Eden had only just spoken when heavy footfalls rolled up from the floor.
Several Custodians carried in a peculiar machine, setting it down upon the deck of the metal sanctum. Plasma arcs crackled between its intricate assemblies.
The rhythm of the plasma felt… alive.
"Human, what do you intend?!"
At the sight of the device, the withered servitor's expression finally shifted. Plainly, whatever it was made the Tuchulcha Engine uneasy.
Eeden offered no reply to the haughty machine-mind. The Custodians followed their manuals, step by step, then withdrew with the legendary warriors.
This would be for the Savior—and the Machine-Goddess.
The shriveled servitor circled the apparatus, found nothing amiss at a glance, and slipped back into its lofty tone:
"A mere machine cannot threaten the Omnipotent. You have chosen poorly, human, and you will regret it.
I will sleep until your pleas satisfy me."
No sooner had it said so—
BZZT!
Suddenly, the plasma went wild, hurling out gouts of lightning.
A tiny winged anime-style girl, sculpted from writhing arcs, popped into the air.
Webby, the Machine-Goddess.
Hands on hips, teeth bared, she looked downright fierce. "So you're the thing bullying my father? You nasty little scrap!"
"Right, that's the one!"
Eeden stood behind Webby, pointing at the Tuchulcha Engine and shamelessly playing the aggrieved dad.
Indeed, the little cotton-jacket really was the sweetest.
Watching Webby plant her feet to defend him, Eeden nodded in satisfaction.
Their father-daughter bond hadn't soured—despite how often he put his little cotton-jacket on overtime.
Maybe he should give her more playtime. Let her go play games with the Emperor for a while.
"What are you?!"
Fear crept into the withered servitor's gaze. What looked adorable in the Savior's eyes was a colossal terror in the Engine's.
It felt pressure—from its own kind.
By scale of data, by core stability, by dominion over machinery—she outclassed it completely.
Even in the age it was made by the Ancient Saints, no datalife existed on this scale.
In Tuchulcha's sight, it faced a tidal bore of zeroes and ones—a godlike life gestating within.
Since devouring Vashtorr's power and molting into something new, the Machine-Goddess had become the bearer of the Imperium's oceanic data—nearly every sector of Imperial life.
She had grown without noticing, a divinity not inferior to Vashtorr—surpassing him outright in the datanet.
Now, Webby was the bedrock of Imperial technology, shielding systems and archives from Warp-rot, and supplying titanic computational might.
She had supercharged Imperial research.
"Hmph. I am the great Machine-Goddess. Father, I'll teach this thing a lesson!"
Webby puffed herself up, her plasma body swelling as arcs licked across the surrounding machinery.
She plunged into the ancient engine.
Vmmm—
Lights across the sanctum guttered as plasma surged. The machines around them spun to high output.
The Tuchulcha Engine fought back with everything it had—and got nowhere.
"You naughty thing. Won't behave? Won't behave?"
Webby reached into the black sphere and yanked out a plump plasma ball, kneading and thumping it with both hands.
It yowled pitifully.
After only a little "discipline," the Engine went docile, crying for clemency:
"N-no… O great Machine-Goddess, I will make peace. I will obey your commands and lie at your feet. Spare me!"
Comical to the human eye.
But to datalife, a brutal cyber-war had just unfolded—Tuchulcha's data nodes and backdoors all overrun, its core at mortal risk.
Worms of Webby's code remained burrowed within—each capable of a kill-stroke at any time.
In other words, resistance was over. It could only submit under the worms' watch.
Truthfully, this ancient datalife had little grit and feared death.
Why else lurk in the Rock's depths for millennia upon millennia, always seeking shelter?
It knew many powers of Chaos coveted it—hungering for its ancient, precious data.
Under the Machine-Goddess' aegis, it might be safer than ever.
So it yielded quickly—eagerly offering up control of its data core.
It knew she didn't covet its being. If she had, she'd have devoured it in that opening clash.
"Hmph. Step out of line again, and I'll smack you harder."
Seeing Tuchulcha present its core and swear obedience, Webby relented and tossed the pudgy plasma-ball back into the golden-flecked sphere.
