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Chapter Text

Nemesor Zahndrekh snapped his fingers of cold necrodermis like a crack of ice across a lake. "No, too crowded. Let's try the glaives again."

Obyron leaned back a few centimeters as his lord paced in front of him once more. Behind him trailed two Necrons of standard build, each carrying a large dispersion shield that their withered frames, enshrined with mechanical strength as they were, struggled to wrangle with any finesse. Though they did not, could not, complain, the vargard took one of the shields in his off-hand and motioned for the one he relieved to aid the other. It wouldn't do for either of the armaments to get scratched, after all. After a visible moment of processing, the servant acquiesced, and together, the party of four trailed back toward the armory from whence the shields had come.

It was entirely appropriate for a vargard to consider all possible routes by which his nemesor could potentially face danger. It was nearly the entire job. But in most times, this mental space would be filled with reasonable threats - enemy combatants, assassination attempts, environmental hazards, sources of illness, hell, even attempts to impinge Zahndrekh's honor by generating lascivious blackmail or intoxicated pacts were Obyron's duty to stop with all appropriate force. But here, deep within Zahndrekh's palace on Gidrim and witnessing such a mundane task as interior decorating, Obyron found himself... not getting complacent, he told himself, but certainly bored. His idle mind danced with horrific fantasies of Zahndrekh being cleaved open by one of his own decorative glaives - incredibly unlikely, given that only the serfs were handling them by Obyron's strong recommendation - or crushed by a cabinet - unpleasant but nonlethal, seeing as his nemesor's metal form outweighed the cabinets themselves. They were morbid thoughts that he would never wish upon his lord, but considering such possibilities was his purview, and he had long learned to push discomfort aside and place overbearing caution in its spot.

In the middle of the merry tune he was humming, Zahndrekh cast a glance back at Obyron in the rear and chuckled. "You look like you're on the parade route, friend. Shield and glaive and all."

"Thank you, my lord."

"Bah. Too formal!" With a raise of a hand and a flare of his cape, Zahndrekh halted the procession and swept back to Obyron. He dusted an imaginary spot of dust from the vargard's collar. "We are home. Relax. As much as I appreciate your thoroughness in duty, I worry you've neglected the rest of yourself, losing your sense of the grander picture. A knife honed too far becomes a brittle scalpel, useless in battle."

He stepped back and winked, one ocular dimming and brightening. "I'm ordering you to have a little fun, Obyron."

Obyron himself blinked in mild surprise. "As you wish, my lord."

"Zahndrekh."

"Lord Zahndrekh."

"You cheeky thing!" The nemesor slapped his arm so lightly that his polish didn't even smudge. He chuckled as he took to the head of the line again. "Onwards, then! And I trust you to keep those two in line!"

The march began again, and Obyron allowed himself a long-suffering quiet rush of static at his lord's enthusiastic pep and step. But march he did, as did the unbothered servants, and the four entered the armory with no more fanfare than that which Zahndrekh occasionally trumpeted. After a quick glance and a consultation to the extensive environmental security scanners assured him that the room was in order, Obyron split off from his lord to ensure the relatively feeble standard Necrons didn't damage the dispersion shields as they wrestled them back onto their display racks. He could hear the nemesor humming his made-up marching cadence as he stalked back and forth up the various models of warglaives.

"My dear Obyron, which would look better? The ferrous glaze is coming back into style, I hear..." Obyron turned, a shrug already building in his great shoulders, when he felt a cool shard of dread pierce his reactor core. A mirror hung from floor to ceiling behind Zahndrekh, and in its reflection, there flickered the reality-warping microtear of an opening hyperspace oubliette.

His chronosense dropped instantly to a 1/10 rate. Even with time slowed to a honeyed crawl, Obyron knew not to waste it thinking. His was to act. He dropped the dispersion shield  and launched himself at Zahndrekh, aiming to collide on his side facing the assumed deathmark. Some subroutine or another calculated the oubliette's location based on the reflection and previous knowledge of the room's layout - behind the armory atrium's wall, next to a display of seized war banners. Once his lord was out of harm's way, Obyron would enjoy ripping the dishonorable little-

The buzzing crack of a synaptic disintegrator at 1/10 speed interrupted his thoughts.

His vision flashed red as his chronosense dropped another four-fold. He watched the beam of green energy - purely visual, auxilliary systems having already shut down to reduce the inevitable heat overload - spear through the air on a course for Zahndrekh's skull. The nemesor himself had not reacted, his face still in its faint smile as he held up a warglaive in each hand for Obyron to judge. The beam was still so very fast, too fast, too fast, I can't make it, please, Zahndrekh, move-

Reality refused to obey.

Obyron watched as the leading energy wave of the bolt collided with the side of Zahndrekh's smiling face just above the cheek ridge. He watched as the energy warped and melted the necrodermis into a tiny crater that grew and grew in his agonizingly slowed time until it popped, cracking a fissure across the nemesor's jaw that exposed the actuators underneath. He watched the main body of the lepton slug reach the softened armor and lance through it, through him, through the engrammatic cores that made Zahndrekh everything that he was, and rip the other side of his skull open in a violent blossom of flux-green fire, leaving him with one eye and half a grin now cut into a clueless smirk.

