The Fall of Lelith Hesperax

The Fall of Lelith Hesperax By Creed of Heresy

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Another convoy, another spectacle of death and overindulgent gore. The Imperial ships had been poorly defended, only a pair of lightly-armed escort vessels, one with half of its armament completely non-functional. The freighters had been easy targets, the mercenaries charged with defending it putting up only a meager fight. The two escorts burned in the nuclear cold of space, breached plasma reactors spewing radioactive flame into the void, and now only one freighter remained. Its engines were blasted apart, its hull pockmarked and scorched.

Lelith recounted the losses for a moment. Two of her wyches dead, one wounded. The Haemonculus would have fun putting her back together, though violation in every sense of the word was guaranteed. Her fault for allowing herself to be struck down by the crude, fumbling humans and their equally awkward weapons; she would learn her lesson well.

A malicious chuckle leaving her lush, bright red-painted lips, a twisted smirk upon them, she strode forth to the boarding door of the Impaler Assault Module as it rammed into one of the pressurization hatches on the crude human vessel. She was, as always, dressed to kill, resplendent in her thigh-high spike-studded boots, pushed up onto her tiptoes by the spike-shaped heel that ended in a deadly bladed point, an over-hip G-string, and a metal brassiere shaped into two needle-fingered hands that pressed firmly into the flesh of her full breasts, bulging the nigh-translucent skin out around the metal grasps. Her hair was tied into a single ponytail, the night-black locks adorned with dozens upon dozens of lethal blades designed to hook into a foe and tear their flesh from their bodies like a flail with an aesthetic whip of her hair. Her unyieldingly firm buttocks flexed with the motions of her thighs, her boots far too esoteric to be wielded in a practical fashion by any but her. To Lelith Hesperax, greatest of the Succubi, killing was an art form, and such seemingly impractical fittings were all tools of her trade.

Besides, she knew she was dangerously beautiful. Why not flaunt it right in the faces of her foes? Tempt them with the flesh even as she tore theirs from their own bodies? All the better to milk the succulent souls from their bodies with a faint garnishing of lust hidden deep within the agony and despair.

The lancecutters of the assault module finished cutting the insertion proboscis into the target vessel. Her wyches, similarly adorned in garishly tempting wargear, shrieked in ecstasy at the prospect of fresh blood and slaves to be taken as they leapt past her into the ship. Lelith smirked coldly, her heavily penciled and mascara'd eyes narrowing in anticipation as she stepped coolly into the blocky vessel's poorly-constructed corridors, taking a slow, deep breath through her nostrils. She could smell the fear. A guttural yelp alerted her to a group of human males as they began to flee. Her wyches fell upon them in an orgy of blood and carnage, thin bladed weaponry working to flay them alive, to kill them in the most excruciating ways imaginable, their blood spraying across the corridors.

This was to be an orgasmic experience.

Motion at the other end of the corridor. Another human with a primitive, tube-shaped weapon. He barked something in his incomprehensibly primitive tongue and pulled the weapon's trigger, sending a spray of small metal projectiles down the corridor at her. Lelith moved, her lithe form writhing and contorting into an elegant display of precision and flowing grace, dancing through the air blindingly fast around each miniature projectile in the ballistic spray as if they were moving in slow motion. The man had no time to react to this astonishing visage, no time to gawk at the way her breasts heaved and swung in their meager holdings, the way her legs bent and flexed, the way her hair whipped out and around, the bladed tips hooking into his body in perfectly spaced intervals away from one another, no time to begin to comprehend the beauty in the sadistic perfection... no thought to any of this, other than to scream in anguish as with a flick of her head the blades tore his flesh completely from his body, baring muscle tissue and blood-carrying veins across every inch of him, the hyperstimulants in the blades keeping him from going into shock, awake to feel every painful moment as he fell to the ground, writhing and screaming.

Lelith knelt before him, grinning, never letting a drop of the primal creature's unworthy blood touch her flawless skin. She raised her hands, clad in metal gloves tipped with sinister barbed hooks, and began the loving process of flaying him alive. She drank in his screams of torment, basked in the coppery stench of blood and entrails as she rendered him into nothing but a pile of offal. She drank deep of his soul energy as it bled away, her already youthful features softening further, immaculate skin smoothing yet more, restoring what little aging she had suffered in the last few months in mere seconds. A cruel necessity... but she had long learned to indulge in this, to bask in the suffering of others, to delight gleefully in the knowledge she was physical perfection incarnate, untouchable, free of the fear of painful death these pitiful creatures suffered at her hands. She stood slowly, eyes fluttering in delight, moaning in ecstasy at the wetting of her appetite, before she stopped, snapping around at a motion behind her.

Another human. This one draped in a long coat made of a thin material that was as dark as the void itself. Long, flowing black hair framed his crude, angular face, but what was most unusual was the solid white eyes set into his skull. He stood taller than most of these other creatures... taller even than she, slighter than most, too. His hands were concealed by the robe-like sleeves, and his face betrayed no emotion.

She licked her lips and teeth hungrily. She had not finished sating her thirst for soul-essence. He was lovely, too; the joy of tearing such an enticing creature to shreds would feed her ego further. With a single push of her endlessly long legs, she careened through the air at him, a shriek of eager laughter keening from her lips as she flew towards him.

The human moved, faster than she could ever have thought possible.

The Callidus Temple...[information about it will go here along with describing the specialized training given to the few males within the Temple along with habits and practices and the like, involving the men being designated as "Marks" with the number following being their number of successful operations]

Mark 537, known as “Enigma,” and a thousand other identities to a million other people who never knew him to be otherwise, had been preparing for his quarry for years. One of the Temple's deadliest Marks, had spent two decades constantly pursuing other targets, keeping his mind sharp and his skills sharper while he worked his way to his true goal; Lelith Hesperax. The most feared and lethal of the xenos known as the Dark Eldar; untouchable, unstoppable, a dance of gory, bloody death given sadistic, beautiful, flowing form. He had spent years working with an infocyte of the Vanus Temple to predict her patterns, to learn her style, her substance, her craft of death. He had studied dozens, maybe hundreds of pict-captures of her in action, finessed his reflexes and his body to match, and eventually, outmatch her own.

Finally, all his studies, all of his practice, all of his skills and contacts paid off. The infocyte, Ominae Sayti, had pinpointed the highest likelihood of her next strike. Mark 537, Enigma, had joined the convoy as a technician. He had almost feared she wouldn't board his vessel; the other four had been boarded, their crew slaughtered or enslaved, and he had heard nothing of the obsidian haired Succubus from the frantic vox chatter. But at last... he had seen her as she stepped off the boarding vessel, heard her moan of delight as she had finished tearing apart the hapless man who had futilely tried to stop her, and seen her eyes, her form, heard her voice, and knew there was no mistaking it.

His target was here, at last.

She leapt towards him, as if rushing to a lover she had been parted from for decades, ululating laughter of delight as she prepared to embrace him in her deadly, talon-gloved hands.

Enigma moved, too fast for the human eye to see, a blur of motion. She barely had time to let shock at the sudden motion register on her face before the first impact landed on her sternum. With a colossal whoosh of air leaving her lungs, she flipped over his head and landed unceremoniously on the ground, struggling to take a breath before her lungs unhitched, and she sprung to her feet dexterously. She twirled, whipping her bladed hair at him with a sashaying motion of her head that send the glittering blades hissing through the air, aiming to hook into his flesh and skin him as they had to the other human a moment ago.

But Enigma was no mere human. He was a weapon. And he had been picked, crafted, bred for this one purpose, to take out one of the greatest threats to ever caress the battlefield. His feet slid across the metal bulkhead flooring as if the soles of his tight-fitting boots were greased, and his body whipped back into a hard curve, one hand whipping back to press the tips of his fingers to the floor, flipping himself nimbly backwards, the blades cracking the air just an inch from him as he righted himself.