Then she fluttered over to the Savior, wings beating, wearing the "praise me!" face.
"Father, I've taught it its lesson. It'll behave now. Am I amazing?"
Eeden beamed, almost grinning crooked.
Thumbs up. "Excellent. My Webby is the best and the sweetest. I'll reward you with half a—no, one month of games. You can go find your Grampa Emperor right now!"
"Yay!"
Her plasma features shifted from hopeful smile to crescent moon, flashing big white teeth as she bounced in midair.
Over the moon, literally.
A whole month to play! Unheard of. Before, after feeding compute to every research institute and working six months of overtime, she'd get… six, seven days.
Truth be told, the Savior's little cotton-jacket worked harder than the Savior himself.
And sometimes had to be the one to get the sleepy Savior out of bed.
It couldn't be helped. Imperial science ran on the Machine-Goddess. The Savior already fought to carve her rest.
"Huh? Something else?"
Eeden noticed she was still hovering and tilted his head.
Normally she'd be gone by now—down to the last second, rest was precious.
Then he clocked the faintly puffed-up cheeks.
Right. He'd forgotten the "snuggle."
"We'll have a good play together once we're back."
He drew a breath.
Gently, he hugged her plasma-warm shape, ruffled her little head—and tossed in a promise for dessert.
"Yesss! Then I'm off!"
Webby bobbed, and zip—vanished.
Tsss—
Only when she was gone did Eeden let the grimace out, fingers trembling.
A body made of high-temperature plasma is… not for everyone to touch. He'd almost earned himself a mild burn.
A little longer and he'd be blistered.
"Tuchulcha?"
Eeden glanced at the silent black sphere at the sanctum's heart and knit his brow.
"Your… Majesty the Savior. I am present."
The Engine moved the withered servitor once more, its gaze now containing respect.
This ancient datalife was quick to read the room—and quicker to protect itself, to prolong its survival.
Else it would have met the fate of other Engines long ago.
Eeden's voice softened, free of needless severity. "I'll have a body assembled for you. You will obey orders and cooperate fully. Understood?"
"As you will."
The servitor aped an old Imperial bow it half-remembered from a data cache.
The Engine feared the Savior even more than the Machine-Goddess—and would not cross him.
It had realized something.
The Savior didn't truly need it. He could command the Machine-Goddess to unmake Tuchulcha and run the Engine in its stead.
And yet he stayed his hand and spared it.
Truth was, Eeden just needed another datalife to share the workload—and to ease Webby's burden a little.
Otherwise she'd be maintaining the psy-net, providing compute, and controlling an ancient Dissonance Engine to drill the Warp.
That was a lot.
Once Tuchulcha was brought to heel, Eeden didn't linger in the sanctum. He went to check on the other work.
Shortly after he signaled, an Archmagos arrived with Tech-priests in tow to handle the transfer—moving the ancient Engine aboard the Plagueheart.
Per the plan, they'd have to dig out the entire chamber. That would take work.
…
RrrrRRR—
Directed blasting boomed around the Rock's exterior, then the rumble of excavators and pulverizers as they gnawed the designated sections.
Beyond tunneling a route for the Tuchulcha Engine's haul-out, the machines were hunting a second relic—the Ouroboros.
That one was even more abstruse.
Some said the Ouroboros dwelt within Caliban. Some said it was Caliban's rotting heart. Some said it was Caliban itself.
It seemed more like a mindless energy aggregation, dispersed through the bedrock, demanding deeper excavation and stranger searches.
Inside the Rock—
The diggers hammered so hard the fortress shook. Chunks of stone rattled free and drifted into space.
"Technology of the Ancient Saints… baffling."
Eeden exhaled.
Imperial tech—even the Golden Age—still fit inside human understanding.
Even if you couldn't build it from scratch, you could guess how to use it—what principle it ran on.
But Ancient-Saint tech felt like a branch humanity never touched. Without the Machine-Goddess—and xenos lore and Warp-tech—you couldn't parse it at all.
"How much longer must the Mechanicus dig?!"
Azrael's face tightened. Each thump and tremor stabbed the Supreme Grand Master in the heart.