Obyron reached Zahndrekh just as he began to topple. True to his aim, he caught his nemesor on the side facing the assassin. His back was to the deathmark, and his face looked down on the small, clean, too small, too clean entry wound. Even in his bubble of slowed time, Obyron felt locked in place as the realization of what had happened refused to seep in. Zahndrekh is... Zahndrekh is...

No, he isn't. Defend him.

With as much grace as his form allowed, Obyron swept Zahndrekh to lie on the floor, swiveled up from his crouch, and lunged for the oubliette. From this angle, he could see matters clearly; the assassin's hyperspace hide was barely open large enough to accommodate the mouth of the barrel and the sights above it, and the hole was already shrinking. But anger was a powerful engine, and the vargard snagged the firearm's muzzle before it could shrink back entirely. With a sudden jerk that strained his servos, he dragged the surprised deathmark far enough out that one of its hands, still in a steadying grip, emerged.

Then, with a vicious, guttural, feral yell, Obyron reached in, grabbed the deathmark by the throat, dragged it fully from the oubliette, and slammed it bodily into the mirror beside Zahndrekh.

The gangly Necron crashed into the mirror like a ragdoll. Shards of glass exploded out from the impact, raining across both it and Obyron. The deathmark had dropped its gun and beat its fists against Obyron's grip - not dying, not able to suffocate, but certainly making its best attempt to get free. The vargard responded with a freight train haymaker to its skull, which left a dent in both the assassin's necrodermis and the wall behind it. A second punch left it dazed, and a third sent enough force through that its jaw sat crooked and torn on one side. Obyron had let his chronosense slip back to normal at some point - exactly when was a blur - and he could see its ocular actuators tighten with what little expression of pain their kind were still allowed.

With his hand still locked around the deathmark's throat, he threw it to the armory floor, put a knee against its entrail cabling, and squeezed. His oculars, burning bright with a fury far from exhausted, bored into its own single optic, and he spoke with the gravity of a monolith grinding onto a battlefield.

"Who sent you?"

The deathmark did not respond. He raised its neck as far as he could with his knee on its chest, then slammed it down on the floor again hard enough to splinter the paneling.

"Who sent you."

He bashed it again, more out of frustration than interrogation. The deathmark was entirely barren of heraldry. No paint nor chromatic necrodermis stained it, no dynastic polymorphisms made its form stand out, nor did it even carry a sigil upon its eerily blank cartouche. How could he protect Zahndrekh if he couldn't tell from what quarter this- 

Oh dead and damned gods.

Obyron froze in the middle of winding up his next punch and sent out a wide band interstitial message for all available resuscitation units to come to the armory. Guilt crashed over him, threatening to drown him among the sea of other wild passions had take him in the last... 20 seconds. He should have been focusing on his lord, not beating the lights out of his attacker for the hell of it. 

With effort, he rose to stand above the broken deathmark and watched as wan green lights flickered to life in the armory like lanternflies. A twenty-man squad of Immortals arrived first, their gauss blasters already lit a furious yellow in preparation to gun down any threat. Obyron waved them down before they started adding friendly fire to the day's disasters. Next were a pair of canoptek reanimators accompanied by no less than five cryptek attendants, who each entered with the tail end of an ongoing conversation on their vocal buffers, stopped short, stared at Obyron, stared at Zahndrekh, and finally exploded into a whirl of questions, orders, and action. Obyron didn't answer any of them, only stepped away from the battered deathmark and hovered over Zahndrekh. They were quick, at least, and didn't waste time pestering him with questions once he made it clear he wasn't in the mood.

A quartet of wraiths translated in next, which, at the direction of the crypteks, lifted Zahndrekh and the deathmark on gravitic repulsor floats and began ferrying them to the door of the armory. Obyron heard one of them tell him, distant somehow despite being mere cubits away, that translation could risk engram damage. He watched them leave with the two shattered bodies as he stood rooted in place.

When the crypteks had left with their constructs and the only witnesses were the Immortals and the two mindless servants still bearing their dispersion shield, Obyron broke his gaze away from the quiet doorframe and surveyed the scene of the assassination. The floor was slick with flux and coolant from both Zahndrekh and his killer. Now that time had passed - Obyron wasn't quite sure how much - the two pools had seeped together and begun to mix in iridescent swirls. It flowed into the dents where Obyron had slammed the deathmark, the craters making a rough line across the floor and up the wall to the now-broken mirror. The middle portion where the assassin's head had first made contact was in pieces, but the top and bottom were intact enough for Obyron to make out his distorted reflection. He was hunched, he saw now, and slicked in fluid, and steaming with heat, and overall had the bearing of something much more feral than a vargard should be. No wonder the crypteks had stared at him first.

With a swipe of his hand, Obyron sent the rest of the mirror crashing to the ground, called the scarabs to begin repairs, and marched out of the armory.

Chapter Text

When performed outside the frenetic chaos of war, the resurrection of a Necron lord was a meticulous, almost ritual affair. No expense was spared and no corners cut in assuring that they would return to as full of function as the crypteks' arts could grant. Zahndrekh in particular had a good prognosis; his engrams were well-synchronized with the static vaults of Gidrim, as Dagon, his favored technomancer, had surreptitiously installed a backup node reader in the slab his lord used as a "bed". Every time the nemesor attempted to sleep, a light scan of his data banks was sent to storage to serve as reference should he need it. But still, the redundant engram checks and nanometer-scale precision reconstruction of Zahndrekh's obliterated skull took days.

