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“It’s been dreadful, truly.” Zahndrekh waved his empty teacup through the air in a dramatic flourish, complete with a sigh and all. “Not a moment of peace since this began. Imotekh, the poor boy; I do think he needed a break, though.”
Trazyn nodded in sympathy. “I presume the Stormlord’s reputed fury has been only made worse by all this?” He lifted his own mug (Hasemeph, porcelain, 34th century) and mimicked taking a sip with his own lipless mouth. Unlike many of his peers, he found that indulging the nemesor’s delusions of fleshliness to be more beneficial than wearisome, as since he had been ostracized by the sane among his court, Zahndrekh was more than happy to take any positive interaction as a chance to unload the tide of thought that tended to build up within him. This tide was reliably intriguing and occasionally useful, particularly to Trazyn’s interests in both the ways of the Necrontyr and the dealings of the Sautekh. In short, he enjoyed the gossip.
With a light chuckle, Zahndrekh surveyed his surroundings on his side of the holoprojection as if checking for eavesdroppers. Trazyn saw only the unmoving sliver of Zahndrekh’s vargard in the camera’s view (apparently not having realized he was in the shot) and if so, that should be enough to deter anyone too untrustworthy. Zahndrekh, too, appeared to think himself safe. “Imotekh really is a kinder man than he gives on, you know. Certainly, the wars have given him a hard shell to crack, and he is better for it, but there remains a nobility in his core. Ah, but now, he paces like a leashed tiger beetle; his throne awaits, and he is loath to leave it for long.”
“Hm. Does he worry an attempt will be made upon it?”
“Not with it in the state it is. The court fears the palace after the havoc wreaked on the place, and all procedures are to occur over remote contact instead of meeting there. Until the conclaves are done with their work, none shall sit on the throne of Mandragora!” Zahndrekh cackled and flung an arm wide in emphasis, then took another sip in satisfaction at his own theatrics. “No, in his words, he has far too much to deal with already without an angry ghost putting him even further behind schedule.” Trazyn snorted.
The latest and tastiest of Zahndrekh’s tales today had been on the subject of the most recent drama to plague the Sautekh Dynasty. It seemed that, in the briefest of terms, there was something haunting the court. Or the palace complex, or perhaps just Imotekh himself and merely spilling out to affect those around him. There had been no consensus yet among the absolute stampede of crypteks who had come to Mandragora to investigate this baffling occurrence, and Trazyn didn’t expect them to ever reach unanimity until it was no longer relevant. Until then, Imotekh’s proclamation of it being a “ghost” seemed apt enough.
It had begun with a stylus. Phaeron Imotekh’s stylus, specifically, one of an effectively infinite supply he could requisition at any time, but as it had been one he was using at the time, it had gained the inenviable status of being the target of the Stormlord’s personal ire. According to Zahndrekh, during a grueling session of bulk approval and denial of a stack of intra-dynastic trade agreements, this infamous stylus chose to begin falling from the phaeron’s desk at a steadily increasing rate. Once an hour at the beginning, perhaps, then slowly escalating until it practically launched itself from the table every time it left his hand. No orientation stopped it, and any attempt to block it would result in the blocking object eventually sliding out of the way and being taken down in turn.
Irritated at having to pick up his own stylus so often (he had seconded a scarab to do so, only for the poor canoptek to go tumbling off the edge itself), Imotekh decided to fix the problem himself. Assuming that the desk was perhaps tilted, he knelt below it and looked to see if there was a quick repair he could muster, such as propping up a table leg or siccing the tumbling scarab on a loose weld.
According to Imotekh this is the point at which he heard a chuckle on the wind. It was also the point at which the entire stack of datapads and scrolls Imotekh had been signing fell upon him in a horrific attack of gravity, which he fought back against with an uproar of cursing leftover from his days as a field commander and entirely unbefitting of a phaeron. Thus was the court of Mandragora informed that the coming days were about to be hellish.
