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Chapter 2 - Jei Haroth
Far off in the void, Echidna felt Hotha die, and felt his memories travel into her agents’ minds, and from there
into her own. If she had been human, she might have laughed. He knew nothing of the others, the slender prey that had
manipulated him. They had manipulated her as well, at first.
In the dark, still hours of the night they had come, strange beings with faces hidden behind red masks. They had
injected her with strange fluids, muttered strange words over her, drawn glowing sigils on her flesh that burned and
itched. After their visits, she had changed. It was before she had spawned, while she was still small, but she felt
her mind awakening. The aversion to killing humans lifted from her thoughts and feelings, to be replaced with a desire
for their flesh. A craving for the sensation of killing them. But also, her intelligence had grown, her cunning had
been sharpened. So she knew enough to bide her time, and wait to kill until the opportune moment.
Years later, that moment had come, but Hotha had escaped, at least until now. When the slender ones returned, she had
thought to kill them as she had the humans. But as she had tried to take such actions, her body and mind had been racked
with pain. How she had hated them for that. They had come and gone, and she had been powerless against them. In the years
since that meeting, this had changed. Echidna had long since broken their control over her. The very forces they had used
to change her had turned her against them. A presence in the warp, a coalescence of the lust and violence of an
entire race. It had betrayed these creatures, and given the hive mother her freedom.
Her mind reached out into the void again, searching in a different direction. A ship had split off from her fleet,
upon her orders, and pursued these slender strangers. It was nearing their vessels now, a paltry five ships, far smaller
than the vessel she had sent to chase them. They were formidable in their way, but compared to her ship, they were
delicate, easy prey.
Aboard her ship, she could sense the minds of the horrors she had bred to track these prey down. There were dozens
of leader beasts, great tyrants with formidable weaponry. There were thousands of gaunts and similar creatures, all
scuttling excitedly at the command of their leaders. Lictors were also plentiful, with tendrils that would extract
the prey memories and genetics. They would soon feast upon these former annoyances.
***
On one of the fleeing ships, Jei Haroth paced anxiously at the bridge. Like all the others on the vessel,
he wore a red mask. How he would have loved to tear it free from his face, but that was not possible. It had been bonded
to him, an inescapable prison surrounding his identity. Years now since it had been welded over his face, years of shame,
the life of an outcast, vilified by lesser Eldar.
All because of his former ally, the accursed leader that hid aboard one of the other ships now, and fled from the menace
he had engineered. No, that useless waste of skin hadn’t engineered this horror that was now chasing them. It was
this very same Eldar that had done that, though he was goaded and threatened by the leader. He reached for the soulstone
embedded in a gauntlet on his left hand, and stroked it with his right thumb a moment. That most precious possession,
the one escape from the terrors that awaited them all after death. He shuddered at the thought, the loss of that stone.
The leader had threatened to destroy it, and those of all his comrades, if he didn’t succeed in altering those
cursed monsters.
It hadn’t always been like this. Once Jei Haroth had been happy, living on Iyanden. Then the Tyranids had come,
and nearly laid the craftworld to waste. He had left, along with a number of others, under the leadership of the man he
had since come to hate. They had been friends then, or so he had thought, but he had merely been used. When the leader
declared war on a group of rangers, he knew the Eldar was insane. Yet even before then, the signs had all been there.
The way the man had sneered at all things other than his craftworld brethren. The hatred he exuded for humans and all
other “impure” creatures. Even the Eldar rangers were impure to him, and he had fought many battles,
slaughtering his own kind along with any other species that got in his way.
But if the blood of the wars was bad, what happened later was worse. All who had opposed this insane dictator
had been enslaved, and treated in a manner not even fit for the humans. They were forced to do the most menial
of tasks, and each had a red mask bonded to their faces as a mark of shame. Even Jei Haroth, who had supported this
leader, was forced into a mask. For what crime? He had only sought to counsel the man, to temper his insanity, to
keep him from this dark path he was so determined to follow. For his troubles, he had been consigned to the ranks
of the shamed.
His hatred for his former ally, and new master, had festered for many years. He had been kept around for his intelligence,
spared the worst of the menial tasks, but still laughed at and made sport of. The leader’s cruelty had been horrible,
and on many nights Jei Haroth had gone to sleep in his tiny cell covered with bruises and cuts.
But he had his revenge, oh yes. His master still didn’t know what he had done. “Make the human’s
pets turn against him.” The leader had said. “Change them to kill all of the foul mon-keigh, and cleanse
the galaxy of their stench.” Jei Haroth had hesitated at first, but he didn’t dare show it. Then came the
threats, as he failed to progress. He still remembered the night he had first dreamed, of her.
She had been so beautiful, so alluring, but powerful and dangerous. He stood before her, in his dream, his skin
marked with scars and bruises, cuts and gashes. She had reached a hand out to him, and her touch was indescribable,
causing his every nerve to cry out in ecstasy. He felt his wounds healed, and gazed into her dark, beautiful eyes
in wonder. It was then that he saw her sigil written in purple flames on the air before him, and recognized her.
His fear had been terrible then, but it had quickly subsided. This was no god of chaos, no destroyer of his people,
no feaster on souls. No, she was his savior, and he knew what he must do. He pledged his undying allegiance to her,
there and then. When he awoke, his wounds had all healed, and his scars disappeared.
From there, ideas came to him. Complex sigils wrote themselves in his mind, almost of their own accord.
The genetics of the Tyranids were unraveled before his gaze. When he heard of the breakthrough the human inquisitor
had made, he was ready. He had traveled in secret to the ice-encased facility, crept through the corridors with a
few of his most trusted assistants.
There, they had found the small creature, he remembered how deceptively harmless it had looked. He had brought
all the enzymes and viruses that would be needed to rewrite its life pattern. His mind held all the runes and sigils
that would be needed for the ceremonies. In his own blood, he wrote the glyphs on the small horror, dedicating it to
his master, Slaanesh. With his own hand, he bonded the thing to his will, writing a powerful geas in its every thought,
that it could do no harm to him or his kind. Then he had prepared it, enhancing its intelligence enough so it would
know when to strike back at the humans that had created it.
He and the others had left, completely unseen and unknown by the humans. Only the tiny hive mother had known of
their visit. When they had come again, after it had turned on its creators and destroyed them, the geas had held.
They found everything proceeding according to plan, the creatures growing with unnatural vigor, a gift from Slaanesh,
their new master.
But now, it was all very different. The shock had nearly killed him when he heard of the hive fleet, named Hydra by
its originators, attacking Eldar. The leader had been furious, and nearly had him killed on the spot. However, he had
spared his life, hoping to use his knowledge to bring the fleet back under his control. Jei Haroth had to laugh at that,
since they had never really been under his control to begin with.
More deeply worrying though was the silence from his true master. His dreams had been quiet lately, and he feared he
had been deserted. But she wouldn’t do that to him, she was merely testing his faith. She would protect him, if the
organic horrors in that ship reached him.
He was jarred from his thoughts by a sudden change. The gentle hum of the engines was shifting, weakening. Their
velocity through space was slowing. Something was terribly wrong.
Aboard the Tyranid ship, the hive tyrants became aware of one of the pursued craft falling behind the rest. The hive
ship senses detected a decrease in the energies that propelled the prey ship. For a moment, the minds of the leader
beasts waited, then they felt the will of the One. The other ships could be caught later. This one would be snared
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