Chapter 265: Soul Stones
The power blade stopped moving.
Soul stones.
Every Aeldari carried one — typically teardrop-shaped, worn at the forehead or on a chain at the chest. The function was specific and essential: when an Aeldari died, their soul entered the stone before it could disperse into the Immaterium, held safe within the crystal lattice until a kinsman could collect it and bring it to a craftworld's infinity circuit.
Without it, the soul went to Slaanesh.
The youngest of the Chaos Gods had been born from the Aeldari themselves — an entire civilisation at the height of its power, with lifespans approaching eternity, physical needs solved, and nothing left to do but want. They had indulged every desire conceivable and invented new ones. They had detonated stars for spectacle. They had manipulated life at the genomic level for entertainment. They had committed acts of such concentrated depravity that the accumulated psychic weight of it, building over millennia in the Immaterium, had eventually cohered into a consciousness.
Slaanesh. Born screaming from the collected excess of an ancient civilisation. And preternaturally hungry for the souls that had made it.
Every Aeldari who died without a soul stone was claimed. Eternally. The details of what that meant were not described in polite literature.
The soul stone was not a precaution. It was a necessity of survival beyond death, as fundamental as food and water were to survival in life. Destroying one was not an act of cruelty. It was a sentence.
The warrior had watched her crewmate burn. She had been in the treeline, beyond the perimeter, watching the Confessor work. She had felt the moment her crewmate's soul attempted to leave — and felt it taken. Not by the flame, not by physical death, but by something older and hungrier. The soul stone had been glass and wire when the promethium reached it. Powder when it was done.
She had flayed the Confessor for that.
Not for his death. For what came after it.
Kian's voice carried across the garden.
"Everyone listen. If she kills General Zeppelin, you scatter — all of you. Get out, find a vox, and tell the planetary command to execute the remaining four Aeldari prisoners immediately. Shatter their soul stones. Every single one. Let their souls spend eternity where they belong."
Most of the guards in the garden had no idea what a soul stone was. The order was operationally incoherent to them.
It was not addressed to them.
The warrior turned and looked at Kian with an expression that the war-mask processed as combat data and filed as extreme threat response. The blade came up.
Then she killed three guards who had moved to flank her — efficiently, without apparent emotional involvement — turned, and ran.
Over the wall. Gone.
Kian put three bolts after her. Missed. Watched the last of her movement disappear into the dark beyond the perimeter.
He lowered the weapon.
General Zeppelin was still standing, which was medically remarkable given what he looked like.
Head wound exposing pale matter beneath. One shoulder catastrophically destroyed, the arm attached by things that shouldn't have been doing the work of load-bearing structure. His expression had the glassy clarity of someone running entirely on adrenaline, a state that would end badly and soon.
Kian pushed through the remaining guards, pulled a Regen-Bolt from his kit, and drove it in. He uncapped a small vial of Sanctified Spirits and applied it to the General's face — the sharp scent cutting through shock, buying some clarity before the pain that was coming.
He looked at the steward.
"Go. Rejuvenat Order physicians. Now."
The steward ran.
The General's eyes found Kian's face. Remarkable lucidity, given the circumstances. He blinked blood out of his left eye.
"I got robbed," he said. His voice was steady. "This whole business, I came out the other end missing about forty percent of my skull. I got robbed."
Kian crouched down to his level.
"General. You went hand-to-hand with an Aeldari Aspect Warrior and you're still talking. Do you understand what percentile of Imperial history that puts you in? You're literally in the top point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one. You could walk into the Senatorum Imperialis and every single person would want your autograph."
The General's mouth moved. It might have been the beginning of a laugh.
The adrenaline held for another thirty seconds, and then he started screaming, which Kian had predicted and which meant the Regen-Bolt had kicked in and the nervous system had resumed normal pain transmission.
The Rejuvenat Order physicians arrived eighteen minutes later.
Three days afterward, the Hive counted its losses.
Lady Zeppelin: deceased.
The Confessor: deceased, manner of death detailed in the Arbites report and subsequently classified.
One noble who had purchased an Aeldari prisoner: deceased, cause of death described in the medical examiner's report as catastrophic structural trauma to the pelvis and associated anatomy.
Several other nobles: deceased, causes varying.
The fusion reactor beneath the Zeppelin estate: former fusion reactor. Now a crater of solidified stone, a three-thousand-square-kilometre zone of severe radiation contamination surrounding it, and a further fifteen thousand square kilometres of moderate contamination above it. Ninety habitation levels compromised. Three million five hundred and eighty thousand dead in the immediate event. Twenty million further exposures to radiation levels that would manifest as illness over the coming months.
It was, by any measure, the single worst event to occur in Hive Tenebris in living memory.
It was also, in the opinion of every senior official who reviewed the situation, entirely their fault for what they had done with the prisoners.
The Hive's leadership changed posture.
All remaining nuclear and high-energy facilities were either sealed behind maximum-grade security or physically entombed in plasteel and rebar until proper defence could be arranged. The surviving senior nobility consolidated — abandoning their individual towers, moving into a single high-security location with all available elite troops concentrated around them.
Information management was implemented. The Aeldari warrior had been extracting targeting data from household servants — servants who knew their masters' movements as a matter of professional necessity. That flow of information was cut off. Controlled misinformation was seeded through every channel that might reach her.
A bounty was posted: one hundred billion Agri-Scrips and a hereditary title for the warrior's head.
A significant portion of Hive Tenebris immediately became amateur bounty hunters. The streets filled with people watching the streets, watching each other, watching shadows.
The effect was not immediate capture. The effect was that every viable target hardened beyond her current assessment, every intelligence channel she'd been using dried up, and the cost of continued operations against the Hive climbed past what the warrior's tactical calculus would currently support.
She went to ground.
For the next several months, nothing happened.
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