Storytime "A gentle warning"

His fingers ached, coiled around the auto-quill like snakes that had forgotten to shed their skins.  Broken. Again. The servo arm resisted his movements, giving no small aid as intended.  He could smell leaking oils over the overpowering stench of a hundred spitting tallow candles.

He had to manually adjust the auto quill's path as the attached servitor chattered its remaining teeth like a lunatic.  It was probably as old as he was, probably.   

The relic of a wooden desk creaked and banged against the adjacent book shelves like a bustling crowd of anxious varnished refugees under the assault.  

The cell was too damn small!

Lywin the Adept sighed as he switched it off, causing a coughing fit as he heaved the heavy old piston assisted arm away from him.  He brought up a blue faded handkerchief, flecks of dirty old blood stained the "I" marked Aquila in the corner. Returning to his work, he squinted his eyes, adjusting the lenses on his spectacles with some extra strength.  He picked up his favorite manual quill and continued. 

His fingers ached again as he rubbed off the excess ink.  Blotted, bulging with arthritis and old augmentations, his hands were nearing their end.  He stopped and stared at them.  These hands, he mused, that had penned the Imperium's only true knowledge on the most ancient of Xenos known to the Imperium.  That pride, which once warmed his loneliness, seemed to be but embers these days faint lights in the ash of his final years.  

Lywin glanced outside and decided to ponder on the weather.  Cold.  The Inquistor always sent him somewhere gekking cold.  Snowflakes of perfection danced past the half stain glass window.  The visage of the Saint Thor looked down at him with that damnable smile.  Saint Thor, a man touched by the Emperor and destined for a life of greatness, remembered forever for his deeds.  Lywin stared for a moment before remembering himself.

"Oh piss off."  He croaked, coughing again but this time tinged with the hint of bitter laughter.  I bet the almighty Saint Thor never had issues digesting meat, he thought.

The old scribe frowned.  He was so easily distracted these days, old thoughts, or echoes of thoughts pulled and drew at him like children in the sweetgoods storage.  He should have sired children...

He cleared his throat harder than he probably should have, causing another hacking fit, ending abruptly with an aggressive grunt.  The work needed to be finished by the end of the lunar cycle.  He had his task.  He would do it.  Such was his lot.

The great book, a veritable tomb, which lay before him was standard issue Inquisition storage for all of its most sacred, if not dangerous, knowledge.  Black leather, bound in chains and encrypted with hexogrammic wards and security protocols that would destroy the entire work if opened incorrectly.  His work, his life's work, would be locked up after completion.  It would be hidden away in the deepest darkest library.  Opened but for the highest necessity.  The only real reason they had given him this task was probably because of his age, and the certainty of silence that came with it.

The text he translated was old.  Ancient.  Certainly heretical in its very existence: it suggested a universe with no Emperor to start with.  It suggested a time before mankind even breathed.  The writing was in the form of symbols, perfect shapes like ice crystals, but more akin to circuits and monorail conveyance maps.  Flowing vectors that never seemed to curve but for an abrupt perfect circle.  No deviation.  No tangent.  Every line was immaculate with grammatical purpose and one deviation broke the entire meaning.   

Above his desk a shard of something altogether normal and yet at the same time horrifically other floated above his desk.  The tablet he had been sent, hovering in its personal stasis prison, had endured over forty thousand years.  A more precise date was less than forthcoming, though it reached a point where guess work was in the millennia.  Regardless, it like its style, felt immaculate and eternal.  

Taking in the patterns until his eyes blurred, he looked down into the book and wrote "And by decree did the quiet lord did bring down the star gods..."

The translation of this line troubled him no end.  Not quite Lord, nor Gods.  The symbol contained a dichotomy, a contradiction.  Both worshipped and all powerful, yet baleful and hated.  And then there was this quiet lord?  The symbol for quiet was extended more than usual, did this indicate relative silence?  Was it Silent Lord?  But then the symbol for Lord was far complex...

Lywin was scratching his dry weathered cheek when his answer came to him, but not by his own doing.

"SILENT.  ALWAYS SILENT.  THE SILENT KING." 

Lywin span around on his chair, the adrenaline numbing him to the pain of his protesting frame. The darkness of his cell was more apparent than ever.  His ears, forever ringing strained for the source of the sound.  Shaking hands grasped for the distress switch under his desk.  His heart was hammering in his small chest, now it was his teeth that were chattering, not the servitors.

Out of the dark a skull came.  Tall, thin, crowned and regal in the colour of bone.  It loomed over him out of the shadow, its motions deliberate and smooth, no deviation, no wasted movement.  It said something again, the sound was impossibly complex and all at the same time.  Lywin was still scrabbling when he heard the first word he understood, it was a childish base level phoneme, meaning... hello?  He spluttered.  His mistake was simple enough.  He had never heard the word spoken before, at least not correctly, but had read it a thousand times.

It was Necrontyr.  The language of The Eternally Dying.  Now the language for that monstrous world ending race, the Necrons.

