States of Being
Feil
-1-
I was.
Blistering streamers of pure jealousy tore at my mind, madness and sorrow spattering off of them like oil from pan. I forced my consciousness through, clenching forgotten teeth in psychic agony, warding off those I could with dark tendrils of my own power. The warp flowed through me like water through a pump, drawing up strength for eventual release. A million colors man has never named flooded the vision of my mind's eye.
I could feel him.
I could find him.
There.
Drawing on powers too vile to countenance, I drove forward through his storm, screaming my hate into the maelstrom. Daemons dogged my wake, drawn to me by the blazing light of my tortured soul. I felt fear well up within me, a dark purple bruise upon the burning aura of my being—and used it.
Here in my world, emotions have power.
I drove it forward like a spear, bursting through clouds of golden pink tainted with dripping green ichor, shattering his shields.
My enemy staggered. The warp screamed in its thousand voices. Laughing rumbled from somewhere far below.
A blast of jealousy drove me back, almost into the waiting jaws of a daemon-beast, swimming like a lamprey against the flow of our battle. For a moment, I withstood his assault, waiting for an opening. There was none.
I threw the whole power of my uncontrollable mind at him, hurling him backwards into the storm of his own creation, and dove in after him. Logic bent. Causality shattered. Effect and cause became confused. My eyes saw past and future, pasts that had never been and futures that may yet come to pass; I heard the laughter of the thirsting gods loud in my ears; I gazed full on into the swirling madness that is Chaos, felt my soul melting away. The daemons that had pursued me were smashed aside by the current, and I was sent tumbling. Was? Will be?
I was.
Then I saw it, faint and flickering but steady, unmoving in the whirlwind dark: the constant glow of the Astronomican. I fought to keep level, to gaze upon it. My eyes rolled out of my head, so I looked at it with my palm. Blood flowed from wounds that were not on my wrists and feet and side. I clung to the distant light as I rippled and flowed, turned inside out and inside-in again, and—
It ended. I heard his scream as his consciousness died, snuffed out by a universe too mad to face, unwilling even in the darkest hour to gaze on the light of Terra.
The maelstrom faded.
The warp faded, slowed, lost its myriad colours, and was replaced by a red darkness against which spots of blue and yellow danced, mundane and dull compared to the miasma of eternal insanity.
It took me a moment to realize that my eyes were closed. I opened them. My cell presented itself. I was drenched in sweat. There was blood in my mouth. My flesh was pale and limp. Around me, the bars of the psi-inhibitors buzzed and hummed in tune with the binary chanting of a trio of red-robed techpriests bringing the barriers back to life.
'Good work, psyker,' said my keeper, Malchlorous Vandius Timmi the Fourteenth, a vulture-faced man of indeterminate rank whose true age was hidden by the fact that he had forgone human skin for undying, unfeeling synthflesh long before I met him. Even with the inhibitors running, I could feel the fear and disdain mingling in nauseating concert from his pallid little mind. He flipped a switch on the wall, and shackles slammed over my hands and feet and throat. Servitors entered on cue, trundling up slowly, in mockery of life; drool dribbled from sutured-shut lips, and the red dots of video cameras winked from raw, empty eye sockets. I felt a trickle of my own spittle clinging to my chin; I was helpless to remove it.
'Did I...' I breathed, the words feeling strange on my lips. 'Is he...?'
'Dead. Exploded. Took out half a facking city block when he went, but the storm's gone.'
I nodded weakly, too tired even to smile, but he went on: 'Emperor, you have no idea what our boys were going through down there. Why, the lightning, and—Throne of Earth, some of them said they were hearing voices from the Warp. And the artillery, and the bullets, and the enemy troopers—dreadful little devils—'
The psy-inhibitors crackled menacingly. Frost began to coat exposed edges. He caught the look in my bloodshot eyes and his sentence ended in a squeak. He moved to the wall, spun the inhibitors up to 75%, then turned, sniffed, and finished.
'You have no idea, psyker. Hell down there. Absolute hell.'
As if it were scripted, the servitors finally found their way into position, and as one they drove the syringes that kept me alive and sedated into neck and legs and arms. I felt myself begin to relax. The endless whispering of the eighty thousand souls on the battleship faded to ten thousand, then a hundred, then five. The tech-priests filed out, one by one, still chanting in their damnable lifeless binary.
'Good night, psyker,' lilted my keeper, and left. The inhibitor grating clanged shut behind him, and then there was only one soul in the room. The psy-restrictive drugs coursing into my veins grew stronger, and my mind-sight faded. Soon I lost sight even of the light of my own soul, and all that filled the room were lifeless machines: some of steel and adamantium and gold-thread, two drooling, mindless servitors slaved to the will of their thinking masters, and one drooling, mindless combat psyker, waiting until his next opportunity to step out of their world, and get back to his. Mine.