Lelith hissed her ire at him, and even twisted and pinched into the beginnings of frustration her features were perfect. Even her anger was perfect. She danced forwards on her bladed heels, lashing blurringly-fast kicked towards his throat, pivoting and launching another to his stomach, aiming a coordinated strike-after-strike kick with each of her legs towards his face and thighs, whipping up and around to whip her bladed hands into his chest, swiping the other hand up into his chin, flowing around him and seeking to gouge out his spine. And to her growing frustration, and with a twinge of disbelief, none of her strikes could land. Every blow missed by the smallest fractions of space, his form twitching and jerking the most minimal of distances to escape each of what would have been lethal or at least incapacitating blows. As the clawed gauntlets of her hand moved to stroke his spine, he whipped around, following her motions, and even outpacing her. Before she could alter her strike, he whipped his elbow into the side of her head. The blow sent her momentarily into darkness, and for the first time in her long life, her body moved ungracefully and without its own accord; it careened into the wall, slammed into it, and bounced off, sending her sprawling to the floor, her metal brassiere screeching against the plasteel floor as it dragged against it. Her vision swam, and she struggled to focus, the effect of the concussion rattling her senses. Vaguely, she was aware of the human's voice speaking with an almost cultured tone to it... and it was full of malice and contempt.

“This... is what I have hunted? For twenty Terran years... I have hunted THIS? You are unworthy. This is a waste!”

Lelith's lips pulled back into a snarl, indignation and fury at being talked to in such a way by such an unworthy creature, at being laid low by such a pitiful being, by a HUMAN of all things galvanizing her senses into full awareness. She rolled onto her side and whipped her clawed hand up, and was rewarded with a strangled grunt of what she assumed was pain. The human jumped back, gazing down at the five red slashes across his chest. But, with extreme disappointment, she realized they had been little more than superficial wounds. The concussion was still affecting her; she had gauged it to be a killing blow.

“Maybe there's something to this after all,” Enigma growled, a mild note of relief entering his voice. He leapt forwards again, sending a bullet-fast sideways dropkick to her face. She bounded up on one hand and twirled in midair; as he hit the floor, missing her entirely, he pushed himself with one hand, sending him across the floor as she spun up and around into the air, her body arching into a hard 180 degree angle to drive her bladed heel down towards his head. She missed by the smallest fraction of a centimeter, and spun on her landed foot to deliver a vicious full-body spinning kick to him as she stood. His arm whipped up as the other pushed against the floor, spring-boarding to his feet and blocking kick, hooking his elbow around her knee and twisting it around, knocking her momentarily off-balance. She spun through the air, out of control for the briefest second before he kicked against the ceiling, twisting her body around into an impossible angle to drive her elbow into his back. To her delight, it landed. To her immediate dismay, he moved into the blow, absorbing it and denying her its impact. He rolled as he hit the floor, transferring all the impact away, as she did the same as well, twisting free of his grasp and rolling to her feet, breathing deeply.

Enigma windmilled onto his feet, hands up into a esoteric fighting stance. “That's much better,” he purred, and despite herself, Lelith shuddered at the tone. She had never been bested. Never been matched. Dozens of other fighters had tried to take her on all at once and had never even landed a blow. By himself, he was already backing her into a corner.

It was... sexy.

“You weak, under-evolved monkey,” she hissed, forcing her wavering confidence back into full posterity. “Do you really hope to best me? ME? I am-”

“Lelith Hesperax. I know who you are,” Enigma shot back in a low, sibilant whisper. “I am Mark Five-Three-Seven. Secondary; Enigma. And I am the end of your long spree of torment and despair, tainted xenos witch!” He darted forward suddenly, but as Lelith spun to dodge and to whip her bladed hair into his side, he zig-zagged into a different course, right into her. The sudden move was brutal, crude, unexpected, and it took her entirely by surprise, spearing her body with his own. He slammed her against the bulkhead, fracturing four of her wing-shaped fused ribs. For the first time in as many eons as she could remember, she felt pain. Actual, sharp, body-invading pain. As they fell to the floor, she screamed, unused to the sensation. She was the giver... not the taker. She danced around blows, she didn't take them. The human fell atop her, driving his knee into the underside of her damaged ribs in a quick, powerful, fluid motion, slamming one hand open-palmed into the side of her shoulder, impacting it into its socket and breaking her collar bone and fracturing her upper arm with a sickening crack. Lelith shrieked in agony, silenced by his other hand impacting into the side of her face, smacking it violently against the floor. She lost consciousness for a moment, but a moment later was awakened to a groggy world of shooting pain coursing across the left side of her body. Her vision was cloudy, blurred, stars exploding before her eyes. She tried to scream but the human's hand pressed to the side of her face, mashed her cheek against he floor, forcing her lips into the grotesque parody of puckering for a kiss. Her eyes mashed tightly closed, the swimming of her vision making her nauseous. Or maybe it was the vicious concussion, she wasn't sure.

Enigma breathed slowly, steadily, perched atop his prey, solid white eyes narrowed in contempt.

“I have won, witch. I am your end.”

Lelith shuddered underneath him. For a brief moment, he thought it was fear, of terror. But then, muffled by the floor, she moaned, and he felt her body warm underneath his. He stopped, completely frozen in disbelief by the bizarre reaction.

“...Did you just... have an orgasm?”

“I have won, witch. I am your end.”

He was right. He had won. Within mere minutes, a single human had overpowered her, outmatched her, flowed around her attacks as readily and easily as she had for so long flowed around the attacks of her own opponents. He had lain her low, shown her the experience of mind-shocking, body-crippling pain, forced her flawless face into the floor of a human vessel, into the surface upon which HUMAN boots had trod upon countless numbers of times, pinned her, completely overpowered her. And then he had spoke, again, those words. She was in pain. She was humiliated. She was everything she had visited upon others and yet never felt herself. And then came his voice.

She couldn't help herself. Her body tightened, a great wave of heat shot through her, the pain only amplifying it, coursing down her spine.

She came hard, her juices all but squirting against her wychsuit G-string, trickling down her thigh and lower cleft curve of her buttocks. A moan, hot and needy, ripped unbidden from her full, rouge-painted lips.

“Did you just... have an orgasm?”

She couldn't respond. Not in any sense. She couldn't respond because her senses were overloaded with an agonizingly sensual mix of extremes of pleasure and pain. She couldn't respond because she was too humiliated, too ashamed to admit it. The very idea revolted her... and as it revolted her, it threatened to make her cum again. She couldn't. She wouldn't. And the more the idea repulsed her, the more the thought of a human's defeat and domination of her aroused her to the point of an orgasm caressed her awareness, the worse it got until with a scream laced with self-disgusted ecstasy ripped from her lips. Her body heated again, hotter than before, her entire body going to the greatest of extremes to tighten, defying the norm of eldar muscular physiology to coil like springs as she came, violently, this time her juice actually squirting out and spraying around her wychsuit's lower garment, her body trembling violently underneath the human. She became aware, in her lust-hazed, pleasure-wracked state, of a low, guttural chuckling sound. The human. Enigma. He was laughing.

“You DID. TWICE,” he crowed, laughing loudly. “You xenos whore. Does the realization you've been beaten cause you so much pleasure? Or perhaps it is my prowess, my domination of you, that enchants you so.”

Lelith tried to speak, tried to say something to insult him, to wipe that smug smirk off his face. Off his... handsome... angular face. Another wave of revulsion washed over her. She was ATTRACTED to this creature! But... he had beaten her so soundly, had done so with so little effort, with such... efficiency, with such brutality, such power and grace. He was so primal, so... so... deadly. So perfect. The thought ran around her tunnel-visioning mind, and her body went limp. She could say nothing to defy him. She had always thought she was the most perfect manifestation of death. She had been proven wrong. Her entire world had been shattered as surely as her collar bone, her ribs, and her arm were.

