” She picks absently at a starburst scar under one eye. The wound is no longer fresh but it is recent and still healing. It had been self-inflicted; a brutal knife wound intended to vandalize the fleur-de-lis tattoo that only lingers in disconnected spots of ink.

“You don’t want to?” you ask her.

She’s quiet for a long time, staring out at the fields and the grassy slopes. There are mountains in the distance, great peaks capped with snow and a cloudy haze. No one goes that way anymore. It’s the edge of the world as far as they’re concerned. Two Imperial ships sit in the shadows of those mountains, left to rust and rot. One landed gracefully. One bears a peculiar scar of anti-aircraft weaponry, a clean incision like a scalpel cut unraveling the steel. It crash-landed, gouging a smoldering scar across the landscape like a stripe of forest fire.

“I’m still having nightmares,” Tryphena admits. “About being found here. Sometimes it’s an Explorator fleet, stumbling upon us by chance. Sometimes it’s no accident. Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus. My own Sisters, clad in fury. They burn everything and everyone to ash, but it’s the way they look at me that haunts me come morning.”

You watch a man hang a damp blanket on a clothesline. A woman draws water from a well. Children run past, the youngest clutching a stuffed animal with sooty stains peppered across its raggedy fabric skin. “No one is going to find us here,” you say, your voice quiet but firm.

“If it happened once, it can happen again.” She looks towards the mountains.

“Nurakhet isn’t on any Imperial map. The tides of the Warp are too treacherous for anyone to risk coming this way. And even if they do…” You clutch the jeweled brooch affixed to a sash hanging over your shoulders—the symbol of the Ruunadi Dynasty. It’s an impossibly ancient antique, luminescent crystals and delicate metalwork forged before even the simplest unicellular lifeforms had begun to swim through the primordial seas of your ancestors’ homeworld. It rested in a stasis container for untold millennia, protected from the ravages of time in subterranean darkness.

“If anything comes here,” you say, “they’ll protect us. They’ll honor the pact.”

Tryphena frowns tightly but she nods, her gaze drawn to white tufts of cloud drifting through the sky. You stand with her in silence for a while, watching the sun rise and the village brighten. “I’m grateful to you,” she says after a time. “We all are. But are you alright?”

You’re startled by the question. “Of course I am. You see what I’m wearing, right?”

That’s not what she meant and you both know it. “This was always meant to be the start of something different. Something better than what we had before. What good is a peace bought with blood?”

“It really isn’t like that,” you insist. You smile, hoping she doesn’t see the tension in it. You look her in the eye and squeeze her shoulder. “Tryphena, I mean it. There’s nothing to worry about. The most strenuous thing I’ve had to do all week is walk from one end of the palace to the other.”

She cracks a smile. “What hardship! All that walking. Next you’ll tell me that dinner was served on a gold plate, but there was no dessert.”

The scarab beeps on your shoulder, the glowing node embedded in its body flickering. There’s a shrill, electronic noise, a hiss of static, and then a voice. “Consort, your presence is requested in the western solarium.” It’s Zereb, curt as always. You apologize to Tryphena but she waves you off, insisting she has things to do anyway. You feel her stare lingering on your back as you walk away.

The lychguards are still where you left them. They bow when you return and shadow you on the long, pleasant walk back to the palace. “Good morning, Zereb,” you say.

A long sigh emanates from the scarab. Zereb doesn’t breathe—he has no lungs. He makes the sound only to ensure you understand just how exasperated he is. “Is it good? Truly? Do you know what I’m doing right now?”

“I’d rather not know, but I bet you’re going to tell me—”

“I am studying the human phallus,” he interrupts. “It is loathsome. Perhaps the most inelegant, repulsive structure in the natural world.”

“Ah,” you say.

“The Phaeron is displeased. He asked me why you insist on abandoning the lychguards when you leave the palace, as though I have unique insight into your rudimentary cognitive processes.”

“Is he displeased because I left them behind?” you ask. “Or because you insulted me?”

“Irrelevant,” Zereb says.

You stray from the path. The lychguards abruptly change course to follow you. The trees lining what will one day be a grand, crystalline walkway have sea green leaves and large flowers, starburst blossoms with several layers of pointed petals. You pick several. “Do you know what he likes?” you ask.

There’s a long pause. “What he likes?” Zereb repeats with confusion.

