Luciene’s vision was painted gold, but stained in red. As she landed from another blow from Lunacius, her Eviscerator carving a path in the ground to hold her position, Luciene could not help but pause. She had never fought daemons like Cronos or Lunacius before—even if the latter insisted on not (yet) being a fully-fledged daemon. And now, she had fought two beings who were pushing her to her utmost limits within the span of just a few days.
It infuriated her, that feeling of possible-inferiority. Of not knowing whether she was enough to stop them. But, then, hope could only be borne of that uncertainty; Luciene’s element did not exist in a world without fears and doubts.
But what infuriated her even more than how she stacked up against Lunacius was the damage the daemon-in-progress was wreaking. Eutophoria was in chaos—literally, in the sense of being partially-submerged within the Empyreal plane. As Warp-born tendrils drilled into Eutophoria’s surface, the city’s structures began to wither away, gradually disintegrating and being consumed by the oceanic spillage of the immaterial. Was such a thing even stoppable, let alone reversible? Was there even anyone left to save at this point?
She had to hope that there was.
But hope could not last in inaction, and Luciene had spent too much time reflecting on her recent past and current reality. Zet and the human that had once subdued him—Bliss—were keeping Lunacius occupied, but only just. With a self-encouraging beating of her wings, Luciene dove back into the fray against her hellish foe. Yet despite the distraction her allies had made for her, Lunacius once more caught Luciene’s Eviscerator within a crustacean’s claw, instantly halting Luciene’s advance. The regal-colored near-daemon thrust Luciene, and her Eviscerator, back into the ground before kicking her away once more, but she was quicker to her feet this time.
In the meantime, Bliss had found herself tossed aside by the choking grasp of the beast’s tail, leaving Zet momentarily alone with Lunacius. “Creature of steel,” Lunacius began, towering over the Nemesor, who held his phase-scythe before himself. Again, Luciene dove to interrupt Lunacius’s focus; again, Lunacius swatted her aside without much care. “I understand you have but one life to live—an anomaly, for your kind. Why spend it here?”
“Because she is as anomalous as I am, if not more-so,” Zet replied in a heartbeat, despite lacking a beating heart.
“And this makes her worth dying for?”
“I have not lived, nor known the possibility of death, for millions of years,” Zet deflected. “But she is worth fighting for, yes.”
“Exquisite,” Lunacius purred, like a lion about to pounce upon its prey. “Tell me, can an undead contraption scream?”
“Why don’t you find out?” Zet taunted. The monster’s grin widened to a half-moon shape, and a moment later, Luciene realized why her mind made such a comparison; Lunacius pulsated with power, his form fading into shadow and sucking the light from his surroundings too. The near-daemon grew in this darkness, engorging itself on the terror of its own existence, all the while smiling down at the Nemesor. Luciene understood, then, exactly what Lunacius was—the apex of all predators, the perfect hunter, the ultimate murderer. A beast of a being, truer than any other. It was very likely, Luciene thought, that she may have succumbed to Lunacius’s display of horror were it not for Zet’s bland and uninspired reaction to the event: “Well?”
That seemed to sour Lunacius’s mood, and the swelling of his form halted. His smile vanished behind thinned lips. Just as Zet did not possess a “presence” in the Warp for Lunacius, it seemed the Necron could not perceive any horrors of Warpcraft either. “Well,” Lunacius sighed. “You disappoint me.”
“Good,” came the monotone, emotionless reply, though Luciene knew that if Zet’s necrodermal face could smile, it would have. Lunacius snarled, and then clashed with the Nemesor once more, raw flesh, Warp-empowered as it was, coming in to contact against phase-blade and leaving unharmed. As their battle reignited, Lunacius’s form returned to its original size and shape, and the swell of fear that he had conjured diminished as well, enabling Luciene to spring into action again. In the background, Bliss decimated a contingent of daemonettes that otherwise sought to aid their apparent master.
In time, however, each group’s roles would switch. Faster and stronger than Luciene and Zet, Lunacius batted the pair away from one another before seeming to move in for the kill upon the angel. A spined crab-claw lurched out for Luciene’s neck as she recovered her wits, but it was halted from snapping Luciene’s head from her shoulders. “Leave him to me!” Bliss shouted over her shoulder, fighting to hold Lunacius’s claw in place. “Save your city! I can handle him myself!”
“I very much doubt that, little one,” Lunacius laughed, amused, looming over Bliss and pressing his claw downward, more harshly contending with her grasp.