So she nodded, humiliation etched onto her immaculate features, which now were smudged with her paints of vanity, the mascara running down her cheeks, the rouge smeared across her lips and mixing with the black eye paint on her cheek.

“Then SAY it,” he growled... like a beast snarling its dominance to its mate. The notion sent chills down her spine. She spoke in short, hiccuping bursts.

“I... I-I-I... am b-beaten... you are... t-too... good... I am-am... beaten... I am... in-inferior.”

Enigma smirked coldly. The words were more satisfying than her blood. He tilted his head back and let out a scream of victory that filled the corridor, a feral howl of triumph, before seething through his teeth as he regarded her. Lithe, luscious, lustful. Huge, heaving breasts. A tight, perky ass. Fair, nigh-translucent, immaculate skin, a lush, taut physique, long, shining locks of hair as dark as Abaddon's soul. Sharp, angular, death-entreating eyes, full, delicious lips. The only imperfection was those ears... those pointed ears, and the shape of her face that gave away her alien visage But he could overlook that. He paused, hearing a clattering, looking up in time to see Lelith's wych-cult turning the corner swiftly, swords and splinter-pistols raised. They froze, seeing the position of their cult-leader and her assailant. Lelith's eyes turned up at them, empty depths conveying the magnitude of her defeat.

The wyches were stunned momentarily. Even if they had not been, it would not have mattered much in determining the extent of their lifespans. Enigma pounced up from Lelith, leaving her broken body immobile on the floor. She could only watch... only WANTED to watch, as Enigma blurred amidst them. A punch to the throat collapsing the trachea. An arm whipped into the nose of another, shattering her face and shoving shards of bone into her brain. A hand twisting at another's neck, snapping the vertebrae, before dropping the dying body to the ground. A kick to the stomach, pulverizing the organs, the same kick translating into a spinning heel kick to the back of the head, shattering the skull, a hail of blows to the chest, a dozen in a single moment, all open-palmed, impacting the ribs and shoving them into the heart and lungs, before both hands grab the dying individual, slamming her into another, breaking both bodies against the wall, an elbow to the chin, chattering the jaw, followed up by a vicious uppercut a fraction of a second later, sending shards of bone up into the cerebral cortex, the insides of the wrists impacting opposite temples of the head, bursting the head open, before the last one was grabbed and hauled into the air, screaming, before being brought down upon a knee driving up, breaking the wych in half, but not killing her. For that, he took her splinter pistol, pulling down her wychsuit's pants. As she mewled in pain, she jammed the barrel of the weapon into the tight pucker of her ass, pausing a moment for her to scream in agony and terror before he fired the gun, tearing her organs apart from the inside out, before discarding the ravaged body of the former torturous murderer. Ten of the deadliest dark eldar wyches in Commoragh... killed in under five seconds. Enigma turned his gaze back to Lelith.

She was spasming violently, choking on her own screams, chain-orgasming. Enigma smirked.

Victory for the Emperor was not the only prize he would take from this...

Fear. She felt fear. Somewhere inside the tempest-tossed storm of extremes of pleasure and pain, the part of her that had led Lelith to become an indomitable embodiment of beautiful lethality felt shattered. It was a crisis of identity, the complete and utter ruination of her entire sense of being, leaving her more broken than her body was.

But Lelith was not going to surrender. Not by a long shot. In spite of everything, in spite of the swirling haze of her concussed senses, the shooting pain flowing across half of her body, the damnable waves of ecstasy shooting up from her loins and along her spine, as her contemptible dominator approached, she shoved a hand to the floor, cartwheeling elegantly to her feet, her senses threatening to yield and plunge her the darkness that tugged at the peripherals of her acute vision. She stumbled, and for a moment she cursed the design of her boots, but only for a moment. The sudden motion seemed to throw the human... Enigma, it seemed to throw him off, causing him a half-moment's hesitation. It was all she needed. One leg whipped up and forward, her upper body twisting with the motion, her broken arm hanging uselessly down, throwing her off balance. But in spite of that, too, the kick was well-timed, perfectly aimed, and even as her off-balance posture sent her stumbling into the wall to impact into it and slide down it, she saw the damage was done. The bladed heel stabbed clear through her assailant's chest, piercing through, blood splattering across the blade and her foot as he stumbled back, a hand reaching up to grasp at the injury. She braced herself from the floor with her good arm, legs and body in a crouch.

Nausea swept over her from the sudden motion, her taxed senses going into revolt. It was all she could do to keep from retching, her eyes clenching shut to try to halt the spinning world as she stood unsteadily and started to stumble off in what she feverishly hoped was the direction of her boarding craft. She didn't see the assassin stumble, trip, and fall backwards, didn't see him catch himself against the wall, didn't see him slap a powdery substance from a metal canister on his hip onto the injury. She heard him yelp in pain, and then she heard the footsteps. She stumbled faster, esoteric footwear clacking on the metal plates of the crude mon-keigh vessel's flooring, eldar curses sputtering from her lips in a breathless, terrified jumble as she ran into some cargo crates. She stumbled forwards, barely maintaining her balance. She didn't see Enigma kick from the wall to the crates, to propel himself into her from behind. Lelith let out a sharp scream as she impacted into the ground, his weight coming down on her hard, sending a fresh wave of pain from her broken ribs and arm.

“Get... OFF of me!” she shrieked desperately, wriggling underneath his grip, blade-tipped gloved-hands scrabbling at the floor to try to pull herself away, to no avail. She was pinned. Purely, completely dominated, her pert posterior pressed tightly to his lap and his hands pinning her wrists. The crude brute was far stronger than she... and, somehow, far faster. She couldn't understand it... he moved less like his race, and more like hers. A single enraged thought flickered through her mind.

How could this have happened?!

“You love it, you twisted whore,” came the guttural reply. A desperate sob ripped from her lips as her strength began to desert her. Finally, he pressed flush against her back and she found one of his hands releasing her damaged arm, to replace itself on her throat.. “I can break your neck, or crush your throat, with the simplest, quickest of motions. I will finally be able to remove you as a threat to the Emperor's domain.”

“No... please...” she whispered weakly. The last of her strength left her, and she lay slack against the floor, arms splayed out submissively, eyes closed to spare herself the humiliation of letting him see the self-disgust and absolute destruction of her self-esteem behind them. “Spare me... I... I do not wish to die.”

Enigma smirked cruelly down at her, squeezing slowly. “Spare you? And why would I do a thing like that? With how many faithful of the God-Emperor rent asunder by your hands?” As he spoke, he sat up, grabbing her shoulder and rolling her onto her back, before yanking her good arm out to the side, pinning it roughly to the floor plating, his body straddling her bare, bruised midriff.

Lelith finally opened her sharply-angled eyes as he flipped her over and pinned her, desperation and terror clear in her gaze. “I will serve you... service you... do whatever you wish of me! Make me a servant, a slave, anything, just... I beg you, don't kill me!” she blurted, voice growing in pitch and diminishing in volume as his hand squeezed tighter, blocking more and more of her airway.

“Please! Anything! I'll... do anythi-!” she finally managed to choke out, before her airway was choked completely shut by his grip, her eyes bulging in terror, mouth open wide in a desperate bid to gasp in a breath that she had no chance of pulling in, her long tongue lolling out. She bucked her body, anguish overwhelming her mind. The world began to grow dim, and she could almost hear an insane, eerie laugh echoed across her senses... She Who Thirsts.

But suddenly the pressure eased. She sucked in a hard breath, the darkness that had been pressing in receding slowly, coughing violent as she sucked air into her lungs.

“Yes... yes, anything...” Enigma whispered. “You fear death... You heard the laughter of your damnation, didn't you?” He laughed coldly as her head bobbed rapidly in reply, her body still taken by coughing fits. “Would you kill for me?” Another rapid nod. “Would you bow to me?” Another nod, a note of desperation in the motion as she felt his hands tighten their grip threateningly once more. “Would you render your body unto me?” Another furious nod. “I... I would be... eager! Hungry to kill for you! To... to bow to you! To give myself to you!”

