Chapter 109: The Limitations of God (Patreon)

So Yvraine was far from easy in her mind just then. Set beside Ahriman, the hunt Slaanesh's side kept up on her was no gentler — she genuinely possessed a method for killing Slaanesh and bringing the God of Death into being ahead of schedule, even if, in terms of actual results, that method could never possibly succeed.

The last of the Croneswords lay in Slaanesh's own bedchamber, after all. To kill Slaanesh you needed the Cronesword. To get the Cronesword, you had to kill Slaanesh. A textbook case of needing to graduate from Karazhan before you're allowed to raid Karazhan — just thinking about it, there was no way through.

Even so, Slaanesh hunted her no less diligently for it.

"The Harlequins... all of them came?"

One person's face was a study in exasperation just then, and that person was Guilliman.

His Macragge had, it must be said, grown just the smallest bit notorious of late. Daemons. Orks. Aeldari.

Guilliman had settled into weary resignation by now, though at least the numbers were small this time.

"You handle them. I don't want to look at that pack of Harlequins."

He knew perfectly well the visitors had come for Heydrich, but they gave him a headache all the same. So he stated flatly that he had no wish to see them, handed the reception over to Yvraine, and had word sent to Heydrich aboard the Ark while he was at it.

Naturally…

"Emissaries of the Laughing God. What did that man promise you?"

Yvraine studied this crowd of her own kin, genuinely at a loss. What terms could Heydrich possibly have offered to bring the single most enigmatic faction of her entire race trooping over here in one great mass?

This was the faction with the highest average combat power among the Eldar — the rough equivalent of the Custodes among humans. Naturally these clowns were insufferably proud as well. And what troubled her more were the rather odd masks that had appeared on their faces.

"We merely follow the instruction of the great Laughing God, Cegorach."

The Great Harlequin, chief of the troupe, delivered this to Yvraine in a theatrical drawl, his body folded into a ridiculous pose.

"Hsssss…"

Yvraine rubbed her forehead. These clowns had one defining trait: they never gave anyone a straight answer.

It was only in front of Heydrich — overwhelming as he was — that these Flower Sprouts talked like ordinary people.

"You've all come—"

Yvraine hadn't finished when a shaft of light punched clean through the ceiling, and Heydrich stepped out of it with Pearl and his Palace Guard.

In that instant every eye in the hall fixed on them, and above all on the Palace Guard at his back. Because for that one instant — with only a rare handful of Harlequins excepted — everyone present felt the threat rolling off him. Heydrich and Pearl had folded their own edges completely away.

But Kamir was escort and bodyguard both, and that meant staying wary of everything, these treacherous xenos most of all.

These days the Eldar's diminished weight let them coexist with the Imperium of Man well enough: not strong enough to pose a real threat, not weak enough to be finished off, and with the webway to shelter in.

Setting aside the Black Sprouts, there was no fundamental clash of interests between them and humanity. And as for the clashes that did occur, most of them came down to both sides being idiots at each other.

Everyone said the Eldar were out of their minds. The Imperium wasn't much better.

So Kamir the escort kept a wary edge on everything. That was the mindset that came with being one of Heydrich's lieutenants.

"I am honoured to meet you, humanity's newest god."

Seeing Heydrich emerge, the Great Harlequin swept him an exquisitely elegant bow.

"…"

The moment the words landed, the whole hall went dead silent.

The Flower Sprout who had been sent to fetch them quietly covered his eyes. He knew exactly what this one was like.

"I'm not a god. A god is omniscient and omnipotent. I'm not, so I'm nothing of the sort."

Watching the sprouts' reaction, Heydrich found himself hammering the point home again. As he understood it, a god was capable of anything, which meant that even an Aeon didn't qualify as a god in his eyes.

"Only a true god knows the limits of godhood. It is a height that those who merely costume themselves in divinity can never reach. So it is with you; so it is with our Laughing God."

Smack!

Heydrich clapped a hand over his own forehead. He was telling the plain truth — why would nobody believe him?