+Are you sure, Carmichael?+ Luciene’s voice appeared in Bliss’s head. Bliss was not used to any voice, other than mine, sneaking into her thoughts, but nodded in resolute assurance despite such surprise. Recognizing that trust was not misplaced with Bliss, Luciene flew out from behind the Assassin, joining Zet in cutting through a legion of daemons before contesting the Empyreal slurry that Eutophoria was drowning beneath.
“You are at least more interesting than that machine,” Lunacius admitted, raising and slashing down upon Bliss with his other hand. Bliss responded by giving up on holding the beast’s claw back, ducked under said-claw, and kicked out at his hand as it fell upon her. That sufficed to deflect Lunacius’s talons away, and in slight surprise from the strength within the small ball of fury before him, he allowed a second kick to strike his gut, which pushed him a few paces back. “Oh, I could have such fun with you. Succulent, provocative, and with some feistiness in you too—you are exquisite.”
“Charmed. I’ll treat you to a dance if you tell me everything you know about Cronos,” Bliss suggested, holding herself low to the ground in an agile stance, ready to meet whatever pace Lunacius struck out at her with next.
“I know you’re even less of a threat to It than you are to me,” Lunacius admitted. “Even I can’t defeat the daemon, not alone.” Without any warning, Lunacius lurched forward as soon as he finished speaking, again drilling his claw down upon the Assassin. She met his strength head on once more, albeit now holding it against her wrist-mounted phase blade. “You must think me bestial, no? If you do, know this: Cronos is no beast. No, It is a monster of myth, even among other daemons. Shall I tell you of its true form, even though there’s no way you’d see it unless he that you lust for had already perished?”
“How do I kill It?” Bliss hissed, fighting with all her might to hold Lunacius back.
“You don’t. You never will. Cronos is so much more than mortal minds can comprehend. It will devour you—and the continent upon which you stand—whole, and barely need to chew. Your mutated strength is not a means through which you can contend with that,” Lunacius answered. “May I have that dance now?”
“You may,” Bliss agreed, and in a blur, raced out from under his claw and launched herself onto Lunacius’s forearm. As though trying to swat a fly out of the air, he waved his arm about, and in so doing lifted Bliss within striking distance of his face. And there, finally, the first drop of his Empyreal-filled blood was shed, as the Assassin at last managed to nick a gash into his right cheek before pirouetting away from the angered beast. “I’ve danced with Cronos already,” she noted after a graceful landing. “If you’re as inferior to the daemon as you allege, what makes you think you can keep up with me?”
Lunacius stared daggers toward Bliss for a moment, but did not lash out. Instead, he tapped a finger to the first wound his face had suffered in millennia, and licked a splash of his blood from his hand. “Mordefir has tried for centuries what you have managed in minutes; oh, how my brother will envy you. That will be a sweetness indeed,” Lunacius mused, sneering. “A part of me wishes to see you try to keep his wrath at bay, to see you gored upon his blades. But I think it’ll be sweeter still if I deny him even that.”
“You’re welcome to try,” Bliss replied, uncaring. To her, if this quasi-daemon was a lesser threat than Cronos, than he should have been something well within her might to destroy. And thus far, she had inflicted more wounds than she had taken in turn, if only by a score of one-nil. But still, she liked her odds. And when the titanic form of Lunacius lurched toward her again, like a beast leaping from hind legs, she found herself undeterred, heart steeled by her encounters with a far greater terror.
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Yet it was no mere physical attack that Lunacius unleashed upon Bliss next; instead, the beast raised a hand to skies of witchfire and pulled them down upon her, purple light stretching like skin to form a lashing whip in his grasp that snapped out at the Assassin with voracious bloodlust. Bliss tumbled away from the attack in the nick of time, and where the whip struck the ground where she had stood, reality gave way. The steel earth folded upon itself and disintegrated apart, another hole into the Empyrean forming in its stead, glistening in vile shades of avaricious violet. But Bliss remained unmoved by the spreading terror of Lunacius’s weaponry, and the moment she touched the ground from her dodge, she, too, broke the earth at her feet, albeit by sheer strength alone.
Leaving heated footprints in the steel flooring behind her stride, Bliss raced toward the chimera ahead of her at breakneck pace, and struck wide with her phase blade as she passed between his legs without needing to see if her blow landed true. She jumped into a cartwheel to redirect her momentum and turn about just in time to see Lunacius fall to his knees, now with a tendon slashed open. Bliss held her weapon before her eyes for a moment, and recited, in thought, to herself, I am the death in the dark. Then, aloud but in a whisper, as she raced toward Lunacius who, for the first time since taunting his sister, had donned a face of fear, she continued, “I am the destroyer and usurper.”
