I am sorry guys, I have succumbed to slaanesh. I just could not resist, may emperor have mercy on my soul because I am going to commit heresy.
Cassian walked the halls in a bathrobe. The fabric clung to his damp skin, beads of water still threading down his neck from the shower. The Craftworld's interior was quiet.
He reached Faevelith's chambers. A tall arched door of living crystal, flowering open like petals when he stepped close.
She was waiting. The air inside was warmer. Not just by temperature but by presence.
No armor. No weapons. Only her.
Faevelith stood barefoot on an etched circle of rune script carved into the stone lines glowing faintly, shifting, alive. Warp glyphs, curving in ancient, impossible angles. Language not meant for tongues, only thought.
She turned her head slightly as he entered. No greeting. Just a look at him.
"You're late," she said softly. Then: "Undress."
Cassian blinked. "What d—?"
Her eyes narrowed. "We are spirit walking. Your garments will interfere. I need your skin bare to the resonance. The soul bleeds through flesh. Not fabric."
He gave a slow exhale. Not quite nervous. Just tense.
"Understood."
He untied the robe and let it fall. Cool air touched his body, but he didn't shiver. He has that much confidence in his body.
Faevelith turned back to the ritual. "Lie in the center. On your back. Breathe deeply. Channel nothing until I say."
He obeyed. The stone beneath him was unnaturally smooth. Warm. It thrummed with energy. Above, the vaulted ceiling was a mosaic of soul gems and polished obsidian, reflecting faint glints of his body stretched below.
Faevelith stepped forward. Still silent. She took his left hand in hers. Her fingers were slender, long her skin warm.
A curved ritual knife appeared in her other hand. Ornate. Delicate. She pressed it lightly to his palm.
He breathed deeply.
The blade cut. In a straight line. Blood welled, ran in a thin ribbon across the glyphwork.
She tilted his hand. The drops spilled into the runes. The lines drank the crimson, pulsed brighter. The symbols ignited silent fire racing through the circle.
"Good," she murmured. "Now look at me."
Cassian did.
Faevelith unclasped her bodysuit from the collar. The psychoplast mesh parted down the center, unfolding like petals.
She disrobed in silence. Piece by piece. Layer by layer.
First the suit. Then the underweave. Then the bindings. She moved slowly, not teasing, not hesitant. This was not seduction. But it definitely felt like that.
She stood revealed under the crystal light, and Cassian could not look away.
Her body was alien in symmetry, but only just. Tall. Lithe. Sculpted like a porcelain doll grace carved into curve. Her skin was pale, marked faintly with runes inked into her hips, along her ribcage, the underside of her heavy breasts. Every motion she made was seductive to him. Her hair, long and black as void-glass, slid over her shoulders like silk.
He watched the curve of her thighs as she stepped into the circle, the arch of her spine as she knelt beside him, the slight breath as she leaned in and pressed his body against him full, bare, alive.
Her body touched his. Her breasts against his chest. Her hand to his cheek.
"I can feel your pulse in the aether," she whispered. "You burn hotter than before."
"You said the warp was shaped by emotion," he murmured. "Maybe you're the reason I am burning now."
A flicker of something passed in her eyes. Something close to…. hunger. But it went fast as it came.
Then she placed her forehead to his.
"Close your eyes."
He did.
"Now… breathe."
She guided his hand to her waist. As she started to ground her body against him.
Their blood, their bodies, their soul-threads.
The glyphs brightened again. The chamber dimmed. The warp gathered.
He felt it begin.
Not a flare this time. Not a surge.
A soft unraveling. Like a knot being undone from the inside. His mind separated. The physical sensations dulled. The warmth of her skin faded. The weight of the air vanished.
And then
The soul left the shell.
His sight inverted.
He saw from above. His own body below, hers beside him, their forms outlined in light, soul-thread to soul-thread. Faevelith's presence.radiant, precise, sharp as starlight. Her soul entwined with him.
She started to guide him.
And then they started moving.
Not the body but their essence.
Cassian started observing as he is pulled forward into the warp.
It was not space. It was not time.
It was form and formless. Color beyond spectrum. Motion without direction. He felt himself expand, his mind stretching to grasp infinite shapes geometry that sang, flames that remembered, winds that spoke his thoughts back to him in his father's voice.
Faevelith was beside him. A soul-form taller, vaster, robed in nothing.
"This is the Immaterium as seen through discipline. Through unity. Not Chaos."
Cassian beheld rivers of gold thought, oceans of grief, islands of memory. He saw beasts but distant. Watching. Daemons, yes but restrained, outside the veil she had drawn.
"Your soul is strong. But raw. The warp reflects what you are, Cassian."
He looked down.