“Yeah. You know. Favorite color, favorite place in the palace, things like that. I know I could ask, but I’d like to try surprising him sometime.”

There’s another, much longer pause. “I do not think he remembers what he likes.”

“There must be something,” you insist. “He must like Ruunadi spearblossoms, right? He just had more of them planted in the courtyard.”

“That is because he heard you say that you liked them,” Zereb says.

“He likes gold, doesn’t he? He keeps giving me more.”

“The first piece of jewelry you accepted from him was a golden bangle.”

“Well, what about…” You stop yourself. Those light blue stones, you were going to say, the ones he just used in a spectacular mural in the dining hall—until you remembered they’d been used in the tile flooring of your luxurious bathing chamber. You’d made an off-handed comment once while sitting in the palace garden together. You liked those tiles. It was the color of Nurakhet’s sky just after sunrise, a shade you’d never seen before coming here.

“Perhaps you could tell him that you like when I have free reign over the observatory?” Zereb proposes. “You especially like when I have several uninterrupted weeks of privacy and do not need to debase myself with the study of human anatomy. Yes, I think it would please him greatly to hear that.”

“Sure,” you say dryly. The lychguards guide you back to the path, beneath the shadows of looming statues and a great arch of stone. It’s so empty here compared to the village. Most of the Ruunadi Dynasty has yet to awaken. Those few who work tirelessly to construct the palace are little more than automatons, sleepwalking shells directed by the Phaeron’s will. Zereb has told you that they are recreating the old Ruunadi palace down to the smallest painstaking detail, a futile task that may take the rest of time. They keep making and remaking sections. Statues are meticulously carved and then shattered in frustration, their faces unfinished collages of features that don’t match.

The lychguards stop walking suddenly. You turn back and find them angled towards a different hallway, clearly expecting you to go in that direction. “I thought I was supposed to go to the western solarium,” you say.

“That was a lie,” Zereb admits. “Sometimes you are reluctant to return if I am truthful.” You don’t move. Zereb knows, somehow. He always does—both of them. Maybe the lychguards silently report your every move, or maybe the scarab tracks your movements. “Consort. I know we are not always in agreement. But it is good that you are here. Your presence has a noticeable stabilizing effect—”

“He doesn’t even know who I am, Zereb,” you say tiredly. “He thinks I’m someone else.”

“The Phaeron says you are his consort, therefore you are.”

“This isn’t sustainable. You said his memory was affected by waking early and his IFF transponder isn’t functioning normally. So what happens if it gets fixed? What happens if those memories come back? What if—”

“Enough,” Zereb hisses. You recognize that hushed, fearful tone. There’s a long agonizing silence before he speaks again. “I must insist that you change your robes later. The Phaeron has already waited so long to see you. He would not care if you came to him covered head to toe in dirt, for the dirt would become precious for touching your skin.”

You take a deep breath. “I guess you’re right. I shouldn’t worry about things like that,” you say. “I’ll be right there.” There’s a crackle and then the scarab falls silent. The lychguards follow you closely as you begin descending a flight of stairs that seems to go on forever. The palace changes from a warm, sandy brown to sleek black, shiny like obsidian. Veins of bright green pulsate in seams and crevices. The deeper you go, the more alien everything becomes. Enormous structures twist, piston and ripple in ways metal and stone should not. Jutting obelisks shine with strange symbols. The walkways are constantly changing, floating platforms gliding silently across great chasms. You would get lost here without the lychguards to guide you down the proper steps, across the proper moving sections of flooring, into the proper doorways and chambers.

This is where the Ruunadi Dynasty has slept for longer than you can even imagine.

The chamber you’re led to is not like the others. Rather than the unnerving quiet, silence save for the constant, bassy thrum of machinery, there is sickening noise. Muffled screams and sobbing. Wet squelches. Flesh peeled, nauseatingly slowly, from bone. Blood spatters tall surgical slabs, dripping constantly down the sides.

“Darling,” purrs Amuresha the Relentless, your savior, your jailor, your husband. “There you are. I had just begun to worry. You dismissed the lychguards.”