And as Lunacius fought to find his footing, Bliss lunged toward him again at an even brisker pace still. Lunacius desperately swung his Warp-tinged whip out at her, but she again dodged beneath its reality-cracking lashes, landing past her initial target but leaping out for him at once. The outcome justifies the deed, she thought, finishing the recital of her Assassinorum upbringing, and went for Lunacius’s neck.
But in a flash of green light, her blade failed to connect. Instead, with flesh stinging and ears ringing, Bliss carried all of her momentum with her as she found herself slashing at a necrodermal wall. Incensed, Bliss spun about and swung her phase-blade at her Xenos tormentor, who caught it against its own scythe. “What are you doing?” Bliss shrieked. “I had him!”
“The city is lost,” Zet replied, servos whirring against the Assassin to whom he had denied a kill.
“I had him dead to rights!” Bliss raged on.
“Luciene’s orders,” Zet said simply, and then teleported a few paces away from her, letting her stumble forward in her fury. “Our angel shall smite that beast; of that I have little doubt. I also do not doubt Luciene has words of choice for him, as you had.”
Bliss retracted her phase-blade into its wrist-mount, but continued to hunch over, heaving her breathing in directionless anger. Her fists stayed clenched, and after a moment of labored breathing, they shook violently. But after that, they stilled, and even loosened up. “Damn your orders,” Bliss said, voice cool but far from calm. “Never spare my enemy again, Xenos, or I will finish the dance you and I started.”
***
“Your allies flee, angel,” Lunacius taunted, looming over the last survivor of Eutophoria. “Have they given up on your hope?” he laughed. Daemonettes flanked his slowly-healing calves, as eager to taste an angel’s blood as their commanding beast was.
Luciene, however, regarded him not with optimistic pride, but with cold hatred while she watched the world she had called home be devoured by the abyss behind their confrontation. Don’t fight personal battles, she reminded herself—a teaching from her earliest days, by blessed Veralith. You’ll only get bloody.
Damn that, she thought afterward, and lifted her great Eviscerator to point it toward Lunacius, whose grin widened. It then fell to a frown as she instead sheathed her blade upon her back. “Why?” she whispered, eyes squinting until all she could see was Lunacius’s bestial skull against the backdrop of the Empyrean.
“What was that? I admit, my ears are not good enough to—”
“Why?” she shouted, fists trying to clench upon themselves but being held back by her own emanation of power, which exploded out from her and made more than a handful of daemonettes shriek. “What was all this for? What good can all their deaths do for you?”
“Whose deaths?” Lunacius frowned, and then glanced around. “Oh, theirs. The city’s. They’re meaningless. What good were their lives for anyone?”
Luciene again saw red, then, amidst the gold, and not from any blood in her eyes. Fury is as much a weapon of hope as it is despair’s, Veralith reminded her. “I’m going to burn you alive, fiend,” Luciene hissed, wings beating twice, hard enough to kick up the dust and rubble that surrounded her.
“I’d like to see you t—” Lunacius started, but failed to finish his taunting before his face grew awash with golden light. Lunacius plummeted across—and through—the remnants of Eutophoria, a fist-shaped crater between his eyes, while a wave of gilded flame incinerated his legions of followers and washed over the broken city. Lunacius next found himself buried in a pile of rubble, from which he rose like a phoenix from ashes, albeit with no such grace. “She better be worth it, sister-mine,” he growled to himself, and looked up at the angel that loomed in Empyreal skies overhead.
+I thought you always wanted to dance with an angel,+ his sister teased him, which also sufficed to remind him that she was close, and watching. +Of course I’m watching. Put on a good show, brother-mine.+
“Insufferable bitch,” Lunacius grimaced, well-aware his sister had heard his cursing. Again, he turned his head skyward to look upon his foe, waiting for her to make the next move. She did not, as while this was the first time Lunacius found himself far beneath his target, Luciene was instead reminded of her duel with me, having assumed a similar position then. An ounce of sorrow crept through her rage, then, bringing her pause. Lunacius could not have that, his quartet could not have that; they needed her unbridled, unrelenting. So, he broke her pause, slashing through the cosmos from far below, tearing another hole through reality where he stood. Stepping through it, he appeared directly before Luciene, who, momentarily startled, was a sitting duck for a crab-claw to puncture her front-to-back. It was a nonlethal wound, as Lunacius had intended, but damn if it would not have been a painful one.
