A shower of plasmic fire tore through the miasmic haze of incense in fiery contrails of incandescent purple, both halting the ceremony at its zenith and liquifying a fanatic priestess in an instant. Midnight clad titans of ceramite and steel poured forth from chamber’s newfound — and still smoldering — portal. They hunched forward in impenetrable suits of desecrated terminator plate, replete with racks of freshly skewered skulls and the various trophies of their most prominent conquests.
In the sudden maelstrom of whirring chain fists and emulsifying fire, once orgastic cries of pleasure — indubitably laced with masochistic pain — twisted into ghoulish lamentations. Bewilderment spread like wildfire amongst the Dionysian revelers but for their terror only served to embolden the onslaught. Whether their victims prayed for mercy or rallied, the scions of Nostramo dolled out death indiscriminately.
Lissome concubines of the fairest complexions and uncanny beauty transformed mid-pirouette into haunting mimicries of their human facade; wiry tails flicked at the air, chitinous pincers snapped and maws of needle-like teeth stretched into beastly snarls.
Unmasked daemonettes bounded forward in mesmerizing displaces of unnatural grace — whirlwinds of gnashing limbs and indignant fury — brought low by the percussive fire of plasma cannons and the crashing of voltaic powerfists.
The astartes had utilized the advantage of show and awe just as they had in millennia prior, pummeling through the hurried countercharge in such brutal fashion that it could hardly be considered a battle at all; pale-fleshed daemons and their rousing cultish brood blossomed into gory sprays of boiling blood as engines of carnage delivered the final killing blows.
Silence returned as quickly as it departed, barring the squelch of still-steaming flesh and the ragged moans of the infernal harvest. While many of the congregation now decorated to sanctum's walls in ropy tapestries of gore smears, a dozen or so initiates lie strewn about, sex-funky and exasperated. Contoured musculature twitched beneath the pale glow of flickering candelabras, sensitive to the stalest of breezes and oblivious to the surrounding carnage. Women all.
So stupefied in their newfound corruption, several sweat-sticky bodies continued to nakedly writhe even under the shower of bone grit and blood. There could’ve been no greater distraction — no sensation so gripping — than the liberation of body and spirit to the Thirsting Prince, and why should they worry? Even if their newfound mistresseses had been slain in the corporeal sense, their devotion would be rewarded in the domain of the Lilac Princess. In death, sensation beyond wit or reason awaited their already condemned souls.
“Clear,” Nakraan sounded aloud, plodding through corpses and shimmering baubles alike, “Haephon is gone.” The Night Lord snarled to the surrounding blackness, his tusked helm slicing through the dissipating smoke in a short, sweeping arc; their master would would not be pleased. The kill team was 5 strong, standing in statuesque solidarity amongst the sprawl of incapacitated mortals. They did not jest or trifle. These were consummate veterans of a bygone epoch, not the raving lunatics so often imagined in the fever dreams of Imperial propogandists. Perhaps that would've been far more frightening.
The quiet was interrupted once more as the distant chittering of metallic, insectile pincers danced upon the deck in cacophonous procession. The scraping echoed louder and louder from the yawning darkness until a dozen of scurrying servoskulls clattered into the ritual chamber. They hungrily scoured for every scrap of data; analyzing charred corpses, deciphering the runic scrip of singed banners — every accoutrement to the recent slaughter was worthy pickings.
Of course, the cranial swarm was merely a prelude to someone much more important. “Haephon is gone,” Nakraan repeated.
“I see that.” The Warpsmith entered with the hiss of venting pistons. Servos whirred and clicked with every thundering step, pneumatic guages whining under the burden of overclocked artificer armor. While Jagad was many things — traitor, technological savant, heretek, visionary — subtle, he was not.
“Not even a worthy battle,” Kargol added, pointing his gore-slicked chain fist at the undulating mounds of flesh beneath them, “only meat.” He gunned his chainweapon’s teeth, spinning out a few chunks of shredded pulp in preparation of second helpings.