At first, though everyone was on edge due to Imotekh’s irritation, the incident was assumed to be a one-off mishap. It was soon followed by a rapidly growing body of evidence that something was improbably unfortunate about the palace of the Sautekh crown. The floor of a hall was found to be inexplicably wet and slippery, which sent Magistrate Djedenn into a flailing dance trying to keep their balance in front of their overlord. An entire reactor complex nearly went into meltdown after its entire cohort of maintenance scarabs had been flipped on their backs and stuck scrabbling at the air. The temperature of the throne room began rapidly swinging between uncomfortably hot and cold; as this was high enough to be deemed uncomfortable by Necron standards, it unfortunately resulted in the immolation of a number of victory banners in the heat before anyone was brave enough to comment on it to their phaeron, having assumed that the thermostat was his domain alone. A pack of hapless Flayed Ones made their way into the palace; according to the only one of their number still capable of speech, they weren’t quite sure how they got there themselves, only that it wasn’t at all their intention to emerge from the Ghostwind to land on Imotekh’s own lap as they had.
Equipment broke. Everything seemed to go missing at the worst time. The improbabilities stacked up tremendously, and the superstitious began to whisper of curses. Imotekh himself seemed to be the lodestone of the mess, being afflicted by a constant barrage of tiny inconveniences that, over the course of a mere two weeks, broke him utterly.
Zahndrekh took another sip, shook his head, and tutted aloud. “Of all things, a sticky note. That is what it took to make him call it. I hoped he would hold out for another decan, at least.”
“A note?”
“Yes, adhered to his back. ‘Kick me,’ it said. A child’s prank.”
Trazyn hid a snort behind his mug. “I can only imagine his fury.”
“Oh, you have no idea. I was in a remote meeting with him at the time, along with many of the other overlords who could not attend in person. We were discussing the events in question, you see, when the Phaeron happened to turn his back toward the orbuculum for a moment. Ogdovakh made the comment; a fool, but at least attempting to be kind in his bluntness. Imotekh called - well, shouted for a recess immediately, and now here we are.” The nemesor raised one arm toward the pleasure garden behind him, likely imagining it in full spring bloom rather than the dusty clutter of twigs it truly was. “Vacation. Somewhat. I still have my own court to contend with, but at least I have reason to avoid the Mandragoran vipernest for now.”
“So you do.” Trazyn lounged back in his own throne to match Zahndrekh’s ease, settling himself into the plush, unnecessary comfort of his favorite reading chair (Macraggian, granite and velvet, Crusade Era). “If I might pry a bit, Zahndrekh-”
“Oh, by all means.”
“-what exactly does the Stormlord plan to do about this… these occurrences? Surely he doesn’t plan to have an exorcism.”
“Ha! He may very well! He did seem quite adamant about calling it a ghost, much to the crypteks’ irritation.”
“If I might again, I too find it a little difficult to believe.”
“What, do you not believe in ghosts?” Zahndrekh chuckled as if at his own joke, but stopped upon looking at Trazyn’s impassive deathmask. “You do not believe in ghosts, truly?”
“Nemesor, I am regularly called a tomb robber, and while I dislike the choice of terminology, I do have a fair share of burial goods in my galleries. If ghosts were real, I would have quite a few hounding me by now.” It would perhaps not be a good idea to bring up the matter of their own undeath, Trazyn decided, and instead chose to end his rebuttal with an emphatic gulp of air from his empty cup.
With a flutter of smugness across his nodes, Zahndrekh winked. “Are you suuure you aren’t haunted? Perhaps they are simply waiting for you to let your guard down, to make ironic statements such as that.”
“I am certain, Zahndrekh. Ghosts do not exist! Once a being is dead, it stays dead.”
There was a corpse in his mind’s eye, charred void-black and twisted into an agonized curl.
Zahndrekh forged ahead. “I am not so sure of that. It is good to keep the dead in mind - it is how we keep them close. And is that not what a ghost is, in the end? I think we can indeed be haunted.”
Trazyn touches the husk with a trembling hand, with a gentleness usually reserved for the most delicate of ancient papyri or fragile organics, and he whispers a name that chokes his vocal processors.
Trazyn set his mug down on the coffee table (Ogdobekh, copper and metagold, 113th century) and laced his fingers together. “I protest. Remembering the dead should not require being harassed by their memory.”
