The "Marionettist," William Wood, moved his mind and plucked at invisible threads.
The Farseer puppet raised her Singing Spear and hurled it.
The Khrave Titan swelled, growing to the size of a Warlord Titan.
It leaped, a series of psychic detonations trailing its movement.
The silver spear, inlaid with gleaming gems and carved with mystic runes, hummed as it shot through the air.
The Farseer puppet's eyes were deep. The Singing Spear abruptly changed course, spinning in pursuit of the Khrave Titan.
The Khrave Titan shrank, compressing to Warhound size.
Whoosh!
In the barest instant, the humming spear grazed past the Titan's back.
"Aeldar Farseer!" The head of the Khrave Titan, the pilot's head, its tendrils writhing with excitement.
He knew, from the Progenitor's mental web, that the Aeldari had been a primary food source for them across the long ages.
But 'recently,' before his own birth, most of the Aeldari had fallen. Their numbers were few, and the survivors were hard to hunt, forcing his clan to include humanity in their diet.
The Khrave Titan swelled to the size of an Emperor-class Titan. Its psychic shadow darkened the entire deck. The cold spread, frosting the three-kilometer-long, one-kilometer-wide chamber.
The Honour Guard fired at the shifting form. A dense barrage, laced with plasma beams, struck the contorting body, only to be deflected by the layered psychic shields.
The green plasma beams refracted and scattered, vanishing into the dark.
The Khrave ignored the Shadows of Order. Thousands of arms, like a forest, rose and fell from its torso, its burning, elastic body twisting.
Its arms, no longer moving with the supernatural subtlety of aetheric travel, moved like plankton. Two arms thrust towards the Farseer puppet.
The Farseer puppet raised her arm, a swirling psychic vortex forming above the Khrave Titan.
A torrent of destructive psychic energy rained down, hammering the contorting body.
On the supernatural plane, a wave of dissolution rippled, distorting everything around.
The Titan's shell, in the shrieking aetheric explosions, transmuted into a strange psychic crystal.
The Khrave Titan, now fully manifested in reality, shone like a crystalline statue, ablaze with color.
Boom, boom, boom...
The Honour Guard surrounded the Khrave Titan, firing relentlessly.
The dense barrage, warped in strange ways, struck the crystalline body, sending up sprays of psychic mist.
The Titan's body flickered and burned.
Crystallized in the material world, it was wounded. Its frame trembled with a fury and hatred that blazed like a furnace.
Five "Seers" felt a sudden premonition. They fled.
The psychic flames, faster than their intuition, consumed two black-armored figures within five hundred meters in an instant.
With a crack, the Shadows of Order were reduced to two wisps of ominous smoke.
A dozen "Clowns," acting on instinct before conscious thought, fled.
Flowers of flame, like grasping hands, pursued them.
The "Clowns" dodged left and right, leaping and rolling, evading the psychic fire with agility.
Amidst the storm of psychic flame, the "Magicians" did not flee.
They flickered and teleported through the bursts of flame, firing, then "Flame Jumping" away, evading the psychic shockwaves.
The Khrave Titan's solidified arms rose, poised to strike, when its thoughts stalled, frozen in mid-air.
The Khrave pilot gathered his consciousness, ignoring the tempting prize of the Farseer puppet and the loathsome black-armored warriors, and examined himself.
From body to mind, he found nothing amiss.
He was about to delve deeper when a sharp psychic assault struck his mind.
Bang!
The Farseer puppet's "Psychic Duel," like a hammer blow, shattered his thoughts. He even forgot the strange influence he had been feeling.
The "Marionettist" materialized silently in the exploding psychic flame upon the Titan's head. He had achieved preliminary control over the Khrave pilot through his Spirit Body Threads.
In the billowing psychic smoke, the Khrave Titan stumbled.
Its myriad arms swung. Aetheric tides churned. With a deafening roar, a cascade of psychic lightning fell.
With a series of sharp cracks, four "Clowns" exploded, their Cataphractii-pattern Terminator armor and bodies reduced to dark scorch marks.
The "Magicians," who had been leaping through the flames, were struck by the falling psychic bolts.
Bang, bang, bang...
Their black armor, like paper dolls, was torn apart in the detonations.
Those "Magicians" who had used "Paper Figurine Substitution" to evade the psychic lightning reappeared around the Khrave Titan, continuing their assault.
The "Marionettist," William Wood, using the Farseer puppet's psychic interference, circled the Khrave Titan's head, gradually gaining control of the intangible, black threads he had woven into its body.
Each psychic attack cost the lives of several Shadows of Order, but the intervals between attacks grew longer.
Suddenly, the flame-wreathed arms froze. The Khrave Titan stood motionless.
The "Marionettist" stood atop the shimmering crystal head, opening the vox channel: "Cease fire!"
The Shadows of Order of the Twelfth Chapter obeyed, lowering their weapons.
After a few seconds of stillness, the Khrave Titan straightened. Its body, fixed in reality by the Farseer puppet's attack, grew ethereal.
The solidified form became mutable once more. It shrank from Emperor-class size to that of a Knight in moments.
The "Marionettist," William Wood, leaped to the ground, looking at his second puppet.
The Khrave Titan slowly bowed. "Progenitor!"
At the same moment William acquired the Khrave Titan, the Progenitor who had once butchered four thousand Ultramarines and their Chapter Master, and then clashed with Angron in the material world, aged five million years in an instant.
He watched the psychic flames on the Nest-Web. With the death of the Khrave Titan, the linchpin of that branch, the entire web-section detached, like a torn spiderweb.
Within the twenty-kilometer-long web-ship, the Khrave warriors, fighting for their lives, convulsed in agony, dying in screaming torment.
Each death-scream kindled a fire in the Progenitor's soul.
The Khrave depended on the Progenitor for their existence, but he too withered with the loss of his clan.
The perfectly geometric War Crown upon the Progenitor's head warped with the shifting energies. His multi-jointed limbs writhed, resisting the immense psychic feedback pressing against him.
His body convulsed. His tendrils rapidly faded and withered, then fell.
The weakened Progenitor's voice was a drawn-out, hate-filled hiss: "Shadows of Order. Nareth."