Sacken Alar stood in the deep shadows of the grand hall. The two pairs of semi-transparent psychic wings protruding from his back vibrated unconsciously, casting grotesque, twisting shadows against the wall.
His skin had fully mutated into a pale purple, chitinous carapace. It felt cold and hard to the touch, yet the psychic power surging beneath it burned with the heat of a star.
"Is everyone present?" he asked.
His voice was no longer the gloomy, stifled tone of Garrison Conmo. It was a terrifying chorus, multiple voices layered over one another.
Nine psykers clad in black robes stepped out from the shadows.
Beneath their hoods, their eyes glowed with a malignant blue-purple light—irrefutable proof that the Mark of Tzeentch had been seared into their very souls.
These men were originally a clandestine psyker squad cultivated by the true masters of the Conmo Dynasty. Each of them was a Master-tier psyker, tasked with monitoring the mental state of the dynasty's other psykers and delivering regular reports to the Mechanicus.
But now, they were Sacken's most loyal... slaves.
"Lord Patriarch," the lead cultist bowed, his voice raspy. "All five hundred and twenty-seven members of the dynasty have arrived in the grand hall. None are absent."
The corners of Sacken's mouth curled upward.
"Excellent."
He turned and strode deeper into the hall, approaching a concealed alloy blast door.
The door was sealed by a complex psychic lock. Originally, it required three Conmo elders to simultaneously input their psychic signatures to open it.
This was the true core sanctum of the Conmo Dynasty. It housed every scrap of psychic research and every forbidden experiment log accumulated over the past eighty years.
Sacken merely raised his hand.
Pale purple psychic tendrils slithered from his fingertips and wormed their way into the keyhole.
The mechanical tumblers inside shrieked in protest, the psychic circuitry dissolving as rapidly as if doused in hyper-acid.
Three seconds later, the door hissed open.
The sight within this secret chamber was enough to make any pious Imperial citizen scream until their sanity shattered.
The walls were built from hundreds of transparent stasis-vats stacked atop one another.
Suspended within each vat was a human body. Men and women, young and old. All completely naked, their skin bleached a translucent, corpselike white, their bodies pierced with countless data probes and nutrient feed-tubes.
They were not dead—at least, not in the strictly biological sense.
Their minimal vital signs were sustained by the amniotic fluid, but their consciousness had long since been systematically erased by psychic indoctrination engines. They had been reduced to nothing more than living psychic batteries.
These were the psychically gifted individuals the Conmo Dynasty had secretly harvested from hive cities all across Aurelian IV over the past eighty years.
Most of them had been discovered as children, taken in under the guise of "adoption" by the dynasty, only to be thrown into this chamber to serve as endless research material.
"How truly... pathetic."
"This is the Imperium... This is the glory the Great Crusade brings."
"Is this what the Emperor meant by leading humanity to the pinnacle of the cosmos?"
"You Great and Holy Emperor... have you ever truly seen what one of the heads of your Imperial Aquila has done to this planet?"
"Are you truly ignorant of it all?!"
"No. You tacitly permit this to exist, all because you need them to forge the armor and repair the weapons for your massive Legions."
"You compromised with the Mechanicus! False Emperor, you have betrayed your original ideals!"
"You handed the nearly thirty billion souls of Aurelian IV over to a cabal of soulless mechanical monsters!"
Sacken spoke softly. His tone carried no pity, only a lofty, condescending mockery.
He walked up to the first row of stasis-vats.
This row contained exactly nine children.
The oldest couldn't have been more than ten; the youngest looked no older than five or six.
They were all trapped in deep comas, their small faces deathly pale, yet a faint blue psychic halo shimmered across their skin.
These were all Master-tier psychic talents or higher. They were the highest quality "human material" the Conmo Dynasty had harvested in the past decade.
The original plan of the Tech-Priests was to wait until they grew older and their nervous systems matured before strapping them to the dissection tables for invasive psychic experimentation.
But now, they were destined for a far nobler purpose.
"Bring them out," Sacken ordered.
The nine black-robed cultists stepped forward. Working in pairs, they carried the stasis-vats and the children out of the chamber, heading toward the grand hall.
Sacken cast one final look at the vats lining the walls.