Trazyn’s hand comes away black with soot as the plating beneath him crumbles to ash, and he cries out in a manner a soulless being should be capable of.
“Ha! Perhaps being dead is rather unpleasant, and they are simply taking it out on us living- are you quite alright, old chap?”
“Hm?”
“You look ill.”
Trazyn took stock of himself. Were he a being of flesh, Zahndrekh would probably be correct: his hands were shaking; beads of condensate were running fat down his face and neck; he had drooped down to lean his elbows on his knees, curled and defensive; his voice quavered, and he hesitated to use it again lest he look even weaker than he felt. But Zahndrekh was eyeing him with an annoying look of concern, and so Trazyn reset his vocal actuators and affected a clearing of his throat. “Merely tired.”
“...I am sorry, Trazyn. It had slipped my mind.”
Trazyn slumped down again. Damnit. “Orikan. Yes.”
With a sympathetic hum, Zahndrekh set his own teacup aside and faced him fully through the projection. “It is good for you to remember him. I know the two of you were close; he mentioned you often during asides at Mandragora.”
“Ha. Nothing positive, I imagine.”
“From what I understood of him, the fact that he thought of you at all was high praise, and to do so often was practically obsession. You have done well by him.”
Trazyn shook his head absently. Orikan the Diviner, Last Seer of the Necrontyr, had met his end below the surface of Serenade, and Trazyn had been the one to watch him go. One final blaze of divine glory, the culmination of his millions of years of research and meditation - Orikan had become a god, only to then die as one. There was no telling precisely what happened, as the energies involved were so intense and arcane that the memory of them only remained as the searing agony of being burnt alive in the mere corona of his new god’s ascension. But in the end, he knew only that the Deceiver’s shards had been utterly consumed, and with them, Orikan too had perished, leaving only an empty husk of ash that disintegrated to the touch. Perhaps the power had been so great that there was no room left within the god for Orikan to remain. Trazyn had no way of knowing.
He did, at least, leave a body. And with the care reserved for the burials of phaerons, Trazyn had taken what remained of Orikan into a stasis-stabilized tesseract vault and borne him back to Solemnace. There he lay now, resting in a labyrinthian tomb decorated with scenes of Orikan’s great victories in life, of his works and breakthroughs and the kings he had crowned, of his apotheosis wrought in gold and gems, much of it inscribed or painted by Trazyn’s own hand. The ceilings were vaulted with spars of tectonically-stable strangesteel engineered to last longer than the planet itself, and it was packed high with all good things deserved by the highest of honored nobles. The corpse itself had been too fragile to reposition, and so it had been placed in a triple-layered sarcophagus of purest metagold carved to represent the Diviner as if he had been laying in peaceful slumber. The entire complex had been sealed with the mark of Trazyn himself, and only when it was sealed had the overlord finally collapsed on his knees before the archway blocked with necrodermis bricks laid by his own hand, ordered his aides and servants to leave him, and screamed.
“No,” said Trazyn, and set his mug aside. “I do not think I have done well by him.”
Zahndrekh emitted a sound akin to clicking his tongue. “You are picking at the wound instead of letting it heal.”
“Are you saying I’m wallowing?”
“I’m saying you are letting your perfectionism keep you from grieving. What is done is done, and though I would never ask you to just get over it, neither can you stay in acute mourning for the rest of your life. How long has it been?”
Four hundred and eighty six years. Such a number would be impossible for the fleshly Zahndrekh, though. “Just over a year.”
“Still relatively raw, I understand.” The nemesor took up his teacup again and mimed a long sip. “I apologize for pressing the matter of spirits and hauntings. I fear that, once again, your expertise exceeds mine.”
Trazyn was silent for a time, as was Zahndrekh, though the latter continued sipping at his tea until, surely, if there had been anything there in the first place, it would have been emptied twice over. Regardless, at the very moment Trazyn braced himself to speak some word of thanks, his next words were killed most violently by the sudden interjection of a high priority alert through his interstitial connection.
Irritation flashed across his nodes, met with a curious tilt of the head from Zahndrekh. “Is something the matter?”
