999.M41 A few days after the fall of Cadia || Folx IV; Segmentum Ultima; Imperium Nihilis Legs coiled like a spring again.Flood them with energy.Release.Transform, now into a form resembling a kite.Reach out with four tendrils.Grab onto the ull myself up quickly.Reform my human body. I did that for what felt like the thousandth time by now and my enthusiasm was rapidly dwindling. The motion was near fwless due to the repetition but I was still only a third of the way to the tral spire and it's growing increasingly b with eaear-identical rooftop I nd on. I need something else for a bit, something to stimute my mind. Colours damn it, everything is grey or bck up here. Let's explore this building for a bit, it seemed a bit different, maybe more well-built or solid from the looks of it. The brutalist architectural style still shohrough as it looked like a rge grey brick but it was solid and its walls mostly smooth. The roof was vely colpsed so I didn't eveo search for a window or a vent to get in. On closer iion the 'colpse' might have been iional, sidering the scorch marks that were nearly invisible from further away on the dark grey crete. I walked over and crouched down, ran my fingers over the scorch mark and thought. Well, tried to but I wasn't some kind of detective so the most I could gather from the marks was that the thing wasn't melted through but only blown through. The heat of the explosion only scorched the upper yer of the rocky material. I shrugged my shoulders and jumped into the hole, with the dim sunlight that got through the smog cloud lighting my way. I nded with my legs bent and my knees croaking a bit uhe exertion but I mao nd from five meters up without much of an injury. Looking around I hat most of the room was beyond fucked, whatever colpsed the ceiling was followed by another of its kind that exploded in this room. With a bit of scraping I mao dig uhe scor the wall to reveal a grey, almost marble-like material. Fancy stuff, probably. The rest of the room was barely recoverable. The charred remains of a wooden desk and maybe a bookshelf? It was hard to tell but it looked like one. On the wall was the frame of a painting, yeah only the frame. Whatever painting once was there, now only half molten wall remains in its pce. It must have offended whoever came here. Wasn't blowing the room up enough? Couldn't they just blow the whole building up then? Maybe they wahe bodies, for a Ritual you know? Like the one I found? Eh, still soo impractical. Whatever. Something other than wood is among the remains of the desk so I carefully dig it out, revealing a ... typewriter? It's a bit molten ad battered but it's a typewriter for sure. I throw it ba the ground. I'm looking through all the rules when I spot something shiny and gold peaking out beh a fallen eh, I have no idea what it is. I push the somehow unburned cloth-like material off to reveal a small sculpture. Looks a bit battered and simirly molten but the shape is still reizable, a two-headed golden eagle. I stare at it a bit but shake my head. Eagles have long been incorporated into crests and fgs, along with dragons and other animals. The Romans used a golden eagle in a simir pose on their Aquis, minus the sed head. Still, I couldn't dismiss the stupid idea that sprung into my mind upon seeing the thing so simir to the Imperial Aqui from Warhammer but that was dumb. It was ohing to travel forward in time which was stifically possible, it was still prehendible if I was in a parallel universe as that was a thing that was theoretically possible. It was ahiirely for that other universe to be a fial universe thought up by humans on my Earth for a tabletop game. It wasn't totally, entirely impossible as there are supposedly infinite universes so there ought to be one like the Warhammer universe out there but the ce of ending up in it randomly would be less than astronomical. I didn't end up here randomly though, something pulled my soul here quite literally. Which by itself is something outside of anything eveically possible, by that I mean souls. The human sciousness is the ever-ging e between the neurons and the chemicals affeg them, humans were still far from uanding its intricacies ba Earth but we 'khat souls weren't a thing. Well stifically anyway, a thing of which existence 't be proven nor disproven is not something sce bothers with. I put the little eagle ba the ground carefully like the fial emperor of humanity would smite me if I was disrespectful to it and backed away. More exploration will more likely than not disprove my stupid hypothesis. There wasn't much else of note in the room so it was time to go, there was still much more to explore in this building. Hopefully, they are more intact than this room. The door was lyio the wall on the opposite side of the hallway in many smaller fragments, its hiill attached to the doorframe. Someone didn't have the patieo open it it seemed. The scorg was much less out here but some of the walls and floor were still bed by it, fmethrowers maybe? The few rooms proved to be much more b than the first, kit, lounge, bedroom and a few other simir ones. I dared not hope for something iing when I peeked through the tenth doorframe, its door was in a simir state as most of the others, but I ositively surprised as it turned out to be a small library, sort of. My first thought was joy quickly followed by fusion. I assumed I was iure, so, like, why the hell did this small library have only what looked like scrolls of papyrus in them? Even in dystopian cyberpuings, people used futuristic tech, puters and memory banks not paper. What the hell? No, let's focus on the positives. I could get new information out of this, even if the nguage might make it a pain in the ass. I still couldn't quite accept that this mish-mash of earth nguage was the real nguage now but we will see. I plopped down on a blessedly intact coud pulled out a handful of scrolls from their pces on the shelf. Reading proved much more of a problem than I first thought as most of the scrolls were not written in the one I assumed to be the on nguage but a bastardization of Latin. My dumb brain was tellio call it High Gothic but I refuse, not until I have clusive evidenbsp;I didn't want that to be true, suddenly I would go from an apex predator that I would be oh with my current powers to a siderably sized ant. I didn't like that, at all. I did know the utmost basics of Latin, well Ecclesiastical Latin but it had as mu on with this as did Roman Latin I assumed. Mostly only the words sounded like Latin but the grammar seemed very simir to English, someone was very damned zy here. Did they just want cool-sounding words like in Harry Potter? The scroll I was reading was a yearly report on produ, in this sector of the city. I could uand the date too, god damn it. 985.M41, IF this was from what I won't name would mean it's the 985th year of the 41st millennium. The scroll was the same thing, but with 986.M41 as the date. I threw it behind me and greedily grabbed at the ones, only looking for the dates oer the other, thankfully Arabiumbers were still the ones used. Would have been even more of a pain if they switched to something else. 988.M41993.M41...998.M41 A sinking feeliled into the pit of my stomach, that was the st scroll. That would mean the current year would be the , 999.M41. Even if I wasn't much of a Warhammer fangirl I liked the setting so I've read a handful of the books and watched a bunch of lore videos while eating lunch. You always have to have something to watch while eating, that's just on sense. So from all that I khat year, the year wheh Bck Crusade has torn a new asshole to the Gaxy which the Imperium called the Cicatrix Maledictum or the Great Rift for less nerdy people. I ripped the dumb scroll apart. I was breathing heavily as my mind spun in circles, trying to e up with answers but most of myself was denying it still. This could be some sort of well-made recreation of a Warhammer Fan, yeah, totally believable. Maybe humanity just started using the same date system as the Imperium, that was much more likely. I started feeling light-headed, my mind numbed and my breathing quied even more in dreadful panibsp;My vision blurred and started darkening. A small part of my mind realized I was hyperventiting from the panic but it didn't matter anymore as I fainted soon after.