Those pale faces bobbed aimlessly in the fluid, their hollow, empty eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
"You will all be... free soon."
He turned and left, the chamber doors sliding shut silently behind him.
--
The Conmo Dynasty grand hall spanned over two thousand square meters, its vaulted ceiling soaring thirty meters high. The decor was obscenely lavish.
Crystal chandeliers hung from the dome, every single crystal psychically enchanted to emit a soft, soothing white light designed to subtly pacify the mental agitation of psykers.
It was a perk designed by the founding elders of the dynasty, a measure to ensure the members could serve the Mechanicus with greater stability.
But now, the light was turning sinister.
Wisps of pale purple began to bleed into the pristine white, spreading slowly like ink dropped into clear water.
Five hundred and twenty-seven people had gathered in the hall.
They wore opulent formal wear, draped in fine silks and expensive fabrics. Every one of them was impeccably dressed, bearing the refined, elegant demeanor typical of Upper Hive nobility.
They were the upper crust of the City of the Holy Anthem, and indeed, all of Aurelian IV. They were the elite standouts in every single industry and profession.
On the surface, they had clawed their way to their positions through sheer talent and merit.
But only a tiny fraction knew the truth: they had been identified as psychic talents from the moment they could form memories. They were brought into the Conmo Dynasty, subjected to indoctrination, rigorous training, and periodic memory wipes.
All of this was to ensure their absolute, eternal loyalty to the dynasty—which meant loyalty to the true masters pulling the strings from the shadows: the Order of the Omnissian Mind.
"Why did the Patriarch suddenly call us all here?"
"I heard that those Imperial Champion robberies a few days ago emptied out several of our warehouses across multiple hive cities..."
"Were the losses severe?"
"Severe is an understatement! My nephew works in the mining division in Holmes Hive. He said the dynasty's entire stockpile of rare metals there is gone. It's got to be worth at least a billion Aquila Thrones!"
Whispers echoed throughout the grand hall.
But gradually, some began to notice that something was wrong.
The concentration of psychic energy in the air... it was too high.
Abnormally high.
It felt like the suffocating humidity right before a torrential storm, pressing down so hard it was difficult to breathe.
Those with higher psychic sensitivity were already breaking out in a cold sweat, their fingers trembling uncontrollably.
"Do you guys... do you think the color of the lights has changed?" a young female psyker whispered to her companion.
Her name was Lina, and she worked as a physician at the grand hospital in the City of the Holy Anthem. Her psychic talent allowed her to vaguely perceive latent emotional fluctuations in her environment.
And at this moment, the emotions she was sensing were terrifying.
An insatiable hunger for knowledge. A desperate craving for change. And a certain... blasphemous ecstasy.
Lina's face drained of color.
Right at that moment, the massive doors at the far end of the hall—doors that were strictly forbidden to ordinary members—slowly slid open.
The nine black-robed cultists emerged first.
They carried the heavy stasis-vats, the children still trapped in deep slumber within.
The grand hall instantly fell dead silent. Everyone stared with wide eyes at this bizarre, unsettling scene.
Sacken emerged last.
The instant he stepped out of the shadows, it was as if time in the entire hall froze solid.
Because the being that stepped out was no longer the gloomy, pale Patriarch Garrison Conmo, always swathed in black robes, whom they were so familiar with.
It was a monster standing two point three meters tall, its skin covered in a pale purple carapace. Two pairs of semi-transparent psychic wings sprouted from its back, and its eyes had transformed into swirling purple vortexes.
"AH!" someone shrieked in terror.
But the scream was cut off the moment it left his throat. An invisible force gripped his vocal cords, reducing him to a choked, gagging wheeze.
Sacken ascended the dais at the front of the grand hall.
He looked down from his high vantage point, his gaze sweeping over the five hundred terrified, bewildered, and slack-jawed faces below. The corners of his mouth slowly curled upward.
"My... brethren."
His voice, amplified by psychic power, echoed directly within the depths of everyone's minds.
"Welcome to the moment of truth."
Sacken raised his right hand.
Palm facing upward, his five fingers slowly splayed open.
With his movement, the purple-and-gold psychic conduits etched into the grand hall's floor flared with blinding light!