“Unfortunately.” Trazyn rose from his throne and shook his cloak tiles straight. “My apologies, Zahndrekh, but it seems I have yet another excuse to push off my grieving for now. Something most urgent demands my attention.”
Undisturbed, Zahndrekh nodded. “Far be it from me to steal even more of your time. It was pleasant hearing from you, though - perhaps you’ll have time again before I must return to the affairs of the greater dynasty?”
The alert pinged another twelve times before Trazyn managed to fully extricate himself from Zahndrekh’s hospitality, a process involving multiple rounds of goodbyes, schedule making, and “one last question”s that Trazyn neither had time for nor could bear to cut short. But extricate himself he did, with promises of another meeting “soon-or-so.”
And so he was already in a sour mix of exasperation and melancholy when he arrived at the scene of the crime.
The War in Heaven gallery was typically a somber place. Trazyn preferred it that way, and he had made his preferences explicitly clear to all his staff. He had even had a plaque engraved just outside the gallery’s entrance demanding some basic dignity from any visitors that might end up here, even if Solemnace didn’t get much in the way of willing tourists yet. Unfortunately, the sheer number of lychguard and crypteks clogging up the place right now made silence an impossibility. The design decision to make the hall particularly prone to acoustic reverb (a tasteful choice, Trazyn thought - his artistic vision sought to evoke the loneliness of the ages, to emphasize the solitude of all that was lost in those ancient wars - or something like that) was now a catastrophic, overstimulating cacophony of clanging necrodermis plating and a dozen people trying to talk over it at once.
When he finally found Sannet among the throng, the cryptek took one look at him and winced in sympathy. Apparently, Trazyn wasn’t hiding his displeasure well, but neither was anyone quieting down about it.
“Obeisance, Overlord - or would you prefer to get this over with quickly?”
“In the absence of Necron-grade analgesics, yes, let’s get to the matter at hand.” Trazyn pinched the bridge of his nasal cavity. “What, precisely, is the issue?”
“As briefly as I can,” Sannet pointed two of his spindly fingers toward one of the doors dividing the gallery into subsections. The hall he pointed to focused on leisure activities of the ancient Necrontyr, containing everything from musical instruments to gaming boards to a taxidermied racing dytiscide. “There is a… an energy being of some sort. In there. Huntmaster managed to shoo it in and lock the door, as it was getting concerningly close to some rather delicate artefacts.”
“An ‘energy being’?” Trazyn went silent then and moved the conversation to a private interstitial connection. “Not a C’tan, is it?” Since the annihilation of the shards below Serenade, there had always been a level of concern within him that the rest of the Deceiver’s consciousness may try to enact revenge for Trazyn’s part in the insult.
Sannet reciprocated. “Not a C’tan, my lord - its signature fails to match any known specimens.”
“Do we know if it is hostile?”
“No, Overlord.”
“Do we know what it is capable of?”
“No, Overlord.”
“Is it trying to get out?”
“Thankfully, no, Overlord. We can’t quite tell what it’s doing, if anything.” With a few taps of his stylus in the air, Sannet drew forth a holographic projection of the interior of the closed gallery. It was a three-dimensional model hanging midair, tinged with the jade of the projector but otherwise a perfect recreation. Between the cabinets and dioramas, the being was immediately visible as a blotchy figure of pure white on the cameras’ limited spectra. Only its outline was visible, and even that was an unintelligible blob according to the camera.
“Well. Are there any alarms for damage or interference being tripped within that room?”
Sannet flicked the projection over to a chart readout momentarily. “A few temperature warnings. Whatever it is, it’s radiating heat like a skolopendra in… well, heat. Nothing immediately damaging, but should it rise a few more degrees, we may start seeing degradation of the more fragile artefacts, gutstrings or playing cards and the like.”
Reshaping his necrodermis into a furrowed brow and frown was an entirely unnecessary but mildly cathartic choice. Trazyn took it. “There isn’t a single thing in that gallery that we can replace short of consulting a chronomancer.”
“I am aware, Trazyn. And were it anything we could reasonably fend off, you know that we would spare no effort in defending your great work.” Unknown to himself, Sannet began flipping his stylus through his double-jointed fingers in a nervous buzz. “But, well. It looks like a C’tan. It acts like a C’tan. Its energy readouts are reminiscent of a C’tan. I fear that no one here has any expectation of surviving an encounter with it, or the planet’s survival for that matter, and that is what has everyone on edge.”