Obyron had taken to making rounds between the reconstruction forge and the hallway outside on an endless patrol, much to Dagon's irritation. He stalked through the buzzing space like some predatory night hunter, glowering at anyone who came too close. Four days in, Dagon had shoved a chair towards the vargard from across the room and told him to "either keep your maudlin little repulsor field in one spot, or remove yourself entirely." Obyron had chosen to sit.

The resurrection took an entire decan. Obyron was no master of the cryptomantic arts, but he could appreciate their work by the closing of Zahndrekh's wound and the crawl of progress bars on diagnostic monitors. When both seemed as filled as could be and he began to wonder how much work could still need to be done, he also appreciated when Dagon sent the boldest of his apprenteks to his corner to tell him outright that Zahndrekh was nearly ready to awaken.

There was no telling which of the crypteks - all of them, perhaps - had spilled the news over the interstices. But by the time Dagon had finished his work and poised himself to reignite Zahndrekh's core, a decently packed crowd of well-wishers and sycophants had crammed their way into the ward. Obyron, already having had his fill of impotent waiting, distracted himself from the final diagnostics by examining each of the attending nobles.

In better days, he would have been looking for glee or disappointment peeking out from the faces and eyes of the lords. Perhaps irritation that their attempt had failed, that they had wasted their payment on an incompetent assassin. Or, by their words, one might let slip that they knew a little more about the details of the assassination than they were meant to. As chief of security, Obyron had made it clear that the investigation was to be a closed affair until he could suss out the culprit. Unfortunately, the deathmasks of the Necrons could betray nothing, and the barely perceptible nanoscarabs flitting through the crowd reported nothing of note in their conversations. Most of it was idle chatter only, simply filling the time until they could press their agendas to Zahndrekh by practicing against each other instead.

"Did anyone see what happened?"

"Hierophet did, that green cryptek over there. Quite a gory scene, she said."

"Terrible, quite terrible. His poor vargard - fellow looked rather shaken."

"I hear it was one of the Silent King's agents."

"The Silent King is out past the edge of the galaxy. It cannot have been him."

"Not according to rumors. They say he's been making moves in Charnovokh space recently."

"There's also rumors that Orikan the Diviner really did managed to reach godhood and disappeared into the ether. Stop believing everything you read, fool."

"He disappeared into a hole in the ground on some Unclean hovel, I heard."

"Do you think Szarekh might try to dig him out?"

"You presume Szarekh is active at all!"

The other lords hushed the outburst, and they faded back into the unceasing drone of before. Nothing useful, nothing concrete from any of them.

But it has to be one of them, Obyron thought. No deathmark worked their trade without a lord at their back; to kill a noble without the protection of another was a fast track to a fate worse than death, and dishonorable besides. Obyron had heard stories of mad snipers going rogue, of course, one even supposedly taking a whole coreworld in his murderous rampage, but such tales were ghost stories meant to engender fear of the Deathmark cult, not meaningful reports. Besides, he had been keeping a keen eye on the now-broken assassin that had fired on Zahndrekh. In his lucid moments, he appeared sane enough.

Someone must have called the hit, but the crowd was giving him no leads on who. Zahndrekh was better at such puzzles, he resolved. Obyron would wait until his master could take a crack at the problem. He settled back into his role of looking intimidating beside his lord's sarcophagus.

He hovered close enough, in fact, that Dagon was forced to squeeze past him to unhook the last of the monitoring devices. As he did so, the technomancer met Obyron's glare with a tired murmur, quiet enough that only the two of them could hear.

"You would be in an even fouler mood if I rushed this and somehow damaged our overlord in the process. Would you kindly busy yourself with scaring off the court and not my apprenteks?" Dagon was tense, almost jittering with his ever-present anxieties, but he had always been so, from the moment he had first entered Sautekh voidspace millennia ago. He had mellowed significantly since those days. Whatever trauma he had escaped on that battered, limping freighter, Zahndrekh's protection and joviality had given him the safety to blossom into his full breadth of technomantic skill once more, which he quickly put to use in bringing the nemesor's whims to reality in thanks. The ghostwalk mantle, for instance, which hung from Obyron's own clavicle collar now, was Dagon's creation. The cryptek had been particularly reticent in explaining the mechanisms of that one. He had always been more close-lipped than the average cryptek, sometimes suspiciously so, content to keep his secrets rather than show off his knowledge. But, even if Obyron didn't know how it worked, the vargard had come to rely on the mantle far too often for him to not let a few of Dagon's little quirks slide. In this way, the two had an informal, mutual appreciation bordering on friendship, united by their well-earned dedication to Zahndrekh and their disdain for wasting time on the nobles' false civility.

He turned a fraction of a centimeter to look at Dagon. "Your apprenteks have done good work in repairing Zahndrekh. They have nothing to fear."

"Pfeh. Save your evaluation for once we turn him on fully."

"Do you think you have failed somehow?"

Dagon unhooked the last of the monitors, which gave an annoyed bleep. "No. I simply think optimism is a fool's choice."

"Then do you think I'm a fool, cryptek?"

"Well, are you an optimist?" said Dagon. Obyron snorted, and Dagon clapped him gently on the pauldron. "Then no, I do not think you are a fool. Except in, perhaps... we should probably make a speech of some sort to get these lot calmed down before awakening him fully. And by we, I mean you." The cryptek's finger came up to tap the rim of his empty nasal cavity in an ancient, playful, completely obsolete gesture. "Nose goes."