He couldn't be bothered to do anything about it now. He was fairly sure that if he wiped every last one of them out, so long as a single mouth remained, these sprouts would use their final breath to howl: "That's a load of crap!"

"You've grasped the essential nature of the power I gave you, I assume. There's no need for me to explain further."

Heydrich saw no point in padding it out. The power of the Path had to be experienced firsthand. There was usually someone to guide you, true, but no amount of guidance replaced working it out for yourself.

They had all set foot on the Path of Elation now, so there was little left for him to say. The rest they could develop on their own.

"We shall walk a road that has never been walked before. I have already resolved to found a new troupe, and its name shall be the Death Playwrights. We will gather the shards of countless perished worlds and write their final radiance upon our masks, so that those who come after may glimpse in them the last light of destroyed worlds. As you yourself said, the core of all comedy is tragedy. What a profound understanding that is."

"Straight to Death Jesters, then. Not one single Masked Fool in the lot?"

Heydrich looked at the crowd of Harlequins and gave up on finding anything to say to that. The insight wasn't even his own; it was a summation from the world he had originally come from.

Barring a very few nonsense comedies that ran on no logic whatsoever, most comedy worked exactly that way. Chaplin, the master Heydrich loved best, was a man who carried that conviction all the way through.

As Heydrich understood it, the highest order of Pathstrider of Elation wasn't the one who made himself laugh, but the one who put a smile on someone else. Desire was one of the Path of Elation's driving forces, yes — but desiring your own joy and desiring the joy of others were two very different things.

"Then go and put your understanding into practice. Oh — and I'll need about ten of you kept at my side."

Heydrich raised it now because for the moment he had no Trailblaze and no Star Rail, and no imaginary-number energy engine either. The main means of transit in his hands was the tavern doors — paired with the storage pouches he had only just finished making, so he could run trade quickly.

That was precisely why he had landed in a financial crisis in the first place: a crippling shortage of materials.

From now on, every world these Flower Sprouts walked would have a door left behind on it. With those doors, the Flower Sprouts — who understood the webway better than anyone alive — could travel between worlds at speed.

Heydrich didn't know whether that counted as Trailblazing, but there was no question it would bring him endless benefit.

So the instant the Path of Elation unlocked, he had thought of these Flower Sprouts.

"We are deeply honoured. We shall obey your will without fail: to carry laughter to every world, and within that laughter, to warn those worlds."

"Mm. Very good. Hm—?"

Heydrich nodded along. That suited him nicely enough. Then he stopped short and looked up into the air above him, faintly dumbstruck.

Because in that one moment the whole of the Warp had begun to churn, the residual swell of the Battle of Macragge echoing back through it. With the Path of Remembrance, Heydrich could feel the Warp's motion with perfect clarity — though feeling it was all he could do. Intervening was flatly beyond him; he was, after all, a complete psychic Muggle.

But in that same moment every sprout in the room changed colour. Heydrich had shielded their souls from Slaanesh's gaze, true — yet as a far more purely psychic species, these sprouts weren't like humans.

First, that shelter was premised on the sprouts not being sacrificed by Slaanesh's own factions; if that happened, no amount of shielding helped. Second, they could not face Slaanesh directly — Slaanesh's bonus against sprouts was simply too comprehensive.

"The Prince of Pleasure…"

Yvraine's voice carried a thread of terror. The words had barely left her—

CRACK!!!

Almost the next heartbeat something split with a snap, and a Warp rift went and burst open, bold as brass, right in front of Heydrich. A towering figure leapt out of it and slammed down before them all.

Shalaxi Helbane, Slaanesh's Chosen Champion. Unlike the rest of Slaanesh's misshapen menagerie — maybe it was because Slaanesh had built him around the concept of a martial obsessive chasing the absolute peak of skill at arms, or maybe it was because he had to debut in Total War: Warhammer and somebody had to think about the ratings board — either way, he looked remarkably restrained.

You could call him the one Slaanesh creation Heydrich didn't find revolting. Taken as a whole he looked more or less normal, even faintly reminiscent of a Khorne Bloodthirster.