“No.” Jagad wasted little time in dashing Kargol’s hopes as he ambled towards the throng of pleasure-slaves. While they had become pathetic, fresh-branded slaves to the slavering ‘god’, the maidens had once served a different master. Jagad knelt as low to the decking as his heft could manage, a monstrous merge of necrodermis and slithering mechatendrils. His clawed digits moved with unexpected grace, parting some of the ashen locks from one of the incapacitated victim's cheeks; a fleur de lis of solid black, freshly desecrated with the amethyst seal of Slaanesh. “Sororitas.”
Jagad ‘chuckled’ — if the grinding reverb of a prosthetic trachea could be called such — before rising. It was a mirthless sound more akin to an active manufactorum than a chuckle. Haephon, one of the Warpsmith's most promising initiates, had betrayed him in favor of Fulgrim’s mutilated whoresons, scurrying to the void with one of the Jagad's most coveted weapons and tearing through the Chilata Sector in a desperate gamble to prove his newfound loyalty. He and his chosen had come for vengeance only to be denied it. For the blackguard to slink away at the eve of his doom.
He would have to settle for mere sabotage, destroying this vessel at the very least and resuming the hunt as possibility offered an opportune time to strike. To the heretekal techmarine, patience had proven itself to be a virtue time and time again. Gratification could be delayed if it meant the retribution would taste even sweeter. He motioned the unit for departure, honing their teleporter nodes back to their vessel, when a separate pict-feed filled his visor. A direct view from one of his numerous chittering servo-skulls.
“What do we have here?” He turned back to the undulating mass of fallen sisters, focusing on a single motionless form. “Peculiar.”
***
Sister Carmeena roused from her nightmarish slumber in a sprawling fit of dry heaves and cold tears; alabaster skin prickled in a sheath of sensitive goosebumps. She struggled with renewed conviction, thrashing at the surrounding emptiness of a sterile cell, the tangling of heavy canoptek robes, and the numbing weight of her unresponsive limbs. The cell was cold and dark, save the dull glow of an overhead lumstrip.
Everything had changed. No longer was she consumed by pulsating clouds of nebulous thought and daemonic temptation, nor was she a participant in debauched revelry in the twisted caverns of Slaanesh. She was alone. The last and the greatest failure of her fallen sisterhood. The throbbing inside of her skull was unbearable yet she was nothing if not resilient.
Pain was now a constant and welcome companion. Pain kept the madness, the temptation, and the delusions of pleasure at bay. Her gaze swept downward through the cloudy veil of half-staggered vision. Sweat glinted on alabaster-flesh, soaked robes hugged at her womanly contours, and her coif of snowy hair tumbled in sodden ringlets; bare calves twitched from the effort, and heaving breaths passed through parted ruby lips.
Her ears perked and hands instinctively tightened on the slick stainless steel frame of the infirmary bed at the sudden sound of the sliding portal hissing open. Baleful lights spilled into the chamber amidst a shadowed silhouette. It was massive, ‘he’ was massive. A tower of fleshless metal in the mockery of an astartes.
“You live,” Jagad intoned blandly, his voice a robotic bark of low gothic and Martian binary, “good.”
He strolled further into the chamber — mag-locks carrying the great mechabacus with a lithe gait — slithering tendrils tapping along the deck.
“From one heretic to another,” Carmeena could hardly believe her misfortune, biting back a multitude of curses, praying for the peace of blissful damnation and gritting a set of sharp canines. Compared to the dread of never-ending service to Chaos, an existence as a disobedient slave-bitch of some perfidious metalmonger was somehow no better. No matter her determination. No matter her desire to live. It seemed that she had earned an even harsher fate in the hands of her current captor; blight and damnation seemed rather simple by comparison.
He stood there silently, green bio-lights blinking through the eye slit of a flat-faced helm. It was impossible to read him, any part of him. Who could even pretend to discern the intents of a heretek that had long replaced any semblance of humanity.
“I will not scream for you.”
Jagad tilted his head as if to indicate confusion, “Elucidate.”
“If you expect me to cry out for mercy or salvation I refuse. I have been tainted enough already…”
A sliver of conviction, that was good. “Your confidence is amusing, but I doubt it would take much to break you; my lessers have tried and nearly succeeded.”