Yet, equally painful was Luciene’s reaction, in which she smashed an arm through his claw and broke it entirely. Lunacius recoiled away, having sprouted wings of his own to otherwise meet his foe in the skies, yet was not fast enough in his retreat to avoid being stabbed in the chest by the fragments of his own claw. Lunacius, in blinded anger, thrust his good-hand forward, ripping reality in his grasp once more, but Luciene simply ducked under it before swooping overhead again, after which she punched the beast’s skull in a second time. And so, a second time, Lunacius plummeted into the ever-decaying remains of the city.
He began to rise again, but did not succeed before two feet slammed into his chest and punched him not merely into the city, but through it. Luciene chased after him still, blood streaming from them both as they fell through the backbone of Eutophoria, racing toward the black hole below. The pair fought in their descent, trading blows, but with each time Lunacius struck the angel, his flesh singed. It burned a lot more when she struck him, and the weight of her blows proved heavier than his too.
The pair fell and fell, until at last, each felt the unimaginable tug of concave space—they had beaten each other past the black hole’s Event Horizon. Knowing that even he could not survive being shredded at a subatomic level, and with only moments more to live, Lunacius at last turned from his foe and ripped another hole into reality. Before he could step through it, however, he was tackled into it, he and Luciene now spiraling not through the void, but through the Warp. There, his wounds healed at a far brisker pace, but so too, he found, did the angel’s.
But the angel was suddenly much less concerned with Lunacius alone. Instead, her eyes fell upon the colossal titan of blackstone that loomed beneath the surface of reality. A thousand Eutophorias could have fit across the span of the monstrous vessel, which took the shape of an eight-pointed star. Plague Drones loomed at the edges of four great cannons, each larger than several Imperial battleships, while Screamers circled about the ship’s core. And worse still was the presence that lurked within. Something saw her from behind the vessel’s armored hull, something of such intense hatred and malice for her and all she represented, and it was possessed of a power orders of magnitude greater than what Lunacius wielded.
“Fething shoot her!” Lunacius called, in desperation, to her left. She turned, seeing him tumble away from her still, albeit with wounds fully closed. The great cannons of the vessel began to move, swirling about its central core, though they—and their craft—were of such a size that they seemed to turn slowly. Luciene darted through the abyss for her violet-skinned foe again, and broke his face for a third time. It all but healed at once, opening it up for a fourth breaking.
You’ll only get bloody, Luciene heard again, and at last allowed herself a chance to breathe in the Empyreal not-air. Eutophoria could not be saved. And if she tried to take this fight, here, she knew she could die a thousand deaths and possibly not even make it to the ship’s hull. If Eutophoria, and everyone that had called it home, was ever to be avenged, Luciene would need to fight this fight another time. “You have friends, fiend?” Luciene asked Lunacius, holding him by his neck between herself and the giant monstrosity that loomed over them both. “So do I. And I imagine they look forward to knowing what you’ve shown me here.”
“It doesn’t matter what they know, because I’ll just skin each—” Lunacius started, but again failed to finish the sentence before he careened away, skull broken a fourth time. Plague Drones and Screamers began to near Luciene’s position, however, and while individually they were not much of a concern for her, there were easily thousands among their ranks. Again, Luciene knew this was not her fight, not yet. At last, then, Luciene drew forth her Eviscerator, and cut her own hole through spacetime.
While she stepped out of the jaws of hell and back into realspace, Veralith’s voice appeared in her head once more. Be seeing you, she said to Luciene, though the angel was uncertain why she heard that then. It was the last thing her mentor had said to her, over a thousand years ago.
Luciene left hell without interruption, and used her powers to seal the small rift she had created, though it felt a bit moot given the larger tear she could not close where Eutophoria once rested. Meanwhile, on the underside of reality, the Plague Drones at last reached Luciene’s final position, and successfully managed to clasp their hands upon the droplets of blood the angel had left behind.
+Well done, brother-mine.+
Assassinorum: Kingmaker by Robert Rath, a creed of the Vindicare Temple of Assassinorum operatives. There isn't a creed given for Callidus (from which Bliss hails) in Rath's novel, but I thought it was fitting for her to have her own, as a mish-mash of other creeds; after all, Bliss is a master of all forms of murder - no doubt she could give a Vindicare a run for their money, too.