“So your plan is to stand here and wait for it to go away?”
“Well, Ashkut should be back soon with the haplodimensional mortar array any minute.”
“You are not letting him shoot my gallery with a mortar array!” Trazyn shouted aloud, forgoing the interstices. No one reacted; the staff of Solemnace was used to their overlord’s ways by now.
Sannet sighed and raised a placating hand. “I am certain we can think of another course of action before resorting to that. But this is the level of danger we are working with. A foe equivalent to the C’tan warrants weapons built to destroy them.”
Or… tactics designed to surmount them. Just like immortality, infinity is more of a pain in the arse than I had ever hoped. With a mild harrumph, Trazyn straightened out the tiles of his cloak and braced himself with a mildly imperious air, one that left quarter for no objection. “I will go in myself, then.”
No one made any grand outcry, nor did anyone react with so much as a look of concern. In fact, most of the court looked relieved that someone other than them intended to break the stalemate. It was disappointing but not unexpected; Trazyn did select for practicality in his subordinates, after all.
Sannet, at least, gave a long sigh and pressed the back of his stylus against the side of his head in concern. “Please don't do anything foolish in there.”
The door closed with a clang of heavy iron. It was chased by the sound of multiple deadbolts, then the clicks and whines of electromagnetic locks, then a menagerie of cryptomantic wards, then, finally, Trazyn swore he heard the sound of something large and heavy being pushed up against the door. His suspicions were confirmed by the heavily muffled sound of a metal palm slapping wood and an “Eyep, that’s not going anywhere” from Ashkut.
Help would not be forthcoming, it seemed.
Nothing left to do but move forward. Trazyn called his empathic obliterator to hand and held it in a duelling grip, ax-blade forward like a spearman. Thus he advanced into his gallery, keeping his back to the wall and circling around the center as he scouted the room.
This was one of the smaller galleries, thankfully. It was an overview and comparison of leisure activities among the ancient Necrontyr, split into a square of four sub-galleries by class: servant, soldier, cryptek, and king. This, the intended entryway, was that of the commoners, the non-military, non-noble laypeople. Cabinets of musical instruments and childrens’ toys were scattered tastefully between full-size displays of table games frozen in time and enacted by mannequins in the vague shape and dress of necrontyr. A quartet of such figures sat in raucous, faceless laughter around a storyteller posed with their dice. Opposite them, two smaller mannequins traded colored cards with each other while kneeling in a cordoned pile of sand. Three figures sat beside each other, nearly on top of one another, with propriomirror controllers laced through their fingers and a gaming orbuculum frozen on a scene of digital chaos. A large harp lay across the lap of a cross-legged doll in one corner, their hands suspended over the replica strings and their unmarked face nearly lifelike under a half-veil. Watching it all, two mannequins sat intertwined in a narrow wooden rowboat that rested in stasis upon a false pond of mirror glass.
“This is a miserable place. Why do you torture yourself by remembering such things, Trazyn?” Orikan plucked one of the trading cards from the young mannequin's grip and studied it. He didn't get very far before Trazyn snatched it back.
All gone, now.
And upon a woven rope bench-seat (slightly singed, to Trazyn's distress), coiled like a lazy gyrinx, lay the energy being. Sannet had not been exaggerating; the thing was radiance incarnate. Even from the edge of the room where Trazyn stood, enough warmth spilled from it just passively that the air was cloying. It appeared like the liquid essence of a sun had been poured into a mold, from which it had sprung with all the agility and grace of a rapier. It was difficult to tell precisely how big it was, curled as it was, but it appeared lithe, thin, all sharp edges and curves swooping into points. A long, frill-tipped tail draped over the edge of the bench and onto the floor, its tip occasionally flicking and sending strange shadows to lick across the cabinets.
Its surface was blinding, forcing Trazyn to dial down his ocular receptors until the corners of the room were in complete darkness. But, in settings appropriate for skimming the surface of a star, he could make out more details on the being itself. There wasn’t much, but he could at least make out a giant cyclopic eye centered on its face.
