Ajax sat on the cot in his small officers room aboard the Truth's Razor in a Lotus position. He had spent a third of his time in the last month studying tomes related to Imperial Astropaths, Eldar Seers, and searching his memory archive for information related to the Thousand Sons Legion.
Ajax had finally decided how he wanted to structure his psychic core. The fundamental nature of a psyker's psychic core varied between species, cultures, and armies. But, the central facts remained the same.
The psychic core was a summation of a psyker's power. It was the metaphysical structure that a psyker created that fundamentally changed their relationship with the warp.
Instead of being a perilous leak of warp energy, as all untrained psykers were. It established the psyker as a regulating valve that controlled the pressurized torrent of warp energy that flowed through them. If a psyker created too weak of a valve, death and damnation followed. If a psyker knowingly tried to use a flow greater than their valve's ability to control, death and damnation followed. If a psyker unknowingly attracted the attention of warp entities greater than their valve could resist, death and damnation followed. In all fairness, most actions psykers took regarding their psychic core could result in death and damnation.
Knowing this, Ajax had decided to deliberately structure his psychic core in a hyper orderly fashion that allowed for organic growth. This choice allowed for a predictable and logical power structure that allowed room for Ajax to grow to face new challenges. Ajax had decided that the foundation of his psychic core would rest in runes like the Eldar, but he would choose human runes. Ajax chose cards of the Emperor's Tarot as his runes.
Billions of humans across the nascent Imperium invested their emotional and psychic energy into these cards and symbols, charging them with great psychic potency. Each tarot card had begun to resonate as a metaphysical entity in the warp that was fundamentally tied to the human species. As such, Ajax chose three Tarot cards as the base of his psychic core. The Lightning Tower. The Blind Seer. The Angelic Primarch.
The Lightning Tower was a card with a complicated history. It was an allusion to the allegorical Tower of Babel. The tower with which humanity sought to reach God in heaven. It was also a subtle reference to a tower that a Chaos cult had built upon Terra and engraved with Enucia during Terra's Bronze Age. Enucia had been a language of power that was both Chaotic and not. It had been used to great effect by heretics and some heroes.
Destroying this cult and tower had been the first time the Emperor had moved openly for the good of mankind. The Emperor, with his first Warmaster, had raised an army and destroyed the cult. The continued existence of the Tower and the Enuncia therein caused the fracture of the Emperor's relationship with his first Warmaster.
The Lightning Tower represented forbidden knowledge, challenging the impossible or the taboo, and revelation through ruin. It was a card that Ajax identified as encapsulating the struggle of all warp based abilities, the warp was a poisoned chalice that would kill anyone who drank too deep. Ajax had included this card as a reminder of the dangers of power, and, hopefully,to keep himself on the correct path to power.
The Blind Seer was even more esoteric than The Lightning Tower. There was a certain irony that the Emperor had included it in his Tarot. The Blind Seer had parallels to the faith of the Last Church of Terra. This church, the Church of the Lightning Stone, professed a faith wherein lightning had struck a stone, which was contained within the church, and healed a blind man and others, leading to the birth of a new faith. The irony of the card is that the blind man of the card is a seer and a prophet, who can see better than the blind man who was healed by faith.
At least, that was Ajax's conjecture. Regardless, the Blind Seer was also related to forbidden, hidden knowledge. However, the card also spoke of the costs to seeking knowledge and power. In myth, many seers had to sacrifice their eyes or sight so that they could 'see' hints of the future. This card also spoke of those without sight 'seeing' all the better for it. Ajax had included this card as a reminder that all power came at a cost, and as hope that he would be blind to lies and see only truth.
The Angelic Primarch was technically a card from the future version of the Emperor's Tarot. Because Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels, had not yet been rediscovered by this point in the timeline, the card would still be known as the Steadfast Angel. Ajax thought that the card's psychic significance would only grow with time, growing explosively once Sanguinius was rediscovered.
The Steadfast Angel, and the Angelic Primarch that it would become, was a card that represented a holy guardian of the human race. Ajax hoped the card would imbue him with the courage, nobility, and unwavering moral character displayed by the Primarch of the Blood Angels.
As Ajax generated these metaphysical tarot cards, he began to mold their conceptual aura link clay to form the manifestation of his psychic core. Ajax molded the auras of the Tarot cards causing them to intermingle into a strong main trunk. He molded roots that dug deep into his own personality, painfully and permanently linking his psychic nature to his human nature. The upper trunk molded into branches that seemed to reach for the heavens adorned with leaves of a multitude of hues more numerous than the stars.
From one side of the trunk lit a bright white fire, originating from the Lightning Tower card, and began to spread up the branches and down the roots. The white fire was blindingly bright. Bright like a divine radiance that mortal eyes were not meant to see. From the other side of the trunk lit a black fire lit, originating from the Blind Seer card, and began to spread up the branches and down the roots. The black fire wasn't black like darkness, but black like a void, an absence of all matter and energy. In the center of the trunk, a golden flame lit from the Angelic Primarch card, forming a barrier that prevented the white and black flames from touching. Much dimmer in radiance, the golden flame exuded a feeling of majesty that neither the black nor the white fire exhibited. With that, Ajax's psychic core had fully manifested itself within the psychic realm and it's name resounded through Ajax's mind "Yggdrasil Aflame."
>>[Hidden Conditions Met, New Quest added to the Archive: Give a Daemon True Death, Reward: Unlock Portion of Anathema Lineage.]