Enigma's grin grew as she choked out her words. “Good,” he purred, releasing his grip on her and slowly climbing to his feet, only to deliver a vicious kick into the side of her head. Already struggling to cling to consciousness, Lelith finally was pushed into the darkness by the spiteful strike, her lithe, battered, bruised, and beaten form going limp against the floor, only the faint motions of her breathing any indicator that she was still alive. The Mark stood slowly, examining the hole in his shirt and the clay-like substance patched over the injury. It had sunk rather far in, but not enough to cause any life-threatening harm. Still... had his target been more aware, she could have driven it in much further, enough to puncture his heart or a lung. He had let his guard down, taken in too soon by victory. The headiness of accomplishment... of finally succeeding in what had been his born purpose... it'd been intoxicating. He snorted in self-chastisement, shaking his head. He closed his eyes, murmuring a prayer of forgiveness to the God-Emperor for slipping in his duty. His victory could have been snatched away, and all the time His Holiness had permitted him to become such a lethal instrument of His will would have been for naught. He would have to confess to this sin later, perhaps commit self-flagellation during the next time he meditated on his duty.

He re-opened his eyes, turning his gaze upon his fallen foe, regarding her prone form contemptuously. Her hair was pooled out underneath her, one of her arms bent at a weird angle. The metal brassiere was dented, the once-polished finish now scuffed and dull. The miniscule loin covering and the insides of her thighs were still glistening from her heavy orgasms. Livid bruises covered her in a dozen different places and were accompanied by a score of cuts and scratches and lacerations from which dark red blood trickled. The side where he'd broken her rib plate was a dark purple, and black rivulets ran down her face from the tears of pain and exertion running the vain makeup on her eyes, the visage matched by the smear of her rouge around her lips, from which more blood trickled as well. One of her eyes was blackened. She looked so beaten, so utterly demolished.

Why was she still alive? The question slithered unbidden into his mind. His orders were not to capture or subdue her; they were to eliminate her. Eliminate... He thought for a moment. He could interpret it broadly... but he had always interpreted the meaning of elimination to killing. Lelith, however... he had not. Arms folded over his chest as he gazed upon her. How long had he been hunting her? Sixty years of training... twenty years of constantly eliminating other targets... And there was that word again. Eliminating. Killing. Eighty years he had been preparing for this. Dozens of rejuvenat therapies, constant brutalization of his body, hundreds of targets killed. He could kill her now. He stepped over her. She lay underneath him, barely moving, chest rising and falling so faintly and so slowly that she seemed to be dead already. He lifted one foot and pressed it to her throat, and began to press his weight down. Her barely-parted lips opened a bit further. A faint gurgling sound left her and her chest stopped moving as he pressed down harder. But then, the memory of her face... that look in her eyes crept into his mind.

Such terror. Such fear. There had been so many he had killed. Heretics, cultists, mutants, traitors. None of his 'fellow' humans had ever had so much fear as he had ended their lives. Not even as it came slowly... a crushed larynx, or an impacted rib stabbing the lungs or piercing the heart, or when it came quickly, a quick glimpse of him before he shattered their skulls or shoved his hand through their chests and terminated their lives. Memories of xenos flickered through his mind. Orks... well, they never showed anything other than war-mongering joy and aggression. Tyranids... did they HAVE emotions? He doubted it, and even if they did, the memory of tearing open a Hive Tyrant's skull-carapace did not include it indicating any kind of fear... just animal rage. The necrons... well, he'd only encountered them once and they were even more emotionless than the tyranids, even when he'd torn their heads from their metal bodies, struck them in points so miniscule and requiring such concentrated force to remove them as a threat. Never a sound. Even the eldar. Such arrogance they showed, even through the excruciating pain of death he wrought unto them. The others such as Lelith, other so-called dark eldar, had shown far more terror... a fear that couldn't be explained but it was a fear tempered by experience and familiarity... as if they had always been afraid all along.

Lelith, however... that look... such terror... such fear. One that could only come from being aware of what came in death, yet never contemplating the possibility of ever having to suffer it, and suddenly having the very real likelihood of it happening shoved into one's face.

It could be useful. Something to exploit. She knew his lethality. He suspected she had only begged, promised things out of fear, but... if he could maintain that fear, she COULD be shackled. And, Enigma thought, perhaps he felt a strange kinship with her. Such self-assurance of superior skill, an absolute denial of the possibility of death. She was a lesson to him. One he realized he should keep around. Something to avoid becoming.

He removed his foot from her neck and she took a shuddering breath, coughing fitfully, body twitching involuntarily, before resuming her normal breathing, albeit wheezy and fitful. His eyes swept her form again, and that feeling he'd felt when he'd looked upon her before she had made her last-ditch attempt to escape... the way she had been shuddering, choking on her own screams, her abdomen and legs spasming and convulsing as she came over and over at the spectacle of his domination of her and her filthy whorish minions... it came back. It was his turn to feel revulsion, this time...

He longed for her. A sneer crept over his face, but it melted as he gazed over her long, supple torso... the sleek, smoothly-rounded contours of her breasts, bulging out over her harlot-envy armorpiece. The long, slender legs, the pale, flawless skin... well, flawless where he hadn't battered her into defeat, anyway. The angular eyes, the plump, soft lips, the silky locks of ebony-black hair. Every smooth, rounded, feminine curve of her body appealed to him, appealed to his desires. The Callidus Temple did not exorcise that from its Marks... it encouraged it, rather. Seduction was just another way to get closer to a target, and all the better when the seduction was genuine rather than an act, all the more convincing. But she was not human.

Still... as he gazed upon the plush mounds of her breasts and the smooth, flat plane of her stomach and the flare of her hips he had to admit... she looked human enough, at least.

Yet still... if he were to take his pleasures from her, it would be while she was conscious. He suppressed a shudder of anticipation at the thought. The gleeful delight of forcing her to endure it while he ravaged her, of visiting such humiliation, of robbing her so utterly of control over her very body. Yes... for a bitch such as she, it was well-deserved. He knelt, gathering her up before slinging her over one shoulder. He carried her to the docking-hatch, where his small personal shuttle was docked to the vessel. The tainted xenos had failed to notice it and it had remained unscathed during the disabling process of the freighter's engines... as he had figured would be the case. He climbed down the ladder, dropping Lelith unceremoniously onto the floor, considering a moment as he gazed upon her. He fetched some cords, fashioning them into restraints, grabbing her ankles and pulling them back until her heels touched her pert, taut buttocks, tying her ankles together before yanking her wrists back towards her ankles and tying them all together, effectively hog-tying her. If she regained consciousness, she would be too weak to fight the bonds. Then he climbed back up into the freighter, leaving his prize bound in the shuttle, and walked down the blood-slicked corridors towards the xenos boarding craft.

As he strode into the craft, a faint, urgent cry for help made him turn his head. The prisoners from the other vessels. They were shackled to the walls, twisted into grotesque positions. Enigma moved towards them, examining the consoles before the cells.

“Please... help...” one prisoner whispered hoarsely.

“Silence,” Enigma muttered, pressing a button. The manacles on a few of the prisoners began releasing. Enigma considered, then pressed the rest of the buttons. In turn the manacles disengaged, dropping their prisoners to the floor. After a few more buttons pressed, trial-and-error found him the one to open the cell doors. The prisoners stumbled out, approaching him. Enigma, however, held up a hand.

“Do not approach me. My business and presence here is a matter of none of your concern. This ship's engines have been disabled. Are there are any Navigators amongst you?”

The prisoners were silent, glancing at one another, until one rose a trembling hand. “I am a Navigator,” he murmured, pointing at an ornate headband he wore, one that covered the evidence of his own unique, Emperor-approved form of mutation... his “warp eye.” Enigma nodded. “Good. This ship's engines are damaged but are likely serviceable. I will be departing your company. Thank the Emperor you live to see another day. Should any of you be found wanting after this day, should any of you commit blasphemy against Him... I will find each and every last one of you and personally send you to whatever dark gods you decide to serve instead,” he said curtly, before turning and striding down the ship's corridor, leaving the survivors to stare after him in silence.

