Few things could truly be made better by being devoured and corrupted by the Warp, so when I say that the thing known as the Hadex Anomaly was a prime example of that category, you probably have an idea of just how horrible that cancer upon space-time was. The Warp, at least, had some commonalities, if not rules, then guardrails. It corrupted, it whispered, it was populated by daemons and Four Warts calling themselves Gods of Chaos.
The Hadex Anomaly, though? It made no sense. It was a monstrous heart palpitating in the void, the influence of which expanded and receded rhythmically, absorbing and disgorging entire solar systems over the course of solar decades.
Worlds bathed in the crimson glow of the Anomaly became saturated with its corrupting essence, while stars languished under its stygian radiance. Such stars become clotted red orbs, shedding a carmine luminescence mimicking that of the Anomaly itself. The locals called them the “Charon Stars”.
Imperial scholars have noted that the Anomaly “spews time”, which was the closest they ever came to determining anything specific about the thing. The Hadex Anomaly defied classification, sometimes in a manner that seemed almost … willful. It had been described as mercurial, changing its ‘habits’ and the way in which it acted whenever someone tried to study it. This erratic behaviour made many scholars believe it had a sentience, or even a mind of its own, though considering that most Imperial scholars went more or less mad by the time they stopped studying the phenomenon, I wasn’t sure how much to trust their notes. Any efforts to fully catalogue or study the full scope of the Anomaly’s innumerable effects ended in utter disaster.
The man who the Anomaly had been named after, a Rogue Trader Captain named Emanuel Hadex, had been one of the few lunatics to travel into the Jericho Reach during its Age of Shadows. He had made the idiotic decision to explore the Anomaly, or maybe it had lured him in, because records showed he led his entire fleet right into the heart of the sanguine star, ordering a full broadside on the one ship under his command that turned to escape.
It was centuries later that Imperial explorers discovered the wrecks of Hadex’s fleet orbiting the Anomaly named after him, and boarding it, they saw a crew in the midst of a violent mutiny. Emanuel Hadex himself was found on the command deck, alone, the door barricaded as he sat in his Command Throne. He was frozen in time like the rest of his crew, a mad grin painted onto his still features while his eyes, bloodshot and deranged, reflected the crimson light of the Anomaly he was staring through the viewscreen.
So you may begin to understand why I decided to go with the ‘if I ignore it, it won’t be a problem’ approach, trying to stray clear of the damned eldritch horror despite the Anomaly being one of the terminus points of the newly opened Great Rift, and sitting in the very heart of the Jericho Reach.
I’d hoped, perhaps futilely, that being absorbed into the Cicatrix Maledictum would overwrite this eldritch horror with its own Warpy rules and essence. Alas, that proved rather unwise in retrospect … or maybe it was the only reason I still retained my sanity.
My mind-cores alerted me of the danger the moment my sensors and aura detected the incoming Warp Jump, though I was more than a bit stumped when a void ship of an entirely unfamiliar design translated into realspace. It was a vessel of gleaming silver and brass, a civilian merchant craft of elaborate craftsmanship. It was when its vox buzzed to life a moment later and began projecting a message systemwide on all frequencies that my heart turned to ice.
“This is Chartist Captain Olympia Thyatira of the Limitless Grasp,” a woman’s cultured voice rang in my ear as I tuned my senses to catch the vox message. “We would like to formally request permission to enter the orbit of Verronus. Transmitting identifications now. Over.”
What the hell is she- I began to think before going still as a high-priority alert from my mind-cores blared in my mind like an air siren. There was no planet that’s ever been called ‘Verronus’ in the Vallia system … However, I remembered the name both from a wiki dive, from Octavian’s files and also from the records I’d managed to extract from the Watch Commander of Watch Fortress Erioch.
It was an ancient Hive World, having sat on ancient starcharts right where the very core of the Hadex Anomaly now stood on the more modern ones. The most widely accepted theory of the Anomaly’s origins proposed that a most profane ritual had been conducted there during the Age of Shadows, using a once-in-a-million-years celestial alignment that allowed them to bring the abyss of the Warp into Realspace.
