“Grandfather, the rebel army has already crossed the Spike District.
Overlords Skaren and Molga have been killed, and Sorcerer Lord Tragern’s soul fluctuations have vanished as well.” Within the grand and opulent palace, bizarre chandeliers dripped red wax, and the walls were carved with twisted reliefs impossible to decipher.
Bitter-Tear Bodyguard Ezra pressed its head to the floor, bowing toward the veiled half-room before it, hidden beneath layers upon layers of white gauze.
Before the finely robed bodyguard hung veil after veil of white gauze, each embroidered with intricate patterns that blocked any gaze attempting to peer inside.
Unlike the wars Zelo of the rebel army had waged before, this time Zelo had brought only a small force.
They drove like a spike straight toward the planet’s most vital heart.
Even the dullest of these slavers could now understand what Zelo intended.
This was a suicidal decapitation strike, and the target was Grandfather Syllax.
“The Soulshredder and I both wish for you to withdraw temporarily to the Murmuring Palace, lest the flames of war displease you.” Fine beads of sweat broke out across the Bitter-Tear Bodyguard’s forehead, which was covered with countless eyes.
Ezra’s forces had failed to stop this cursed army of slaves, had not even managed to slow its pace.
Those warhorses had leaped over shell craters, charged into the streets, and were now heading straight for the palace where Grandfather Syllax resided.
This was proof of the army’s failure and incompetence.
But before this, Zelo had never used such tactics.
He had maneuvered against these slave-owning nobles like a chess player, advancing and retreating, carefully marking out his territory on the board.
Until today.
With the chessboard before him, Zelo had stood up and flipped it over, catching every slaver completely off guard.
Not a single Overlord had managed to intercept Zelo.
Even a high-ranking Sorcerer Lord had been beheaded by a suicide attack.
After this campaign ended, quite a few Overlords and lords would likely lose their heads for their failures in battle, the Bitter-Tear Bodyguard thought.
“No, I will not leave.” Behind the white gauze, an indistinct voice spoke, as if many mouths were speaking at once.
Bitter-Tear Bodyguard Ezra quickly spoke again, “But, my lord, these ants have come in force this time.
They have also cunningly used the souls of the Overlords to detonate the Warp currents.
If you remain here, we fear you may be harmed by the Warp explosion.” They were not confident they could stop Zelo’s force before Grandfather Syllax’s Cindercorpse Palace.
“I came from the rear palace to the Cindercorpse Palace specifically to await this day.” Grandfather Syllax’s voice came from behind the wall of gauze, unhurried and low, carrying a power that seemed to make the soul itself resonate.
“Ezra, my child, I have ruled this planet steadily for a thousand years.
I could have continued my reign for another thousand years, then ten thousand more.
I could have continued offering sacrifices to our Lord until our Lord descended.” Their Lord, the sovereign who governed Pain, was not one of the Warp’s other blasphemous entities.
On Stoll Star, generations of slavers had believed in a legend.
When suffering accumulated until every soul shed tears, the God of Pain would awaken.
He would cast the guilty into a boundless hell of agony and raise the faithful into a divine realm free of suffering.
These slavers were His most faithful devotees, gaining their god’s blessings by offering up the pain of slaves.
The Overlords’ power came from sacrificing slaves to this god who had not yet descended.
“But I believe I may have succeeded back then.
He has already descended, walking the mortal world in flesh.” Eleven years ago, Grandfather Syllax had conducted the largest ritual ever held on this planet.
Yet that ritual was not a sacrifice, but a prayer for incarnation.
It selected the most tenacious and tormented individual among the slaves, severed his limbs, inscribed him with curses, forced a medicinal brew down his throat, and buried him deep among his agonized kin, as if carefully planting a seed of hope.
This ritual was called Blood Ants.
It had originally been used to punish slaves who dared to resist.
Agonizing curses were inflicted upon them, then they were thrown into a pit.
Often, after half a month or a month, they would die inside.
When one stood on the palace balcony and gazed over those pits from afar, those skinless ants could be seen writhing in agony in the depths, their dried and scabbed blood gluing them together.
The slaves were numerous, naked, and tiny, like ants.
To mock the slaves for their ignorance and wretchedness, this punishment was named Blood Ants.
