Chapter 389: The Emperor's Whispers
The fleet dropped its Gellar Fields and, guided by the Navigator, plunged into the Warp, bound straight for the Forge World.
As the ships settled into their high-speed transit, Kian took his security detail and began patrolling the vessel's key junctions. He walked point with a cigarette between his lips, Silentium trailing at his side, head down, clearly turning something over in his mind.
They'd just finished sweeping the upper decks and were about to take the lift down to the lower levels, the ones daemons loved best, when Silentium suddenly stepped in front of Kian and held up one finger.
"Hey! I've had a great idea!"
Kian visibly flinched, voice trembling.
"Does it have to be an idea? Can we just not, this time?"
Silentium ignored him completely.
"I was just thinking. Daemons can get inside our heads, whisper away in our souls, chip at our sanity, and then when we're at our weakest, corrupt us completely. So couldn't we do the same thing in reverse? Get inside a daemon's head, whisper in its soul, and corrupt it right back?"
Kian stared at him, stunned.
"Whoa. You're a genius. Alright, genius, tell me. How exactly do you get inside a daemon's head? How do you whisper in its soul? How do you corrupt it?"
Silentium said, "You brought back a soul-tracking device a few days ago, remember? I reverse-engineered the locator runes on it into a working ritual. If I can catch a daemon weaker than me, I can brand its soul with a mark. Once it's marked, I'll always know where it is. Then with the right Warp technique, I can broadcast sound and image directly into that weak little daemon's soul, one-way. And once I've got that channel open, I can whisper in its ear forever, feeding it the Emperor's own corruption."
Kian clapped him on the shoulder and threw up a thumbs-up.
"The Emperor's own corruption. I respect the wordplay. I'm quitting the Inquisitor's retinue right now to go study that phrase."
The lift arrived, the heavy doors slid open, and the group descended from the upper decks to the lower ones.
The lower decks were packed with crew berths, and wherever there were more people, the soul-fire burned brighter and was harder to shield. Daemons that slipped through the gaps in the Gellar Field liked to hunt there most.
The moment Kian's group stepped out of the lift, screaming echoed down the corridor. At the far end stood a daemon fused with twisted metal, a stone-golem shape wrapped in scavenged plates of steel and ceramite, thick as armour.
Soldiers on patrol were pouring lasfire into it, but it wasn't doing much damage.
Kian figured another daemon had slipped through a Gellar Field breach and bonded itself to some scrap metal and ceramite. He checked with his Warp-sight for a moment. The thing's soul-strength wasn't much, ordinary tier, just another wild daemon off the Warp currents.
He waved a hand. Little Joel and Rudolphson stepped forward, each drawing a plasma pistol. Two beeps, and two fist-sized balls of blue plasma streaked out, slamming into the stone-thing and detonating. Plasma pistols didn't hit as hard as a full plasma rifle, but the blast damage was still substantial, melting away a chunk of the creature's body. Two shots left the stone-thing crippled, flopping and writhing on the deck.
The soldiers who'd been grappling with it sighed with relief and saluted Kian.
"Thank you, my lord! If it weren't for you, it would've wiped out my whole squad! No idea where the damned thing even got in, the wall just came alive and crushed two of my men. It was terrifying."
Kian told them to carry on their patrol and led his own group over to encircle the creature.
Its physical body was badly wounded and immobile, but its soul-essence hadn't been touched at all, which left it plenty cocky.
"Kekekeke! So many souls, such strong souls! I love souls like these! I'll catch every one of you, and lick your souls like candy, roll them around in my mouth over and over, leloo leloo leloo leloo!"
Kian drew the Demon-Cleaver, ready to finish the two-headed thing off, but Silentium stopped him.
"Wait. Remember what I just said?"
Kian raised an eyebrow.
"Hold on, you're serious? You actually want to corrupt a daemon?"
Silentium shrugged.
"Might as well try. Doesn't cost us anything. If it works, we've got a whole new way to torment daemons going forward."
While they talked, the stone-thing had opened its mouth wide, stuck out a crimson tongue, and started licking at Kian's boot.
"So fragrant, so fragrant, your soul smells so good, let me have a taste!"
Kian lifted his armoured foot and stomped the daemon's tongue flat.
"Fine. How do we do this? Make it quick."
Silentium said, "This thing's soul is only a little weaker than mine. We need to weaken it further before I can work with it."
Kian immediately wreathed the Demon-Cleaver in psychic flame and drove it into the daemon three times. Golden psychic fire set the thing howling and shrieking, since the Emperor's psychic power hit daemons like true damage, and not the kind that just chipped at a health bar, the kind that dropped the maximum cap itself. If the daemon started at a hundred out of a hundred, those three strikes left it sitting at ten out of ten.
Silentium said that was plenty and began casting.
As he worked, he explained to Kian.
"It's weak enough now that I could kill it with a slap. There's no way it breaks free of the spiritual brand I'm about to set."
Once the ritual was done, Silentium tore open a random rift into the Warp, and together they shoved the stone-thing through, casting it back into the Immaterium.
Kian asked, "So now what? What's the plan?"
Silentium said, "Find somewhere quiet to meditate. I'll link our souls together so you can see exactly what's happening to the daemon I just marked."
Kian did as told. The two of them found a sealed compartment and sat down to meditate. Once Kian's soul left his body, Silentium wrapped it in his own, showing him a strange, shifting vision. Not either of their own perspectives, but the point of view of the stone-thing they'd just thrown back into the Warp.
By now, the creature's soul-essence had separated from the steel and ceramite it had fused with, reduced to a twisted knot of raw psychic energy. Wild daemons like this one spawned randomly in the Warp, and most hadn't yet settled on a fixed body, existing instead as pure psychic energy given form by how people perceived them. As they grew, killed more, and absorbed more souls, they'd gradually lock in a permanent shape, the clawed horrors, the writhing tentacle-things, the roaming beasts that hunted anything that moved.