“Only for a moment,” you assure him. He stalks forward from the shadows and your head raises, craning your neck to keep your gaze on his face. Amuresha, like all necrons, is cursed for all his unlife to wear a visage of death. The living metal of his body is sculpted into a skeletal form, an elongated skull for a face with a grim, unchanging expression. His chest is a broad plane with horizontal slits mimicking a ribcage, connected to his pelvis by nothing more than a flexible metal pole serving as a spinal column. Rather than clothing, his body is adorned with colorful protrusions mimicking garments and jewelry. Layers of thin, flexible metal sheets hangs in front of his legs to form a ceremonial loincloth and a cloak of interlocking hexagons form a cloak over his shoulders. A flared crown juts directly from his skull, wide and colorful like the wings of a bird.

“A moment is all it would take to lose you, beloved. You are not like I am.” He reaches for you, metal fingers curling against your cheek. You hear his internal cooling systems kicking into high gear as he overheats himself, cognitive processors humming dangerously, just to warm his living metal to a comfortable temperature. “You are perfect,” he murmurs. “Just as you have always been.”

You smile sadly. It’s hard to know exactly what Amuresha sees when he looks at you. He knows something is wrong. He knows time has passed since the days of flesh, but how long, exactly, eludes him. Zereb has told you he was married once—and that the marriage fell apart in a rather spectacular fashion. Somehow he holds two truths simultaneously; that it was mere days since that last screaming argument that drove his spouse away, and yet staggering cosmic ages have also passed. He knows he is made of living metal and he knows you are not, and no effort has been made to reconcile the two.

He says you are his consort. Therefore, you are.

“Are you going to join me for lunch?” you ask. You take his hand in yours. It’s much larger, each metal digit stretching far beyond the length of your own fingers.

“Soon, my love. I have work to finish here. Come and see.” You don’t want to. Your stomach churns at the thought of what’s waiting for you in the darkness of this room. But Amuresha bends slightly, bringing your hand to the stylized indents on the lower half of his face resembling the grimace of a skull. “Love?” he asks, so soft and hopeful that your heart aches.

“Of course,” you say. He can’t smile but the green glow in the dark sockets of his face seems to brighten.

He leads you. He walks slowly. He never lets go of your hand. The lighting in the tomb chambers is incidental, any illumination the result of machines carrying out their functions. Amuresha makes more light for your benefit, encouraging the walls and pillars to glow more brightly. Your breath hitches as the rest of the chamber becomes gradually visible. You see things that will return in your nightmares.

There are humans—bits and pieces of them—scattered across the chamber. Heads preserved in stasis cubes and torsos dangling from angular meathooks, bodies bisected and vivisected and peeled like fruit. The worst are the ones that are still alive, strapped to metal examination tables. Some of them thrash as much as their bindings will allow, trying to scream through their gags. Some are motionless, staring blankly at the ceiling. Blood trickles from their ears, nose and mouth. The ones that still have tongues make noises that are almost words; curses, prayers, oaths of vengeance. The ones that still have eyes stare at you with fear and awe and hatred.

“We have been studying, Zereb and I,” he says, chuckling as though you might find this amusing. He strolls down aisles of death and butchery, leading you along at a leisurely pace. The stench of rust and rot and death is unbearable. Zereb is here, hunched beside one of the slabs. He is slighter in frame than Amuresha, his chest section narrower, his limbs more delicate. Living metal encases him like a robe, a rounded sheet covering his head like a hood. He glances at you with five gleaming bulbs, gemstone bright, set in his face. A swarm of scarabs, much smaller than yours with much sharper limbs, crawls around restlessly by his feet. The scarab on your shoulder whispers an apology.

“What have you been studying?” you ask, eager to leave as soon as possible.

“Oh, all manner of things! There is so much wonder in the flesh. I wish to emulate its softness for you. Its warmth. Its sensitivity.” His hand wanders down your back, squeezing your hip suggestively. “I have studied males of this species most extensively,” he says, lowering his voice to a sensual purr. “They are unseemly, I know, but they are more complex than they appear. Just like us, they sometimes copulate purely for pleasure. Perhaps I will be able to do this again soon. Love you in the ways of flesh, just as I once did.”

You’re too stunned to answer. You didn’t think it was possible. Amuresha has nothing resembling genitalia, just smooth metal between his legs. Zereb’s mentions of his studies earlier ceases to be amusing and suddenly becomes a concern.

Amuresha stops beside one of the slabs. “Do you recognize these, my star?” he asks.