Zelo was noticed by Grandfather Syllax the fifth time he crawled out of the Blood Ant pit.
He was the only person Grandfather Syllax had ever seen survive a Blood Ant pit and still dare to keep defying the slavers.
It was also then that Grandfather Syllax discovered the child’s body was no ordinary flesh.
It was an exquisitely crafted masterpiece, somehow lost on Stoll Star.
So it personally claimed him as its slave.
Subduing him was clearly no easy task.
But fortunately, the Immaterium showed him no favor; he knew nothing of psychic power and showed not even a flicker of psychic talent.
Through sacrifice and psychic power, it placed the strictest bindings upon him.
He was being destroyed every moment, forcing him to devote a large part of his strength to healing his own body.
He was not allowed to eat, not allowed to sleep, forced to witness the sacrifice of his kin, and subjected to witchcraft that tortured his mind to slow the growth of his soul.
All of this was done to tame him, to make him submit.
Grandfather Syllax had originally planned to tame him, then sacrifice him as a warning to those slaves who dared to resist, so they could see the consequences of rebellion.
But even then, the child still tried to fight back.
The sixth time, with both feet severed, he killed dozens of the guards watching him, including two Sorcerer wardens.
On the third day, he crawled out from among the corpses of his kin, an indescribable flame burning in his eyes.
To imprison this madman, Grandfather Syllax had to go to even greater lengths.
He wore a heavy collar at all times and endured brutal punishment every day.
More tortures, each more elaborate than the last, were used on him.
But none of this extinguished the flame in his eyes.
The seventh time, he escaped through the slave sewage drains.
After fleeing for a day and a night, he was recaptured by the Bitter-Tear Bodyguard.
By torturing infants, the Bitter-Tear guards forced him to emerge from the shadows; he tried to kill those children to end their suffering.
He was subjected to Blood Ants again, and he was thrown into a pit deeper and larger than any before.
But this time, he climbed out in only a single day.
The eighth time, he fled even farther, escaping the palace where the high-ranking slavers rested.
The slavers finally found him in a factory district where suffering was mass-produced, only because the stockpile of explosives in the warehouses had gone missing.
Half a day later, he crawled out from the bottom of the pit.
During his ascent, he tried to kill the kin who struggled and wailed around him, to end their suffering.
Along the path he had crawled through, everyone was already dead.
The ninth time, as expected, he ran again.
He even freed ten slaves during his escape.
But this time, he did not make it far; the slaves he had freed slowed him down.
They were captured again.
Fortunately, this child was not a Psyker, or the slavers would never have been able to break him.
When he was found, he tried to kill the kin he had rescued so they would not have to endure even more inhuman torment.
But the slavers’ psychic power reached them first, and so they were all buried together in a Blood Ant pit.
Ten hours later, the child appeared one meter beyond the edge of the pit.
He knelt silently on the ground, the flame in his eyes extinguished.
His face was expressionless, and he only wept in silence.
Behind him, inside the Blood Ant pit, the slaves who would normally have taken half a month or a full month of struggle to die were now all utterly lifeless.
When Grandfather Syllax stood on the viewing platform and met this slave’s gaze, it suddenly shuddered.
An omen from the Immaterium descended upon it.
This slave, this person who had arrived on Stoll Star less than two years earlier, revealed a soul unlike the others for the first time, a soul that had ripened into a kind of complete agony.
Suffering hung heavy like fruit bending a branch, full and fragrant.
Yes.
This was it.
In Stollian culture, ten was the sacred number of this revered god.
If a soul endured the same lethal torment ten times without dying, then the deity would choose that soul as its earthly emissary and descend upon it personally.
And before Grandfather Syllax’s eyes, this child kneeling beside the Blood Ant pit had already endured nine ordeals.
So Grandfather Syllax decided to conduct the Blood Ants ritual once more.
This time, its purpose was no longer to intimidate those who dared to resist, but to summon a god.
This slave was brought before it again.
Grandfather Syllax personally cast complex and terrifying witchcraft upon him, beginning to reassess the young man before it.
If he truly became a divine emissary, then he could no longer be treated with such contempt.
The young man before Grandfather Syllax had no name, only a string of slave numbers.
His soul showed he was not yet two years old, yet he had already grown taller than an adult slave.