Except…

"How does this guy have the nerve? This is the Fortress of Hera, Guilliman's own den. And he's torn a Warp rift open and come down alone, without so much as a daemon host."

Heydrich stared at the figure that had appeared out of nowhere. Forcing a manifestation like that, with no sacrifices, took an enormous bite out of a daemon's combat strength.

"Shalaxi Helbane?"

Seeing what had come through, Yvraine finally lost all the colour in her face.

She had to be the unluckiest sprout alive. Everyone else was hunted by one or two of Slaanesh's things; she had Shalaxi Helbane and Ahriman on her at the same time. Nobody's luck ran worse than that.

But the newly arrived Shalaxi Helbane paid no attention to the Heydrich behind him — in his eyes the man was a mortal, nothing more. He paid no attention to the Kamir at Heydrich's side either, since that one was merely Custodes-grade, an ant as far as he was concerned.

"Are we having fun, Yvraine? And all you fine Eldar — this little conclave of yours… hm?"

It was then that Shalaxi Helbane noticed the problem, because it dawned on him, with some astonishment, that the situation was not at all what he had pictured.

The plan had been to stand atop the craftworld Srith and duel the entire Eldar high command single-handed.

As a matter of fact he had already pulled that off once: one daemon against craftworld Eldar, plus Dark Eldar, plus Harlequins, plus an Eldar corsair coalition.

His opponents had been the highest individual combat power the Eldar could put on the field — among them the God of Death's avatar, the Visarch; the Phoenix Lord Jain Zar; Lelith, the Queen of Knives; and a Harlequin Solitaire (the vicious piece of work who has played Slaanesh on stage).

Those four essentially represented the peak fighting strength of the Reaper Army, the craftworld Eldar, the Harlequins and the Dark Eldar respectively.

And he had killed very nearly all of them, withdrawing only when the God of Death was forced to manifest. That record did honour to the title of strongest Greater Daemon; your average Primarch had nothing so glorious on his ledger.

Beyond the Slaanesh faction's built-in bonus against Eldar, his own raw quality was formidable in its own right.

But now he noticed that this didn't look like a webway world at all, and that the only company around him was a pack of Flower Sprouts.

"Did Ahriman lie to me?"

Something clicked in Shalaxi Helbane's mind, because only a little while ago Ahriman had quietly informed him that a great mass of the mightiest Eldar had gathered in one place.

He had assumed it was the conclave of Eldar factions he'd guessed at. But how in the world was this Macragge…

Then he swept his gaze around and found a mortal — except that this mortal showed none of the terror an ordinary mortal showed at the sight of him. Nor did he brace himself the way those Astartes did, as though facing the end of the world. What he showed instead was a mild resignation, and something else beyond words.

That was right. Pity.

Consider: a Khorne Bloodthirster stood ten metres tall as a baseline, and a Great Unclean One came in around the same. A Keeper of Secrets, though, generally ran a fair bit shorter — most of them under ten metres. Even Shalaxi Helbane, mightiest of the Greater Daemons, stood only a little over ten, about the same as a run-of-the-mill Khorne Bloodthirster.

So how tall was the Helbane standing in front of Heydrich now? Six point six metres. A very Slaanesh-appropriate figure, admittedly — but this was no time to be admiring numerology. It meant that Shalaxi was currently half-crippled, or at best badly weakened.

Which left Heydrich utterly unable to work out what was going on inside this thing's head. Slaanesh's creations really were reliably, spectacularly insane.

And Heydrich could feel it quite distinctly: a gigantic blue hamster had turned itself into a bolt of lightning and was charging straight at them. This thing had a bonus against Eldar. It did not have one against Guilliman.

Guilliman, ground down by paperwork and one meeting after another, had just found himself an outlet.

If this thing had come out at the normal state it could reach in the physical universe, Guilliman might genuinely have been unable to put it down quickly. But in this state…

CRACK!!!

The instant Shalaxi locked his gaze onto Heydrich, Pearl, Kamir and the Harlequins had Heydrich behind them.

Every one of them held this strongest of Greater Daemons in profound dread.