He examined a number of instruments on his way down, until finally he found what he was looking for... a binding collar. Dozens of them, in fact, but he had need of only one. He had seen these before on dead human slaves unfortunate enough to have been dragged away by the dark eldar on their raids. Tuned to the neurosignatures of the holder of the 'leash,' the collar could send a harmonic frequency powerful enough to cause the head of the one it was attached to to explode. He smirked. Perfect. He turned, leaving the vessel.

As he descended the ladder into his shuttle, he was greeted by a soft groan of pain. He approached Lelith's prone form, kneeling next to her. Her eyes slid open, lifting to focus on him, before they turned to focus on the collar in his hand. They widened slowly, and she began to struggle weakly as he grabbed her hair, yanking hard on it. She cried out hoarsely in pain, eyes squeezing shut.

“No...” she moaned as he opened the collar, closing it around her neck and tightly fastening it. It clicked shut, beeping once. She jerked as an electrical jolt coursed through her, before going limp again. Enigma smirked. “You know what that is, don't you?” She didn't respond. Enigma waited, then yanked hard on her hair. “DON'T YOU?” he asked again loudly. Lelith squealed, then nodded in defeat. “Yes... yes, I do.”

“Good. It's tied to my signature. If you disobey me... if you fight me, try to escape... I will blow your head like a radgrenade. Do you understand?” Lelith let out a quiet sob, nodding again faintly.

“Yes...” she whimpered.

“I can't hear you,” Enigma snarled.

“Yes!”

“Yes what?”

“Yes... master...” Lelith whimpered.

“Good. Now sit there and stay silent.” He stood, letting go of her hair, her face falling back onto the floor limply. Enigma turned, moving to the controls. The hatch slid shut, the docking clamps released, and the shuttle drifted away, before the engines powered up and began to accelerate away. The ship couldn't enter warpspace on account of lacking a Navigator and warp-engine, but it could accelerate to light-speed, and at that speed the nearest Imperial world was only a month away. He had plenty of vacuum-sealed food and water to last three times over; always best to be prepared, after all, and it would help since he now had a prisoner that he, admittedly, would want to keep alive. He fed the machine-spirit the coordinates, letting it take over control, before he turned from the data lectern towards her. Her face was turned to him, her dark eyes gazing at him.

“What do you intend to do with me?” she whispered as he approached, her gaze following him. Enigma leaned over, removing the cords, letting her limbs fall limply to the floor. A strangled groan of pain left her as her damaged arm flopped to the floor. He didn't answer, instead grabbing her by the hair again and dragging her across the floor. Lelith screamed, reaching up to grip at his wrist, though the threat of what could happen stopped her from sinking the blades into his flesh, instead only holding at him to try to ease the pressure on her hair. He hauled her onto her knees, yanking her head back to face the ceiling.

“Get on your feet, whore,” he ordered her, which she readily complied, shakily climbing to her feet, stumbling, her concussion still ruining her balance. He released her, and she fell against the bulkhead wall, clinging to it for support. He smirked at the sight as he pressed a few buttons on a nearby panel. It slid open, a medicae servitor sliding out from its niche, a series of mechanical arms brandishing syringes, blades, cauterizing tools and various other medical implements, a metal table sliding out underneath it. Lelith lifted her gaze to it, then to him, eyes widening slowly.

“What... what do you intend to do with me?!” she asked again, her voice shrill with terror this time. He rounded on her, grabbing her by the neck, hauling her over to the table and slamming her down onto it. She began to struggle until he drove a fist into the side of her head, stunning her. The darkness pressed in around her vision once again, threatening to send her back into unconsciousness.

“From henceforth, you will not question me. This one question is the only one you shall get an answer to. I intend to use you in every way I see fit. You will accompany me when I need you to, to do what I want and need. You will kill in my name, and by extension, in the name of His Holiness the God-Emperor. And in between those times, I will use you for my own... desires,” he said after a moment's pause, letting the last word sink in. She turned her gaze to him slowly, glaring at him.

“Very well...” she whispered, hatred and loathing filling her voice. But it wasn't directed at him. She wouldn't tell him that, of course... but it was directed at herself. “I will use you for my own desires.” As he had said it, a shudder had run down her spine... not of fear or disgust... but of delight. In her twisted mind, in her broken state, the thought of him using her to satisfy his urges sounded like the most delicious thing imaginable. She fought back a wave of revulsion as she felt a wave of warmth slowly spread across her body, fought back the nausea as, through the concussion, she could feel herself getting wet all over again at the thought of him ravaging her. She was so caught up in self-disgust that she didn't notice or care that he was locking her legs and arms into metal clamps on the table. He pressed a sequence of buttons on the panel, and the servitor loomed over her.

“But before I can do that, I need to repair the damage done. Wouldn't be very fun if you expired midway through,” he said softly, a cold smirk on his face before he stepped back as the instruments closed in on her. Lelith turned her gaze up at the machinery in dread. A moment later her screams filled the shuttle as the machine began its work, probes and incisors cutting into her body. Enigma stood nearby, arms folded, cruel smirk growing on his lips as he watched. Her body writhed, struggling and bucking against the restraints, able to feel every moment of her flesh being invaded by the cold metal instrumentation, given that it didn't apply anesthetic. A set of needle-thin probes slid into her chest, another pair slid into her arm, and a series of laser-incisors began to cut her open across her chest and arm. Her anguished, traumatized screams continued, before finally her eyes rolled up in her head, and with a shuddering cry, she finally passed out from shock, her body going slack against the table as the servitor did its job. Enigma reached over, pressing a button on the console before turning and walking down to the compartment where the shuttle's bunk was located. A couple hours of rest and meditation would do him well while he waited.

After all, he wanted to enjoy his prize to the fullest extent, and he would need to be at his best for that...

Consciousness brought with it a horror Lelith had not known in time immeasurable, a fear of the unrequited agony that had rendered her senseless to begin with, but to her relief, the agony was gone. All the pain was, in fact. Her eyes slipped open, but she could see nothing. The darkness in the room was so absolute that there was no light of any kind that even her highly-tuned senses could pick up. Absolute darkness, like the void the empty space between galaxies. That's all there was. There was no sound, save for her own breathing, and the silence, she realized, was maddening. It was horrible. She had spent so long, spent so many countless "millenia," as the mon-keigh referred to such vast expanses of time, reveling in the howls and screams and cries and wails of the tormented and the damned that the terrible silence began to tear at her very soul. But the tearing sensation was not pulling in a certain direction, for lack of a better word. The ceaseless drain that could never be plugged was strangely absent. But somehow this silence bled her even more. She began to struggle. Another emotion she had long forgotten she could possibly feel, something completely alien to her mind (and given her vast experience, this said a lot), began to creep over her razor-keen senses. Panic. Had she ever felt this before? She found herself wondering in some clinically detached way, some part of her standing aside and analyzing her actions with bizarre interest. Some element of curiosity, the part of her that always craved experience, that always kept her striving for ever more, not just to feed the insatiable appetite of that strangely-absent drain, but to simply feel. The part of her that was a part of all the eldar, tainted or not, the part that had torn that endless vacuuming maw of the very spirit itself into existence. It watched now as her struggles continued. The metal would not give way. Her body arched and bucked, wrists twisting and ankles wriggling, the metal cuffs scraping cruelly against her skin. But they would not give way. Lelith was not a strong individual. She was not raw force. She was dexterity and grace, speed and agility. That did not help her here. She screamed. Terror rang through her voice, but it did not ring back. It was as if she were in a vacuum. The sound was hollow and muted. The fear grew. Her eyes were wild, staring at the vast nothing all around her. The part that continued to regard her in detached, clinical amusement noted that she was naked now. At some point the machine that had tortured her into senseless had cut the miniscule amounts of what counted for modesty from her body. It was then that she realized how little she could feel, too. Even as she wriggled her wrists into the metal cuffs, drawing blood that trickled down to the metal beneath her (which, strangely, felt just as absent as everything else), there was no pain. There was a minor sensation of discomfort, but it was muted.

