Before entering this tomb-world, Magnus had braced himself for an assault by the undying legions of the Necrons. Yet, as the archaeological team advanced deeper into the structure, no such resistance materialized.
"It seems we are fortunate," Magnus remarked with a rare note of ease. "The master of this place appears to be absent."
"Brother, it is not we who are fortunate—it is the master of this place," Duke corrected him. "If he were here, I'd have already taken his corpse as a souvenir."
Magnus sighed. "Duke, I advise you to at least try behaving like a human being."
More than once, Magnus had questioned how it was he—a supposed scholar—who had been condemned as a traitor, while Duke, whose ruthlessness eclipsed that of many warlords, basked in Imperial favor. The irony was not lost on him.
No one, however, could understand his turmoil in this moment.
"Duke, can I take these?" Isha interjected, holding up a handful of Eldar trinkets, her expression brimming with innocent excitement.
Duke barely spared them a glance before waving a dismissive hand. "Take whatever you want. If it makes you happy, don't hold back."
"Great!" The goddess beamed, her mirth bringing an unexpected warmth to the otherwise grim setting.
Meanwhile, mortal laborers and Mechanicus servitors swarmed into the tomb, their presence a stark contrast to the ancient silence that had once ruled this place.
Though merely the tomb of a lesser Necron noble, the wealth contained within was staggering. The vault stretched larger than even an Imperial fortress-monastery, yet the influx of workers barely made a dent in the mountain of relics awaiting reclamation.
It was akin to a festival—an unrestrained indulgence in plunder. Smiles spread across the faces of even the most hardened veterans.
Duke noted, with some amusement, that the Tech-Priests were so overcome with excitement that their cooling vents were spewing black smoke.
For them, the Standard Template Construct (STC) fragments found within could mean a direct path to the rank of Archmagos.
Meanwhile, the Doom Slayers rummaged through the ruins with a childlike glee. Ancient weapons, extinct xenos specimens—anything of potential use was cataloged and spirited away to the nearest forge-ship.
Yet, not everyone succumbed to greed.
Efilar and the Adepta Sororitas had uncovered numerous blasphemous artifacts. Their rage burned hotter than the Mechanicus' zeal, and they swiftly abandoned all thoughts of looting. Instead, they dedicated themselves to inscribing purification sigils across the tomb, ensuring its absolute destruction once they departed.
The excavation lasted over a month.
When Duke finally surveyed the departing frigates, their holds bursting with treasure, he nonchalantly tossed the drained shards of a shattered C'tan into storage—a mere trophy among many.
The discovery of just one Necron noble's tomb had yielded riches beyond reckoning.
If one day he could uncover Solemnas—the fabled Necron throneworld—
The thought alone sent a thrill through him. He had drafted a long wishlist in anticipation of such a day.
"You have a fine collection," Duke mused, his lips curling into a predatory grin. "But once I find you, it will all be mine."
[Mind Network Alert]
A notification materialized before him:
[Mind Network Administrator—Efilar—has submitted a request to activate the Psychic Blessing: Fire Disaster (World-Destruction Level).]
[Reason: To purge the world of corruption.]
[Do you approve? Choose carefully. Your decision will determine the fate of this world.]
The request was simultaneously broadcast to one hundred thousand randomly selected members of the Mind Network.
Duke had implemented this system as a safeguard, ensuring that world-ending psychic abilities could not be used impulsively. A minimum of ten thousand approvals was required for activation.
High above the tomb-world's towering necropolis, Efilar's burning wings stretched wide. She hovered in silence, an angel of annihilation awaiting judgment.
Votes poured in.
The pyromantic warp energy behind her swelled, distorting reality itself. Red flames surged across the ashen sky.
Within her, a storm of psychic might raged, the bio-magnetic field surrounding her spinning faster and faster—
50,000 approvals.
100,000.
200,000.
Her soul blazed with untamed fury. Her eyes, radiant with psychic fire, darkened with madness.
At last, she reached the pinnacle of her power. Raising her hands skyward, she gathered the inferno into a single, concentrated sphere.
Then, like the wrath of a vengeful god, she hurled it toward the world below.
"Filthy, wretched xenos—"
"BURN IN HELL!"
A cataclysmic explosion engulfed the landscape.
Fire cascaded across the world like an apocalyptic tidal wave. The very crust melted, oceans evaporated, and the air itself ignited.
Duke and the Mechanicus observed impassively.
But unknown to them, barely a million kilometers away, a cluster of drones quietly recorded every moment.
"Commander, do we… still proceed with the ambush?" A shaken Tau officer turned toward his superior.