He had black hair and black eyes, his irises the color of the deepest darkness.
“What do you want?” Behind the white veil, Grandfather Syllax asked its slave.
The young man remained expressionless, tears still flowing.
He raised his head and looked directly through the veil, an act of grave disrespect.
In truth, the first time he had been subjected to Blood Ants was because he had raised his head to glance at a minor lord.
The second time was because he had asked a single word, “Why?” “People say…
end their suffering.” He spoke in a hoarse, breathy voice, because his throat had been half-severed by the collar.
“I am asking you.
What do you want?” He refused to speak any further, remaining silent no matter how Grandfather Syllax questioned him.
Grandfather Syllax did not dwell on this.
It began preparing the materials for the divine descent.
The young man seemed to realize what these slavers intended and kept resisting, forcing Grandfather Syllax to adopt even more extreme measures.
In the end, he was forced to drink the medicinal brew and was buried once more in the Blood Ant pit.
Grandfather Syllax itself waited beside the altar pit, awaiting the descent of a miracle.
But this time, he escaped again.
He ran far enough, cleverly enough, moving from place to place, hiding with the slaves he had rescued in the shadows between the palace and the districts, until they gathered strength, seized one of the production factories, and formally carved out a power base on the map.
Those slaves called him “Zelo.” In Stollian culture, that was the name of the first psychic river to flow through the mortal world.
Then came ten years.
Grandfather Syllax knew how foolish its underlings were, and it had never expected anything from them.
It watched Zelo’s power expand all the way until the two sides were locked in a stalemate.
But still, it kept thinking about the ritual from that day.
It remembered the young man lying on the sacrificial stone bed, limbs severed.
Grandfather Syllax knew that without witchcraft, this young man would need only half a day to regrow his hands and feet.
This young man was a miracle in himself.
Grandfather Syllax silently punished him and forced him to swallow the brew.
The young man seemed to still be cursing the slavers, but he could only make garbled sounds.
Pale blue stones were embedded into his eyes, stones rich in psychic resonance that the Stollians believed to be a medium through which mortals could communicate with the Immaterium.
Then came the runes, written onto his body with ink brewed from Bone-Eroding Grass, Heart-Burning Moss, and other herbs.
These runes, these rituals, carried profound occult significance.
Their psychic fluctuations were so strong that, by themselves, they could draw a small portion of the Warp close to the physical world.
An ordinary soul that merely came into contact with one of these things would have its soul thrown into chaos by the overflowing presence of the Warp and burst apart.
Only the souls of Psykers and Sorcerers could control the Warp storms stirred up by these things.
Grandfather Syllax could see that this young man was not human, but some other existence, some humanoid creature.
But that did not matter.
He was powerful enough.
The only flaw was that he knew nothing of the Warp.
Those painful omens, those whispers of the gods, he had never seen, heard, smelled, or felt them.
He was like something deliberately sculpted to be insensitive to psychic power, utterly devoid of talent.
But Grandfather Syllax knew he was the one.
He was now a psychically inert stone, a hollow space in the Immaterium, perfectly suited as a vessel for descent and ready to receive the gift.
Because he was empty, he could receive the gift.
And so, like burying a seed of hope, Grandfather Syllax buried him in the pit of flesh and blood, then performed rites beside the altar, praying for the god to descend into the world.
But he escaped.
Grandfather Syllax completely failed to detect him.
All the psychic witchcraft previously used to track and locate him had ceased to function.
Grandfather Syllax had been able to control him precisely by relying on that overwhelming psychic force.
But he escaped.
When he next appeared before the slavers, people called him Zelo, his body filled with the radiance of psychic power, his pale blue eyes gleaming in the light.
This time, Grandfather Syllax knew that none of them could contend with him anymore.
“I reshaped him.” Behind the veil, Grandfather Syllax’s soft, muffled words reached Bitter-Tear Bodyguard Ezra’s ear.
“He has already descended into the world through the slave’s body, but there is one thing I still have not understood.
His wisdom has not surfaced in the slave.” “Perhaps He needs a little enlightenment,” Grandfather Syllax said, a thousand mouths speaking in unison.
“I will give Him enlightenment.
The Immaterium has already granted me a prophecy.
I shall be His guide.”