Lywin's left arm blazed with a fresh hell of pain, his breath coming only after a fight.  He fell from his chair scrabbling back from the thing, as it rotated its head in confusion.  It stepped forward without preamble, It's body was skeletal, that was obvious, but a fire burned inside, lighting optics with an acidic green light.  It's body rippled with the occasional incandescent arc of lightning that it paid no heed to.  A pulse of sorts, possibly a heartbeat in a way.  The symbol on its chest was a deep red, the Dynastic Icon unfamiliar to him.  His mind was gripping conclusions and puzzles as his body failed him.  Not like this...

"NECRONTYR" It said, Its voice was sibilant, distant and like a mans final breath, like his final breath as it stuttered to a halt.  He could feel his brain dying.  It reached out It's wide hand snatching his robes like a small bag.  Lywin felt himself die as the creature yanked at him, cradle him, tutting as if both annoyed and troubled.

***

All was darkness.  The occasional casting of light , a green light, caught his attention.  He heard things, tools at work, the discharge of static.  Scuttling of a million insects.  Someone was crying, or was that laughter?  A thought evaded him, some horrible possibility.  Then all at once he remembered his heart attack and that blank and soulless bone coloured death mask.

***

When Lywin awoke he was alone.  An unfamiliar ceiling greeted him.  Gritting his remaining teeth, he teetered off the solid bed of what felt like rock, onto his bare feet.  He stared down at his bare wrinkled feet, noting the bed and floor was made of a flawless black material that shined yet did not reflect the light.  He was still wearing his robes, though upon further inspection something had been attached to his chest. He fingered it idly, thankful that it didn't itch. It was a circle shaped thing, like a large ebony coin with dozens of small tendrils reaching into his chest, flickering that familiar acidic green light. 

He leaned over and tried to empty his stomach.  Instead he launched into a violent hacking fit which had him leaning against his stone bed with a feeble arm.

Eventually Lywin looked around, the room was a windowless box, the walls and ceiling made of the same flawless obelisk rock as the floor and bed.  An impossibly still glowing ball hovered above him, showing no sign of repulsers or emitters.  It was simply light with a faint emerald tint to it that pulsed... like a heartbeat. His host, or his captor had saved his life.

He fingered the device on his chest as he approached the only exit:  A hole in the room with no door to bar it.  He twiddled his trembling thumbs before summoning enough courage to stick his head outside.

"ARE YOU WELL?" 

Lywin yelped, his host stood there by the door, immobile as a statue.  The globe followed him, casting better light into the seemingly endless corridor. He got a better look now.  The Necron was like a tall sun bleached corpse, joints of oiled silver sat between limbs and the burning emerald sun spat out of an apparently empty ribcage. Beyond this body, It was decorated and bedecked in a srrange finery of more metals.  It possessed a shimmering cloak of interlocking scarabs that he swore moved and changed position as it flowed and a transverse crown of clotted blood red.  It's face, no more than an elongated alien skull, regarded him without emotion.  It cocked it's head to one side as if trying to hear something, two sockets burned with an ill green light.

"I'm well, yes... yes, thank you."  He managed.  His voice carried down the long corridor.

"WALK WITH ME."  It said, turning with such speed and confidence that Lywin had to walk quickly to catch up. "THE LIFE WE HAVE GIVEN WILL NOT LAST LONG"  The Necron said.  "WE HAVE MUCH TO DISCUSS."

***

The Inquisitor Craven was troubled.  Alone in the Adept's cell, he simply stood and thought.  All manner of auspex had failed.  His agent, Lywin Callis, had simply disappeared.  No open door, no stain on the warp to indicate teleportation.  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

Most importantly though, the tomb remained as did the tablet.  Strange, both were infinitly worth more than the Adept.  Had he missed something?  The idea made him somewhat quesy.


There was a change in the atmosphere, a sudden movement of something into nothing that made him spin around whipping out his plasma pistol in the blink of an eye.

The construct that was once Lywin calmly and impossibly exited the shadows like a man would exit a house.  Skeletal, but with a mockery of the human face, smooth and perfect with thin acid green eyes.  It walked with no pain in its knees, nor arthritis in its hands. It no longer had fear of a failing heart or the deterioration of its senses.  It no longer feared death or the need to be remembered.  It was eternal.  It now was death, just as the Necron Lord had promised.  Their exchange was complete.

But somewhere inside, Lywin remembered as clearly as that perfect snow flake.  It remembered feeling pain, misery, loneliness.  It remembered having to adjust his spectacles and to be patient with his failing hands.  It remembered feeling sad and feeling angry and feeling proud. It remembered feeling, of how it should feel and now possessed only a lingering nostalgia.

No.  Now Lywin felt nothing.  Not even Lywin.  Now all it had was its new task, and It neither hated nor loved it.

"INQUISITOR CRAVEN.  I BRING YOU TIDINGS FROM MY MASTER AND A MESSAGE."

The Inquisitor powered his pistol up, the plasma pistol growling.

The construct that was once Lywin cocked It's head to one side, curious.
"ARE YOU WELL?"