She screamed again, felt her vocal cords vibrate in some distant, far-off way, heard her voice as if it were a mile away and deep under a body of water. She knew her eyes were open, desperately seeking out some frame of reference, something, anything to witness, but she couldn't. She was devoid of all feeling. It was horrifying beyond imagination. Worse than any pain, worse than any torture, worse than any violation even her depraved mind could imagine was all this...nothingness. She screamed, and she kept screaming, desperate to feel the burn of her vocal cords straining, desperate to feel the desperate vacuum within her chest as her lungs voided entirely. She felt nothing.

Horror, like a great, venomous serpent, reared its head back and sank its poisonous fangs deep into her. It flooded her, filled her, until it felt as if she would physically burst from absolute, indescribable despair.

Enigma stood beside the platform that held his captive prey. Pale amber light from the brass candelabrums set into the bulkheads suffused the room, never touching the front side of him, the side that faced her, casting him as a tall, featureless shadow. He was under no illusion that this would intimidate her even slightly...even if she could see him. She screamed again. It was a discordant, haunting sound, a pitch he'd both heard many times, and yet never heard until now. It was a note he had dreamed of hearing since he had accepted his Mark. Long had he pondered just how he would break her, but he knew there was no pain he could inflict on her, no agony that could be instilled on a creature that thrived off of it, that would ever be sufficient. He regarded her momentarily, eying her as her body bucked and arched, writhed and wriggled in ever-increasing vehemence and desperation that bordered on the mindless. He had to be careful, of course. Too long, and she might break TOO much, and never recover. Granted, it would be well-deserved, given the sheer number of lives she had taken and inflicted such suffering upon. She alone knew just the true extent of the damage she had done to mankind. Other races, too, of course, but he cared not for their suffering at her hands, if he did not outright take joy in it. In point of fact, the suffering she had brought upon other xenos was the second thing staying his hand. The first... He looked her over again.

Well, one could not very well destroy such artwork and not feel at least SOME guilt, after all.

She screamed once more. He knew plenty enough of the eldar, and their tainted kin, to know that in terms of emotions, they felt things to such extremes as to make his own, or any save for the Astartes themselves, seem like bland, muted grays and blacks and whites, contrasted to vivid purples, reds, blues, and greens. Dim, dull, too subtle. "Horror" was not a word he could use to describe what her voice and expression were conveying now. She had stopped struggling. Sobs were filling her screams. Rapid, cyclical, choked, laced with words in a language few in the Imperium understood. He understood them well. Pleading words to what she very well thought to be a silent void, describing feelings he simply could not possibly comprehend. The words flowed like poetry. Her vivid green eyes were staring wildly, everywhere and nowhere, looking upon everything and seeing nothing.

The artwork was about to be destroyed. Like a recaff spill threatening to reach the edges of the canvas, tainting it permanently with its ugly, jarring brown stain. He reached over, and pressed the button. The rag came down, blocking the spread of the beverage, halting its spread, but not yet mopping it up, letting its presence linger.

The chemicals slowed their flow, letting her metabolism begin to process them. Still she struggled, eyes like emeralds still wild, seeing nothing. He leaned in, his lips barely a hands-breadth from her long, pointed ear, and spoke.

"Be still," he said simply, softly.

Lelith jerked at the voice. Her hair, cascading down behind her back like an endless flow of blood from her scalp, caught and tugged...and she felt it. She heard his voice. She felt the tug. She felt the bite of the manacles. She felt the cold air caressing her bare frame. And slowly, bit by bit, she saw. It was a dim, dull, sickly yellow glow, and a vague, blurry form framed by it, but she could see. She focused on the form, her eyes wide, her chest rising and falling rapidly. She hadn't been aware of how hard she had been breathing, but the sharp, constant pain told her her lungs had been stressed to their limits, her heart hammering violently against her rib-wing.

"What did you do to me?" she whispered, her voice hoarse and flimsy. The mon-keigh stood up, and now she could see his eyes, the faintest glint of the light touching them, casting their silver-white oculars upon her prone, trapped, helpless form with a mix of contempt...and hunger. The contempt she was familiar with. She had seen it many times in the eyes of his kind...the hunger, she was familiar with, too, but not on such features. Others of her kin, yes. Countless times in the eyes of her kin. Somehow, on him, it was both more brutish, primal, and yet it almost pleased her. A conquest of her own. It was an appreciation, and a new one. It was a new experience. That was good enough for her. She felt a shiver tickle its way down her form, but it was dull, muted, and made even more so by the lingering touches of the wild, frenzied terror that still pressed in insistently on her senses as surely as the numbness did. They were synonymous in her mind, now.

"A recipe. A concoction. Void's Embrace." He glanced at the tubes leading down from the machinery overhead into her elbows, and the strangely orderly and tidy pattern of veins there. "I've found that the worst horrors are not the ones experienced in agony and suffering, but in absolute nothingness. Madness does not come at its swiftest when it is induced by any one sensation, or even all of them, but rather by the absolute lack of them. As I am sure you will agree," he added, a softness to his voice that did not match the sadistic glee his words conveyed, even without the proper vocal inflections. "It is a message to you. A whisper, one that you will never forget...and one you will never be deprived of."

"What do you mean?" Lelith asked, her voice gaining some of its strength. She did not move. She knew the futility in it. Her eyes sought his and locked with them. It was equal parts defiance and invitation, some twisted, coiled feeling only she and her kin could ever find reasonable. Memories of her trouncing were still there in her mind, and they trickled to the front, urging her immediate attention, as the numbness trickled away, former replacing latter.

"It's a metabolic chemical. It can be easily metabolized but it becomes a part of your body chemistry. It will never quite go away. Like the deepest of scars, it leaves a mark. While your body processes it, it does not process it out...it processes it in. Like that which gives us energy. Your kind have their own methods of it. More advanced, more difficult, and I must admit that tailoring this concoction required some extensive favors being called in. I had to acquire many samples for testing and verification, and obtaining these samples was not something that could be done without considerable effort..."

"I'm flattered," Lelith whispered, and even though in her mind the words had been spiteful, petty, vindictive, sarcastic, when they rolled from her tongue and off her lips they were thick with sincerity. She had fans, oh yes did she ever have fans, and many of them quite rabid indeed, willing to go to all the lengths her tainted kin could possibly go to for her attention. They never succeeded. Such pitifully transparent displays. Devotion, adoration...obsession, without a purpose, or with purposes that bored her to no end. Obsession for her sexual characteristics, obsession for her wealth, obsession for her status and to be associated with it. This mon-keigh had an obsession of a different kind. An obsession of her. Simple as that. It was brutally simple, in fact. Crass and unsubtle, but she had seen him in action, knew him to be anything but. The lack of subtlety in the movements of her opponents had always been their downfall. The most miniscule of errant twitches, the quietest shift in breath, the smallest discordance with gravitational force, was all it took for her to pounce. She had come up short because he had never betrayed any of those. He had been at one with himself and the environment around them. Even at one with her, and her movements. He had controlled the ebb and flow. She had thought herself a league above all comers, and until him, she had been. Had she become complacent? So assured of victory through her perception of perfection that she had missed one single possibility in pursuit of that perfection? She must have. But how? And in what way? She knew how he had beaten her, but how had he realized the one possible error she had allowed? And what WAS that error? The depths of his own obsession clearly ran much deeper than anything even she could fathom, yet it was controlled and restrained and beautifully focused, deliciously concentrated.