Carmeena mustered her composure, forcing herself from the steel of her infirmary seat onto unstable legs. Her pulse quickened as an immediate surge of exhaustion sapped away at her with renewed strength. One step to redemption, one step back into the light of the God-Emperor. That was all it took, she reminded herself. Her stockinged feet carried the brunt of her modest weight on uneven footing. With stilted resolution Carmeena lifted herself to stand, a thin-lipped grimace cut across sultry features. Carmeena appeared both confident and vulnerable under the watchful eye of the tech-heretic; slender, marble-skinned, and petite while quite physically imposing to the base human.
The acolyte stood as strong as one could under such recently endured torment.
Her thoughts were scattered, visions of previous celebrations. Memories of passion and divine pleasure flickered behind searing hazel irises. Yet still, her feet were planted firm. She recalled the moment of her first brush with a daemon, the welcoming embrace of the Rhapsodos Mater.
Memories of soft silks, warm thighs and ebbing ecstasy slowly slipped her control. Mind frayed, and resolve wavered at the prodding of such delectably fond remembrances. The tempest built and crashed violently in her mind's eye. Every muscle in her lithe body clenched tight in a spasm of resistive exertion.
“You are spiritually tainted, half-consigned to the will of a lascivious parasite.” That’s how he saw them, ‘the pantheon’, cosmic wounds in the immaterial that leeched upon the life force of physical causality. Jagad may have been a heretek but a servant to chaos he was not. While his machine-spirits and occult trinkets may have fed upon a diluted reservoir of the warp in order to function, he himself did not. For some individuals the effects of The Four were irresistible. Others might at least harbor a personal conviction that kept them tied to the physical realm; to remain unbroken and impervious — a wall against the warp winds, unwavering. “I’ve kept you alive in spite alone, and that you may be useful in one of my petty rivalries.”
As soon as the dam within was burst, a flood of inundating memories — visions of succulent flesh, the ebb and flow of unholy wanton bliss — threatened to wash away her fragile awareness. Crimson streaked lines fell down Carmeena's nose, painting the arch of her chin and soaking to the base of her neck. A fevered pitch throbbed in an ever growing ache behind her brow.
All of that desire.
Trying her will in vain to contend with the raw temptations that had stolen her peace.
'Just another day for one of the unfortunate daughters of Terra,' the acolyte reasoned. “I-I…This is madness.”
“Interestingly enough, you are only partially incorrect, the science of these matters is malleable and muddled. Emotion or motive cannot alter fact, human. No matter your previous entanglements, your soul and thus your will are at proverbial war. The Master of Mankind or the Prince of Pleasure, a fascinating dilemma.”
“And my sisters?” Carmeena suspected the answer but could not bring herself to accept it, not without verification, “What of them?”
“Their souls consumed by the Thirsting God and their flesh by purifying flame; I offered them a sort of mercy.” Jagad stated bluntly.
Carmeena could not find the words but her pursed red lips conveyed her emotional state, how the loss of a few seemingly mattered less to him than dirt, blood, or rust on his equipment. If the Emperor was a vengeful star, this mechanical fiend was a black hole.
“Come with me.” Jagad turned on his heel, tossing a folded set of black vestments in Carmeena’s direction. “Your clothes.” It was a simple order given in a toneless gaggle of vocal static, a nuisance if it was any. Jagad had no tolerance for niceties; this mortal belonged to him.
She examined the stained cloth of the vestments a moment longer, as if mentally affirming her resolve before unfurling their black threads, nodding and submitting herself to his request. The silken caress of familiar vestments felt divine, almost impossibly pleasant. Carmeen shuddered as the lustful comfort of the texture tickled her nerves, curling her toes. Even in her most zealous days as a sister of the cloth did such a simple act elicit these intoxicating sensations. She removed the tangle of the damp medical robes as quickly as possible, donning the blessed vestments with feverish desire.
He watched the movements with detached interest, noting her body and condition, watching the undulation of supple curves, the twist and release of tendons and ligaments. Disgusting flesh.
Her cloak and robe fell back in a smooth cascade, dark fabric lightly kissed the tile. Pale light danced in angular shadows as Carmeena moved, and as her cowl was drawn the ghost of an obsidian specter wafted alongside the heretek.