This was the strike force of the T'au Empire, led by Commander Shadowsun herself. Upon receiving intelligence regarding the Primarch's location, they had mobilized immediately.
But now…
On the holographic display before them, a lone human had just unleashed a cataclysm that reshaped an entire planet.
Fire consumed all. The land cracked and boiled. The sky itself was aflame.
Shadowsun's expression remained unreadable.
She had heard tales of Imperial Alpha-level psykers—of their rumored ability to shatter worlds. Until now, she had dismissed such accounts as gross exaggerations.
How could a single being destroy what had existed for millennia?
And yet, she had just seen it with her own eyes.
"Commander, should we proceed?" her adjutant pressed hesitantly.
Shadowsun hesitated—but only for a moment.
"Continue the mission," she ordered. "The Primarch is separated from the Imperium's main forces. This is our best chance."
"But… wasn't our original task to lure him into a trap?"
"We cannot rely on our so-called allies," Shadowsun snapped. "They seek to use us like puppets. We will not be controlled."
She clenched her fists, steeling herself.
"This is for the future of the T'au Empire."
Her conviction burned like a beacon.
"For the Greater Good!" her officers echoed, rallying to her side.
The ambush began.
Far across the void, deep within the stars, another battle raged.
A Necron overlord, Tassinla—one of the many duplicates controlled by the Infinite—had launched an assault upon a daemon world held by Abaddon the Despoiler.
But this was no act of righteousness.
No, Tassinla's true goal was the blasphemous war machine crafted from the raw power of the Chaos Gods themselves—an engine of terror unlike any other.
The Raven Lord feared its existence.
Thus, he had summoned Duke to the Dark Imperium, demanding the monstrosity be destroyed before it could tip the balance of power.
But the Endless One saw things differently.
To him, such a weapon was not an abomination.
It was a masterpiece.
And like all masterpieces…
It belonged in his collection.
Thus, while the Necrons waged war in the Warp, the greatest collector in the galaxy remained blissfully unaware…
That his own home was being plundered.
Without warning, the Endless unleashed countless technological horrors upon dozens of daemon worlds, striking with ruthless precision.
Though the cost was immense, it was a calculated necessity. The Endless knew that without a battlefield vast enough, Abaddon would never risk deploying his forbidden weapons. Thus, his assault was meticulously orchestrated—coordinated, relentless, and purposeful. Every move was designed to make the attack appear as nothing more than a brutal raid, concealing his true objectives. Even after the Endless had conquered and occupied these daemon worlds, Abaddon remained oblivious to their loss.
From the void, these fallen worlds showed no signs of change—only an unnatural silence, as if a portion of the galaxy had been carved away, erased from existence.
Beneath the veil of Necron technology, the daemons were banished back to the Warp before they could even register an attack. Hundreds of millions were reduced to dust in an instant, annihilated before they could cry out or summon reinforcements.
Dozens of worlds fell in mere moments.
It was only by sheer misfortune—or fate—that a Khorne warfleet managed to breach the Endless' blockade and send a distress signal through the Warp. Only then did Abaddon, the Despoiler, grasp the horrifying truth. The Black Crusade he had meticulously planned had barely begun. The revival of his fallen Primarch had yet to be set in motion—yet already, dozens of his dark worlds had been obliterated.
The Warmaster of Chaos stared at the reports in disbelief, fury rising like a storm within him. If not for the fact that the warning had come from a battle-hardened Khorne warlord, known for his unwavering loyalty and bloodthirsty honesty, Abaddon would have dismissed it as another of Tzeentch's deceptions.
Dozens of daemon worlds had been conquered without a sound. Abaddon's rage was incandescent. He immediately mustered a massive Chaos fleet, summoning reinforcements from the depths of the Warp.
At first, he had no idea who was responsible. For a time, he suspected the enigmatic Lord of the Second Legion. Only the mental matrix of the lost Primarch could wield such absolute dominion over the boundary between reality and the Warp. Only an entity of such magnitude could annihilate an entire sector's worth of daemons in an instant.
This misconception held—until the Undead revealed themselves.
The Endless had anticipated the demons' counterattack. Using the ancient sciences of the Necron Dynasties, he intercepted all attempts to locate him. When the Chaos fleets plunged into the conquered star systems, they found only darkness.
Then the attack began.
A brilliant digital storm, laced with high-frequency interference, surged through the void. This unseen maelstrom of raw data and corrupted signals instantly blinded all Chaos augurs, rendering their detection arrays useless. Even the most sensitive of daemonic entities shrieked in agony, tormented by the shrill, invisible screams echoing through their warp-born essence.