Get back to hell.
I faded a few seconds more. Darker. Darker.
Black.
I wasn't.
-2-
I was young.
I was young, and she was beautiful.
I was young, she was beautiful, I had been too young and too nervous to talk straight, and I had my figurative foot wedged firmly in my mouth. She laughed, like a sweet silver bell crossed with one of those ludicrous grey seagulls that cackled from above: 'Heea-hea-hea-hea-hea!'
'Aren't you a little young to be dancing with girls, Mikkie?'
She was only two years my senior, and laughter made her perfect chest rise and fall so delightfully it required superhuman powers of the mind to keep my gaze on her face. I blushed, hot and crimson, blurted a 'Nevermind!' and skulked out into the sweltering night. I could still feel her disdain, sour at the back of my throat, drowning out, for a moment, the whispering, like so many filthy cicadas, of all the minds in the grange hall. It felt important, somehow. More than it felt in the other boys' minds when they were scorned. Like there weren't other fish in the sea. Like there wasn't a second chance.
Maybe everybody felt this way.
Maybe that didn't make me any less frustrated.
A breeze swept in from the sea, tart with brine and seaside rot, and the cicadas chirruped and creaked slower as the temperature fell.
And fell.
And fell.
I drove my fist into a treetrunk, angry with myself and with her and the whole gods-forsaken world. It hurt. I did it again, harder. Again, harder. Something cracked in my hand, and a beam of agony flashed bright in my consciousness, driving out embarrassment and anger with the pressing urgency of immediate bodily damage. Pain flashed in my head, for a second, as if my soul was flashing with the discharge of pent up emotion like the wirebrush toy flashed little electric sparks between metal spheres when you turned the crank—
And in that instant, my first broken bone (by all the gods, not my last!), my first great rejection, I saw the boy walking up the path. His light shone like mine, not bright with pain but with something similar. Something red and throbbing and hateful. The stench of blood welled up from my chest into my nose, and lingered when I held my breath: there was nothing in the air.
I remembered—remembered? No—foresaw screams screamed by voices I had never heard raised.
I foresaw the hot, hot feeling of blood welling over my hands, the hot, helpless tears rolling down my face, the choking stink of kak and piss and death, the pleading look in her too-pale face as lifeblood pooled and mingled with vomit and excrement on the grange hall floor.
There was a burning hot glint of suffering tucked into his belt, and I recognized the shape from the vids even though I had never held one of the proscribed autoguns myself. His fault. It was his fault. Would be. Would be, in a few minutes. Unless....
Run! screamed an insistent voice at the back of my mind. Hide! Get away! I was between him and the door, and that was where he wanted to go. My hand throbbed. Pain and fear seeped from me in bitter waves, and I remembered again the reek of death. I almost choked.
He was closer, raising a hand to push me away. In that moment, his hood was open to me, and the light behind me, buzzing with mosquitoes and junebugs, illuminated his face. He was from the year ahead of me in the church school. My frustration and rejection resonated with him, and he paused, eyes narrowing. Could he feel others as I could?
Run! Hide! Get away!
Fight.
Fight?
He shoved me, hard, snarling. When his hand touched my chest, an explosion of horror slammed through my young mind, like a hundred clambering spiders on my face, like a bullet to the chest, like the sight of all that was once good and beautiful reduced to a welter of blood and death—
And I killed him.
Right there.
With my mind.
It tasted like overcooked garden greens that my mother forgot to wash clean of chemical insecticide, washed down with a swig of pureed cod and rotten seaweed, when I smashed through his puny self-image, walked into his mind, and ripped out his living, throbbing, malevolent soul, and cast it into the swirling maelstrom just visible on the edge of my vision, that hid itself from me whenever I looked straight at it.
Somewhere, something laughed.
He went flying back like Jethro did when he got clipped by a passing trundletruck trying to snag a bottle of beer from its moving cart to share with the rest of the boys. Light burned from his dead eyes, from his ears and nose and lolling mouth; he spun and tumbled like a ragdoll ten armspans into the tall grass at the side of the road. There was a sound like a million voices raised in sudden, penetrating horror for an instant, then silence.
My hand throbbed.
Inside, out of sight, I felt someone approaching the door, nervousness and worry and trepidation and urgency rippling from his soul-light. I could kill him, too, if I wanted to, I realized. Walk into his head and cast him into the ravening darkness.
I ran.
By all the gods and devils, I ran, as if it would do some good.
Foolish, I knew, even then. Madness. Naivety. Stupidity.
I was young.
States of Being [40k vignettes (sequential; 2 so far)]
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