She walked with grace and a delicate poise, the mark of the schola progenium, primed for war and the faith of the Emperor. Here the former acolyte stalled, "Your name, monster." Jagad had never officially announced his patronage, and so he remained nameless in her mind — no different than any other idling automata, if not a slightly more monstrous one.
“Jagad.”
***
The Maiden’s hull rocked and vibrated, twisting on unseen axis. Dutifully armored servitors stalked her winding bowels with the rhythm of routine.
Exiting the warp in a timely manner was imperative. The Maiden’s subspace transit had been limited and severely constricted during its hunt for Haephon, made increasingly tenuous by the daemon essence that thrummed within her every circuit.
With a series of calculated bursts, The Maiden’s drives resumed function and accelerated accordingly. Another stutter of motion. A nauseous moment in the time-space distortion as the spectral wound of the immaterium tore into realspace. It was not long before an orb of infinite black caught its edges.
Warped by the contortions of the immaterium, the tear resembled a swath of diseased velvet torn straight from the empyrean tides.
Carmeena nearly wretched as the voidship finally settled into the cold blackness of reality. Imperial vessels never moved so violently through the warp, she told herself.
Moved was an improper word to describe it — as if the vagabond ship had slipped and plunged through the warp itself — the ebb and flow was never so wild and unpredictable.
Her expression softened, contemplative even, Carmeena marveled at the engineering of a loyal vessel. The technological might of mankind and the eternal design of the Omnissiah worked in unison. The Maiden was tainted, far removed from the thrice-blessed rituals of Martian dogma.
“How are you faring?” Jagad asked. The questioned lacked sincerity and spoke more to a scientific curiosity. Carmeena’s half taint was a case if anything. The servants of Slaanesh would be desperate to catalyze the sister’s fostering corruption; perhaps Haephon would hear wind of his failure, of an offering made incomplete. Pride would bring him to the Warpsmith and Carmeena was merely bait.
The sister pursed her lips, finding the courage to stare up into Jagad's dimly glowing optics, “Do not patronize me with your false sympathy, heretic…I feel…I feel…”
A yearning so profound enveloped her thoughts. A heat burned in the pit of her stomach with intensities near painful. Pleasurable memories assailed her. Though obscured, the shapes of pale and entwined flesh still clung to the corners of her sight. The sounds of rushing, sensuous blood cascaded in her ears as the memory of throbbing, intimate pleasure deep within her womanhood roiled the most delectable delights and threatened to overwhelm her.
Carmeena breathed in a shaky and reluctant breath, attempting and failing to maintain composure, her face flush and warm. The physical warmth of a partner caressing her inner walls and sliding in and out, slow at first then building to a euphoric intensity. It became overwhelming. Every fold and crease of the wet silken flesh seemed to be set alight in ways she had never known. Every instinct clawed violently at her ability to contain her dignity, and her breath threatened to spill out in unheard whimpers if she didn't hold back. The telltale sheen of a few well-formed beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead.
“I’m fine.”
Jagad could smell the hormonal lust-stench of a mammal in desperate heat. Carmeena’s body betrayed what her words so desperately sought to conceal. “Noted. Come.”
He led her deeper into the bowels of the corrupted ship, passing a myriad of silent cyborgs and lumbering techno-serfs as well as a gaggle of drifting servo-skulls; a herd of floating, occult eyes that ceaselessly catalogued.
Unlike a regular voidship, the denizens of the Maiden shambled onward as though drugged or bewitched, lagging in a clumsy imitation of activity. Some were recognizably human, while others displayed mounds of twisted plasti-steel and gruesome surgical fixtures that melded both. None acknowledged their passing. Many of the abominations were not unlike the seevitors common throughout the Imperium; thick hydraulic armor-tubes and steam spewing along bulbous, fleshy faces. What did catch her eye was the hulking, ceramite clad astartes within the Warpsmith’s employ. These were not the proud sons of the Emperor. From their cruel profiles, discordant markings and baroque deviance. These were the heretical degenerates of the ancient, yet never forgotten, heresy of yore: Traitor Space Marines, an honorless shame. Diverse palates of electric cobalt, tarnished steel and metallic trim decorated their melange collections of wargear. While the minutia of features that separated specific carapaces from another remained a mystery to Carmeena, she ascertained that only a few of the renegade legionaries wore their original suits of armor. When it came to design, some sported a morbid diversity of winged-skull crests and lazily stitched tabards of desiccated flash, others much more simplistic plates of riveted ceramite and yellow-black hazard stripes; they blended amongst ranks regardless of such cosmetic distinctions.