The conduits began to writhe, extend, and interweave like living serpents. In the blink of an eye, they formed a massive, intricate summoning circle of Tzeentch spanning over fifty meters in diameter across the floor!
At the dead center of the array sat the nine stasis-vats containing the children.
The nine black-robed cultists moved swiftly, taking their positions at the nine nodal points of the array. They sat cross-legged, their hands weaving complex psychic seals.
Their eyes turned entirely blue-purple, and they began to chant ancient, blasphemous incantations.
This was forbidden knowledge poured directly into their minds by the Lord of Change, Aetaos'rau'keres—a taboo ritual dragged straight from the abyssal depths of Tzeentch's domain.
"Wait! Patriarch! What are you doing?!"
An elderly, white-haired man burst from the crowd. He was one of the highest-ranking elders of the dynasty.
Master-tier psychic fluctuations erupted from the elder, and a pale blue kine-shield expanded before him.
He was a Telekine specialist focused entirely on defense. Over the past few decades, he had successfully blocked at least seventeen assassination attempts against the dynasty.
But today, his shield lasted for exactly 0.3 seconds.
Sacken didn't even look at him.
He merely flicked his left wrist casually.
A purple psychic beam, as thin as a hair, shot from his fingertip. It instantly pierced through the elder's shield, punching straight through his forehead and out the back of his skull.
The moment the beam penetrated, it released a high-frequency oscillation. The elder's head exploded like an overripe melon, spraying a mixture of red and white matter all over the people standing nearby.
The headless corpse swayed for a second before collapsing to the floor with a heavy thud.
The grand hall was dead silent for three seconds.
And then, absolute panic erupted!
"Run!"
"Monster! He's a monster!"
"Guards! Where are the dynasty guards?!"
The crowd scattered like a kicked anthill, stampeding frantically toward the exits.
But the heavy blast doors had already been sealed shut.
A dense cluster of Tzeentchian runes surfaced across the metal doors, and a pale purple psychic barrier locked them down completely. No matter how hard they pounded, rammed, or even bombarded it with their own psychic powers, the doors didn't budge an inch.
"Silence."
Sacken's voice echoed out again.
This time, the voice was laced with the beguiling whispers granted by Aetaos'rau'keres.
Warp energy, mingled with the will of a Greater Daemon, washed over the entire hall like an invisible tide.
The panicked movements of the crowd began to slow. Their eyes glazed over, and the expressions on their faces gradually shifted from stark terror to... blank confusion.
Sacken watched the scene with deep satisfaction.
He turned and walked toward the altar.
At some point, a dagger had appeared in his hand. The blade was forged from an unidentifiable, non-metallic black substance, its surface etched with constantly shifting runes of Tzeentch. Pale purple Warp energy flowed continuously along its edge.
This was a Runeblade of Tzeentch, a sacred relic bestowed by Aetaos, capable of carving through the veil between reality and the Warp.
Sacken arrived at the first stasis-vat.
Inside was a boy, roughly eight years old, with brown hair and lingering baby fat on his cheeks. He was still trapped in a deep coma.
Sacken popped open the lid of the vat and raised the dagger.
He aimed the tip of the blade squarely at the boy's chest.
"In the name of Knowledge," he whispered softly, and drove the blade down.
The dagger met absolutely no resistance, sinking into the boy's chest as easily as cutting through warm butter.
But it wasn't blood that flowed out—it was a stream of pale blue psychic light!
The stream of light surged from the wound, guided by the runes on the dagger, and poured directly into the summoning circle on the floor.
The boy's body withered and desiccated at a rate visible to the naked eye.
His skin lost all luster, his muscles atrophied instantly, and his bones emitted a faint, sickening crackle as they shrank...
Ten seconds later, all that remained in the vat was a skin-wrapped skeleton, and a fist-sized core of pure psychic energy hovering in the air above it.
"The First Sacrifice: The Essence of Psyche."
Sacken withdrew the dagger and turned to the second child.
It was a little girl, no older than six.
"In the name of Change."
The dagger plunged down.
The exact same process repeated, but this time, the psychic stream that poured out was a vibrant pink, representing the psychic spectrum of emotion and perception.
"The Second Sacrifice: The Dimension of Perception."
The third, the fourth, the fifth...
