=== Nira ===
The battered transport bucked and shuddered as it soared low over the battlefield, its engines straining against the thick smoke that rolled over the battlefield like a living thing.
Inside, Nira stood, one hand gripping a handle overhead. Beside her, Anakin glared out the viewport, jaw tight, a storm in his blue eyes. Padmé stood close behind, pale but composed, her gaze flicking between them both.
The sight outside was apocalyptic.
Above them, three massive battle barges hung in the sky, their cannons booming ceaselessly. Orbital strikes lanced down like the judgment of gods, carving great scars into the planet. Everywhere the golden beams struck, those green skeletal creatures and battle droids alike were annihilated, vaporized in the cleansing fire.
But the Imperium was paying dearly for every victory.
Two battle barges had fallen from the heavens, colossal wrecks now embedded in the shattered earth. Around them, squads of Astartes in shattered, soot-blackened armor fought desperately, locked in brutal, desperate melee with the relentless new warriors. Chainswords howled. Gauss weapons hissed and cracked. Explosions rippled across the ground, throwing bodies — both machine and man — into the smoke-filled air.
Even from this height, the clash of forces was deafening.
Closer to the horizon, a grim spectacle loomed: the Necron fleet, cold and metallic, circled their downed flagship. Scarab swarms and heavy monoliths crawled over the wreck, tearing at anything that wasn't supposed to be there.
Flashes of light — bolter fire, lasblasts, the deadly green flare of Gauss cannons — peppered back and forth across the battlefield.
"This is madness..." Padmé whispered, her voice barely carrying over the roar of the transport's strained engines.
Anakin didn't answer immediately. His gaze was fixed ahead, burning with intensity, scanning the chaos unfolding below them.
That was when he saw it — a flash of movement slicing through the smoke-choked skies. A sleek, predatory vessel, black as the void and wreathed in faint tendrils of strange energy, darted away from the heart of the battlefield, heading toward the edge of the conflict zone.
He leaned closer to the viewport, jaw tightening. The vessel's markings were faint, but he could just make out the distorted iconography: the eight-pointed star, twisting unnaturally, almost seeming to squirm on the hull, unlocking a memory from his distant past.
"What did the Astartes call them? Chaos Sorcerers?" Nira said from beside him, voice dark with recognition. She too had seen it — and felt it. "He's fleeing."
"Once he's gone, we'll lose any chance of tracking him."
Anakin was already moving toward the cockpit.
"Divert us," he barked to the pilot. "Take us after him."
The clone pilot hesitated, glancing back over his shoulder. "Sir, our orders—"
"New orders!" Anakin snapped. "This is bigger than a battlefield. If we let that thing escape, it'll come back with a hundred more just like him!"
He had just seen the Ultramarines do the same, and wasn't about to take any chances.
Nira was already stepping forward, placing a steadying hand on the pilot's shoulder. "He's right. Follow that ship. Now."
The transport banked sharply, the hull groaning under the stress as they veered off course, leaving the devastated battlefield behind them. The world became a smear of smoke, fire, and distant bombardments as they hurtled after the fleeing vessel.
Below them, the ruins of the battlefield gave way to broken plains and hills of sand. The Sorcerer's ship wove expertly between the mountains, but the transport's more powerful engines slowly closed the gap.
"There!" Nira pointed, her eyes narrowing.
In the distance, nestled against the edge of a blackened mountain range, was a half-ruined hanger facility — massive blast doors torn open by ancient wars, now little more than a shelter of broken ferrocrete and rusted steel.
The Sorcerer's ship was already dropping into a landing port.
Anakin's face hardened into a mask of pure resolve.
"We cut him off. Land us outside the hanger."
The transport skidded through the air, repulsorlifts howling, and slowed down just outside the broken hanger's perimeter. Dust and ash blasted outward in all directions.
Anakin leapt from the door before it had even fully opened, lightsaber blazing into life with a shriek. Nira followed an instant later, her own blade igniting.
"Call for reinforcements." Padmé said, having a bad feeling about the situation before running after them.
The hanger loomed before them like the gaping maw of some slumbering beast, broken ferrocrete and twisted steel forming jagged teeth around the black entrance.
Anakin slowed as he approached, the hum of his lightsaber casting long, flickering shadows across the ruined ground.
He could feel it — the darkness radiating from within — thick, like tar clinging to his skin.
"This doesn't feel right," Padmé said under her breath, drawing closer to Nira.
Nira didn't answer immediately, her senses flaring wide, tasting the miasma of corruption that oozed from the bunker's depths. "This isn't a hanger," she finally whispered. "It's something else. Something much worse."
The three of them moved inward.