Carmeena curled the fingers of her ceremonial gauntlets with white knuckles at the sight of them, filled with her usual disdain for such heretics, but that was not all. Beneath her obsidian robes burned a newfound shame. It made her cheeks burn a little brighter, blush deeper, heart pound a little louder. Her mind wandered to the hidden figures that dwelt beneath such outdated warplate; ageless flesh, rippling with genehanced muscle, veiny and scarred...A few traitors had cast their glance as she and Jagad past but their vigil never lingered.
Jagad interrupted her silent fury in his usual robotic cadence. "Refrain from staring."
Were her thoughts so plain on her face and radiant from her aura? A heat flushed within her center. She burned beneath the dark fabric of her returned wargear, sweating with an insatiable need. Perhaps their judgement burned hotter? She dared to hope as much but suppressed the scandalous thought, pushing it far back into the recesses of a quickly warped psyche.
“Where are we headed?” the Sister asked, eyes trailing the curved bulkhead to distract her self-repenting mind. Her efforts to clear her thoughts had done little to calm her already indiscrete hormones and erratic heartbeat.
“My personal laboratory.”
An imposing blast door of reinforced steel, at least 20 feet tall and 10 feet wide, blocked the end of the adjoining corridor. Over that loomed the ghostly relief of a great iron mask. Black smoke unfurled about the towering doors in ebbs and drifts, its obsidian lenses bore a malevolent energy as if staring not through but into its viewer.
Servants shambled about the atrium with armfuls of mechanized filth and scraps of gunmetal and azure armor; the sigil of a winged skull emblazoned upon various bits and pieces.
Jagad thrust the full force of his will into the surrounding technomatter, into the very fiber of the heretical ship, commanding the great blast doors to hiss aside. Heavy motors churned as the portal dutifully complied. The maiden had not been a regular ship prior to the change, and would not adapt.
The interior shone from the vibrant glow of artificial green lumstrips and harsh glow globes that bordered an immense workshop. Gleaming brass and exotic metals decorated the wide chamber, bulky power lines ran every which way like the limbs of a giant octopus.
An intricate web of interconnecting wires, cables, and braided arteries stretched about her view. Stacks of crates held tight the ends, clanging against the worn floor with each listless sway. In the belly of the beast lie a workspace dominated by an enormous crescent workbench.
It groaned with the same weight of the blast door, a hodgepodge of scrap and smelted iron. Of equal length sat a great docket, resting on a waist-high scaffold and lined with an array of tools and antiqued schemata. It resembled something like an architect's desk, fit for a titan legion machinist or a hive world engineer. The edges were carved in Martian runes, some of which glowed with an occult dim.
“You are worsening.” Came the rattling drone, neither a question nor a statement but a pointed observation.
A flush spread through her skin like a crimson tide. Heat coursing throughout her body and gathering behind a sheen of sweat. The effort to stem the tide of remembered sin became too much for the sister. Her center raged in unfettered heat, begging for quenching. It was as if every ounce of sexual excitement were compressed into the burning flesh between her legs. Carmeena bit the inner wall of her cheek hard. Sweet, copper filled her mouth and she reined her mind back from the lilac abyss. The pain kept her stable, marginally at least; a broken, guttural cry escaping her lips before she could suffocate it.
Jagad was growing increasingly tired of her half-restrained whimpers, “Your agony can be alleviated, simply in fact. Interfacing in your current state is proving increasingly tedious.” The offer was one not of mutual, carnal intrigue but mere convenience. While Jagad did not indulge in fleshly pleasure, he did not doubt his ability to assuage the sister’s aching burden. While Carmeena was a tool, the notion did not excuse further dysfunction.
