“Fascinating,” Trazyn found himself saying, staring at the sensor readouts. Serenade had been a dead world for centuries now, ever since the Imperium committed Exterminatus upon it in the wake of … Trazyn’s minor miscalcution.

  In his defence, he had never dealt with Genestealers before that incident. How was he to know that letting a few of them loose as a distraction to make his escape would spiral out of control so massively? He certainly hadn’t considered the humans so inept as to be unable to hunt down a handful of feral aliens. By the time he came to revisit the pnet, a third of the pnetary popution turned out to be Genestealers and they just so happened to time their uprising with Trazyn’s visit. They ruined the py he was watching at the pnet’s foremost theatre, too, the primitives.

  “By the Stars,” Orikan muttered, disbelief clear even in his lifeless voice. “Trazyn. What have you unleashed?”

  “She’s never been truly leashed,” Trazyn noted with a hint of amusement. “By her own accounting, she is a … not a hive mind, but one mind in many bodies. She called this body of hers a mere avatar.”

  “She ate that pnet,” Orikan said numbly.

  “Not … quite,” Trazyn said, having already processed the sensor logs and the analytics his onboard Canopteks had run. “There was a moment of immense Empyrean bleed-through, nearly a full breach, coinciding with the moment when Cephris’ Bckstone core vanished. She most likely merely transported it somewhere far away.”

  “So she can transport an entire pnet expressly resistant to Empyrean interference by using that very force, and not just a short distance either,” Orikan said. “Have you detected the destination? A new pnet smming into the fabric of spacetime should have sent ripples.”

  “None, but I’d have assumed such things would be under your purview," Trazyn said. “You are the Astromancer out of the two of us. I’m just a humble Archivist.”

  “You’ve never had a single humble bone in your body, Trazyn.” Orikan was tapping his metallic fingers on his hip-pte, which was the Necron equivalent of nervous pacing. “This is worrying, and you think she will willingly let you re-seal this ‘avatar’ inside a Tesseract Labyrinth?”

  “We have an understanding,” Trazyn said with a shrug. “She is more a mercenary I pay for services rendered than one of my hapless, unwitting exhibits. Though she has also agreed to being pced in an exhibit. I suppose the fact that it doesn’t rob her of autonomy like it does others made her much less averse to the idea of being preserved in a stasis field forever.”

  “Here she comes,” Orikan said, his rigid posture betraying his nervousness to his old rival. Trazyn could read him like a book, though the Overlord knew the Astromancer could just as easily sense his own amusement despite his own ck of outward expressions or body nguage.

  Sure enough, the strange creature appeared inside the room a moment ter, its- her head on a swivel. Trazyn’s experience with humans told him the expression on her face was a sign of great joy, mixed with clear indicators of self-satisfaction in equal measure. It seemed she was extremely pleased with herself after her test feat, likely a new trick then.

  “Ready to depart?” Trazyn asked instead of voicing the other dozens of questions he had. He would have time ter to engage Echidna in conversation. He’d promised her a pair of Canoptek tutors after all, and perhaps he could pair it with another tour of his Galleries. It was such a rare pleasure to share the fruits of his tireless bour with another soul who appreciated history for its own sake.

  “I am,” Echidna said with a grin. “Though there was something else I wanted to talk about. I happened upon something you might find interesting enough to dispy in one of your exhibits.”

  “Oh?” Trazyn asked, his curiosity piqued.

  “Trazyn,” Orikan said warningly.

  “Come now, dear colleague.” Trazyn waved him off. “It’s not like we are in a hurry. Mandragora isn’t going anywhere, and you are all but perfectly fixed up. So? What is it?”

  “A clone of the Primarch Lion El’Johnson,” Echidna said. “Not perfect like the Fulgrim one you have, it doesn’t have the original’s soul and presence, but it's a perfect physical clone.”

  Trazyn’s thoughts whirled. Souls and such things were no concern to him; authenticity was. This was a replica, yes, but if Echidna was the one giving it, then it would be as authentic as it could be.

  He was oftentimes forced to use replicas, or worse, stand-ins, in his exhibits. Every time he looked at a colge in which some of the soldiers had been gathered from a different regiment, different time period or something to that extent, something in him recoiled slightly. It was an eyesore to the perfectionist in him, but it was much better than leaving the histories depicted by those stand-ins to be lost to time.

  He had some Dark Angels, records and scans of their destroyed homeworld of Caliban. Perhaps he could make an exhibit depicting its fall. There was also a Calibanite beast in his collection, one that the First Primarch was said to have fought a great number of during his formative years. Perhaps a duel between them?