Their footsteps echoed, strangely muted, swallowed by the oppressive atmosphere. The lights in the corridor beyond flickered, half-burnt, casting strobing flashes down endless tunnels of metal and bone.
Yes, bone.
Anakin's eyes narrowed as he saw it — fragments embedded in the walls. Fossilized, twisted remnants of once-living things melded into the architecture itself.
A low sound curled out from the depths of the bunker — a ragged, broken moan.
Then another. And another.
Screams, dozens of them. Echoing through the tunnels like the calls of damned souls.
Padmé stumbled slightly, catching herself on the wall. It was warm beneath her hand. Pulsing.
"This place is alive," she choked out, recoiling.
Anakin nodded grimly, keeping his saber high. His instincts screamed at him to turn back, but he forced himself forward, step after grueling step.
The first chamber they entered was massive, dome-shaped, lit only by sputtering control panels and the eerie green glow of containment tanks lining the walls.
Inside the tanks floated horrors — creatures stitched together from half a dozen species. Twisted Wookiee torsos sewn onto droid limbs. Rodian faces stretched into howling, silent screams across human skulls.
One thing was clear: none of them were natural. None of them were alive, not truly. They twitched — spasms of instinct or suffering, it was impossible to say.
Padmé gagged, covering her mouth. Nira placed a steady hand on her shoulder but said nothing, her own expression grim and pale.
"They're... experiments," Anakin muttered, feeling rage bubbling in his chest. "Spliced together. Warped."
A klaxon wailed somewhere deep within the bunker — long and mournful.
The lights overhead went out entirely, plunging them into darkness.
For a moment, only the glow of Anakin and Nira's sabers lit the void — a pair of trembling stars in a sea of black.
Then they heard it.
The wet, slithering sound of something moving just beyond the light.
"We need to turn back." Padmé gasped, fear thick in her voice.
As if in answer, a sudden, a sick laugh as if the creature was just out of sight.
Anakin gritted his teeth, eyes scanning the blackness. "We need to find the exit. Fast."
They turned around but found only solid wall from where they had come.
"No." Nira whispered, her voice shaking a small bit.
They had to press deeper into the bunker.
They passed rooms where mechanical arms twitched endlessly over dissected corpses.
Chambers filled with cages, each holding half-melted, half-formed things that whispered gibberish in alien tongues.
There were cloning vats too — some shattered, spilling ichor and stillborn monsters across the floor in glistening puddles.
The walls themselves pulsed, as if breathing.
The screams grew louder.
Every shadow seemed to move.
Padmé stopped, and looked up to the ceiling as she heard something.
She nearly screamed as she saw a gaunt, deformed creature, clung to the ceiling above them before its head rotated one hundred eighty degrees, its eyes weeping blood as it clawed futilely at the stone
"You'll die here." It said so calmly, so… sanely.
Suddenly the green little monstrosity lunged at them from the ceiling, but Anakin reacted fast, and blasted it into the wall beside them.
"Run!" He screamed before pulling Padmé behind him.
The moment they moved, the darkness exploded behind them.
A mass of writhing, bladed limbs erupted from the shadows as monsters only from nightmares chased them.
Padmé screamed, opening fire wildly.
Anakin and Nira charged together, blades flashing.
The creatures shrieked as they stumbled over each other to get to them.
They fought as they ran — slashing, stabbing, deflecting. Anakin's blade sliced through one twisted arm, Nira cleaved another.
But for every abomination they slew, two more took its place.
The darkness itself fought them, claws reaching from every surface, the very walls sprouting tendrils that lashed at their legs.
Padmé reached the end of the long hall first, slipping through a set of massive doors with a desperate cry.
Anakin turned, cutting down a mass of writhing flesh that lunged at Nira, then shoved her through the gap of the doors.
The creature roared, hurtling toward him.
With a last, savage slash, Anakin severed its reaching hands, then dove through the gap an instant before the blast doors slammed shut with a thunderous, final boom.
They collapsed outside, gasping, bleeding, coated in filth.
Behind them, through the sealed door, the monsters shrieked in frustration — the sound fading only after a long, agonizing minute.
Padmé stared at Anakin, her face pale and blood-spattered.
"What was that...?"
Anakin didn't answer immediately.
He just stared back at the bunker — the bunker that still pulsed, still breathed.
A cold certainty settled over him.
For a moment, none of them moved.
Padmé leaned against the jagged wall, shaking as she tried to steady her breath. Nira wiped blood from her forehead, her eyes scanning the broken landscape ahead.
And then they heard it.
A low, ancient laugh.