"As well you should be," Enigma replied, eyes narrowing. "The lengths I've had to go to, the trials I've had to undertake. I alone, a single man, had to become an embodiment of finesse capable of taking down the one xeno that none could ever hope to touch. The Officio Assassinorum has lost countless numbers to you. All the Temples have tried at one point or another. All have failed. What a daunting task, then, it was to accept this Mark...this target....this goal. Yes, this is the first time you've seen me, but this is not the first time I have seen you. I have had to watch you cut down thousands, never able to approach, to intervene, for knowing that you would cut me down just as easily. I had to watch you, scrutinize you. Were I less disciplined a man, were I not conditioned for this..." he whispered, his head slowly shaking at these last words, his eyes lighting up with an intensity that could have burned her, "I would have lost myself to madness. Indeed, what levels, what extents I went to could very well be considered as such." He leaned down, and snapped a hand up to wrap around her throat. Lelith let her eyes slip shut, mouth parting ever so slightly. The touch of his hands, calloused, rough, warm, and immaculately steady, was heavenly, made even more succulent with the memory of the void still upon her. He squeezed, and she choked, but her lips curled into a gleeful grin.

"Yes...it has done its job nicely," he murmured, and her eyes slid open, heavily, to gaze into his own. He regarded her with satisfaction, with coldness, with triumph. The look of one vindicated absolutely at the end of a lifetime of dedication to their work. Oh yes, Lelith had been obsessed over...but this was so very different. This was the ultimate form of flattery...

...The flattery of conquest.

She didn't say this, though. Instead, swallowing against his hold, she merely gasped out, "how so?"

"The memory of that nothingness. It will haunt you forever. A mark of what I am capable of rendering upon you. I haven't even shared the ingeniousness of it yet, either," he added, and a manic grin split his features, his teeth bared in a grimace of ecstasy. She shuddered under his demented expression. She could read his expressions with ease, could see what they meant with as much effort as reading a catalog of runic lore. Every word he didn't speak and instead told through his body language might as well have been shouted. What he was saying silently sent a rush of joy through her tortured soul.

Her soul. She stopped, and her eyes widened in sudden realization.

"How?" she could only ask, this time with greater urgency.

He grinned wider, the depths of his glee insane by mon-keigh standards. Because of her. Another shudder. He raised his other hand, and even before she saw his palm, she somehow knew that her name, written in his own language over the same expression but in the jagged runic expression of the tainted eldar, was carved, painted, and burnt into it. Her eyes confirmed what she already knew, and then turned up to his.

"Because you are bound. A ritual, ancient, but it can be found by those who know where, and more importantly how, to look. One element to be controlled. One part. Useless to most, except for the most brutish and simple-minded who consider things such as the mind. But I don't want to control your mind...I need you able to act on your own. I do not wish to play you like a puppeteer, I wish to influence you. I don't want to hold strings, I want to hold a leash. And so I do. I control the element I injected you with. And should I need it to overwhelm you...I can." He laughed, such a strange sound. He threw his head back, and laugh louder, harder, his obsidian-black...no, his VOID-black hair cascading down his shoulders before he rolled his head back down to look upon her, now with quiet satisfaction. Lelith could only stare back. He truly did hold a leash. A terrible one. She wanted to believe he was lying, but she knew he wasn't. She could only hope he was wrong, and there was only one way to test. She steeled herself, somehow knowing that he was not wrong...and knowing that because she knew he was not wrong, that he was not wrong. The ritual imparted some of what he felt onto her. She knew the depths of his triumph and obsession, because she knew the depths of his triumph and obsession, as surely as he knew it.

"Prove it," she whispered, her eyes never leaving his, even as her pale, nude form tensed under his contempt-filled regard. He did not reply. Not with words. He responded with action. He released her neck, and yanked at the needles sunken into her fair skin. A trill of pain sang up her arms, but she ignored it. Pain was not important...something much worse was coming. He did nothing, said nothing. No words of incantation, or movements of the body. But the effect of his non-action was instant. Her vision tunneled into nothingness. A blanket of nothingness wrapped about her body, suffocating all sensation with its absolute, horrible lack. Her ears were filled to the limit with absolute silence. The smell of nothing permeated the nothing, and she tasted a complete tastelessness. A moment passed, and the panic surged up from her chest and into her conscious awareness. There was nothing, and it was too much for her to handle. Her mouth flew open.

And she screamed. She screamed so loud that even if she could hear something over the deafening muting, she would not be able to hear his laugh. But she knew he was laughing. He was triumphant. She was helpless. Her terror was great. Too great for words. And then, just as suddenly as the nothingness had enveloped her and surrounded her, it receded mercifully, like curtains drawn up to reveal the great play of life once again. And there, center stage, stood Enigma. He said nothing. He did not need to. Words were meaningless now. She only stared, her chest heaving. She didn't have enough time to catch her breath before his hands had shoved down onto her chest. Her breasts, handfuls each, capped with stiffened, leather-black nipples, were squeezed to the point of pain. The sensation clashed against the receding voice; the red of lust slamming into and pushing against the black of the void. A song filled the air. A moan. Hers. And even before his hands had slid around to curl his fingers around the outer and under curves of her pliant, pale mounds of flesh, exposing the nipples for his mouth to wrap around, lips clamping to them and sucking so hard that they stretched slightly into his mouth, she was singing a song of boundless desire, the wantonly seductive note pushing the muteness away. Oh yes, she was surrendering to him entirely and absolutely. What better way to see off the absolute nothingness, than with the most ecstatic sensation of all?

A few moments later, and with a lewd, slurping pop his lips came free. At the same time, his hands left her plush mounds and he drew back. Lelith sucked in a breath, an irate tirade upon her tongue; he had not so much pushed her buttons so much as he had jammed a fork into them, and regardless of the bigger picture of her situation, she ached for more than the underwhelming tease. But before she could begin to demand him to get back to work, his lips clamped onto hers, effectively cutting her off before she could begin. Her eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowing into a frown as she muffled her annoyed protests into his mouth, hands balling into fists and wrists twisting uselessly in the clamps that held her down. Cutting her, beating her, breaking her bones? That was not torture, not for her, anyways. No, this was the torture, giving her nothing but the most chaste examples of carnality. Suddenly, the mon-keigh's lips forced hers open and he literally sucked her tongue into his mouth. He did not stop there, clamping his teeth upon the slick muscle aggressively. Her impatience dimmed; this was more to her taste, and much to her delight, he did not stop at that. As her eyes wrenched themselves open so that she could watch, Enigma's lips wrapped around her captive tongue, his teeth still aggressively biting down to the point that he was in danger of drawing blood, and then he drew back, stretching the muscle out, though this was not the improvement. The escalation came in the form of one of his hands reaching up and taking a fistful of her blood-red locks, the aggressive act accompanied by his other hand delivering a harsh slap to the underside of one of her tits, a brilliant red imprint blazing upon her deathly-pale flesh. No cry of protest or pain left her lips, which were now parted wide with her tongue stretched out between them. Instead, the sound that ripped from her throat was decidedly approving, encouraging even. The intensity of the sound grew sharply as the hand that had delivered the strike wrapped aggressively around the same mound, fingers clenching painfully hard into the pliant, silky-smooth flesh. Lelith's back arched harshly into his hand, silently urging him onwards. His hand departed again, only to return with another vicious slap that was followed by a sharp back-handed strike and finished with his thumb and forefinger gripping the stiff peak of her nipple and yanking up until her tit stretched to its limits in conjunction with his hand giving a sudden, sharp yank to her hair and his teeth finally clamping to the point that he broke skin and they both tasted her blood. A heady, gushing moan of glee ripped from her throat and her eyes rolled up in their sockets momentarily. Like all of her tainted kind during sexual congress (consensual or not), pain traveling its way up her nerve endings to her brain got fucked up and mistranslated somewhere along the line, ending up as a sickly perverse form of pleasure to her mind.