Obyron's oculars tightened a micron. "No wonder you and Zahndrekh get along," he muttered before stepping forward to stand before the lords. His throat buzzed low in a mockery of clearing it. The lords quieted a fraction as they noticed him, but they gave him no more than that.

"Esteemed nobles," he began, his voice firm. "Nemesor Zahndrekh is ready to reawaken. The House of Gidrim asks that you-"

"Took him long enough!" Someone grumbled right as the room's conversations took a dip in volume, letting everyone hear what was hopefully meant to be a remark to oneself. Obyron glared at the speaker - Lord Kethyst, a master duelist who had never been able to translate his physical finesse into subtlety of thought. For his part, he at least flinched slightly under the vargard's eye.

"That you silence yourselves to permit our lord a peaceful return. Thank you." He never had been good at speeches. Obyron's oculars flicked back toward Kethyst before returning to Dagon's side of the sarcophagus. Come to think of it, why was Kethyst here? Or Lord Akhenik, and Tjennet, and Uszerekh? None of them were here to kiss Zahndrekh's ass and would rather attend his funeral procession than his bedside. Could they be...

He directed the spying cloud of tiny nanoscarabs to align themselves in a grid between Zahndrekh and the crowd. Just a little extra precaution.

With quick, precise flourishes, Dagon's hands wove a cryptomantic sigil in the air above Zahndrekh's chest. Simultaneously, the other crypteks flicked on a complex array of switches in a coordinated rhythm, and with each one, another node on the nemesor's necrodermis flickered to full brightness. Dagon's sigil extended up to Zahndrekh's head, then bloomed out in a geomantic design around his vestigial nose and mouth, the calligraphy of which was too dense for Obyron to even try to translate. Then, the technomancer hooked his finger at the last knuckle, pushed it through the sigil, and pressed it against the seam of Zahndrekh's oral aperture. A resurrection hex, Obyron recognized, performed to its fullest, most exacting form.

There was a loud snap as Zahndrekh's reactor ignited. A blue haze flashed over the watching crowd before settling into a bright green glow that matched the glimmer slowly building in his oculars. By the time Zahndrekh was completely awake, his eyes staring at the ceiling above, the lords had finally calmed themselves to an acceptable whisper. Everyone waited for Zahndrekh to rise and, like all his prior resurrections, make some grand, deluded speech on his own unbeatable vigor and Death's incompetence.

But nothing happened.

Zahndrekh did not move, and not a sound passed through his vocal actuators. The longer Zahndrekh stayed still, just staring upwards, the more Obyron felt something cold and heavy seep into his flux. Had the hex failed?

"My lord?" he said.

The actuators of the nemesor's eyes twitched. Then, with the laboriousness of a great ship turning in the sea, Zahndrekh leaned his head just enough that he could catch sight of his vargard.

"Obyron?" His voice was just above a whisper and laced thick with fuzzy static. Obyron's chest tightened, and he looked at Dagon.

"Is he still damaged?" he snapped.

Dagon's single ocular furrowed as reams of diagnostics crossed his vision. "Everything I can fix, I did. There is nothing I can detect, physically, mentally, physiologically, hell, even psychically. Just... give him a minute to get his bearings."

"I'm... alive." Zahndrekh's eyes drifted back up to the ceiling panels. He said something else, but by now, the sea of whispers from the assembled lords had swelled to rival a passing doom scythe. Obyron readied himself to make a speech more in line with the soldiers' way of handling an unwieldy crowd when Zahndrekh began shakily peeling himself out of the sarcophagus. Obyron leaned over to lend his arm as a steadying bar, which the nemesor took without a thought. Still leaning, Zahndrekh met the gaze of his court at last.

"Lords of Gidrim and beyond, I..."

Then he stopped. Zahndrekh watched the lords as the lords watched him. It looked to Obyron as though, if they had been flesh, something had gotten caught in Zahndrekh's throat, then shriveled up and died. The imagery was not helped by the nemesor eventually coughing aloud before continuing.

"I will attend to matters after some rest. Good day." And he began shuffling toward the exit door.

The crowd erupted. An entire decan of absence had let dozens of personal crises and genuine concerns build up, all of which the lords chose to shout at the top of their vocal buffers to try to grab Zahndrekh's attention. The nemesor and vargard, who had been obliged to shuffle along too by Zahndrekh still leaning heavily on his arm, were blocked from exiting by the density of the group. Zahndrekh still tried to absently slip through any gap he saw, of which there were few, and which Obyron's bulkier build had no hope of fitting past. Finally, after taking an elbow to the ribcage on what he hoped was accident, Obyron called his warglaive to hand and slammed the butt of the weapon on the floor of the forge. That was enough to open a path.

Neither of them spoke as they left the noise of the resurrection chamber behind. Zahndrekh was leading them down a circuitous route to the central palace, one which took them through desiccated pleasure gardens rather than busy thoroughfares. Obyron might have objected on the grounds of the nemesor's shakiness, but he seemed to have worked most of it out soon after leaving the busy room. Now, his grip was loose, only occasionally using him to stabilize his balance or wordlessly steer him. 