This was the Dark Angels' monastery—what was left of their home. Anyone would ache, watching a forest of machines chew through their house.
"Brother, why mourn? This is a good thing."
Commander Dante of the Blood Angels—certified slacker—clapped Azrael's shoulder and slipped him a deluxe spa voucher for Paradise World.
"A good thing?!"
Azrael stared at the card, baffled—and a little angry.
"You don't yet understand His Majesty the Savior—or the Imperium's situation…"
Dante sighed.
The Dark Angels didn't know the market these days—how many begged the Savior to redevelop their planets and estates and never got the chance.
It was well known that when the Savior redeveloped private holdings, compensation followed—and it was lavish.
Plenty of poor Chapters and plain Imperial citizens had gotten rich on redevelopment alone. The Blood Angels had been among them.
A signature of the Savior-Domain.
"Check your slate when you can. Treasury in the Court District will ping you soon."
The Imperium's governance reforms under the Regent—Bayev, the Savior's Hand—weren't finished yet, so fiscal flows still ran through the Urth Court District.
Within two years, everything would fold into the new capital's court at Dawn City.
Even with Dante's walkthrough, Azrael still couldn't see how compensation would offset the Dark Angels' losses.
"By the Emperor, this… this…"
Then the Supreme Grand Master opened the relocation schedule the treasury had sent—and his pupils slammed wide.
Because it was a forced redevelopment, the Savior felt a little bad—and made it up to them in other ways.
Enough materiel to arm the Dark Angels to vomiting—gear, vehicles, ammunition. Sacred webway plots. A brand-new monastery beside the Black Throne's temple.
And a promise to "rebuild" Caliban.
The Savior-Domain couldn't conjure a planet from scratch—yet. But it could fuse Caliban's debris into a small planetoid.
He'd already pulled biotic and botanical samples from the wreckage.
Forests and ecosystems would be restored on the new planetoid. A sacred spire would shine the Emperor's holy light upon it.
The surviving sons of Caliban could return to a piece of their mother-world.
For Dark Angels, that beat the Rock. It felt like home.
Azrael stared at the list—and finally understood why Dante called redevelopment a pathway to fortune.
"His Majesty is… merciful indeed."
He watched the Savior's back with a flicker of gratitude.
He had, as they say, been won over.
All those black-tech and taboo engines they couldn't even access, rotting in vaults, guzzling upkeep—
While resources on the other hand were real.
The Dark Angels had been in a bad way for years—mother-world gone, endless Fallen hunts—bleeding resources beyond belief.
The First Legion's reserves were long gone; they were running on fumes.
They even snuck back to salvage Fallen gear, refit it, and press it back into service.
Once, they'd have sniffed at such a thing. Not pure. Not loyal.
Now the Dark Angels could end the shame of scavenging, and kit up with the newest, consecrated arms and armor.
In a word: flush.
And the Savior was happy to oblige.
Once the Dark Angels accepted Imperial funding flows wholesale, they were, in effect, under Imperial reins. Why not?
"Give enough—and you'll get even more loyalty."
Eeden noticed the Supreme Grand Master's look and mused.
Of course, not everyone could buy it like that. Generally, only a Primarch-level figure would be accepted by Astartes.
The next heartbeat, the whole Rock convulsed.
Segmented zones came apart. Thousands of tons of stone and iron fanned into space.
Then a jet of energy erupted from the fortress, swept up the debris, and assembled it into a vast, translucent ring in the void.
Sunlight bled through it, tinting it pale amber. Organ-like sections began to throb and stretch.
A multitude of translucent limbs unfurled, casting membrane-thin sheets—like sails, or specialized appendages that harvested solar flux.
"Is that… the Ouroboros?"
Eeden took in the twenty- to thirty-kilometer torus—wordless for a moment.
Its head and tail met, a serpent swallowing itself, an ancient sign of infinity and cycles.
Its vast glassine body seemed set into the gap between realspace and the Warp.
"Perhaps that myth was no myth.
Imperials did witness this techno-life of the Ancient Saints."
He was beginning to see the Ancient-Saint branch.
Biotic, most likely—Eldar and Orks and this half-techno creature, all works of life-craft.
