Chapter 317: The King of Explorers

“That damned arch-traitor was it?…” the Burning One hissed, “…He deceived us with temporary dormancy, then picked us off one by one while we were tearing ourselves apart in civil war… Those cursed traitors, traitors! No race in the galaxy can rival the Necrontyr in sheer treachery.”

At the mention of the shard mounted upon the Silent King’s throne, the Burning One ground its teeth in fury. The living flame of its form warped and flared, its hatred so concentrated that it seemed to distort the air around it, sharp enough to feel as though it might pierce time and space itself. Had Szarekh, still possessed flesh, whether in the present age or the long-buried past, the Silent King would have felt a chill crawl unbidden down his spine.

“How did you not see the betrayal?” Qin Mo said helplessly, looking at the Burning One. “After having their very souls devoured by the C’tan, they still willingly used those bodies, stuffed with inferior machine intelligences, to continue serving the Star Gods as slaves?”

“Even so,” the Burning One snarled, “the Necrontyr were never innocent victims!”

It continued to spit venom at the ancient Necrontyr, at the dynastic husks the modern Necrons had become, and at their last sovereign, the one named Szarekh, the Silent King.

“Szarekh didn’t wage war against the Old Ones merely because he hated them for being immortal lizards. He did it because his rule was on the verge of collapse. The Necrontyr were a dying people, wracked by radiation sickness, short-lived, and obsessed with legacy. He needed an external enemy, an overwhelmingly powerful one, a war so vast it drowned dissent, to force his short-lived subjects to rally behind him again, to remain obedient servants beneath his throne.”

The Old Ones’ mastery of biology and the Warp made them the perfect foil. They represented everything the Necrontyr lacked: longevity, adaptability, and a future that did not end in slow cellular decay.

“And besides,” the Burning One went on, its voice dripping with scorn, “if one of the Star Gods was literally known among its own kind as the Deceiver, just how staggeringly foolish must Szarekh have been to listen to its counsel?”

At the height of his rule, the Necrontyr were already engaged in a vicious struggle against the Old Ones. It was during this desperation-soaked era that the Necrontyr encountered the C’tan and underwent the grand biotransference process that transformed their species into the undying and soulless Necrons.

“Perhaps he never truly hated us for consuming the souls of his people,” it continued, its tone turning coldly speculative. “Perhaps he only hated that we failed to transfer his soul intact into an immortal body. For all we know, the moment he stepped out of the bio-transference furnaces and realized that his entire species had become eternal slaves, bound by command protocols that made disobedience impossible, he might have been secretly delighted.”

An empire that could never rebel. A people who could never age, never question, never fracture. For a ruler terrified of instability, it was not a curse, it was resolution.

By the end of its tirade, even the Burning One laughed, a harsh, mirthless sound that echoed unnaturally through the Webway chamber. In its own judgment, it had conjured the image of a dark, despicable tyrant, and conveniently laid the blame for its shattering entirely at the feet of that leader’s bottomless moral bankruptcy.

Qin Mo had initially intended to say a few words in Szarekh’s defense, but upon reflection… the Burning One wasn’t entirely wrong. Intent mattered less than outcome.

The Necrontyr’s transformation into the Necrons had never been a true mechanical ascension. It had been a harvest. Their physical forms were fed into the bio-transference furnaces, their bodies stripped down to raw matter and recast as living metal, their souls devoured by the C’tan. Perhaps they even watched, helplessly, as their skeletal metal bodies were fitted with crude artificial intelligences, stamped with their former identities, rolled off assembly lines of living metal… and then watched as their true selves were consumed.

In the 40k lore, Szarekh had once sneered that the Emperor of Mankind was nothing more than “meat dabbling in witchcraft,” and that Sanguinius would have made a better Emperor than that slab of decaying flesh.

Yet the Emperor had truly created the Primarchs by bargaining with the Dark Gods. He was a mad gambler who lost the wager and was beaten half to death, but at least a few loyal Primarchs still lived. His chances of recovery were infinitesimal, but they were not zero.

Compared to such a lunatic gambler, Szarekh almost seemed… innocent. He had gambled as well, but with cards stacked by a god who defined deceit as a principle of existence. He had been deceived so thoroughly that even the burden of responsibility had been stripped from him.

Still, to be fair, Szarekh was not an entirely incompetent ruler. After realizing he had been duped, he did manage to orchestrate the shattering of nearly all the C’tan.

“These tangled chains of cause and effect are a headache,” Qin Mo sighed.

The galaxy had become the hellscape it was today, and the C’tan, the Necrons, and the Aeldari all bore their share of responsibility, each catastrophe layered atop the last, each attempt to escape extinction leaving scars that never healed.

“Enough,” the Burning One said seriously, turning to Qin Mo. “Your consciousness is not that of the original Forger. There is no need for you to bind yourself to ancient grudges.”

Qin Mo nodded in agreement and turned, walking toward the exit of the Webway leading to the Talon System.

The Burning One followed, and with a casual wave of its hand, the Webway gate it had opened sealed shut behind them.