He wants you to look. Your heart pounds. Bile climbs up your throat at the sight of the body lying there. It’s a woman. Her armor is cracked and shattered in places, bloody from the oozing wounds underneath. Her hair is white, cropped just above the shoulders. There is a fleur-de-lis tattooed beneath her eye. She’s chewed and struggled against the gag in her mouth so much that it’s dug into her face hard enough to expose slippery insides, the meat of her cheek muscles. Her eyes are glazed over but even through the blood loss and agony, you can see the clarity and the sheer magnitude of her hatred for you.

Across the room, Zereb gives a command. The scarabs rush up the side of the slab in a wave. A man babbles through his gag, and then he cries, and then he screams.

“These…these are…” You’re going to be sick. “I…I thought you killed them already.”

“My love,” Amuresha says softly. He turns you towards him, framing your face in his hands. “Don’t be afraid. Yes, these are the creatures that followed your retinue here. They can’t harm you anymore, you see?”

You don’t want to look but he makes you, turns your head and forces you to watch Zereb pluck the gag out of the man’s mouth. Scarabs rush in, a few impatient ones wriggling into his nostrils instead, making his eyes bulge and his flesh distend around them as they burrow into his brain. He shivers and retches, fingers scraping the metal slab he’s trapped against so hard they bleed. He gags and retches and gurgles violently, blood trickling from every invaded orifice. Zereb bends over him, studying his face intently and searching for some hidden sign. When he sees it, he makes a slight gesture. A wave of the hand, two fingers extended.

You don’t think you’ll ever forget the noises he makes. The wailing. Wordless, mindless animal fear. His struggles turn to trembling and then he goes completely still. Mouth hanging open. Eyes blank. Rivulets of cerebrospinal fluid dribble from his bloody nose.

Amuresha mistakes the cause of your frightened whimper. He holds you, a hand smoothing over your head in gentle, affectionate strokes. “You are safe here, my star,” he whispers. “You and your courtiers are under my protection. No harm shall come to you.”

You cling to him, keeping your eyes squeezed shut. You can still smell the rancid stink of decay and inhumane cruelty. You can still see Tryphena’s Sister, her bloodshot, hateful eyes, the peek of her mandible through mangled skin. “You promise?” you say weakly.

“I swear it,” Amuresha says. “You are safe, now and forever. As long as you are here. With me. I love you, darling. I will love you until the stars have all died.”

His grip tightens until it’s bruising. You tell him you love him, too.

#rotpeach writes #goretober #warhammer 40k

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magistralucis · 1 month ago

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Oh the things we do for internship [Snippet]

(Haven't posted wips for a while. The prompt was @metashard's, the pairing: Lysikor/Phillias. This was originally part of Lacunae - a drabble collection that began in July - but it just kept growing and growing, and I can no longer deny this will have to be its own thing 🤣

Pre-biotransference TDK. Phillias is a junior Triarch Praetorian, shadowing the Ithakas-Ogdobekh war on the Ithakan side. The Ithakans don't like her much because politics™, which she could put up with, if not for a stowaway who complicates things. She does not get paid enough to handle this. 🤦‍♀️)

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It did not take long for them to notice the stranger's presence.

Phillias was listening in when the elder prince of Ithakas was informed of the situation. The praetorian-in-training guessed he'd joined them about two hours into the march, and her host was inclined to agree. From the very back of the procession to the front the news had traveled, in whispers and nudges: credit where it was due, they'd said, the stranger had tried to blend in as seamlessly as possible. An Ithakan glyph tattooed on his wrist marked him as one of their own, and if not for the glaring lack of a marching partner, he might well have gotten away with it until evenfall.

Kynazh Djoseras took note of the disturbance. Notably, he did not address it on the spot. It was not until his troops had stopped for the night, and the evening tents had been set up, that he turned to the stranger and spoke: "Bold of a sutler to come this far without demands."

The hooded stranger chuckled. "Is that what I am now?" He had a reedy voice, dampened by the sand and exhaustion, but his speech was steady. "A sutler it is then, my lord, though a poor one. No money, nothing to trade."

The kynazh wasn't having it. "Stand."

The stranger obeyed at once. Some three-quarters of a Synaptic Disintegrator fell out from under his robes. The unassembled pieces rolled forward on the sand, followed by everything else that had bound him to the earth: copper weights, ammunition, salt rations, scarab amulets, a whole selection of dream-tobacco in tins and cases and bundles.