He waited for Zahndrekh to break the silence first. He was dying to know what ailed him, for clearly there was something. The nemesor had not been resurrected often - Obyron was damn good at his job, and he could recount perhaps a dozen instances at most since their awakening from the Great Sleep. Each time, there had been no doubt that Zahndrekh had returned with his mind fully... not intact, per se, but back to its usual strangeness, for he would leap dramatically from the sarcophagus and tear monitor cables from his body like intravenous lines in a theater play. This quietness, this visible weakness being shown now, was downright eerie. Guilt bored into Obyron for being unable to fix this.

And for letting Zahndrekh be harmed in the first place, but he had decided to avoid processing that part just yet. Focus on making it right first.

So he walked, and tried to simply be present as Zahndrekh did as he wished. Perhaps Dagon was right, that he just needed to get his bearings. A walk around the palace grounds sounded like a decent way to do it. But as they walked, the route wandered into more and more obscure pathways, sometimes even passing through servants' alleys. Still, neither said a word, though Obyron's curiosity was growing to bursting. It reached its peak when, three hours later, the pair slipped out of an abandoned side passage, through a dusty hedge, and out into one of the first gardens they had passed through.

Obyron turned with an eyebrow raised to Zahndrekh, but the nemesor beat him to it.

"Obyron, where are we going?"

His other eyebrow came up to match. "I... thought you knew? I thought you were leading us somewhere."

"Well, I know how to navigate this place well enough. But not if I don't know our destination."

Obyron stared. His processors felt like they were running in such tight circles that the functions tripped over their own punctuation. Had Zahndrekh cracked completely? Why would an overlord ever presume his vargard to be leading the way? Some part of him remained unscrambled enough to send an urgent meeting request to Dagon with a glyph of unrestrained accusation while the rest of him struggled to find an answer.

"You... mentioned needing rest, my lord. Perhaps we are meant to go to your chambers?"

Zahndrekh stared back, and for a moment, Obyron worried he had triggered something venomous in his clearly addled circuitry. Then he nodded slowly and began gliding toward the appropriate gate, his hand still taking Obyron's forearm with it. "My chambers. Yes, that would make sense, wouldn't it?"

Obyron decided it was safe to assume the question was rhetorical, grunted his usual assent, and allowed himself to be led back into the depths of the palace.

When they at last reached the opulent corridor leading to the nemesor's private quarters, Zahndrekh began slowing their pace until, by the time they finally stood in front of the doors, the two could feasibly have been outrun by a tectonic plate. There they stopped, and Zahndrekh let Obyron's arm free. He looked to the door handle, then inspected the rest of the door with some strange distaste in his eyes, as though he were trying to find some reason to reject the whole thing and cast it into nonexistence.

Obyron decided to break the silence for once. "If the door is not to your liking, shall I order the servants to have it replaced? We never did get to finish your redecorations."

Zahndrekh laughed. It was a sharp, bitter, hollow sound, so unlike his normal self that Obyron nearly flinched. "You... thank you, Obyron. But it wouldn't make any difference, would it?"

"Pardon?" Maybe his fashion sense had been somehow knocked out of him.

With the gravity of a tomb door sliding closed, and with oculars cinched tight in anguish, Zahndrekh turned to face Obyron directly. "Oh, my dear vargard. What use does someone dead have for such pretty things?"

Chapter Text

Obyron was speechless. No, that was not quite it. He had a hundred words trying to escape him all at once, none of them patient or organized enough to wait their turn, and so they clamored at the gate of his vocal buffer and clogged it until all that came out was a staticky buzz. "No," Zahndrekh continued uninterrupted. "There's no need to change the decor anymore. I dare say my time to make such marks on the world is over, isn't it?" He ran a hand over the gold filigree with a screech of metal on metal, which he made no appearance of hearing, and looked wistfully over the design.

Something finally busted through the dam. "Szarekh's teeth, Zahndrekh, what are you talking about?" Not his finest choice, but it was something.

"Death, loyal vargard. It seems it's come for me at last."

Obyron's vocals stoppered up again. Evidently, Zahndrekh's delusions had taken a morbid turn upon awakening, one which the nemesor had never before considered. Certainly he was mad enough to attempt to eat air and entertain aliens as guests, but to think that he was dead?

"My lord, are you not currently... up and moving?" he said tentatively, not wishing to spark something further in the nemesor's clearly altered mental state.

"Wandering is the duty of ghosts and spirits, is it not?"

Ah. And now wandering an afterlife, which most necrontyr had abandoned belief in even before the biotransference. The old religions had been demoted to myths long before the last days of the necrontyr; the conclaves of the crypteks had succeeded in cracking open the secrets of the universe so utterly that there was little room left for gods. Only a few temples had persisted, many of them secretive, but just enough to keep the practices alive. Obyron himself could not remember if he had ever paid much attention to their ways in life, but he did have a cursory overview of the myths from Zahndrekh's stories and from encyclopaedic wanderings that filled his more idle days.

"I've been wondering as we wandered if you are not my Obyron at all, but instead simply Aza'gorod wearing his skin. Taking me from my deathbed, leading me through the halls and all. I admit, I've never put much stock in the ways of the old priests until now. Better late than never, as they say." Zahndrekh's voice started almost jokingly, but by the end, his vocal buffer choked on itself in a digital sob. Obyron took his lord's shoulders in both hands and twisted him, forcing him to meet his oculars.

"Nemesor, with all due respect, stop this. You are not dead."