In short, any mention of it was exceptionally bad news. Usually ‘call an Inquisitor right the fuck now’ grade bad news.
From there, I recognised the name ‘Limitless Grasp’ as well. It was the most notorious phantom ship of the Jericho Reach. A ship that’s died a thousand times, its crew’s final moments transmitted to any ship close enough to receive a vox message. But it was what would supposedly follow that made me let loose a slew of profanity that would have made even hardened sailors blush and scramble to enact all of my purely defensive anti-Warp incursion contingencies.
The Limitless Grasp was at the very edge of the Vallia System, far out in the Oort Cloud, but it was still far too close for my liking. From what I knew thanks to my mind-cores hastily compiling a data packet, the most dangerous thing I could do now was attack the void ship, something which would allow its eldritch curse to spread to all who struck out against it. So no, I was going to stay far away from the damned thing and not even look at it in any way that could be found offensive.
“I’ve forwarded a formal request for an audience with his pharaonic eminence, the Sanguine Oligarch of Verronus-“ the eerie vox message began again, but I sent a jolt of Biomantic energy through my network of buoys and sensors. Each and every one of them detonated, erasing the system in an instant as the self-destruct command cascaded across the network, jumping from node to node in the span of a second.
I cut off my ability to receive vox messages when panicked vox-chatter began to radiate from the Limitless Grasp as its crew bore witness to something horrifying, some strange phenomenon that consumed the planet they were orbiting.
The Blackstone Pylon network on Vallia Prime went up in full force as I teleported around, dropping new Pylons and doubling their numbers planetwide. The Null Field enveloping the moon went from a mild 4 — on a scale from 1 to 10 — all the way up to an oppressive 9, which was akin to the entire planet being under the influence of a proper Omega Class Blank. People worldwide shuddered, some even passed out or curled up in fright as the world around them seemed to lose all colour, becoming a muted, dreary place without joy.
It didn’t matter. It was disturbing and uncomfortable, but they were alive, and even the most Warp-sensitive ones would be deaf to what was to come.
I sensed the Limitless Grasp bank sideways hard, as if scrambling to evade something coming its way, and after a brief instant, which I spent consulting everything I knew about this eerie phenomenon, I reeled my aura back in, just to be safe. I knew I didn’t want to risk even so much as vaguely perceiving what was to come, so I leashed my aura and wrapped it around myself like a skin-tight bodysuit.
I grimaced in sympathy as neither Val nor Selene made it a secret just how much they hated me at that moment as their bodies betrayed them. Nausea, vomiting, migraines, heightened anxiety and panic attacks were all common symptoms occurring when a Psyker had the misfortune to be in the presence of a sufficiently strong Blank.
Again, it was better than the alternative. I descended to Vallia itself, opened the floodgates to my Realm and channelled an ungodly amount of power through my poor little Storm Ward as Atiesh slammed into my other hand, condensing the torrentuous energy before it entered the small amulet. A barrier went up, sweeping out a thousand miles a second as it quickly grew to encase the entire planet, then kept growing until even the moon of Vallia Prime, where all my citizens fell under its protective aegis.
Now, you may ask why I encased both Vallia and its smaller moon in the barrier, instead of focusing on only protecting the actually populated moon, leaving the relatively worthless main planet to weather what was to come by itself? Well, because my goddamned Overmind experiments with Vallia’s weird hive-mind ecosystem were finally starting to show promise and I’d be damned if I let it all be ruined by an overgrown eldritch wart’s tantrum.
Projecting the barrier over such a massive distance was a colossal undertaking, but the barrier was incredibly limited; all things other than the object of its singular focus would pass through it freely, which greatly reduced the strain on myself. The only thing the barrier had to stop was … astropathic messages trying to come in from outside.