There was an urge, a writhing in her loins. She would fall, and she would plummet, teetering beyond the edge with a will-binding fervor. The consequences did not concern her, for the sister had nearly suffered enough. As for the Warpsmith, the benefits outweighed the inconvenience.
She nearly begged. For release, mercy, dignity, and the oblivion of sin — whatever the machine-man found desirable. The words formed in her throat and refused to coalesce. She had played the nun well and eagerly for the entirety of her adulthood, but the needs of womanhood could no longer be denied. “Please.”
Breathing was becoming laborious, and Carmeena turned to regard him, knowing well her neediness would betray any paltry reason. The Warpsmith was an untamed alien — to men and woman alike — that meant nothing was simple. Jagad gave neither rejection nor blessing to her fervent plea and with a small hiss; mechatendrils unfurled in a cloud of silver-tipped darkness.
The whirring mesh of arms were surprisingly adept at the art of undress. Having undone the knot of her belt, Carmeena's clothing loosened and began to slide free. She grimaced in surprised silence, releasing small grunts in the process. Rushing air of the mechanized workshop breezed onto her naked thighs and robed stomach. Not one piece of her vestment fell to the ground, gliding across the air instead in a flourish, layer by layer until the last bit of clothing snapped free of her and then proceeded to drift lifeless to the ground, revealing a display of scarlet thatched blonde between her creamy, silk white thighs.
Two arms she had felt already, tickling the bare expanse of her waist and touching the swell of her breast. Jagad drew closer and closer — mechanical whirs growing loud as he came upon her. All she had to endure was more moments without thought or consequence. Moments more, no matter how little time may last. With a final fleeting hope and a sliver of sanity, she clenched tightly her will, like the bite of a tiger, to stay grounded to the present.
Finally it began and her sanity was threatened. Two powerful arms of grey, greased iron held fast the curve of her rear, lifting her up while another set of grasping hands explored her slim hips, circling around the band of her thigh, teasing the rounding rise of her backside before two delicate wires peeled her sex apart. It took a great effort not to cry out when the tender cables entered her with a stiff ease. Another pair of tentacles focused on the column of her breasts, dancing across her nipples and sending waves of fire through her lower belly.
Clarity evaded the sister once her thoughts had eroded completely, she would be the sole guardian of her sanctity. Never once had the woman encountered an experience such as this. Each delicate exploration — teasing, pinching, and spreading — felt like a thousand sensual fingers. More of the tendril-arms latched onto her raised feet, splitting and curling in an orgy of pleasure and pressure.
The Warpsmith took detailed notes, delivering his ministrations with scientific intrigue rather than a lover’s caress. This was mere experimentation, nothing more and nothing less.
Another wire thrust its way forward, rubbing into the sensitive crown of her sex. It was too much, and a blaze lit within her very core. All that preceded it was a prelude.
Her teeth clenched hard as her body convulsed in a thunderous tremble, bucking with her legs spread wide, speared and held taut by the probing wires. A hot spike of fire shot through her womb as she cried her first real orgasm; a loud, girlish gasp, the type of indulgent noise Carmeena was loathe to admit she could make. To give herself so wholly to a denizen of the damned was a betrayal in itself, and she did not stop until every inch of her being had been wrung of her pent-up longing.
Embarrassment painted her cheeks red and tears wetted the tip of her ruddy nose, tears which her captor watched silently. To him her diminutive orgasms — this wet-spell — was a pattern to be learned, a machine problem not yet solved.
Her climax was brief and meaningless. It came quick and left behind a taste of ash; so potent it had been for its brevity.
“Interesting.” In that peak of carnal release, Jagad had half expected Carmeena’s soul to slip from its corporeal confines and into the yawning emptiness of the immaterium, promised to the hungering deities of debaucheries. Instead, it had rejected the siren song and regained the modicum of sanity. He’d his theories. Many of his components were not the typical composites of Imperial origin — adamantium, plasteel, ceramite — rather the living-metal of the dynastic Necron; how he’d acquired such material was a legend of its own.