  Ah, if only he had had one of the other Primarchs with whom the Lion duelled during the Horus Heresy. Now that would make for an exhibit worth putting in one of the better parts of his Infinite Galleries.

  “How authentic is it?” Trazny asked thoughtfully, most of his mind already preoccupied by coming up with dozens of new exhibits he could build around a Loyalist Primarch.

  “I got the gene-sample right from the source, and will do the cloning myself,” Echidna said with a smirk. So the Lion lived? … Well, wasn’t that just absolutely fascinating? Perhaps he would have a truly authentic Primarch in his collection after all. “I daresay not even that lunatic you got your perfect Fulgrim clone from could make a better clone than me.”

  “He did make a ‘perfect’ one, as you call it,” Trazyn said offhandedly, earning a dismissive snort for his words.

  “By accident,” Echinda said. “He can’t replicate the feat, and only managed it due to sheer luck.”

  Trazyn nodded; that did indeed fit his impression of Fabius Bile. The transhuman geneticist did not strike him as the sanest of individuals.

  “I suppose you have something in mind that you want in return for that clone?” Trazyn said. Echidna merely smiled in response, and Trazyn felt like he was about to be extorted for all he was worth. Oh well, if it ended with him having another Primarch in his collection, he’d be happy either way. Material wealth and knowledge were all just a means to an end to him. That end being the expansion of his Infinite Galleries.

  *****

  The number of Avatars I had access to once again shrank back down to one, but I couldn’t help but grin all the same. I’d managed to get a Canoptek Spyder along with a small swarm of Canoptek Scarabs added to our deal. Plus, Trazyn also agreed to expand my lessons to include how to properly control my new Canoptek constructs, and how to use them, and other Necron technology, to interface with the ‘inferior’ technology of the lesser species poputing the gaxy.

  In the end, it cost me making four lobotomised Lion clones for him, and three of the same with Fulgrim clones. Still, it was absolutely worth it, especially since he’d been the one to supply me with the biomass needed to create the clones, so there was no bio-energy cost to it on my part.

  The most important of those was the single Canoptek Spyder now sitting in resting mode on the Sovereign. That machine had a Nano-Fabricator array, able to do maintenance and repairs of all Necron technology. More importantly, it could transmute matter in small quantities into necrodermis, or transform energy into it too. The conversion was atrocious, but it could be done.

  On the other Fortress Worlds in the Iron Colr, no concerted effort stood against me to stall my advance. There were some hopeless st stands, but I made btant use of Octavian to make them all surrender. The Custodian clearly wasn’t happy to be used as a cudgel, but at the same time saw those resisting his orders as obstructions in his path, so he wasn’t too hung up about sughtering the few who managed to refuse him to his face.

  Which left me with plenty of time to py with my new toys. Not the Bckstone, not yet. Not the Canoptek Spyder, since I couldn’t command it yet. No, I started with the Psilencer and the Nemesis Force Bdes I’d gotten from the Grey Knights.

  I even gave Valenith a call, poking his soul inside my Realm until he sank into deep enough meditation to project his mind into one of my sub-realms. He was an Eldar Warlock, the primary type of combat Psyker of the Eldar race. But that wasn’t what interested me. I remembered that Warlocks used Witchbdes, which were essentially Nemesis Force Weapons, just better.

  Nemesis Force Weapons struck with the full might of the Psyker wielding them. Witchbdes, however, gave a physical enhancement to the Psyker wielding them proportional to their psychic might. They also wouldn’t break until the psyker’s will held, and power was supplied, according to Val, which was neat. I wanted it.

  He told me tales of his master, the Farseer Eldrad, who could easily cleave through Astartes Terminator armour or cut an entire battle tank in half. Witchbdes enhanced, channeled and unleashed the tent psychic potential of their wielders, so in the hands of someone truly powerful, they could accomplish ridiculous things.

  Unfortunately, Valenith had never walked the Path of the Artisan and was no Bonesinger himself, so he didn’t know the exact construction of the weapons. However, he had a Witchbde, and that was enough for me. He’d shown it to me, and I dissected it with my aura, devouring every st detail like a ravenous beast.

  The weapon resonated with Valenith, but it also held something else, another, older mark. The essence of its maker, an infinitesimal sliver of their soul that suffused the wraithbone. I then quickly checked on Atiesh, and sure enough, it was much the same.