It blinked directly at him.
(Or perhaps winked. It was rather difficult to tell when it only had one eye.)
So much for the element of surprise. Trazyn lifted his staff’s tip to aim for the being’s chest, approximately, and spoke in an imperious tone: “By the will of Trazyn the Infinite, Overlord of this system by writ of the Triarchs and of the Throne of the Nihilakh, you shall leave.” He wasn’t entirely sure how that would happen, but it had entered somehow, and through that way it should be able to see itself out.
It blinked again. Then, it crossed one front limb over the other, yawned with a previously unseen maw of plasma-stained fangs, and settled in for a nap.
“...Bloody stars,” he growled. “Get. Out.” He flung one arm at the thing in exasperation. “Begone. Shoo! You’re upsetting my humidity regulation systems.”
He received a mildly emphatic tail flick and nothing more.
Well then. With one hand keeping the empathetic obliterator still trained on the being, Trazyn reached into a dimensional pocket and withdrew a fist-sized device. It was a battery of sorts, one normally reserved for last-ditch energy supply for the wounded should they face the unfathomable situation of power core failure without either translocation recall or immediate annihilation. Being more prone to jumping bodies rather than salvaging them, Trazyn had never used one, and so these batteries had been sitting in a corner of his pocket for a few millennia by now. He hoped they would still taste acceptable.
He raised his staff to upright, then held the necrodermis and flux construct outstretched and shook it, making the connector cable rattle slightly against its casing. “Here, you obnoxious thing. Enriched plutonium, hot and ready to eat,” he cooed.
Then he waited. There was some semblance of a plan forming in his processors that involved luring the creature away from the archives. It possibly ended with sending it off to stars unknown, or capturing it, or perhaps obliterating it with Ashkut's mortar array once it was out of range of anything valuable. There was still too many unknowns to solidify the plan, but if he could get it moving…
It did. The being rose, stretched back on its haunches, and poured itself off of the bench and onto the floor. It walked with a strange half-upright gait, switching seamlessly back and forth between two legs and four as it loped cautiously toward the snack. As it moved, its corona went with it, and the cabinets and dioramas writhed and danced under the shifting light. Trazyn remarked upon the fascinating sight in his noetic stack to replicate later.
Not now. The being crouched not far from him, appearing hesitant. Trazyn tossed it gently just shy of its front paws and called a second to hand from his pocket. “Go on, it's yours. Get a taste for it. There’s more where that came from.”
After staring at it for a moment, it picked up the battery with one clawed paw and held it up for inspection. Trazyn let the corners of lipless mouth quirk upward; the plan was working. He had a dozen more of the things lying around his various dimensional pockets, which would likely be enough to lure the thing up to the planet’s surface. From there, perhaps with something other than the batteries, as he would surely run out soon, he could take it to-
The creature tossed the battery aside and pounced.
Trazyn went down in a clatter of tiles and limbs as the being hit him square in the chest and pinned him down. It wasn't heavy, exactly, but it had caught him off-guard, much to his embarrassment. No, he was more concerned by the searing heat that radiated from it. It was hot enough that, where its four paws all sat crouched over his cartouche, he felt the pigment nanomatrix of his Nihilakh turquoise warp and molt into a garish magenta. His faceplate burned too, as the being’s own face was looming over him barely a handsbreadth away, the raw power of its cyclopic eye boring into him with the barely-restrained viciousness of the stars.
Trazyn’s first instinct should have been to bat it away. To roll over, to bring his staff to bear, to fight back in at least some degree. He was a Necron; this was, effectively, a C’tan. It should have been in his nature to rip the heart of this god out and break it. The being’s instinct, too, should have been to dip its teeth into his neck and rend him asunder, to drink his core and feast on his fear.
There was a long pause as the two locked gazes - two oculars, one eye - with each other.
Then it leapt off Trazyn’s chest and bounded around a corner into the next gallery.
Trazyn remained alone. He stared at the ceiling where the being’s eye had been a moment before, and he quashed the sudden urge to exhale a breath he had not been holding. The last time he had been face to face with a C’tan at that distance, the Deceiver had ripped out his reactor and crushed it before him. And as much as he despised admitting to the fault, the memory scarred him. So why had this one spared him?