By the time the ninth child was reduced to a skeleton and nine psychic cores of varying colors hovered above the array, the entire grand hall was thoroughly saturated with thick, cloying Warp energy.
The air had become viscous, every breath tasting of a sickly, rotting sweetness.
The light twisted into grotesque spirals. Everything within sight was faintly writhing and mutating.
The nine black-robed cultists had finally reached their absolute limits.
Their bodies began to warp grotesquely. Scales erupted across their skin, their joints inverted, and their skulls elongated into avian beaks...
It was irreversible mutation caused by overexposure to raw Warp energy.
But there was no pain on their faces, only sheer, unadulterated ecstasy.
"The time has come."
Sacken walked to the very center of the summoning circle and raised both hands high.
The nine psychic cores flew toward him simultaneously, swirling and fusing together above his head, ultimately forming a chaotic sphere of psychic energy, one meter in diameter, constantly shifting in color.
"In the name of Sacken Alar—"
His voice abruptly spiked, carrying the fanatical zeal of a martyr.
"I call upon the entities of the Realm of Mutation! Answer this sacrifice, overflowing with knowledge and thirst! Descend, emissaries of the Changer of Ways! For this rotting hive city..."
Sacken thrust both arms downward with explosive force.
"...bring forth true Change!!!"
BOOM!!!
The psychic sphere detonated!
It wasn't an explosion, but rather a violent inward collapse.
A black dot no larger than a pinprick appeared at the center of the sphere. It expanded and spun rapidly, violently tearing through the membrane separating reality and the Warp!
A rift slowly tore open in mid-air above the grand hall.
At first, it was only the size of a palm, but in the blink of an eye, it expanded to three meters in diameter.
The interior of the rift was not darkness. It was an endless, roiling fog of purple, blue, and pink. Within the fog, millions of eyes blinked erratically, and millions of mouths whispered in unison.
Millions of impossible, non-Euclidean geometric shapes reassembled in a frenzy of madness.
And then, things began to crawl out of the rift.
The first was a Changeling.
The entity possessed no fixed true form. As it manifested, it was draped in a hooded cloak edged with the faint luminescence of the Warp. Its silhouette constantly shifted and flowed. Six slender, spindly arms extended from beneath the cloak, one of them clutching the rune-bound Staff of the Trickster.
The instant it crawled out of the rift, its body twisted and morphed, perfectly mimicking the appearance of one of the psykers in the hall, down to the exact wrinkles of their clothes.
Next came the Pink Horrors.
These Daemons of Tzeentch had bright pink skin and bulbous bodies that looked like inflated toys. Their gaping maws, stretching from ear to ear, were lined with rows of razor-sharp needle-teeth.
They bounced and bounded out of the rift, leaving fleeting trails of pink mist wherever they landed, cackling wildly with manic, psychotic laughter.
Following close behind were the Blue Horrors.
These lesser Daemons of Tzeentch had deep blue skin and slender, elongated bodies. They were shorter than the Pink Horrors, their eyes burning with spectral blue Warp-fire.
They squeezed out of the rift chittering and jabbering, sounding like a thousand children giggling and weeping all at once.
Ten, twenty, fifty...
The rift was like a burst dam, endlessly spewing forth the daemonic servants of Tzeentch.
In just two short minutes, the grand hall was packed with hundreds of lesser Tzeentchian daemons of all varieties!
Only then did Sacken finally turn around, looking down at the dynasty members paralyzed and slumped on the floor under the oppressive weight of the Warp energy.
Most of them were already delirious.
Beguiling whispers echoed directly within their minds, conjuring vivid hallucinations before their eyes. Some saw themselves as great scholars, unraveling the ultimate mysteries of the cosmos.
Some saw themselves acquiring power, exacting bloody vengeance upon those who had oppressed them.
Some saw their beloved, deceased family members rising from the grave to reunite with them...
Desire, longing, obsession...
Every emotion was magnified and twisted, forming a staircase leading straight down into corruption.
Sacken spread his arms wide, the psychic wings on his back unfurling completely.
"Wake up, my brethren," his voice was terrifyingly gentle. "Did you truly believe yourselves to be members of the Conmo Psyker Dynasty? Did you think your psychic talents were a blessing passed down through this family's bloodline?"