It slithered through the air like a serpent — thin, mocking, ancient — carrying a weight of cruelty so profound that it made the skin crawl.
Slowly, all three of them turned.
Standing on the jagged edge of the ruined bunker — silhouetted against the burning plains and the ruin of the battlefield beyond — he stood.
The Chaos Sorcerer.
His back was to them, robes tattered and flapping in the wind, stained deep with old blood and black ichor.
The jagged horns of his armor gleamed dully in the failing light, and the Warp itself seemed to coil and shudder around him, an oily shimmer that distorted reality.
At his side stood two others.
They were... wrong.
The first was hunched, twisted. Her once-proud bearing was broken under the weight of madness and corruption.
Yaddle — the wise Jedi Master — now looked like a nightmare given form.
Her green skin had turned pallid, veins blackened beneath it, and her long nails — sharpened into claws — dripped with gore.
Tufts of hair clung pitifully to her mottled scalp, and her robes were torn, soaked with blood and worse things.
Next to her stood Sifo-Dyas.
The once-great Seer of the Jedi Order, now a hollowed-out shell.
His eyes burned with a sickly, Warp-born light. His mouth twitched with barely contained madness, and his body was twisted into a mockery of what it had been — joints bent unnaturally, his frame gaunt and skeletal beneath shredded robes.
Anakin stepped forward instinctively, lightsaber held defensively.
Nira raised hers a moment later, her stance guarded, wary.
Padmé simply stared, horror-struck, unable to comprehend the full horror of it all.
The Sorcerer paid them no mind for several long, heart-pounding seconds.
He seemed utterly absorbed in the carnage sprawled out below — the shattered armies, the burning skies, the Imperium's thunderous bombardments carving craters into the earth.
Finally, without looking back, the Sorcerer spoke.
His voice was dry — like dust scraping against tombstones — yet it carried clearly across the shattered ground.
"Go," he said softly, gesturing with a lazy flick of his fingers toward the battered ship resting on a cracked landing platform nearby.
"Get to the vessel, my pets."
Yaddle and Sifo-Dyas moved without hesitation — broken marionettes jerking into motion, loping away toward the ship, hunched and twitching with barely suppressed violence.
Only then did the Sorcerer turn.
He faced them fully now.
He tilted his head slightly, as though appraising them, before speaking again — a rasp that somehow still held the echo of amusement.
"I hope you enjoyed my little... experiments," he said, spreading his arms in mock hospitality.
"Many fine specimens down there. Some are even still conscious. I wonder... how long they will last."
Anakin's jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.
He took another step forward, fury radiating from him like a furnace.
"You twisted them," he spat. "Turned them into monsters. Abominations."
The Sorcerer chuckled, a dry, rattling sound.
"Twisted?" he mused. "No, no, boy. I freed them. Freed them from the chains of their oppression that were wrapped around their minds and souls. Now, they sing with the beauty of entropy. Of becoming."
Nira's hands tightened around her saber hilt.
"You're insane."
"Of course I am," the Sorcerer said with a shrug, seemingly unbothered. "When you've seen what i have, its… inevitable. But insanity is merely perception, is it not? In the end, all things are drawn to the Warp. To the endless storm. I am merely... an instrument."
Padmé raised her blaster, hands shaking. "You're a monster."
The Sorcerer laughed again — louder this time — a deep, echoing sound that filled the ruined bunker with a terrible resonance.
"Monster?" he said, shrugging.
"I've been called worse."
He turned once more, looking at the war below.
"You think the deaths you see below... matter? The ashes of armies, the crumbling of empires, the slaughter of billions? This —" he gestured out across the battlefield — "is merely the first breath of the true war to come."
His voice dropped, becoming almost intimate.
"You have no idea how small you are."
The ground beneath them shuddered as another Necron vessel exploded in the distance, sending up a pillar of fire.
The Sorcerer stepped forward, slow and deliberate, the Warp swirling tighter around him.
"Run," he said, voice almost kind. "Flee to your Republic lines. Beg your Jedi Masters for protection. It will avail you nothing."
He raised a hand, fingers splayed wide — and for a moment, the air warped at his touch, reality itself bending and twisting.
"You stand at the precipice of oblivion. And my master, my God, watches you struggle. And he couldn't care less about you."
And then, as casually as a man strolling through a garden, he turned his back on them once more, walking toward the waiting vessel where Yaddle and Sifo-Dyas awaited.
Not afraid.
Not worried.
Not rushed.
Just certain.
Certain that they were no threat at all.
And as Anakin, Nira, and Padmé stood frozen, watching him vanish into the smoke and ruin, they realized — with a cold knot of fear tightening in their chests — that he might be right.
===
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