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Fluxmaster, Herald of Tzeentch on Disc
Kyne was not the first Inquisitor to investigate the subject, but he knew he would be the last. Shortly after Kyne had made moonfall, the Overlord of the Syravaul IV lunar communications base had quietly lead him down a guard-lined hallway to the viewing room that housed the daemon’s containment cube and then promptly left him alone. That was good. Kyne had been thoroughly briefed on Holy Terra and needed no barely coherent blabbering or sycophantic wheeling from a scared public servant. The viewing room was exactly fifteen feet across, the containment cube exactly nine. Barely three feet separated Kyne, one step inside the doorway, from the nine-inch plasteel walls that housed the daemon. On the ceiling above were the remains of Inquisitor Rachmaroth that the cleaning detail had been unable to remove before Kyne’s arrival. The Inquisitor took another step forward, a long breath in, and then thumbed the standalone control panel to his left. Immediately the walls transpared, and Kyne saw several things in instant succession. As he watched, each image seemed to linger in his mind for what seemed like minutes; but as each passed into the next he was aware it had come and gone in only a fraction of a second. He was staring at an enormous quicksilver hexagon. It swirled with colour, as inks float in water; turquoise, mint, magenta. The shape itself seemed to rotate in the opposite direction to the swathes of colour inside it. Then the shape was gone; replaced by a melon-sized ball of blackness so intense it seemed to seep out into the air around it. It hovered at Kyne’s eye height. Inside it seemed to glitter and blink innumerable pinpricks of light. One second, candles, the next, stars. The sphere spun around on itself and suddenly it was inside the hexagon that span slowly end over end around it, the iris of an alien eye. It came to a stop, shapes and colours both, and rested. Kyne watched it, unmoving, for a time. When it appeared that the daemon would change no further, he opaqued the walls of the cube and then retired. In his chambers, he wondered. The daemon had not reached out to brush its alien conscious against his own, as he had expected. Inquisitor Rachmaroth’s immediate and ultimate reaction had lead Kyne to believe that making contact would be the daemon’s first move. He felt that today’s display was the creature’s way of sizing him up. Clearly, Kyne was more challenging quarry than Rachmaroth and the planetary consultants that had been here before him. Here, he caught himself mid-thought – he could not pride himself on the judgment of the spawn of Chaos. How highly the daemon regarded him should be of no consequence to an Inquisitor of Kyne’s status. He pushed the thought from his mind and walked the perimeter of the base, contemplating the problem. The next day, Kyne walked in to the viewing room and stared directly into the eye of the Cyclops. Kyne pulled his high collar up to his mouth and spoke into it slowly. “Overlord Waldon, has anybody else been in here?” Crackling came the reply: “No, sir. Not since your last visit, sir.” Kyne approached the cube and rested a hand on the cold of the transpared plasteel. The daemon was still, but its presence seemed to burn and warp the air around it. After a time, Kyne thumbed the control and the thing was gone. That night, he dreamed he was lost in a wine-dark sea. He had sunk below the waves and was trying to claw his way to the surface but had forgotten which way was up. Around him, in the inky darkness, glowed what might have been sea creatures or might have been stars. After a week of daily visits and no progress, Kyne requested a buggy and drove away from the base. His doubts had been growing. This daemon had given him nothing to work with and yet had eaten away at him. He was Kyne, the problem solver. The Inquisition turned to him with cases too difficult for ordinary men. Many had already failed here. He would not. He could not. And yet he was. He spent the night in his buggy; running his air supply down to the wire. He alternated between quiet contemplation and frustrated outbursts. On his return to base, he knew what to expect. He had checked with the Overlord; no one had entered the chamber since he had last been inside, and Kyne himself had opaqued the cube on his way out. Still, he nodded to the last guard, and braced himself for what would come. Before him loomed the daemon, its silver hexagon taking up an impossible amount of the cube. Its swirling black eye trained directly on Kyne. He felt he would rather take a plasma cannon to the chest than withstand its gaze. He was powerless, he was weak. This daemon was greater. Chaos was greater. What chance did he have, mere human against such a beast? He began to weep. This was a hopeless task. Why delay the inevitable? Mankind was lost already. Kyne was lost already; no more was he an Inquisitor than was Waldon. The Emperor will wither and Chaos will reign. Therein lies the great mistake of man; to hope. To hope against hope that there is light when there is none. Kyne had failed. His will was broken, his faith shattered. He was a heretic. He had to get out and get free. Tears rolled down his face and splashed on the lapel of his coat. As he reached out to brush them off, he paused. Wait, he thought…that was it. The tears stopped, and laughter poured out of Kyne like smoke from a grenade. He had worked it out. That was the true evil of the thing. That was the truly glorious, absolute, mind-bendingly wondrous evil of it. Kyne was no a heretic. How could he be? He was an Ordo Malleus Inquisitor - the Emperor’s watchdog against exactly this kind of threat. He was pure – of heart and mind. This thing, this daemon, this mess of shape and colour – had no real power. It could only try to worm its way inside his mind and squeeze it like a lemon; to try to make him believe he was a heretic, and trust that his guilt and conditioning would destroy him. Had Kyne been a lesser man, one prone to the heretical wanderings of a weak mind and the inevitable tumbling spirals of self-loathing and flagellation that follow, the daemon’s plan might have worked. The prismatic beast had certainly done a number on Kyne’s predecessors. But he was Kyne, the Fixer. He had built a name and a career out of succeeding where others had failed. And he was sent here to succeed. He was still laughing as he opaqued the plasteel containment cube and brushed past the startled guards outside. He paused at the top of the stairs to lean on the rail and wipe away a stray tear. He chuckled softly as he punched the Inquisition Master Override into the ID module of the supreme command centre. Making his way to the control panel, he extended a finger and began to enter the moon base’s self-destruct sequence. As the countdown approached 0, he keyed in the containment cube’s emergency release code. There, he thought through fits of hysterics, is the ultimate punchline. And then he thought no more.
Posted: 3 Oct 2020
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