Abaddon, who had planned to crush the Imperium, now found himself beset by an enemy he had not even seen.
First, his machines malfunctioned. Then, they exploded.
The Chaos Machine Spirits howled in torment as they rebelled against their masters. Dark Mechanicus adepts, desperate to restore order, resorted to anointing their cursed machinery with scented oils and dark prayers—but it was futile.
The Endless had struck only once, yet the daemon fleet was already crumbling.
In the void, chaos reigned. Daemons lost control, descending into frenzied riots. Cultists and warriors alike turned on one another, slaughtering anything that moved. The warp-touched instruments of navigation spun wildly, trapping the fleet in an inescapable loop, forever lost among the stars. Khorne's war engines, designed for planetary devastation, became aimless wrecks, their wrath wasted upon empty space.
Abaddon could do nothing but watch as distress beacons flared—then vanished. Each extinguished light represented another world lost, another stronghold torn from Chaos' grasp.
The speed and efficiency of the enemy's strike left him momentarily shaken. Could this truly be the end?
Salvation, of a sort, arrived when several warbands of Chaos arrived to reinforce him, forcing the unseen enemy to reveal itself.
"Trazyn the Infinite."
Abaddon ground his teeth in fury as he spoke the ancient name. The Necrons had plagued the galaxy for millennia, but Chaos had never faced them in such direct conflict. He had even clashed with this particular overlord before, when he took Cartier. But never before had they waged war on such a scale.
To confirm the scope of the threat, Chaos warbands ventured into the fallen systems. As Abaddon had feared, the daemons had been utterly expunged. Yet, there was no sign of occupation. No planetary conquest. The enemy had no interest in ruling—only in erasing Chaos itself.
The warbands, despite their power, were nearly annihilated. Yet in the carnage, Abaddon learned something invaluable: the Necrons were not invincible. Their defenses had a weakness.
The Endless, wary of a counterattack, began reinforcing his phalanxes of soulless warriors. Overhead, immense Necron aircraft—spinning like scythes of death—rained emerald beams of destruction upon Chaos war machines. Blackened wrecks littered the battlefields, the remains of once-mighty daemon engines. From their monolithic structures, the Necrons unleashed torrents of green lightning, reaping daemons like wheat before the scythe.
In response, Abaddon poured more of his forces into the fray, desperate to hold his crumbling lines.
For a time, the war reached a stalemate. But Abaddon was patient. He tested the Infinite's defenses, studying his enemy's patterns, seeking the opening he knew must exist.
Finally, with grim satisfaction, he found it.
A cruel smile twisted his scarred features. Now certain of his foe's weakness, he reluctantly unleashed his most abominable weapons—the forbidden creations of the Dark Mechanicus.
From the depths of the Warp, twisted war machines of flesh and metal surged forth. Daemon Engines, the unholy fusion of Chaos and technology, charged toward the Necron battle lines.
From atop his throne of endless calculations, Trazyn the Infinite observed their advance. The eerie green glow of his eyes brightened.
These grotesque monstrosities were unlike anything he had encountered before.
Which meant they were worthy of his collection.
He allowed the twisted machines to breach his defenses, indulging their desperate charge. To him, this was not a battlefield—it was an exhibition.
"Finally," he murmured, "this collection will be mine."
The Endless was confident. This ancient entity, long devoid of emotion, felt something almost forgotten—pride.
Both commanders believed themselves poised for victory.
But neither could foresee the calamity about to unfold.
Just as the Infinite was on the verge of capturing Abaddon's Daemon Engine, a priority transmission reached his receiver—bearing dire news.
The tomb where the Endless's true body resided, the vast museum he had painstakingly curated on the dark edge of the galaxy, had been plundered.
As the data streamed into his processors, Trazyn the Infinite felt a sensation akin to his logic circuits stalling. A phantom pain twisted through his ancient mind, though he possessed no flesh to feel it.
—The thieves had not merely stolen from him. They had desecrated his sanctum and set it ablaze!
In the shimmering holographic projection, the once-pristine halls of his collection burned, crimson fire consuming relics gathered over countless millennia.
His priceless artifacts, irreplaceable specimens, entire moments of history frozen in time—gone. And as if the looting was not enough, the vandals had reduced his grand palace to smoldering ruins.
The Endless Ones had been roaming the galaxy for countless years, and had never seen such a shameless thief!
He felt as if his very essence was fracturing, his rage and despair manifesting in the way his internal coolant systems suddenly malfunctioned. Looking down, he realized the fluid seeping from his body was not blood, but coolant leaking from his reactor—a mechanical echo of sorrow.