Any further pondering was cut short by the realization that his empathetic obliterator had left his hand.
He sat up, looked around, and cursed. Nothing. Nor did the interstices or dimensional appendices deliver any news on its whereabouts. That obnoxious little star must have taken it. He cursed again.
“Toying with me, are you now?” he called as he rose to his feet. He was unsure if the thing actually understood his words or was merely denying his plans out of its own sense of whimsy. Still, negotiation was worth a shot, and so he kept speaking as he swiftly walked after the thing’s escape route into the gallery of cryptek pastimes. “That is not a toy. Neither is it a good idea for you to eat it. I cannot say precisely what will happen if its energies make contact with you, but I do know I’ll be rather put out.”
Being not a cryptek himself and unfamiliar with their strange ways, Trazyn had left the design details of this gallery to his conclaves. As such, he was less familiar than usual with the details, but he was at least quite sure it wasn’t supposed to look like this. While it was normally a well-balanced smattering of dioramas and displays like the commoner's hall, a large space in the center of the room had been cleared out now. Display cabinets had been shoved to the side (mercifully still upright and intact), mannequins in temple robes tossed out of their stasis fields and into a pile in the corner. The disgrace of it sparked a rare fury in Trazyn, which was immediately doused upon driving his focus back to what actually remained.
In the center sat the energy creature on a chair. It was not the four-legged crouch from before, but a proper bipedal sitting position, if lounging back slightly to leave room for its tail. Before it was a short, small table, and opposite that was a matching chair. The empathetic obliterator, unchewed, lay propped up in the unoccupied seat at a lazy angle.
Trazyn stopped at the entrance archway. He certainly hadn’t been expecting such a setup, nor for the room to still be mostly intact. Neither did he have a weapon, now. And so, he approached cautiously, diplomatically.
The creature's tail flicked excitedly as he approached the table, but it made no move other than to watch him closely. Upon the table itself lay a tiled gameboard - mother of pearl, dark chitin, and bright carnelian alternating across the plate to form a beautiful lattice of hexagons. There were game pieces too - blue and green stones carved in the traditional shapes, arranged not in the starting position but in a mid-game sequence.
Trazyn stared, transfixed.
“We shouldn’t have started this game, I realize,” Orikan said. He waved his pipe over the board lazily, sending a crazed trail of heavy smoke over the table. Sharp flowers and heady resin shocked Trazyn’s nose, and he coughed a bit. “It will take hours more to finish, especially if you insist on interrupting every few turns with your latest distractions. I’ll be here maybe two hours more, at most.”
Trazyn gripped one of his pieces with shuddering fingers and held it, not yet lifting, contemplating his next move. “Then you will just have to come back sometime to finish it. Such a pity. Next festival, perhaps?”
The being’s eye locked into him, searching, wanting something.
“...Orikan?” Trazyn whispered.
Slowly, like an unfurling bloom, the being rose from its seat and walked toward him. It stopped just short of contact, close enough that its heat burned him again in rapid pulses. Then, its mouth of fangs parted, and it spoke for the first time.
“Took you long enough, idiot.”
Trazyn was on him in an instant. He hugged him close, buried his head in Orikan's neck, wrapping his arms tight around as much of Orikan as he could hold. His necrodermis blistered - he didn't mind. Orikan returned the embrace with long arms clamped tight around Trazyn’s back. His tail swung wide behind him in ecstatic loops that he didn't seem to care about containing.
“Orikan, old friend… I've missed you. Oh, how I've missed you,” he croaked, still not parting his face from Orikan's neck.
“I know.” For a god, Orikan’s own voice was weak, thin, cracking. “I am sorry.”
They stayed locked together for some time, neither willing to break contact. They were only forced apart when Trazyn's flux monitor alarms sounded a final warning, and he was forced to pull away just far enough to avoid melting a hole through a vital line.