After leaving the Webway, a thought suddenly occurred to Qin Mo.

“If we refine Webway technology further,” he asked, “is it possible for humanity to use it to completely sever its connection to the Warp?”

“That isn’t your plan, is it?” the Burning One asked.

Qin Mo nodded.

The idea of using the Webway to isolate humanity from the Warp had not originated with him, but with the Emperor of Mankind. The Emperor had dreamed of severing humanity’s dependence on the Immaterium, not out of ignorance of the Warp, but because he understood it too well, of freeing the species from a medium that fed upon thought, emotion, and belief, from the predations of daemons, gods, and psychic corruption.

The Webway, unlike Warp travel, did not rely on emotion, belief, or psychic resonance, it was a sealed extradimensional transit system engineered by the Old Ones themselves. The plan might, might have had some feasibility.

The Burning One considered this carefully, then shook its head.

“Humans are not like the Necrontyr. They possess psychic potential. Their souls resonate naturally with the Warp, whether they wish it or not. How could a single Webway network ever completely sever their connection to the Warp? The closest thing I can imagine is forcing all of humanity to live inside the Webway itself.”

Qin Mo immediately thought of Commorragh.

The Dark City of the Drukhari, built within the Webway itself. It had survived the Fall of the ancient Aeldari Empire and the birth of Slaanesh precisely because the Warp could not easily penetrate the Webway… provided it wasn’t breached.

“A workable idea ten thousand years ago, perhaps,” the Burning One said, clearly familiar with Commorragh and guessing Qin Mo’s thoughts. “But now the Webway is riddled with breaches. The Lizards are gone, and no one truly understands the system as a whole anymore. Warp energies seep through. You know as well as I do that Commorragh is not truly safe.”

Qin Mo nodded.

Commorragh was indeed far from secure. The Drukhari’s absolute prohibition on psychic powers likely existed precisely because even within the Webway, psychic activity could still draw the gaze of She Who Thirsts, their species’ ultimate predator.

Times had changed. The once-sealed Webway now resembled a neglected public latrine, patched, corrupted, and contested. Even the forces of Chaos occasionally found ways to use it.

If the Webway could no longer fully isolate the Warp, then its strategic value was no greater than that of a dimensional engine.

“Then forget it,” Qin Mo said flatly, discarding the idea without even explaining his deeper intentions to the Burning One.

....

A week passed in the blink of an eye.

During that time, Qin Mo focused on researching personality matrices that could replicate the traits of the Pariah gene, attempting to artificially recreate the soulless nature of blanks without relying on rare genetic anomalies.

Across the star sector, construction began on void fortresses and system-scale defensive installations within the systems behind the Talon Gate.

The Burning One took up residence in the system where Qin Mo had previously battled the Nightbringer, settling on the lone remaining planet. There, it created, and incinerated, biotechnologically engineered followers at its leisure.

Everything continued to function as normal.

The warning Yoan had received from the psyker of Beisu I, a prophecy that the Talon Sector would face catastrophe, had yet to manifest.

But beyond the Talon Sector, far beyond its borders, an event that would affect the fate of the entire human species was unfolding.

In a star system due east of the Ultima Segmentum, far beyond its borders, a massive warship emerged from a Warp rift.

Inquisitor Katarinya Greyfax, who had been dispatched from Cadia by Inquisitor Lord Horst to conduct a purge of cult activity in the region, received reports of the vessel. She immediately boarded her own ship and ordered it to intercept.

Even at extreme range, Greyfax could make out the vast, cathedral-like profile of the ship, its armored spires, its arcane sensor arrays, its sheer impossible scale.

It was a Mechanicus Ark.

A mobile forge-temple, a self-sustaining dominion of the Adeptus Mechanicus, capable of operating beyond Imperial supply lines for centuries. Such vessels carried manufactoria, data-vaults, and weapons whose patterns dated back to the Great Crusade and earlier, many of them irrecoverable should they ever be lost.

Incoming transmissions identified the vessel as the Zar-Quaesitor, the King of Explorers.

Its master was Belisarius Cawl.

Greyfax boarded the Ark under formal Inquisitorial authority. Escorted by adepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus, she was guided deep into the vessel’s core, eventually entering the command bridge.

Belisarius Cawl’s colossal form stood at its center, a towering fusion of flesh, steel, and ancient artifice. Incense fogged the air, data-psalms whispered from vox emitters, and countless mechadendrites extended from his body, each one interfacing directly with the bridge’s systems, as though the Archmagos and the vessel were a single integrated machine.

At his side stood a woman with radiant white wings, the so-called Living Saint, Celestine, whom Greyfax had encountered on Cadia.

“You’re collaborating with this mutated—”

Greyfax had barely begun to accuse Cawl of consorting with warp-tainted abominations when the sound of the bridge’s bulkhead doors opening cut her off.

Two Aeldari entered the chamber.

One was female, her hair bound in a distinctive high braid. The other wore crimson armor, bearing the unmistakable presence of a warrior, his posture disciplined and controlled, the stance of one accustomed to command, perhaps a general, or an elite guardian of his kind.