"But I did die, Obyron. I felt it. The bullet slipping through my skull and brain. I heard a voice calling to me from beyond. I am dead. And if you are not The Nightbringer come to take me, then you must-" Pained static overtook his vocals for a moment. "You have to let me go."

Obyron's head shook slowly in disbelief. "Zahndrekh. You are not..."

"I don't want to go, Obyron. But I must." The remainder of the nemesor's façade cracked. He shook under Obyron's grip, and the vargard found himself suddenly pulling Zahndrekh close, the cheek of the latter's deathmask hitting his chestplate with a light clang.

It was inappropriate, unprecedented in any official records, for a vargard to be in such a position. Between the gap in power between a lord and a soldier, and that the elite bodyguards were typically chosen for being physically more powerful than their charges, it was universally deemed unacceptable for either party to initiate intimate contact of any degree. A noble’s mind was his domain alone to defend, according to honor, hence why Obyron had long been leery of invading too far into leading Zahndrekh's mind back to sanity. But in matters of scandal, that which made it into official records was no indication of reality, and Obyron had, multiple times, been overcome with an urge to protect Zahndrekh so strong as to overwhelm his sense of propriety. He told himself that the nature of his position, that of constant companion, protector, and confidante, made such moments inevitable, and he was probably far from the only vargard to embrace their nemesor in secret.

The nemesor was by nature a logical man. Perhaps that was how he could bring him back to reality.

"You are not dead," he murmured, his voice so low that Zahndrekh heard it better through the conduction of his plating than through the air. "Dagon-" Not repaired. Don't push the delusion. "Healed you, do you remember?"

"I awoke in a sarcophagus, Obyron, what else was I supposed to think happened?" Not for the first time, Obyron growled his exasperation with his race's melancholic obsession with the aesthetic of death.

"An unfortunate design choice on the part of the crypteks, but no, that was not your casket."

"But I felt the veil pass over me as we left that place, and now you have led me here, to what is clearly meant to be my first gate of passage to beyond."

"Veil?"

"Yes, just before reaching the mourners." The nanoscarabs. They hadn't moved out of the way when Zahndrekh passed them, just pushed aside, but even the tiny particulate drones could have registered on the skin of a Necron. Obyron cursed silently.

"Alright. If you are dead, then where is your body?"

"Oh, Obyron. In the sarcophagus, I assume. Why else would everyone be looking at it? I had thought the separation of the spirit took place a little after the funeral, not during, but I suppose the crypteks can't get everything right all the time."

"Did you not look back, then, to ensure there was a body there?"

"Ah!" He wagged a finger at Obyron in a loose, half-hearted attempt at his old jovial self. "A test. You make a good psychopomp. For a spirit to look back at their body is to risk becoming bound to it, and decay with it. I remember that much at least from some passing interest in mythology as a child. Who knew it would be of real use someday!"

In the seconds that followed, Obyron devised a detailed and contingent-laden plan to dig the supposed corpse of Orikan the Diviner out of that backwater Imperial world, get Dagon to extract what he could of his engrams, and apply the knowledge to building a time machine so he could go back to the earliest days of the Necrontyr exclusively to find whichever ancient priest had come up with that little quirk of ritual and throw them off a temple roof.

It was becoming clear that he could not dissuade Zahndrekh from his delusion directly. It wasn’t as if Obyron had had much success in correcting his lord's other madnesses, but he had supposed it was worth a shot. So now, in the words of the nemesor himself, in the event that one cannot go through a problem, figure out how to go around. Or, more ideally, convince it to dance around you instead. If Zahndrekh believed him to be Aza’gorod, The Nightbringer, the classical psychopomp god who reaped the souls of the living and carried them off to the land of the dead, then Obyron had inadvertently been given a rather significant sway over the nemesor’s thinking. His duty remained - to keep Zahndrekh safe - even if he was unpracticed at this particular method. I just need to keep him contained until I can find a way to fix this.

"Nemesor," Obyron said, keeping his tone even, "do you know what your next step is?"

Zahndrekh's energy fell again, and Obyron felt a shade of guilt at breaking his momentary good mood. "Nothing until nightfall, if I remember correctly. Then I must... follow the sun, somehow, as it passes beyond the horizon. My, I really should have paid more attention to the old rituals." He paused, considering. "Do you think it is too late to study for the journey ahead? I daresay I'm a bit lacking in my postmortem education."

Obyron’s head tilted slightly. “What do you think you’ll need to know?”

Zahndrekh’s tilted the same direction, moreso. “Aren’t you meant to be my guide? You would know better than I would.”

Until nightfall, he said? Obyron checked his chronometer. Late morning, by Gidrim’s cycle. It would be nearly 20 hours before the sun set. It wasn't much time, but enough to at least figure out his path forward.

“I will have relevant texts retrieved for you, my lord.”

Zahndrekh's oculars flicked back to the door with the same distaste as when the pair had first approached it. “If this is meant to be the gate through which I pass into the world beyond, I would rather make the trek to the library myself. Is it, Obyron, Aza'gorod? Is this door my point of no return? It would be rather poetic, I think. Bit of a closed circle.”

“No, nemesor.” It wasn’t a lie - Zahndrekh was not dead in the first place. But taking the authority of the god of death and knowing that his lord would trust his word so deeply felt like something vile was gnawing his armor all over.