The silvery nanometal was well-studied in few heretekal circles, known to dampen or outright nullify the taint of chaos. Establishing causation would require additional testing. Jagad held the former battle nun closer, leaning her limp, naked form against the cool metal of his outer plating. Tendrils played across her soft thighs, along her womanly chest, and finally found the orifice between Carmeena's still soaked nether lips; as thin as an egg, smooth as glass, and blacker than a shadow it burrowed deeper within Carmeena, slipping the cum-wettened ring of muscle with a grunt from her throat.
“Just a while longer, please…” Carmeena pleaded weakly, resting her brow, red cheeked, against the smooth black chassis of his armor. Every wire-stroked ridge and peak seemed a stimulant, her loins clenching tighter in a desperate spasm around his immovable intrusion, squeezing with tiny muscular spasms at a failed attempt to pull him deeper. As a finger pushed into her womb, the tentacles exploded into life. Like slithering serpents they slithered and thrashed across her sex and deep within, stimulating, massaging and spreading. Jagad took special attention and focus on her protruding clitoris, which rewarded his labors with a fresh, steaming spurt of liquid release.
Everything had taken on the hot, mottling, vibrating blurriness of a fever dream. The biting nag of void subsided ever slightly and Carmeena felt more control than she had in what felt like years.
Finally, with the coming of exhaustion, a surreal calm soothed her ravaged soul. The aftershocks of violent pleasure plagued her sore loins and the lingering buzzing sensation enveloped her brain, drowning it like a wet wool blanket. Numb. The blessed state of numb. Carmeena welcomed its embrace.
After several minutes, and Jagad meticulous recordings, she stirred from the warm lethargy of carnal release and noticed the touch of the techno-wracked abomination was no longer pleasurable. There was still a steady humming friction from her quivering and glistening folds as well as his teasing at her rose bud entrance and her still thrumming womb. Nevertheless, there was no passion and no pleasure.
Everything ached; between her legs especially. Even her finger tips and her jaws were sore. She was tender and beaten, exorcised of sin with sex and denial.
Jagad released Carmeena from his tentacled embrace and set her gently on two uneasy legs. His labored rasping and inarticulate static filling her ears at the movement.
Though her lower half had taken abuse in the ordeal, Carmeena still felt relief. It was a gift to feel no worse, let alone better, and finally she recognized the pain of true relief: the sweet agony of exhaustion.
However there was a new issue that presented itself, Carmeena blushed and crossed her toned yet thin legs modestly to cover her pussy, slick with a mixture of fluids that dribbled down her inner thigh. Even then she hid the pink folds of the aching opening. At the very least her face had somewhat recovered its color.
Fractured porcelain features regarded his inhuman form with a placid scowl. The realization of her actions hit her almost harder than the previous impact to her womanhood. She had given herself freely — however consensual and necessary it was — to a heretic with the sole hope of satiating her wants; for an itch to be scratched and the misery to be eased. The touch was gone from her sex but the phantom buzz continued to itch. “What now?”
“We are nearing Volachia.”
“Volachia?”
She had never heard the name before, it must have been a minor agri-world at best and quite far away from her jurisdiction of the imperial tithe.
“my home.”
***
Volachia was a far cry from the backwater agri-world of Carmeena’s expectations.
Dusty expanses of silvery mesas had given way to sophisticated mega cities that rivaled even the grandest of hive cities. A lightscape of coruscating radiance, chrome skyscrapers and towering, elegant spires cast a luminescent cloak, awash in vibrant chromaturbs and laser-wire filament. Screaming clouds and distant rain were glimpsed through the heavy metal complexities of the mega-structure.
Space-bound trawlers soared through the black skies, sending twin trails of ether-mist and plasma contrails as they ripped through the atmosphere, high-tech tanks and recon flyers bolted through the smog-heavy streets.
Civilization bustled like the legs of an insect swarm, going on with such persistence that it was almost impossible to comprehend that the city was even aware of the Warpsmith’s passing voidship, let alone pay it any mind. Carmeena doubted that such an abomination could be the Stewart of such a city, or that such a place could exist beyond the light of the Imperium in the first place.