A long-lost sensation coursed through his systems—a phantom of emotion he had not felt in aeons. Amidst the carnage of the battlefield, where legions of daemonic abominations clashed with soulless machine legions, a shrill, despairing wail tore from his vocal synthesizers, reverberating across the war-torn expanse.
"Thief! Burglar! Robber! Accursed wretch! My treasures of endless years, my collection—ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!"
The sonic resonance of his cry was agonizingly sharp, piercing through the tumult of battle like a blade through fragile fleshsteel. As if to better convey his unfathomable grief and wrath, he activated the sonic disruptor embedded within his frame. A devastating wave of harmonic destruction erupted from him, raking across the battlefield. Countless daemon engines and Necron constructs alike flared with erratic sparks before crumbling into scrap.
Tasinla's shriek of anguish was so raw, so utterly unhinged, that even the Despoiler himself—Abaddon, Warmaster of Chaos—was momentarily shaken.
Even the dark gods, who reveled in madness and despair, were unable to comprehend the reason behind the Necron's sudden and all-consuming grief.
Even the deathless machines were not spared—what manner of being could invoke such devastation, could unravel a mind that had endured eternity?
Abaddon was certain—none of the Slaaneshi daemons under his command could ever accomplish such a thing.
Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the wailing ceased.
A temporal field collapsed upon itself, and space crystallized into stillness. The dimensional folding technology of the Necrons activated, freezing Tasinla in the very moment of his deepest sorrow and outrage.
"In the annals of the Endless Tasinla, never before has he suffered such a loss. This moment is history. This moment... is art."
From the shifting umbra of reality, another figure emerged. A skeletal hand of intricately wrought necrodermis reached out, fingers curling around the suspended moment in time, grasping it like a delicate artifact.
"A worthy addition to my collection."
The newcomer—another of the Endless, another of the Infinite—gazed upon his own frozen form, miserable and wrathful, yet with neither joy nor sorrow.
Then, with a calculated motion, the Infinite turned away from Abaddon and his warband, abandoning further entanglement with the forces of Chaos.
He traversed the dimensional pathways once walked by Dukel, stepping into a world desecrated beyond measure. When at last his optical sensors processed the sight before him, fury welled within his circuits once more. His systems shuddered, requiring a forced reset to regain rational thought.
In his visual field, crimson flames engulfed the landscape. The earth's crust ran molten, magma cascading like an ocean of liquid fire. The entire planet resembled a sugar-drenched confection on the precipice of liquefaction.
His tomb, his replica-self's resting place, his grand repository of countless treasures—
Gone. Obliterated. Reduced to slag.
There was nowhere left for him to stand in the world that once belonged to him.
The Infinite One stood upon the bridge of his vessel, watching in silence as the lava world smoldered beneath him. The firelight reflected off his burnished carapace, casting jagged shadows across the chamber.
At length, he activated a hidden device within the void, projecting a hololithic replay of past events onto the air before him.
As he watched the figures emerging from the portal, a pulse of disbelief rippled through his circuits.
"This is..."
He whispered, running a rapid analytical scan on each of them.
—A lost Primarch of the Imperium of Man, vanished ten millennia past.
—A Space Marine of a Legion long since erased from Imperial records.
—A severed head, belonging to a Daemon Primarch.
—A Grand Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a master of forbidden knowledge.
—A saint, whose mere presence could annihilate entire worlds.
—A war-banner, woven from the very flesh of a Greater Daemon, possibly the infamous Fateweaver... designation uncertain.
Yet when his gaze settled upon the robed woman standing among them, his movements halted. The optical feeds in his visual receptors flickered wildly as his system processed the impossible.
—An Eldar Goddess of Life.
The Eldar race had been crafted for war, forged to stand against the Necrons' ancient progenitors—the Old Ones. There were few entities in the galaxy that could bear such an identity, yet one possibility resonated above all others.
Trazyn the Infinite meticulously logged every detail into his archive, a whisper of static humming through his processors as he categorized each entry.
At last, he spoke again, his voice a controlled modulation of intrigue and amusement.
"I must retract my previous insults. You are no mere thief."
His emerald optics shimmered as he gazed at the recorded figure of Dukel, his tone shifting ever so slightly.
"In my most humble estimation, you are among the greatest collectors to ever grace the stars."
For the first time in many ages, Trazyn felt something akin to admiration.
And yet, as the hololithic display continued to cycle, the glow of his eyes shifted—deep green fading into a burning, predatory crimson.
"Now, your collection has also been discovered by me. I trust you will preserve it well... and that you will not come to regret it, as I have."