This one, though, was still a juvenile. Its true nature remained a formless, shifting mass of psychic energy, not yet settled into any body. Its very first attempt at slipping into reality had ended with three sword-wounds it hadn't fully recovered from.
"Ehh, ehh, it hurts, it hurts so much! Why could that thing even hurt me? Why won't the wound close? It hurts, it hurts so bad, I want to die!"
The wild daemon drifted through the sea of energy that was the Warp, tossed by the currents, while Kian and Silentium watched from what felt like spectator mode.
"Damn, is it actually gonna just die on us?"
Kian felt a flicker of guilt, wondering if three strikes had been overkill. Maybe two and a half would've done it.
Silentium said, "Who cares. If it dies, it dies, we'll just catch another one. Ready? I'm starting the corruption now."
Kian sat up straighter, curious how exactly Silentium planned to pull this off.
Silentium took a deep breath and began reciting scripture. That was it. He just started reciting scripture, plain and simple, out loud.
The words of the scripture, channeled through the special technique, struck directly at the wild daemon's soul, and the thing froze mid-wail.
"Who? Who's talking?!"
Already tormented past its limit by three wounds that wouldn't heal, the sudden appearance of a voice inside its own head sent it into a full panic.
"Who are you? Who's talking, get out! Get out of my head!"
Silentium didn't answer. He just kept reciting.
Passage after passage, delivered straight through the brand Silentium had burned into the wild daemon's soul, worked directly on its psyche. A voice out of nowhere sent the fragile creature's soul careening in terror through the sea of souls that made up the Warp.
"This is backwards! This is completely backwards!"
Kian found the whole scene absurd. A daemon, reduced to fleeing in circles because of a human muttering scripture at it. What the hell was this? Was this even still Warhammer 40K?
"Ahh! Get out of my head! I don't want to hear it, I don't want to hear any more of this mumbling!"
Caught between physical agony and the whispered assault of the Emperor's own scripture, the daemon had no way to fight back, nothing to do but rage impotently.
Still, credit where it's due, a daemon was a daemon. Its mental fortitude was well beyond an ordinary human's.
Over the following two days, Silentium never let up, muttering scripture nonstop inside the daemon's skull, and yet the thing showed no sign of breaking, just increasingly irritated. An ordinary person stabbed three times, with someone jabbering endlessly in their ear the whole time, would've been driven half-mad already. But after two days of the treatment, this daemon seemed to have adjusted. Grown numb to it.
Silentium's scripture was going in one ear and out the other now, no bite left to it.
After two days of effort with nothing to show for it, Silentium started losing interest.
"That's not right. When I was a kid, Chaos whispers tormented me half to death, took me over a decade to recover. And this thing shrugs it off in two days?"
Kian thought it over for a moment, then spoke up.
"Why don't we switch it up? Didn't you say you can broadcast sound and image together into its soul?"
Silentium asked, "What, you've got an idea? What do you want me to play in its head?"
Kian's mouth split into a wide, cruel grin.
"Alright, do exactly what I tell you..."
Somewhere in a forgotten corner of the Warp, a weakened daemon soul drifted aimlessly. Three unknown wounds had left its mental strength badly diminished. There was still a voice in its head, muttering endlessly, and though it was maddening, it had grown used to it by now.
It had mostly pieced together what happened. It had slipped aboard a human warship, gotten caught, and those two had done something to it. It could feel the mark burned into its soul, the thing constantly feeding it that irritating voice, and in its weakened state there was nothing it could do about the brand itself.
Knowing it was the enemy's doing, it had settled into pure defiance, refusing to react to any of the endless muttering.
"Heh. Think these wicked little whispers are going to break me? Humans, you're all still so naive. I'm a daemon destined to become a Daemon Prince one day! When Heaven means to place a great burden on a daemon, it must first..."
It was in the middle of reciting some half-remembered classical proverb it had picked up from somewhere when suddenly, the wicked whisper in its head just stopped.
It froze, then felt a surge of triumph. Had those two miserable humans finally given up?
But the next instant, over a dozen images burst into its mind all at once, like a phone screen splitting into a dozen panels, playing a flood of short clips.
The first panel showed a dancing, singing banana, gyrating in place, belting out some cheerful, nonsensical tune about how wonderful it felt to be a banana.
The second panel showed a warped, grotesquely stretched cartoon hero's face filling the screen, mouth flapping through some string of gibberish syllables set to a jaunty melody, cackling the whole time.
The third panel showed a crude stick-figure sprinting in an endless loop, chanting the same string of nonsense syllables over and over as it ran, something about pain and fireworks.
The fourth panel showed some blobby yellow creature with a bizarre, lopsided face, doubled over clutching its stomach, laughing and laughing and laughing without ever stopping.
The fifth panel showed a penguin with a human girl's head, squatting up and down on a loop, chanting over and over that this clip was legendary, honking and quacking between each cheer.
The daemon stared at the images suddenly exploding across its mind, overwhelmed by the sheer barrage of nonsense, and for a moment it simply froze, unable to process any of it.
Watching from outside, Silentium looked doubtful.
"You sure this is going to work? What's the point of showing a daemon this stuff?"
Kian let out a wicked cackle.
"Trust me, it'll absolutely work. This daemon is going insane, guaranteed. If it's not broken in a few days, come find me, I'll pull up my personal ranking of the hundred worst memes of the year and hit it with all hundred playing on a loop across a hundred split screens. Oh, and set the playback speed to triple. Then we leave it running and check back in a few days to see how it's doing..."
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