If I had even just a few more seconds of time than I actually did, then I would have repurposed another experiment to help me focus my efforts. I had recreated those massive towering bio-constructs the Tyranids had used to nearly kill me, having one for each of Vallia’s poles, and I was sure that if I put my mind to it I could turn that thing into a global energy-shield projector. Alas, it could only shoot massive Psychic Lances and release Psychic Screams at the moment, which wasn’t of much use in the present circumstances.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the ever-distant form of the Hadex Anomaly start to writhe like the tumorous cancer it was, its carmine light pulsating and undulating as it flowed forth and seemed to fill the void all across the Vallia System. I breathed a mental sigh of relief, since it appeared I’d acted just in time, because I knew what I and everyone in the system looking up at the sky saw was the sign coinciding with a cavalcade of distress signals and panicked vox messages spewing forth from the phantom ship, all to herald the beginning of the final phase of this eldritch phenomenon as the ship itself got torn to shreds by unseen foes.
I took a deep, entirely superfluous breath to calm myself and feeling a flash of danger in the back of my mind, I pushed the energy even harder. Like how coal became diamond under extreme pressure, the soul energy condensed under the titanic weight of my willpower. For just an instant, the entire barrier hitched, its potency nearly doubling as my body began to unmake itself under the immense torrent of power. But my bones, Atiesh and the Storm Ward held, and I couldn’t help but feel a momentary triumph at that before I refocused.
The phenomenon known as the Lamentation Wave, the final message of the Limitless Grasp’s Astropath Transcendent, Dien Xquin. It was a bemoaning cry of awe and all-consuming horror, reverberating across the Empyrean, with a legacy of having driven countless astropaths all across the Jericho Reach to madness, killed some outright and even driven some to such hysterics that they fell on soul-killing blades just to escape the slightest chance of having to hear the wretched cry ever again.
My defences must have worked, because I didn’t hear it myself, just felt something crash against my barrier a mere instant after I doubled its strength. The momentary uptick of power fed to my barrier faded barely a moment later, my willpower proving to be insufficient to maintain it for any longer but the worst of the psychic shockwave had passed with the initial hit. My body healed itself in a blink, my regeneration finally overpowering the rate at which my body was disintegrating now that I wasn’t pushing it so much, and I breathed a mental sigh even as my focus remained on upholding the barrier to ward off the echoing secondary shockwaves.
The carmine light of the Hadex Anomaly slowly started to fade as the vile thing finally started to settle back down. I kept the barrier up and made no moves to lift the Blackstone Pylons network even as I felt nearly every psyker in the system passing out while being immensely miserable. Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether the Blank treatment was all that much better for most psykers than what I was using it to defend them from, but I’d made my bed, so I’d just have to lie in it. There was no cause for regret if everyone survived this absolute mess with their mental faculties mostly intact.
I waited until the echoing crashes against the barrier waned, then fully petered out to the point where I couldn’t feel them anymore. Then waited another minute just to be sure before doubling down on all my personal mental defences and finally unfurling my aura. It swept out, tasting the Empyrean for any lingering danger or corruptive essence leftover from the phenomenon, and when I found none, I finally let my barrier fall. Then I went around collecting some Pylons, once more lessening the suppressive force of the planetary Null Field to a much more comfortable 5.
My drones and mind-cores would handle the inevitable public outcry and do what they had to to calm some nerves, but prime-me had a much more important task ahead of her. I swiftly collected Selene’s unconscious form, tucking her into the comfiest bed we had after doing my best to soothe her inevitable pounding headache and nausea. Next up, I went and bought the nicest flowers I could find, and set about making the best ‘marry me chicken’ for dinner that I could, topped with a nice bucketful of Tiramisu, which was Selene’s favourite. I knew that my beautiful, wise lover would probably be understanding and not be cross with me for what I’d done … but it was best to go all out if I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be sleeping on the couch.
I also mentally prepared myself for a spar, or a hunt, because Selene was probably going to want to kill something when she woke up with the mother of all headaches. I had just the right little monster template in mind to let loose in the forest if she decided to go on a therapeutic killing spree. Wasn’t I just the most thoughtful girlfriend …?
Yeah, I should have pulled her soul into my Realm instead of letting her suffer the effects of the Null Field. I’m probably couchbound no matter what I do now … but whatever, she deserves all the nice things anyway!
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