Still, he kept Orikan's hands in his and looked him over with awe. He was haloed in light, even more than before, a bright corona surrounding him. It pulsed and flickered, sending whips of ghostly plasma licking through the air like a star under cosmic gales. He was crowned in an iridescent storm of pure energy, and at the center of it, the center of everything, Orikan watched him with every thought he had ever held for Trazyn at once. All the sharpness, the criticism, the appreciation, the recognition, the blinding cleverness innate to him in all things, the good, the bad, the simple amusing. This was Orikan, and he was beautiful.
Trazyn knelt.
This, for once, made Orikan step back slightly. “Oh, no. I've not come here to try to make a worshiper of you.”
“I can think of no one more deserving.”
“You maudlin old fool-!” Orikan grabbed him by the chin and dragged him back up to standing. “Stop being contrarian.”
“Then what did you come here for? Just to exercise your usual casual cruelties?”
“...I saw the tomb you made. The one for my old body.”
Trazyn paused. Orikan looked very close to being unsure of himself. “What did you think of it?”
“It looks nice.” He shook his head. “No. It looks beautiful. Why did you go through building all that?”
“Because, my dear Orikan, you are worth it. I… am afraid I must admit that I did not realize that until after you had passed. The silence was deafening, as they say.” Orikan looked him and said nothing. It was difficult to read his expression, given both the Necron-style deathmask and the C'tan blinding radiance. So, Trazyn continued. “I felt as though my soul had been ripped from me all over again. Call me a sentimental idiot if you want, but you deserve to be remembered. Lauded. I discovered that I wanted to cherish you too late, and in your absence, I was forced to make do with exalting you.”
“...Alright.”
“Alright what?”
Orikan drew him closer again. The alarms in Trazyn’s processors began again, but he threw them aside. He let Orikan draw him in for another embrace. “Alright. You're a sentimental idiot.”
“Hah. And you're incapable of taking a genuine compliment.”
“Are you done being an impossible sap?”
“Do you offer any compelling reasons for me to stop?”
“Dead gods, you're just as difficult as ever!” Orikan snarled.
“Oh, how I've missed you,” Trazyn laughed back.
Orikan's mouth opened, then closed into a tight purse, then opened again. “I came here to tell you that I lived. You… it felt appropriate to let you know.”
The necrodermis ridge of Trazyn’s eyebrow shifted upwards. “Is that all?”
“In truth, I came here planning to destroy this horrid time-clot of a planet.”
“Rather rude.”
“But then I saw the tomb, and you. And… I cannot say if this is what having a soul is like, not a proper one at least, but it felt… wrong, to destroy you. So.” He motioned a glowing hand back toward the game set. “Not that I wasn't going to miss the chance to toy with you at least a little bit.”
Trazyn shook his head and chuckled low. “Making me wait. Playing games. Bastard.”
“Tch. That’s my line. I came as fast as I could.”
“Four hundred and eighty-six years?”
“Time is a relative construct. I have always said this. But I did come as quickly as I could - not directly, I admit I made a few stops along the way, but I was not trying to draw this out. Because I have something I want to share with you before I depart again, and it would not do to wait.”
Trazyn flinched. Of course he would leave. The thought had not crossed his mind yet, but now that it was there, it was obvious. Solemnace was not the place for gods, only their jailers. “What might that be?”
With a wink and a grin, Orikan stepped back. “I’m leaving, yes, but I’m not done with you. My powers have grown - and with them, I have need of someone to test them. Someone who I know will put up a fight.”
“Oh?”
“Someone clever, who will keep me on my toes.”
“You flatter me.”
“Someone brilliant, tenacious, powerful, and worthy of my attention.
“Orikan, I don’t think I’ve ever heard such kind words from you in my life.”
“Then remember this, and I’ll see you later!”
With a flourish and a burst of light, Orikan suddenly backflipped, whipping his tail across Trazyn’s face as he flew upwards. He landed on the board in a feline crouch, which sent the pieces scattering in a wild explosion. Trazyn rushed forward in a vain attempt to gather them before they could shatter on impact. Rage suddenly flared within him, and as Orikan jetted his way up through the ceiling like a bolt of lightning, Trazyn lifted his head to the sky and shouted after him, broken game pieces in his hands.
“That was the same set we used the first time, you starsucking fool! That’s vintaaaage!”