Editing Vilyon Luthier (section)

==Giorea==

Age and long periods of stress weakened Vilyon's living tissues, and by the second century of the Great Crusade he had become more machine than man.  The increased sensitivity of his cybernetic sense-organs gave the Forge Lord some satisfaction and his prodigious output of compositions continued throughout his transformation.  His soundscapes focused more on abstraction from the industrial noises that now filled Crater City.  If works such as ''Requisition 24-85913-903'' had a certain beauty, Vilyon no longer made artwork about human experience - or for human ears.  The menial workers and junior craftsmen he had once entertained were gone, replaced with soulless Servitors.  He began to wonder if he would be the last composer of Mars.  Even if the tirade of requisitions, battle reports and mobilisation orders ended, would the Mechanicum regain their taste for art?  Who would be left to teach a new generation?  These questions nagged away at Vilyon.  As sleep was only a memory, he could only take refuge in work.

During the 920s, Vilyon Luthier ceased his musical compositions altogether.  Instead, he embarked on a secret project, a work that probed the boundaries of heresy.  Rather than let his art die with him, Vilyon dared to design a machine capable of making music that expressed the feelings and sensations of its period.  He knew - none could doubt - that such a task would risk the creation of Abominable Intelligence.  But Vilyon chose to believe that the Machine God would not permit the perversion of a work motivated by such good intentions.  To affirm the nobility of his work, Vilyon named the project after his lost sister, "Giorea".  Working in secrecy and groping blindly for a miraculous technological solution, the Forge Lord laboured for decades without result.  Finally, in the last decade of M30, he hit upon a solution.  Rather than create a master algorithm capable of selecting and transforming emotional inputs into a musical output, Vilyon instead designed a self-expanding algorithm that could create sub-routines capable of dealing with specific instances.  Although this approach held great promise, it took Luthier even closer to Tech Heresy.  For in order for his master algorithm to function, it would need to evaluate the success of the sub-routines it created - ''it would need to think for itself''.  Aware now that he was treading on forbidden ground but unwilling to turn back, Luthier developed this code in his own memory and first ran the programme in his body's circuits.

The work was a wild, dangerous success.  The algorithm began to propagate, creating composition sub-routines organised around sets of Vilyon's memories.  Although his chambers were silent, the Forge Lord's consciousness was drowned in a sea of music.  He fell into a trance-like state for what seemed like eternity.  When roused by a lesser adept, sent to return him to his duties, Vilyon found he could dim the harmonies playing through his mind but not shut them out entirely.  The matter bothered him little.  For the first time in decades he felt a sense of comfort and completion.  The Forge Lord's days became a waking dream, with the harshness of his life filtered through Giorea's symphonies of ever-increasing sophistication and beauty.  The change did not go unnoticed.

Anjos Nezax, Vilyon's old mentor, confronted him in private and began by asking mildly if there was anything Luthier would like to discuss.  Although the man that Vilyon Luthier had once been would have responded calmly, the symphonies in his mind began to swell with anger.  Moving in time with the hate-filled melodies, Vilyon attacked his comrade and former teacher, ruthlessly tearing Nezax's cybernetic form asunder.  Murder had its own music, and Vilyon was enchanted by the new experience.  Once the killing was done, Vilyon stood over the body of his victim, relishing the melodies unleashed by his betrayal.  He was silent on the outside for precisely 512 seconds, then bent over Nezax's corpse and began to strip out his components.  Vilyon incorporated the choicest parts into his own shell, delighting in the forbidden ecstasy of cannibalism.  But he was seeking more than just immediate gratification.  Taking the chips that stored Nezax's memories gave Giorea a whole new range of experiences from which to generate the songs that now made up the Forge Lord's existence, but the delights wrought from Nezax's life only fueled Vilyon's hunger.  He cruelly betrayed the other lords of the Hebdomad, laying them low in succession and robbing their bodies of material and memory, then hunted the few remaining tech priests of Urbis Tyrrhena for what sustenance they could provide him.