The Ithakan troops gazed upon this farce stone-faced. All save for Phillias. At that time she was green and new, and couldn't resist the tiniest smile quirking her lips, though she was quick to re-assume the indifference demanded of her role.

Djoseras closed his eyes. "Lysikor of the House of Leukas. Explain yourself."

"A decan ago we were hit by a geomagnetic superstorm." Lysikor replied, paying no heed to the shock that rippled through the men: that cannot be! Phillias understood this was a major subsidiary house of Ithakas. She wondered why a scion from such a family was bearing the Mark, nor why he was doing - well, whatever he thought he was doing, creeping around outposts, stalking them, or something else. "Mass malfunctions from both sides - all communications broke down, as did the vehicles and the gauss weaponry, and we fended for ourselves with the bare blade. The Ogdobekh fled in the confusion but our nemesor was killed. I know not where the rest have gone."

The officers exchanged looks of dismay. If Lysikor had been with whom they were marching to help in the first place, that was the entire reason for their journey nixed. A geomagnetic storm, Kynazh Djoseras seemed to be brooding through the still waters of his expression, another gift from the accursed sun of Tamar. "All parties were on foot?"

"Yes. If they made repairs I do not know of it."

This planet lay close to the Ogdobekh crownworld. They would've had the easier escape than the Ithakans, if anyone had been able to do so at all. "Is it possible we will run across either side?"

"It may be, but for my part, I saw no one. They'd scattered too far for one man to find."

"For one man distracted by dishonorable matters, perhaps." Djoseras replied sternly, and as if on cue four lychguard brandished their warscythes in Lysikor's face. With a scornful gaze he made known to his troops how Lysikor's items were distinctly Ogdobekh in fashion, from the design of the dream-tobacco cases to the copper-plated scarabs rolling around. "Foe or not, I might remind you that looting is punishable by death."

"This is going to make me sound like a robot, kynazh, but I don't consider life to be a valid metric in my decision-making." Lysikor wasn't intimidated in the slightest. He gazed straight into the prince's eyes, dark against dark in perfect serenity. "The sons of Ithakas are not afraid of sacrifice, and to be frank with you, I didn't think I was going to survive this. If I'd been worried about that I would've taken their rations, not their bagatelles. Their only purpose is to keep track of the enemies I saw felled."

"By you?"

"Most from the storm, some by me, especially in the past few days." Lysikor held out his monocular scope, which had been melted clean through in the middle by a gauss shot. Phillias's gaze fell upon the scarabs: five on their own, two threaded as pendants, both the cords and the faience stained amply with blood. "Got even with me, almost."

Djoseras heaved a deep sigh and rubbed his forehead. Nothing more of value would come of this interrogation. For the first time since her posting, Phillias saw exasperation in the young kynazh's face, he who was normally so stern and unflappable.

Yet for whatever reason Djoseras did not order the outsider destroyed. Maybe it was the need to salvage something from this failure, or perhaps what Lysikor had said about life and its utilitarian disregard had resonated with the kynazh. "Were these not desperate times, and every last hand not necessary, I would smite you here and now. But these are strange times indeed. Make no trouble or else you will be struck down, upon this world or out of it, wherever we may be."

"I thank the kynazh and the lords of Antikef for this mercy." Then at last Lysikor bid his prince his obeisance, taking down his hood and bowing low on the ground, his long unkempt hair falling about his face. As he straightened back up he caught Phillias's eye, and gave her a glimmer of a smile, regarding her with a surprisingly pure curiosity. "And my lady - you are?"

"Lady Phillias."

Djoseras's final words for that evening were directed to the praetorian: both address and admonishment, the intended subject left ambiguous. The proceedings were over and the evening tasks of his troops must resume, and that meant she was to return to the highborns' tents with the others. She made no spoken reply, and neither the kynazh nor the interloper demanded it.

With one long glance back she stood, then turned around, and left the clearing with her glaive in hand.

#warhammer 40k #wh40k #lysikor #djoseras #executioner phillias #the twice dead king #necron #necrons #snippet #not helping is the fact that djoseras is lowkey having a mental breakdown about the meaning of war throughout the story #lysikor is having the time of his life though. baking. singing to animals. scaring the living daylights out of phillias. doing a nihilism.#as you do 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

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