She felt Enigma's tongue swirling across her own and, with a surge of excitement, she realized he was licking her blood from the ragged cuts his teeth had caused. Her hands clenched tightly, nails piercing her palms and drawing more blood from her. It ran in thin, brackish red rivulets down her skin, the colors of flesh and vital fluid creating a sadistic contrast. His fingers twisted at her stretching nipple, and in response her back arched higher, her inhumanly lithe form allowing her configure herself into an angle unimaginable by a lesser creature, her range inhibited only by the bindings.

Just as she was on the verge of trying to wriggle away for the sake of getting him to move on and get on with something else, he released her tongue, lips sucking at the tip for a split second as he leaned his head back. His silver-white eyes leered down at her, and she could not help but drag her bloodied tongue across her lips, painting them an even more sinister shade of red, tugging them into a smirk as her own hazel-gray eyes narrowed in as good an approximation of a 'come-hither' stare as an eldar could make. Enigma's own eyes narrowed; he couldn't help but constantly be reminded of what kind of a heresy he was committing every time he paused to look her over. He couldn't help but do just that, though. It felt wrong but what was wrong and what he wanted were two very different things. Her tongue traced her lips again, and as he watched her pupils dilated slowly, her lower lip pulled between her blood-stained teeth and chewed on. Such human expressions and actions, warped and tainted by her alien visage just enough that it made her look... well, that was a matter of opinion. His brothers in the temple had to be open-minded to an extent that most devout Imperial citizens would scream heresy if they ever heard even an inkling of their activities, so perhaps they would share his opinion. Most others, however, would not. To them, the succubus would look positively appalling. To Enigma, however, she looked quite exotic. He allowed himself to savor the moment just one more time, for just one more moment, exercising that titanic force of self-control.

And then he let go of the leash, and let the animal take over.

A hand wrapped around her neck, long, dexterous fingers squeezing hard as he could. His other hand joined, and together their thumbs pressed into her throat, choking the air from her. Lady Hesperax's eyes flew open wide, mouth opening to try to suck in a breath that could not pass to her lungs. She should have felt fear, but she didn't. In fact, she couldn't. All she felt was aroused. She had long been kicked to new heights of lustful need by this creature, and it seemed he was adamant that she be given no satisfaction, no release for the overwhelming pressure. She tried to cry out; not in terror as her vision swam and tunneled into darkness, but in frustration. Her wrists yanked and tugged at her bindings until the skin was rubbed raw, and then she yanked harder. The metal cut into her flesh, her blood dripped onto the metal table, her claws dug into her palms to reopen the healed punctures anew. She kicked her legs half-inches at a time. Her head tossed side to side. All feeling was draining from her; she was at death's door, she could all but hear The Devourer howling for her soul and all the riches of murder and bloodshed and torture it contained, and yet in spite of facing the greatest terrors known to her kind, all she could think about was how much she wanted to snap that which bound her down so she could rip this creature's vestments off, stuff his manhood into her drenched vessel and take him for every iota of feral need he had. It did not matter how, or in what way. Any of her holes would suffice at this point. She would not even balk at the idea of him cutting ones of his own if that was what it took, but she needed it in some way. Her sanity, already hanging by razor-thin threads as it was on a good day, was threatening to snap. She was on the verge of being reduced to a gibbering wreck, and a horrifying thought crossed her mind: What if she did snap? What then? Would she even be aware of satisfaction if it was finally, mercifully granted to her? Or would she spend the rest of her days wanting something without even knowing she had had it?

It was with no small amount of relief that the need for this question tumbled away as his hands eased their pressure. She sucked in a harsh, retching breath of air, coughing violently; this was not helped by her tormentor, who squeezed his hands at each cough, forcing her retch even harder, her eyes squinching shut, tears running down the corners and into the loose red locks of hair trapped underneath her; and as she gagged on her own coughs, her slit; tight, untouched, trickling her need onto the cold, unyielding surface beneath her clenched and with a scream that was choked off in her throat, she peaked, her honeyed juices ejaculating from her a long, streaming spray. Her lower body bucked up off the table, tears of exertion pouring from her tattoo-decorated eyes as the lids forced themselves together as hard as they possibly could. She heard her tormentor let loose a low, malicious laugh. She forced her eyelids open as her body shuddered and twitched in their bindings, eyebrows furrowed into an angry frown. She spat curses at him in her kin's language, elegant words tainted with a contradictory mixture of frustration and gratification, anger and ecstasy. Enigma did not reply. Instead, he reached a hand down and, at long last, touched her. First along her stomach, fingertips tracing at the taut, toned flesh, and then down further. He wasted no time when he reached the point she yearned for, those teasing digits sliding down across her labia. Index and ring fingers rubbed up and down, sending jolts of pleasure racing up her spine, chased by an even more intense cascade as his middle finger slipped into her depths. Virgin-tight without actual virginity to resist his entrance, her depths clenched madly at the intrusion, squeezing and desperately trying to pull him in deeper. His hand eased from her throat and replaced itself over her eyes, blocking her field of view but leaving her free to speak without effort.

"Give me...give to me..." she hissed, unable to focus enough to finish her sentences. "Give...let me take...I will...let-me-have-you!" she finally let the words tumble in a near-incoherent babbling rush from her plump, silky soft lips. "Yes, you will," came the curt, assured reply. His fingers rubbing her glistening folds abandoned their task to join the vanguard of their assault, forcing themselves alongside his middle digit to burrow into her snatch, working themselves to the knuckle into her. Her depths clamped down around his fingers, not against the assault but instead with it, searing-hot slick walls tugging and pulling as the tips of his probing manipulators tapped and stroked and clawed at her depths. Lelith's mouth flew open and she let loose a moan that was weighted with the unbearable weight of erotic gratitude.

"More...moooohhhhhhrrre..." came the words in a long, drawling flow. "Ooohhhuuuhhhhh...right...right there...there, there, there-there-THERE!" she gasped, the last word coming out in a sharp squeal as his fingers twisted around, the tips finally finding her g-spot. Where a human female's g-spot might have been just a small point, or even simply absent, hers stretched along the bottom of her vessel for nearly three inches, and he made the most out its length, curling up and down, stroking up and down. He was anything but gentle; his nails raked and scraped, sending a subtle note of pain to accompany the onslaught of ecstasy surging up her spine to hammer at her already lust-hazed senses. Her mouth hung open, tongue lolling out, and had he not had her eyes covered he would have seen the final piece to her expression of wanton abandon; her eyes were rolled up in her head, eyelids fluttering, eyelashes tickling at his palms. "Mon-keigh filth...insignificant dog...vile creature ays'le nivaal criisa ynnead'a va'ne!!" she screamed, either forgetting to speak in words he could understand, or simply not caring anymore that he could not, or at least so she assumed. She had clearly forgotten the link he had forged between them. What she said matched what he heard, but he understood; you do not deserve, but I beg you, take your eldar toy for what she is worth.

"Akte," he whispered. 'Very well.'

---

Quick writefag's notes:

BLANKED?! WHY? Why indeed...

OK, so, reading back on this, it was a decent idea but it wasn't being executed really well. At all. See, I had begun to write this as my first foray into WH40k fiction, and I figured it being a dumb excuse to just have one of the few attractive female characters in the universe getting pseudoraped would be fun but honestly I found myself forcing it way too much. No horrible pun intended.

So, meanwhile I've been kicking ideas around. I came up with an Inquisitor character I've been fleshing out and doing different ideas with, and his retinue of assassins, one from each of the four major Temples. And, no, not a male Callie. Just a Callidus, an Eversor, a Culexus, and a Vindicare.

The Eversor isn't much of a character. But it's fun practice-writing about him tearing shit apart. The Callidus is perhaps the most vibrant character, but I've been trying to do something with the Culexus assassin. Yeah, writing someone without a soul. It's kind of tricky.

This story is not dead. But its approach is going to be much different. Sorry, guys, but hey, ya gotta write for yourself rather than for others, and as the story was going, it was just too damn stupid.