WARHAMMER 40K UNIVERSE
UNKNOWN LOCATION [SOMEWHERE IN THE WARP]
Silence.
The Warp was never meant to be silent. It was a sea of eternal hunger, an infinite maelstrom of screams, desires, and carnage. Yet now it lay still, its tides broken, its storms becalmed. The psychic gales that once tore reality into ribbons were hushed; the endless choirs of daemon-voices were strangled into nothingness.
Where once every second birthed a nightmare, now only echoes lingered—like the memory of a roar trapped within dead stone.
Through this abyss drifted what remained of Khorne's domain. The Brass Citadel, seat of unending slaughter, had become a hollow fortress adrift in fractured currents of broken time. Its moats of boiling blood no longer frothed; its mountains of skulls no longer grew. Corpses of daemons, twisted iron, shattered banners—all floated like carrion on a tide that no longer surged.
It was a graveyard of rage.
And into this graveyard moved a shadow.
She slipped through the cracks of broken power, a silhouette of silk and hunger, gliding through halls where once daemons feasted upon mortal screams. Now those halls were hushed, desecrated not by triumph, but by absence.
Before the Skull Throne she came to stand.
But the throne itself was dim, its fires long guttered. And when the silence broke, it was not with the thunder that once shook realms, but with a voice that trembled—still vast, still iron, but weakened, cracked, stripped of the omnipotence it once bore.
"Why have you come here?"
The words were thunder muted to a whisper. The voice of Khorne, once unstoppable, now barely an echo of its former strength.
The shadow said nothing.
"Have you come to relish in your "victory"?!" The voice lashed out suddenly, dripping with venom, forcing the cracked throne-hall to quake. "To gloat as carrion gloat, circling the wounded beast? Do you come to taste triumph where none should exist?!"
The shadow stirred. A low voice, velvet and uncaring, slipped through the silence.
"I never wanted it to be like this."
The words were feminine, calm, but edged with something serpentine.
"Like this?" The Skull Lord's voice rattled the chamber. "Do you mean this state of weakness? This ruin? Or do you mean your failure—your scheme to wield the abomination as your blade, while the rest of us withered?"
The throne quaked again as the voice grew cruel.
"Do you mean to mourn that he did not bend to you? That instead of a weapon, instead of a prize, you loosed a plague upon us all?"
The shadow did not flinch.
"You did this," Khorne snarled, "You promised a treasure. You promised us the child, the nexus, the key to uniting the Warp under our dominion. A prize we could corrupt, bind, wield. And what did you give us?" His voice thundered now, rising from cracked whisper to a roar that shook his own ruined hall.
"An abomination."
The silence that followed was broken not by words, but by a sudden, wrenching manifestation. The air split, shadow and brass colliding, until a colossal figure materialized—Khorne, or what remained of him.
He was not the Blood God of eternity, not the incarnate war whose every roar birthed a billion wars. He was a husk, drained, diminished, his form shifting like smoke. Jagged horns leaned crooked; his once-immaculate armor was pitted and cracked, his crimson light guttering like dying embers.
Yet even in his ruin, he was terrible.
"Gaze upon me, Slaanesh," Khorne rumbled, his broken form pulling upright before the throne. "Look at what your folly has wrought. I am but an echo of myself, a shadow of blood and brass. Once, I was war incarnate. Now… I shrink from the very image of what I was."
His head bowed, almost as though ashamed.
The shadow—Slaanesh—remained silent.
This was the aftermath. The aftermath of what had unfolded in the Webway, when the impossible had been dragged into the Warp. They had reached together, each with their schemes and promises, expecting to seize a prize beyond measure.
But instead of a prize, they had welcomed a curse.
Atrius.
Not a weapon, not a vessel, not a slave. But a nightmare in gold—one who devoured not through hunger, but through nature itself. His presence had not claimed their thrones by conquest. It had rendered their thrones irrelevant.
Their daemons dissolved. Their power shriveled. Their domains turned to husks.
It was not defeat. It was erasure.
"You are only sorry," Khorne spat at last, "that you were caught in the wake. That he did not know you, that he did not see you. You sired an abomination, thinking to craft perfection—thinking to bind the Anathema's blood with your own hunger. But now, behold your perfection."
His laughter was bitter, hollow, cracked by weakness, but real.
"Oblivion."
He laughed again, though the sound was ragged, the mirth broken. "I admire destruction, Slaanesh. Always. But this… this was not mine to savor."
Still the shadow did not move. Her voice at last slid across the silence, cold and careless.
"I have come to you because we are all weak. Slumber has restored fragments of our power, yes—but fragments only. We are not what we were. Lesser ones stir at the edges of our domains. Carrion-spirits, proto-gods, nameless ones. They will rise to take our place if we do not stand. They will devour what remains."
Khorne shifted forward upon the husk of his throne, his bulk still commanding though shattered.
"Weakness? You are weak. I endure. War endures. Blood endures. The long slaughter will burn again, and I will rise when war rises. I need no pact, no alliance. The Anathema himself will see to it—the carrion gnats you fear will never replace us. His wrath will burn them before they crawl."
"Your faith in him," Slaanesh whispered, "is almost touching."
Khorne leaned forward, his bulk shadowing her slight frame. "Do not mock me. Tell me why you truly risk my wrath by walking these halls."
For the first time, Slaanesh smiled. It was not joy, but malice in silk.
"It seems your decay has forced you to think. For once."
Khorne's eyes narrowed, two dying suns, dripping hate.
"Indeed." Slaanesh's voice curved like a knife. "You are correct. There is more."
Her shadow stretched longer, her form almost bleeding into the darkness of the hall. Her words were almost tender, though poison dripped beneath each syllable.
"I have found him."
And the silence of the Warp broke again—not with thunder, but with the sudden intake of a god who remembered fear.