“Ah! In we go, then.” Zahndrekh opened the door and entered just as he had a million times before, and Obyron felt the vile specter’s jaws close completely. 

“Please remain here, my lord. The library will send someone down without delay.” He did send a quick message to the chief librarian to assemble a collection of whatever she deemed appropriate regarding the ancient religions, as well as to send him a copy for digital download. Zahndrekh often preferred to manually read rather than take in information via interstitial link. Come to think of it, in those tense battles where nanoseconds mattered and download was the only way to keep pace, Obyron was unsure of how Zahndrekh balanced the sudden appearance of data in his mind against his belief that said mind was enshrined in meat. Now was hardly the time to ask, he supposed.

Zahndrekh had already breezed deep into the room and flung himself onto the entirely metal bed in a clatter of decorative tiles and armor. “What a day. Yes, I would like to stay here for a time. I may as well savor it,” he said with his face buried in the headrest.

Obyron tried, but he could not think of anything more to say, and nor could he bear to remain here much longer while he searched for an appropriate response. And so, he only crossed his wrists in salute and made to exit. “By your leave, my nemesor.”

Zahndrekh raised his head just enough to look at him and wave him off before clanging back onto the slab. “Please don’t make me come look for you when nightfall comes.”

Whatever phantom of guilt had bitten Obyron now started a death roll. “Of course, Zahndrekh.” He closed the door as quietly as he could behind him.

With an interstitial pulse and a wait of mere seconds, a full unit of lychguard, each bearing a dispersion shield and hyperphase sword, translated into the hallway outside Zahndrekh’s quarters. They saluted Obyron, and he put one closed fist to his chest and nodded in return. They may not have been his own personal unit, who had been lost in an unremembered battle at some point through the ages, but they were fine warriors nonetheless, and he gave them the respect they had earned in life.

“Guard him. Let none but myself enter these chambers, and should the Lord Nemesor leave of his own volition, accompany him, and inform me of his position.” As much as he really wasn’t keen on Zahndrekh wandering around, it wouldn’t do to put him under house arrest. He felt he was overstepping enough already.

The lychguard saluted again before taking up positions throughout the hallways surrounding Zahndrekh’s quarters. Obyron trusted them to do the job well, and so he wasted no time with ensuring such and instead dove into the translocation arrays on a path for Dagon’s workshop.

—

Normally, Obyron would have been charitable enough to translocate just outside the cryptek’s forge, then go through the polite hassle of knocking, waiting, and entering by the conventional door. This time, he teleported into the space directly. A rumbling growl was already buffered in his vocal array and on its way out as soon as his physical form was coherent enough to voice it.

"Dagon, what-"

"No, I don't know what happened!"

The particulate lights of translation faded, and Obyron looked around the cryptek's forge with a glare intended for the chief technomancer. Directly in front of him was a sight that caught him in a double take; Zahndrekh was laying in his sarcophagus once again. But this time, the nemesor was merely a shimmering mimic, a chrysoprase projection emitted by an orb Obyron now noticed above the sickbed. Dagon's subordinates clamored around the hologram with the same chattering, arguing fervor that they had when the real Zahndrekh had been under their care. Most of the crypteks (excluding their most passionate, who could remain in debate uninterrupted even through the appearance of a vargard on the warpath) jumped at Obyron's sudden intrusion. They naturally looked towards Dagon for guidance, and so he tracked their monoculars to find his target.

The technomancer himself was sitting in the same chair, in the same spot, that Obyron had taken during the later days of Zahndrekh's repairs. He held nothing in his hands but a simple laser pointer, and Obyron was taken by a flash of irritation by Dagon's apparent inactivity.

"Was my urgency not clear enough, technomancer?" Obyron stalked directly towards Dagon to stand beside the chair, his arms crossed and his nodal array visibly disapproving.

Unphased, Dagon waved a hand at the crowded sarcophagus. "Too many drivers in the chariot. I can oversee them just as well from here."

"This is severe, Dagon."

"I am aware, Vargard. I know how to run my lab." Obyron readied himself to return a jab, but Dagon verbally barrelled past him. "You came at a decent enough time. We have something worth showing."

A yellow-plated apprentek gently passed a chrysoprase emitter orb to Dagon, who activated it and gestured for Obyron to look. Hovering above the technomancer's lap was now a holographic replica of Zahndrekh's head and mantle rendered at twice its true size and halfway through being obliterated by the deathmark's bullet. The model rotated slowly in space, and rather than meet its empty oculars as it faced him, Obyron instead turned back to Dagon.

The cryptek was looking at him already. "I will save the jargon for those who appreciate it. I imagine you would only be interested in two points of our discoveries; first, that after reconstructing the scene of the assassination using the nemesor's injuries and the armory's security auspices, yes, we did repair everything that our lord needed repairing. Flawlessly." Silently, Obyron doubted that, given Zahndrekh's self-proclaimed new spirituality, and apparently, enough made it through to his deathmask that Dagon scowled back. "I am one of the finest technomancers in the Empire, Obyron. If a single one of his circuits is even an angstrom off its moorings, I'll march up the Stormlord himself and beg his forgiveness. Forehead to the ground and everything."

Dagon's tone was airy, as though he meant to lighten the mood, but Obyron could only hear the crack in Zahndrekh's voice only minutes earlier. "I am not trying to insult you, but for all that you say, he still clearly isn't well."

