Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

== Innocence Lost ==

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The story told by spirit talkers and psykers that go too far across the galaxy is a strange one but one that is too consistent. Out in the Formless Wastes beyond where things can easily dwell where the rocks and the bones of the warp are bare and without life or moment, beyond where even Be'Lakor hold court there is nothing but the howling of the winds made up of unattended ideas and forgotten passions that swirl among uncaring rocks, lost to the æther. There nothing moves, things that run there to die quietly when all hound them and promise them worse than death, they are safe from predators because nothing can survive there but they are doomed to end because nothing can survive there. Nothing sings in that place beyond were even the unwelcome light of the Astronomicon is visible.

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If you survive the trek, oddly slightly easier for mortals than gods or deamons, if you go beyond beyond where the last deamon goes to die, beyond the were the constant rumbling of Gork and Mork's eternal brawl can be heard, beyond hope and dreams and memories and the last swirling forgotten idea lost on dead breezes you can come to the place where children once dwelt.

It looks like a village, or what once might have been a village, next to a river or at least the desiccated corps or a river. The riverbed is bare pebbles, the banks mud long since dried and dead. The village itself is broken, the thatch and sticks of the roofs have fallen in where they have not blown away and not one hut has a full set of walls left standing. The flaps of animal skin and reeds that covered doors and windows are dry and cracked and brittle. And all about is stillness, endless stillness of stories that remain after nobody is left to tell them. Sound does not work well here, if sound can work well in that realm at all. Noise of foot steps and voices are heard a second after they should be and muted, seemingly bled and drained into the grey and sunless sky.

And then you hear a crunch and you look down.

Covered by an age of dust there are the bones, they look like children at first glance. They are small and humanoid, but they are not and never were though they might have been innocent up until the end. Their brittle bleached bones you realize stretch to the horizon in every direction.

You might hear a slight breeze disturb the dust, but then you realize that there is no wind here. There can't be, this is beyond the place where life can dwell, but something moves the dust. A serpent, small, little more than a grass snake and the only source of colour in this bleak place. It does not live here. Nothing can live here, it lingers. It might have been a small god once in the time that gods weren't so big. It is not dangerous, this place is beyond danger. It's cold unblinking eyes hold only sadness now, whatever it once was.

It can not bite, in it's mouth it holds a small severed finger, pale green. It has only ever been glimpsed briefly, the moment it meets the gaze of another it darts into the bones once more and slithers away into the bones.

The serpent must have a name as all daemons do, but not one that anyone can remember. Not even the gods.

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