Unlike the Imperium: cold, colossal machines.
"At last…"
Eeden's voice shook with excitement. "Move the Rock out for now. The Mechanicus is about to assemble the Dissonance Engine."
With Tuchulcha, the Ouroboros, and the Plagueheart gathered, the final assembly could begin.
He followed the Mechanicus engineering ship carrying Tuchulcha toward the Mechanicus ark.
The Rock burned away from the zone—barred from watching the assembly. A touch too heretical, that.
WAAAGH!
A swarm of Mechanicus engineering vessels arrived with Ork Roks, dragging oceans of material and machinery.
If you were bolting together an Ancient-Saint warp-digger, you didn't leave out the Orks—the Ancient Saints' favorite hired hands.
Best to let Orks do the assembling and the Mechanicus run support.
Several Big Meks and Archmagi muttered, reached accord, and slung Tuchulcha on grav-cranes toward the Blackstone Ark of Omen—the Plagueheart lay in its core drives.
Eeden didn't catch half of what they said.
Between the Ork cant and the strings of binary—so long as they understood each other.
The Blackstone Ark of Omen glided toward the Ouroboros' titanic ring. Engineering ships closed in, dumping materials and machines by the kiloton.
Then—like dumplings in broth—the Orks dropped in to bolt on the works.
They stuck the machinery all over the Ark's interior and outer plates, until it looked like a hideous hybrid of ship and factory-rig.
Cables ran everywhere.
Once the Orks cleared, the Ark began to glow. Prismatic energies crawled and pooled across its hull, finally leaping from the tower-antenna at the prow—
—and struck the Ouroboros.
That part Eeden understood: some Warp-energy form to trigger the Ouroboros.
Sure enough, touched by the beam, the serpent's jaws unclamped—and slowly swallowed the Blackstone Ark of Omen.
They fused.
Before their eyes, armor and structures shattered—and re-grew in new shapes.
Even the hull turned half-transparent, as if the Ouroboros' nature had taken hold—embedding the ship between the Warp and the veil of reality.
Tuchulcha, Ouroboros, Plagueheart. A living trinity.
The Ancient Saints' warp shield-tunneler—the relic Dissonance Engine—was complete.
"What a creation…"
Eeden stared at the assembled Engine, stunned to numbness.
He turned to a nearby Archmagos. "Is this an original-pattern Ancient-Saint Dissonance Engine? It doesn't… quite look it."
In his view, the reshaped Ark had grown a half-transparent sheath and, well—looked more like a ship-sized drill.
The bow's half-figure and drill-head were… frankly absurd.
An Ork-style bust with a sky-piercing mega-drill.
"Your Majesty the Savior, in both function and essence it is a Dissonance Engine. There is no error whatsoever."
The Archmagos wore the serene look of professional insult.
"Good. Good…"
Eeden inhaled and willed himself to accept it.
The Orks were made by the Ancient Saints—used to build the webway. They would know the Engine, perhaps even have bolted it together before.
So they'd expressed a little… initiative. Not the end of the world.
He tried at least to salvage the look—ordered the Orks to paint the bust gold. Less heretical to the eye.
A hulking, golden Ork-bust with a sky-piercing drill.
As for the hardware under the hood—best not to meddle. Unknown consequences.
"Power up the Dissonance Engine. Let's see what it can do."
Eeden raced aboard the Ork-aesthetic warp shield-tunneler.
He would lead the first cut himself—what prosperity and glory it might bring to the Imperium!
VMMMMM!!!
At once, the titanic drill at the ship's prow spun, tearing the veil between the Warp and reality.
And the twenty-plus-kilometer machine-ship lunged like a tunneling rig—
—and vanished from realspace.
…
At the same time—
High beings across the Warp felt it: violent tremors pulsing through certain reaches of the Immaterium.
The Chaos Gods stirred. Earthquakes in the Warp? Almost unheard-of.
THUDTHUDTHUDTHUD!
Beyond the Brass Citadel in Khorne's domain, daemons froze and turned.
Something huge, bizarre—and strangely familiar—was thundering straight toward them.
A very exciting machine indeed.
(End of Chapter)
[Get +20 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 500 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]