The Immaterium was some kind of vast living thing.
Long ago, Zelo had realized this.
The Immaterium was not inert matter, but an entity with something like a soul, or perhaps a will.
Sorcerers and psychic species did not draw power from the Immaterium; rather, the Immaterium bestowed power upon them.
When a Sorcerer’s soul was part of the Immaterium, or when it aligned with the underlying nature of a particular region of the Warp, resonance occurred.
That portion of Warp power would then be “given” to the Sorcerer whose traits resembled it.
There was no concept of time within the Immaterium.
Time was a measure of the physical world.
Therefore, when these powers were transmitted from the Warp into the physical world, they were assigned a random point on the material world’s timeline.
This was what Sorcerers called prophecy, or fragmented echoes of past events.
Of course, no one had taught him this.
Nor did the superhuman wisdom within his mind include any of it.
Even though he had been born knowing how to command armies, win loyalty, cultivate fungi, and use other skills that ordinary people had to learn, he was utterly ignorant in the realm of psychic power and witchcraft.
It was as if this domain had been deliberately omitted when he was created.
This had once been the most crushing and helpless weakness in his past.
Zelo could lift a massive cauldron with a hundred people bound to it.
He could accelerate and smash through thick walls.
He could easily break chains that ordinary men could never escape.
He knew he was no common man; he was more akin to a superhuman.
But in psychic power, he had achieved nothing, and so he had been at others’ mercy.
Those slaver Sorcerers obtained power from another, mysterious world through sacrifice and incantations.
That power could not be seen or touched, yet it could decide life and death.
Psychic power could strengthen flesh, conjure flames from nothing, subdue crowds, and summon Daemons that burst forth from rifts.
For millennia, the slavers had controlled the masses through psychic power.
Through countless sacrifices and experiments, they had refined their craft to its pinnacle, allowing them to use witchcraft to force Zelo into submission with ease.
Deep in his subconscious, Zelo realized that the rulers of this planet held absolute dominance in psychic power.
The development of psychic power on this world outpaced its physical technology by at least a thousand years, and the weapons produced by that physical technology were utterly incapable of opposing or matching these Psykers.
Unfortunately, fate gave him no chance.
Zelo resisted and escaped countless times.
He tried to look for a way forward in the heavy industrial zones, only to discover, with regret, that the planet’s mineral resources could not support the technological leap he needed.
When he climbed out of the Blood Ant pit for the eighth time, he felt a rare twinge of discomfort.
Zelo had almost no sense of pain.
His senses, shattered and reassembled again and again, had degraded on their own so he could adapt to such a life.
As he climbed through the Blood Ant pit, the corpses of the masses were like the deepest, darkest forest.
Their damp, salty arms were like low branches, brushing Zelo’s cheeks.
He heard their groans, just as he had countless times before.
They were always calling for their mothers, or for the names of those they cherished, or sobbing softly like lambs bleating and weeping in a cold wind.
The slavers did not want numb souls.
Numbness made pain lose its edge.
They deliberately left gaps, allowing people to live unattended for a while, letting the slaves gather and lick each other’s wounds.
Only after the soul had tasted warmth would the sacrifice that followed seem plump and flavorful.
Zelo had once lived in such a place.
His striking appearance and instinctive grasp of how to treat wounds made people especially fond of him.
But every person who grew fond of him was eventually dragged away.
Before the executions, countless people…
Men and women, countless hands reaching out.
Faced with immense, senseless agony, they regressed into children, able only to weep, to hide, to yearn for some higher power to give them a promise, a lie that would keep their souls from drifting in pain.
They said to Zelo, “What do we do?
Zelo, help us.
Think of something.” Then they said, “Why?” Why me?
Why must I suffer this torment for no reason?
What meaning was there in life descending upon this planet?
If the ultimate meaning of every life born on this planet was to die in extreme agony, why were they born at all?
Zelo did not know why either.
There had never truly been any higher power in this world, no omnipotent being.
Everything was a lie.
He was by nature a dull and callous person, but the people’s blood and tears kept flowing.
They all looked to him as though he were some kind of salvation.
Zelo was indeed striking in appearance and extraordinary in strength, but in other matters, he had less than a year’s worth of memories since birth.
He had no answers either.
He, too, was asking why.
But in the end, blood and tears soaked through him.
He no longer wanted to avoid the hands people stretched toward him for help.
He resolved to invent a meaning, even if all of that meaning was a lie, even if those people might curse him bitterly in their final moment and call him a deceiver.
He would no longer hesitate.
So he answered those people.
He smiled and said, “I will end your suffering.
I swear it.
Suffering will end with me.” And so the children caught up in his lie were content.
Their eyes shone brightly as they slept soundly in their final beautiful dream, until the last moment, when the immense torture capable of tearing everything apart arrived.
Amid the screams, life passed away, drifting into the Immaterium.
It was, after all, a lie.
Zelo understood this with perfect clarity.
Even if he had the ability, the technology and mineral reserves of this planet could not allow him to forge weapons capable of resisting the slavers.
He was a hopeless man without psychic talent, forever unable to possess a weapon that could rival psychic power.
He had saved those people, given them a dream, and then the dream had shattered.
Meaningless.
Everything died again.
People prayed.
They prayed for a downpour that would end their suffering.
Zelo prayed too.
Give me psychic power, he thought.
At last, that day came.
When he crawled out from among the corpses of his kin for the tenth time, his gouged-out eyes grew back.
They were no longer dull, lightless black, but a mad, pale blue, the reflection of the Warp cast from the white eyes of the dead.
He could see!
He had originally been a non-Psyker, utterly without psychic talent, but in that instant, at a flash of firelight, the Warp forced him to see the Warp itself.
The shock was immense, enough to send him instantly into a brief fainting spell.
Afterward, he could not remember what exactly he had seen.
But that did not matter.
What mattered was that he had acquired a kind of magic, one that made lies come true.
Psychic power was dangerous, and for that very reason, it was beautiful.
A psychic veil made it impossible for them to detect Zelo or his rebel army by scent.
Psychic shields condensed to block dives from the sky and artillery from the ground, leaving them unharmed.
The flow of psychic energy could be skillfully guided to make warhorses run even faster.
Psychic power also sent him omens.
Once, Zelo had dreamed.
He stood with sword in hand inside Grandfather Syllax’s shattered bedchamber, facing a room veiled by white gauze.
And now, Zelo’s last Gale-Breaker, Lipa, led the final few warhorses in a charge.
Amid the overwhelming explosions, the thick walls of the Cindercorpse Palace were breached.
Zelo heard the screams and roars of the Overlords under the slavers’ command, and saw dozens of high-ranking Sorcerers gathered before him.
Zelo said nothing.
His words were meant to comfort people, but now he was alone.
Psychic power, such a wonderful force, he thought.
Then Zelo drew on his own psychic power.
The warhorse beneath him had been sewn together from two captured Greater Daemons, enough to trigger an explosion that could blast everything apart.
Facing the army of dozens of Sorcerers, Zelo forced his psychic power into a short-range teleport from several hundred meters out, appearing among those Sorcerers.
Then he detonated his warhorse without hesitation, just as every Gale-Breaker before him had done.
BOOM!
In the destructive explosion, powerful enough to annihilate everything, the sky above Cindercorpse Palace abruptly blazed white.