Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Excerpt From The Killer’s Dream==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">There was a path through the mountains, which the man followed closely, or else he knew he’d be lost. There was another ahead of him. The glare of his being was like a beacon in the twilight shade of the mountain path. This was the Godling, the one who wept blood.

He had no body here, save the one he imagined of himself, and he pulled the fur cloak around his translucent shoulders. The man was an empty vessel, hollowed out by the racking of daemon claws. The middle was torn away as the devil was rejected. Once he’d had a fiery passion which made him a killer, one of the worst; a man with a thousand last chances, all unfulfilled. But the hollowing had robbed him of something vital, even as it had been his salvation and illumination.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

The mountains got steeper, until they were the rocky pinnacles of legend. He was on Terra, but like nothing he’d seen in old remembered tales. The air was clean and ancient, and the foothills fecund with life. The Godling’s light was obscured as he rounded a corner on the trail, but the man found he could follow the trail just as well. Bloody feather crunched underfoot, turning to brittle glass as his boots pressed into the dusty path.

Around the corner, time moved more quickly, the clouds wheeling overhead as plants raced to grow all around. Before him was a cavern, a jagged maw of lifeless stone, yawning wide to consume him. He had a brand blazing in his hand, and he knew no fear. The cave was older still than all the nations of man that crawled and wriggled and ran across the face of the world... Eden, Earth, Midgar, Maegros, the Cradle.

The writings and pictograms on the walls were formless at first, and nonsensical; primitive etchings without thought. But then came the scrawling designs of bison and horned beasts of the field, and simply black outlines of the fundamental form of man. And amidst these men, giants walked. Two rows of ten; these giants were the heroes of the picture-legends. They fought the dragons, they rescued the princesses, they rose up as champions in battle and they toppled the tyrants, and stood above all, benevolent and valiant beyond the dreams of the mundane. All of them kings, in their own way. 

The man moved deeper and deeper into the cave, until the memory of an exit vanished from thought. This was the bowels of Terra, where the world spirit rumbled. The fundamental forces of creation. The tumultuous anarchy which brings forth substance and materium.

He caught sight of the Godling, with his trail of broken feathers. Soon, he was in a chamber, where the faceless statues stood; twenty, grim and hollow-eyed. He eventually reached the Godling’s side, and he bade the man be silent, and to watch.

The two shrank back into the shadows, as many dozen figures entered. They were all hooded, and all bore candles in his aged hands. When the figures threw back their hoods, their faces were human, but not humans as the man knew them. Their skulls were different, their eyes sunken into sharped cheeks, with taller skulls and smaller jaws. They moved about the statues, examining each in turn, and also the glyphs and symbols carved into the bedrock walls. They spread blood and chalk dust across the chamber, and sang songs no man could understand. They soon left the chamber, one by one, until only a few remained, blocked inside the rapidly darkening cave. Twenty one figures, eyes gleaming as they slit their own throats, and bled their last against the stepped plinths of the faceless giants. Souls bound to ancient concepts, and released fully formed into the churning maelstrom of existence and chaotic creation.

There to wait. There to languish, drawing power unto themselves, until the day, the moment, they could find their form. Until they could find their brethren, in whatever form their descendants took.

“What is this? Why am I...?” began the man, but his words faded, as the weeping godling turned to him, cheeks lined with red trails.

“More than sons, but stolen all the same. The best lies of devils are those that ring with truth, if only on the surface,” the voice of the Godling said, his face gaunt and drawn, yet once the most beautiful of forms. Like a tapestry stretched thing and taut, till the fabrics leech away all colour and meaning.

“I don’t understand. Why are you showing this to me?” the man demanded, growing more translucent as he did so.

“You are an empty cage. Unlike all others, in the act of creation, you are conduit and vessel both.”

The man’s mind reeled, uncomprehending, as the world flowed around him, becoming something gargantuan and industrial; a ship, overlooking a burning planet.

“We are blessed and cursed. We are mighty indeed, and fathomlessly powerful. But we are not perpetual. Immortals can perish, and once perished, incarnation does not strike twice, for ours is a power stolen from the fundamental monster. Once we perish, we return to it, to be bound to the fundamental monster, or to be scattered to the far winds of creation. All save for me; he who rejected the Red Angel and the oblivion of death.”

“And what are you?” the man asked, as blood pooled around where the Godling lay, his golden armor cracked and his sword broken at the hilt.

“Regret and despair, bound into sacrifice and seared into the fabric of the empyrean by the black fires of rage. Trapped, and forced to linger on, in dreams and avatars, but never to be incarnated again. I cannot return, but another can in my place.”

The man lost patience, shattering the dream as he became more lucid. “Do not speak in riddles. This is not real; this is some dreaming madness.”

“True. You are luminous, and cannot be truly deceived or possessed. But they will die, mother and child both, if you do not do this for me, when the time comes.”

“Do what?” the man yelled, turning the dream to a black void.

“Let me in,” the godling replied, his voice fading to a ghostly whisper on the breeze.

Then, the man woke in a chill sweat. Desperately he reached out from his dark cot, and found her in the dark, touching her soft hair gently.

-	'''[From The Killer’s Dream, by those who chronicled [DELETED]’s life before [DELETED] ]'''
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