He clapped his hands.
Several black-robed cultists dragged three... things out from the shadows.
They were three imprisoned elders, all looking well over a century old. Their bodies were shriveled like mummies, yet they were alive—barely.
"These three," Sacken pointed at the life-support pods, "are the true founders of the Conmo Dynasty. Eighty years ago, they received a special dispensation for psychic research from the Mechanicus and established this so-called family. They possessed psychic talents, but their descendants did not."
He then pointed at two other figures dragged out by the cultists.
They were two Tech-Priests of the Mechanicus.
One had his lower half retrofitted into a tracked chassis, while the other had the entire left half of his face mechanized, a multi-spectral scanner shoved into his eye socket.
They had clearly put up a fierce fight; their mechanical limbs were riddled with dents and scorch marks. But now, they were firmly bound by psychic shackles, their vocalizers forcibly ripped out.
"And these two are the overseers stationed here by the Order of the Omnissian Mind." Sacken walked up to one of the Tech-Priests and gripped his chin, the mechanical structures groaning and grinding under his fingers. "For the past eighty years, the psychic data, growth trajectories, and even the intimate private lives of every single one of you have been regularly compiled and delivered into their hands. This 'free will' you thought you had? It was nothing more than a meticulously engineered cultivation regimen. This 'family glory' you held so dear? Nothing but a convenient cage for easier management."
He released his grip and turned to face the crowd, his voice suddenly spiking in volume.
"You have been brainwashed since the moment you could form memories! Implanted with fabricated pasts! Sculpted into the exact tools they desired! Your true parents? They were likely murdered long ago simply because you possessed the psychic gift! The Mechanicus killed them to sever your ties to the past! And what of your own children, if they lacked the psychic spark? They were quietly disposed of, swapped out for brainwashed, psychically gifted infants! Because the Conmo Dynasty has no use for worthless bloodlines!"
Every sentence slammed into their hearts like a sledgehammer.
Some broke down, sobbing uncontrollably.
Some stared blankly, their minds utterly unable to process the revelation.
But for the vast majority... a burning fury ignited in their eyes.
Because they were suddenly recalling far too many dissonant details.
Why did every member's spouse have to be vetted and approved by the dynasty?
Why did they always struggle to feel any true emotional connection to their own children?
Why did certain individuals inevitably vanish from the dynasty without a trace?
"So, are we to continue living as puppets?" Sacken's voice became heavily laced with temptation once more. "Are we to continue being treated as lab rats by the Mechanicus, as disposable commodities by the high lords sitting comfortably on Mars?"
He spread his arms wide, the Warp light spilling from the rift behind him casting him in the silhouette of a descended god.
"Join us! Embrace the blessings of the Changer of Ways! Knowledge, power, true freedom... everything you have ever desired can be found within the Realm of Mutation! Look upon them! They are not monsters; they are emissaries! They are companions sent to liberate us!"
A Changeling happened to crawl to the feet of a young female psyker. Its body twisted and morphed into the exact likeness of her sister who had died prematurely, whispering in her sister's exact voice, "Sister, I missed you so much..."
The female psyker shattered completely.
She fell to her knees, hugging the disguised Changeling as she wailed in absolute despair.
And with her psychological collapse, her psychic defenses crumbled entirely. The corrupting whispers of Tzeentch invaded her consciousness like a virulent plague...
One, two, ten, a hundred...
Throughout the grand hall, more and more psykers began to lower their heads. Their bodies started to mutate, and a sickly purple light surfaced in their eyes.
Sacken watched the scene unfold, a deeply satisfied smile gracing his face.
He had succeeded.
Over five hundred psykers were on the verge of falling completely into the embrace of Tzeentch.
This would be a force more than capable of completely overturning all of Aurelian IV.
And all of this...
"It is all thanks to you, Lord Sanguinius." Sacken gazed up at the domed ceiling, as if his vision could pierce through the layers of the hive structure to see the Red Tear in orbit. "It was you who gave us a three-day window. It was you who forced my hand to act prematurely. It was you... who personally lit the fuse of this hive city's damnation."
He chuckled softly, his voice brimming with the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of a successfully executed scheme.
--
Goal = 500 Powerstones.
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