“How?” Carmeena’s struggle to comprehend the vastness of Volachia’s central hub temporary eclipsed her returning, budding itch. Fascination stalled the ever-present encroach of her spiritual taint and its hungering desire.
Jagad stood solemnly for a while before beginning, “We retreated to the Eye millennia ago, broken upon the knee of the loyalists legions, hunted to the very edge of extinction. The shattered legions that turned away from the light of the Imperium devolved into disparate warbands…petty kingdoms arose in the absence of high command. Some faded back into myth, others burned through entire systems stars to consume their rivals. Volachia, this world, was once a part of a much greater conglomerate of planetary governments, casted once more to shadow in the untold conflicts of centuries long since passed. I arrived several centuries ago, guiding the people back to industry.” It was the most Carmeena had heard Jagad speak since meeting him and, moreso, the most she cared about his heresiarch past. It only occurred to her then that, like other apostate chapters that had been eradicated through the millennia, not all of the traitors had become wanton servants to Chaos. There had likely been many splinter groups left scattered about the Imperium after the sundering, those which had somehow remained free or wholly outside the Empire. Their names and sins lost to the march of time. There were no forces powerful, or feared, enough to erase them entirely.
Carmeena marveled briefly — but not for long — the novelty of her circumstances not altogether mitigating the oddity. There were tens of millions within Volachia, not quite akin the monstrousness of a hiveworld but impressive nonetheless; where had they all come from? And there was something strange about their architecture, more geometric, aesthetic, than what could be crafted or salvaged by the Imperium.
They drifted steadily lower, below the reaching steel and ceramic spires.
“This world seems too…”
“Peaceful?”
Yes, that was the word, that and so many more. Where were the shackles of iron servitude, of bleak brutalist that infected every transmogrified corridor of the Warpsmith’s vessel? There were no mutinous cadaver-reverters or the acrid taste of blood-fume upon the air. There was technology — impressive tech at that — but was in the service of mankind. There were people, not mindless slaves, but educated citizens and dignified volunteers; not slaves, that was so abundantly true.
“None of us are without dreams, sister.” Jagad’s guttural simulacrum could almost be called wistful.
Carmeena shot him a look, the hypocrisy of his words was unbearable. It was difficult to keep her contempt for the heretek, not in the slightest for him as a person or an ideology, but due to what she knew of his specific heresy and barbarism. Whatever it was, it was so personally revolting. To think otherwise was to see him as a man and not some mindless beast, an abomination. Despite her transgressions, Carmeena’s held to the ideals and belief of the Imperium with self-righteous zeal, even if such fervor was slowly waning. Was it all a facade? She’d already been violated and given herself freely to the soothing arms of lust without shame; hardly the portrait of a loyalist daughter of man. She could feel the cloying at her soul once again as the intrusive memories began their onslaught.
“Do you require relief.” The tentacled former techmarine offered bluntly with little regard to how it flustered his new pet.
That was how he saw her, in no uncertain terms, a slave to his use; an experiment at the very least. Yet something about that so-called assumption had started to attract her favor.
Mere weeks ago, Carmeena would have put the heretek to the bolter or died trying, but now? The offer was strangely appealing, almost comforting and relieving in itself.
Damn her lust. It was getting worse, this damnable affliction that still ate away at the tiniest edges of her mind. The infection was not sated, quite the opposite actually, and the throbbing ache between her legs dulled any resistance. To touch oneself was a crime of mortal sin upon the flesh, and one that Carmeena had fought and beaten for her entire life, yet the distant promises of lissome lovers and paradise eternal crooned from the immaterial. They grew louder as she fought.
“I am in control.”
“You reek of pheromonal stink. It offends me.” There was no humor to Jagad's tone; it was merely an observation. “Do not jeopardize your soul in the name of pride.”
Carmeena let the jab hang in the air between them. However vile the heretek, there was an element of truth there as well. Here stood an ally in the darkness, an opportunity to finally slake the torment and relieve the persistent fogging of her mind.
“Your assistance would be helpful, abomination, but be brief…” Her voice cracked at the end. It was all she could muster, words and pretense had all become secondary to a need that consumed her mind, body, and soul alike.