"Still? Eh, give him a few days, maybe a good battle or other strategic quandry to fascinate him out of it. There's nothing left to fix!"

"Zahndrekh is convinced that he's dead," Obyron said. His voice dropped low to barely above a whisper's volume. He wasn't keen on letting the apprenteks in on the situation after the fiasco with the court at the resurrection.

Dagon's vocal array stopped mid-rebuttal with a click. "That... I was not aware of." His single eye began dancing over the holographic corpse with poorly-restrained intrigue.

"And the second point you wished to share?" Obyron steered him back before the cryptek could get lost in thought.

"Oh. Ah, yes." The projection in Dagon's hand flipped to a wireframe version of the same model. Only the edges of the millions of polygons were visible, and though the display was dense with green light, Obyron could make out the rough outline of the bullet's entry tunnel. It was a jagged tear, and he could see in detail how the sempiternal weave had cracked inward, sending shards like fiberglass into the wound and ripping, blooming inward to exacerbate the damage, piercing flux capillary lines and impaling engram wafers with-

"Simpler and less personal, this one," Dagon said with the barest hint of sheepishness. Obyron looked up at him. "The slug was hollow."

"Hollow point?"

"Hollow body. The entire slug, not just the tip." The projection zoomed in to focus on the capsule shape of the lepton slug as it rampaged through the model Zahndrekh's engram cores. "This is the last moment during which the projectile was intact enough to estimate its shape. It had disintegrated by the time the nemesor made it here," Dagon said with a gesture around the lab, "having dissipated into electrons as leptons tend to do."

Oh, hell, he's veering into particle physics. "Was there anything inside the slug, then?"

"Patience, I swear I'm getting there. As of now, we can't say for certain what may have been inside, if anything at all. We only know that it was hollow because of the resulting shrapnel pattern. But..." Dagon raised his hand not holding the chrysoprase emitter and aimed his laser pointer at a processor rack nearly the size of its fussing cryptek attendant. The beam wavered wildly, barely managing to stay fixed on the computer in the few seconds the pointer remained lit. Obyron, irritated though he was, cocked his head slightly and prepared to ask if the technomancer was damaged in some way.

"The slug may have dissipated, but particle decay leaves products," Dagon continued, disregarding his concern. "Detectable products. That entire engine is currently reverse-simulating the decay according to Zahndrekh's intake scan data. If it works, I should be able to estimate the mass of the original slug, followed by, when combined with the shrapnel-based geometric reconstruction, the size of the hollow."

Dagon had looked rather pleased with himself for a moment until Obyron spoke. “And how does this help, exactly?”

“Well, it's better than knowing nothing! I may not be able to tell precisely what the load was, but at least we can narrow it down. And, now we know there was a possibility of there being a load at all, which is more than we knew before.”

Obyron's shoulders fell. “This is hardly much of a lead, Dagon. All we really have is the deathmark, still.”

"You’ll be better able to tell if he’s lying if you already have a hint on what his modus operandi was. Consider this your own form of ammunition. Though, you'd probably have better luck getting something useful out of him if you let me put him back together first," Dagon grumbled.

After the assassin had been floated out of the armory, he had made it far enough into Dagon's care that the technomancer had already begun applying his arts to the broken deathmark by the time Obyron (still shaking himself out of shock) had sent the order to have him moved to a holding cell instead. The cryptek and vargard had snipped at each other over interstitial communications, one concerned with the slipperiness of the assassin should he awaken, the other focusing on his discomfort with letting someone remain un-fixed as a matter of personal pride. Obyron had won, with the caveat that the deathmark remained in stasis to prevent further degradation until Dagon got his hands on him.

"Have you not been busy with the investigation, and Zahndrekh's repairs before that?" Obyron gestured with an elbow toward Dagon's idle hands and laser pointer.

"I have. I'm not now." Dagon, in turn, shrugged toward the processor rack chewing through its work. "We're simulating individual subatomic particles for a mass about, eh, big," he said while holding up one of his thumbs in indication of size. "This will take some time, during which I have little better to do than wring my hands."

“I'm hesitant to let a live assassin persist on Gidrim, vulnerable as we are at the moment,” Obyron considered. "Can you disable his hyperspace oubliette access?"

"Temporarily or permanently?"

"Permanently."

A whish of static left Dagon's vocals in imitation of a sigh. "Yes."

“Then do so. And do it before you wake him up - leave no chance for him to go free, or it’ll be on your head.”

“Bit overkill, don’t you think?”

“No,” Obyron said flatly.

With a shake of his head, Dagon stood and walked past the vargard and the apprenteks toward a second reconstruction sarcophagus that had been pushed off to a corner of the forge. There, he shuffled the scattered devices of his crypteks into a rough stack and set the pile on yet another cluttered repair bed before turning back and plugging the first sarcophagus into a niche in the wall. Coolant started to hiss through the coffin’s internals.

“I saw what damage you inflicted on the poor sod before you had him dragged off to the brig. Even if he still had his oubliette, he'd still have to be able to drag himself into it in order to make any use of the thing. Don't worry - he won't be going anywhere anytime soon.”

“Make sure of it. All he needs to be is conscious enough to answer questions.”

“Why, are you just going to beat him to death again?” If he had had a monocular capable of it, Obyron could almost hear the technomancer narrowing his eye at him.

“Probably not.” Obyron turned to leave the forge. “Inform me when he is stable enough for interrogation.”