His own soul-form was fractured light. Lines of code and flesh, intersecting. Threads of his existence, fragments of regret, ambitions not yet fulfilled.
Cassian did not speak.
He only followed.
---
There was no air. No time. No ground beneath. Only sensation, layering upon sensation until they drowned each other out raw, roaring thought. Emotion that crackled like fire across his non-existent skin. The place did not obey physics. It obeyed memory. Dream. Will.
Something screamed in the distance. Not a voice. A concept: Hunger.
Cassian floated.
A hundred thousand lights spiraled past him some of them stars, some souls, some just the dying flicker of a thought too weak to survive. Some came close and brushed against him. Rage. Sorrow. Joy. They slid across his psyche like oil on glass. He resisted.
Faevelith's voice came not as sound, but structure. It shaped the chaos into order.
"You see now."
He turned, if turning had any meaning here. Her form entwined with him pulsed with clarity, a tower of order against the shifting sea.
"This is the Warp," she said. "Unreality made manifest. The mirror of all thought."
Behind her, something vast moved a shadow with no shape, only intent. Cassian felt it look through him, not at him. He shielded his mind without thinking. A reflex of his body.
Faevelith drifted closer. "You must understand it's nature."
She reached out not with hands, but with self and the Warp opened.
---
They stood above currents that twisted like aurorae through a vacuum that was not empty. Beneath them, massive amounts of raw emotion, fields of despair and lust and ambition rolling like oceans. Farther still, the monstrous presence of the Four veiled, distant, like mountains glimpsed through ash. One watched. One always watched.
She showed him the Sea of Souls, how mortal life bled into it like rain, pooling into tides that fed everything. She showed him how faster than light travel wasn't movement it was cheating, slipping into this realm and riding it like fire.
And then deeper: the Domain of the Gods.
He saw the edge of it, where space began to bend into symbol, where a color became an idea, and ideas howled with mouths.
"You must never go there," she said.
"What is psychic power?" Cassian asked. His voice in the Warp wasn't speech it was intention, and she answered with clarity.
"It is not energy. Not magic. It is will." Her form pulsed. "To be a psyker is to impose structure upon formlessness. It is to lie with enough force that unreality believes you."
"And if you fail?"
"Then unreality lies back."
She turned, and the Warp trembled.
---
Visions erupted.
Not dreams. Not hallucinations. Memories not his soaked into the Warp like blood into soil.
The War in Heaven.
Blinding stars. Metal gods. Cold, cruel light. The Old Ones, flickering, alien, vast fighting the Necrontyr, who became the Necrons, soulless shells bound to necrodermis, wielding science that broke causality. And in the cracks of that war, something else slithered: the first whispers of Chaos.
Cassian blinked and time did not exist.
Another fracture:
The Fall of the Eldar.
He heard the scream before the vision came. One mind. Then a thousand. Then millions folding inwards, tearing outwards. A psychic detonation. Cities of crystal turned to howling madness. Gods birthed from sin. The birth of She Who Thirsts. A god born of excess, too perfect to look upon, too horrible to name.
Beside him, Faevelith stared.
Pride. And pain.
"It was us," she whispered. "We made something too powerful, too uncontrollable. And we paid."
He turned but another burst seized him.
---
The Age of Strife.
Terra in flame. The sky red with orbital bombardment. Human psykers, untrained, exploding with power, turning cities into graveyards. And yet through the fire a silhouette. Not a man. A presence. Golden, immense, crowned by thunder.
The Emperor.
He walked through it all, unyielding, making war on ignorance, binding together what was left of humanity with vision and violence.
Cassian could not see his face. It was like looking at a sun submerged under black water.
Then,
Black ships. Screaming children. The Mechanicum sealing pacts with Mars. The Primarchs. The Horus Heresy–
Faevelith tore the vision away.
"Enough."
He staggered. His soul recoiled, his essence folding into itself.
She held him.
"Look too long," she said quietly, "and the Warp looks back. You must maintain discipline."
---
Cassian fell.
Not through space. Not through gravity.
He fell through himself.
The chamber returned.
Flesh returned.
His mouth gasped for air. Not because he needed it but because his body remembered needing it. Muscles twitched. His hands clawed at the floor.
He touched his face. It felt alien.
Faevelith straddled him. Pinning his hands. As she watched his face.
She spoke, not aloud, but directly into his skull. "Now you understand why most break. Warp can be intoxicating, but you always have to pay a price."
He didn't answer.
He sat up slowly, his body rebelling against sensation. His heart thudded too loudly. His eyes took in too much detail.
Outside, the soft hum of the infinity circuit returned.
Reality, as much as it existed, had reasserted itself.
Cassian started to breathe deeply. Trying to calm his body. Knowing he was becoming something more inhuman.
---
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