  Wraithbone is not merely warp energy made solid. It is like a crystal forming around the soul-sliver of the Bonesinger. That is what makes it solid, what makes the entire process of Bonesinging possible at all.

  It was such a tiny sliver, too, that I hadn’t even noticed it. Even my mind-cores only noted a momentary dip in the rate of my soul’s incremental power growth, which coincided with the time of my soulbone skeleton’s creation. The fact that it was just a dip compared to the incredibly minuscule growthrate my soul was going through put it into perspective that it truly was an inconsequential fragment. Still, it was nonetheless a piece of my soul.

  Atiesh had a more sizable sliver, but still so minute that I’d recovered what was lost two minutes after the staff’s creation. Maybe that expined why the weapon was so powerful and unique. It was a part of me, the true me.

  Witchbdes weren’t just chunks of sharp wraithbone, though. They were lined with powerful Aeldari runes infused with psychic power, and contained a helix-shaped, crystalline psychic matrix embedded with runes to channel and focus the wielder’s psychic energies. That was what granted it its unique properties.

  I could have copied it over, replicated the psychic crystalline matrix inside Atiesh, but instead, I decided to make a new witchbde of my own. Not to wield it, but to understand it. Aeldari psychic runes were power, intent, conceptual meaning, and ancient legacy all forged into a single shape that defied description. But they weren’t mine. I wasn’t about to put those things inside Atiesh. I would make my own, and only when I had remade the psychic matrix in its entirety would I add it to my favourite staff.

  As I sat down and focused, channelling soul power through myself with more focus than ever before, I paid careful attention to my soul. Sure enough, tiny slivers of my very essence started joining the soul energy when I willed it into that bone-like structure. With that theory now doubly confirmed, I focused on the task at hand. My Witchbde had to be perfect. Even though it wouldn’t be the final weapon I would use, it would probably serve me better as a melee weapon than my current go-to Norn Emissary Bonesword.

  I knew where every molecule had to crystallise; I knew how everything had to connect; I knew where each nook, indent and swirl had to go. More importantly, the crystalline helix-shaped matrix was visualised clearly before my mind’s eye, and the soul energy obediently flowed according to my will, taking on that shape as needed. The runes were the most annoying to replicate. I had to get the intent right; I had to glean the hidden meanings, the sympathetic links and the other empathic synergies the runes used when imbuing them with power. I messed up the first … I stopped counting how many times, each time feeling that the rune didn’t quite match what I’d felt from Valenith’s Witchbde. It was close, but imperfect, and that wasn’t good enough. Good enough was not, in fact, good enough. Not for this.

  Once the first rune was finally done to perfection, it made me smile in glee, even though it was just the first of many. The hours went by; my clones continued to work and indulge in hobbies so my Avatar could keep its focus. Rune after rune, hour after hour, the witchbde crept closer and closer to completion.

  Then it was done. Finally fully finished. I grabbed the hilt of the longsword, longer than I was tall, and felt it. My soul energy flowed into it, cascading through the matrix, passing through the runes and then looping back around, back into my body, carrying newfound purpose. My body surged with more power than ever before, and it wasn’t just strength. It was agility, reflexes, dexterity, speed and flexibility. Every aspect of my body was made better. The witchbde thrummed in my hand, and eager to test it, I expended the bio-energy needed to plop down the Swarmlord before me.

  Not a lobotomised clone, but one left free. The Hive Mind tched onto it in an instant; its initial wild ferocity stemmed and honed into something much more dangerous by the time it leapt to its feet. Intelligence and a depthless hunger shone in its gaze as it stared at me in something that might have been confusion, or perhaps wariness.

  I grinned, then swung my sword. No resistance, just the sound of my energy thrumming through the bde as it cleaved through the beast. The Swarmlord, one of the most dangerous and advanced warrior organisms of the Tyranid Hive Mind, fell to the floor in two bloody chunks, bisected cleanly.

  My grin turned into a cackle, then full-blown, gleeful ughter. It hadn’t been the mere physical power behind my swing that tore through my impromptu test dummy, oh no. A witchbde was a Force Weapon; its edge had thrummed with energy that rent asunder molecur bonds even before the physical edge of my bde touched the target. That, too, had power proportional to my own psychic potential.

  Another step closer to my goals. Another step closer to being strong enough not to be messed with by anyone, strong enough to protect the few things that truly matter. I just need to keep walking, keep snowballing. Keep walking. I can do that. Become the unstoppable force and the immovable object in one gorgeous package.

  P3t1