Warhammer 40: Shattered Steel Soul

Chapter 233 There is a Mandela who loves bathing

Our Commorragh is dirty and desolate, a gathering of shamans who step on blades to dance, and blood relatives who drink fine wine to indulge in the essence of life. The petty fights of power never end, shrines and muse, poisons and curses, Hecate holds the bloody crystal cup, and the long whip breaks the slave's spine.

The sarcophagi are arranged in concentric circles, and the statues are hidden within cocoons and raw red flesh. For dozens of millennia, we have shattered the idols of our old gods and worshiped our sinful poison-lord Shameish as our new idol.

However, today, the age of the gods has long ended, and the emergence of the Muses is buried deep in the muddy past of the Dark City.

When my people lost their lives and lost their souls in the great disaster, I managed to survive due to the great fall.

That day coincided with the birthday of her who was hungry and thirsty. I lay in the sacrificial altar as a sacrifice and witnessed the obsidian dagger falling from my chest without any force, tapping lightly on my heart: the sharp sound of the end of old history. Xiao, happened to absorb the dark soul of my former master.

I look up at the black sun and lament that the current situation allows me to survive, just like the dark muse pities the eternity I will have.

I saw a coming dark age; when in aristocratic palaces and church halls the stupid and arrogant power games of generations were rehearsed and screamed at the absurd and comical petty fights confined within the class, But I saw that the vacuum of power in Commorragh and even the entire Eldar race had been created with the Great Fall.

I will pave my stage with blood, even though I was once nothing more than a lowly slave. My hands were empty, but my stomach was hungry.

In my plans, nothing brews the brew of fear better than the deep kiss of a blade on flesh.

He understands this too. My bloody accomplice, the lover of murder and misery, the blade that quenches the thirst of the blade, the marquis who falls with the twilight from a star higher than the black sun.

Conrad Coates. I'm looking for him.

In this slaughtered family mansion, I stepped over the stumps on the ground and hurried through the corridors with skin and green leather armor on the walls. I cursed the broken bones and limp balls of flesh that blocked the way, and pursued Looking for his scent in the blood spilled everywhere. Blood and guts splattered all over my pointed boots.

That was his style, leaving no one alive wherever he went.

Conrad had an equal hatred for the whole world, and was never stingy in unleashing this intense emotion rolling within his huge and perfect body, releasing it a thousand times into random convulsions in every act of violence. body. The depth of emotion in his chest was enough to astonish any Eldar.

In his own words, there are not ten innocent people in the entire Commorragh. Therefore, when people are feasting, fighting, resenting, and calculating, Konrad Curze does not mind killing every one of them. one.

The rare creatures originally imprisoned in the iron cages suspended in the sky of the mansion were released. Leather-winged birds, blood-clawed birds, Eri-winged-winged birds, wasps, rare beluks, shadow crows and Imgar shrike were several meters long. The wings[1] gathered into a violent cloud in the hall.

It took me some time to deal with them, and I returned to the bottom of the zoo in a trance, back to the past when I still had to fight to prove my worth of survival.

I hope this is not Conrad's deliberate attempt to cause trouble for me, but that it means he has found yet another way to provoke or toy with me within the covenant. He knows that I will never allow a rift in the relationship between us. This bloody Marquis is my only evil card at the moment.

I walked through a series of halls, listening to the crunching sound of my own boots among the remnants of onyx, turquoise, amethyst and emerald. I did not deny the pride and joy that rose in my heart when I trampled on my privileges.

I have been groveling, groveling, imprisoned and bound, living on my last breath. So does Conrad.

Maybe that's why we hate each other.

Soon after, I heard a faint sound of water.

As expected, Conrad Coates will not change his unreasonable bad habits.

While we pride ourselves on the finer senses of our species, Conrad Coz's innately sharper senses showed an unabashed innate superiority. He hears my steps, or smells my scent, before I do.

"Victor," Konrad Curze called my name, "you are here, my ally."

-

Asdúbal Victor found the indoor hot spring in the mansion. In the dim candlelight and the hanging black and red veil, he unexpectedly found the figure of Conrad Coates soaking in the cold spring water.

The Blood Marquis stirred up the water and washed his dirty black hair. The ripples of blood slowly spread around his pale muscles.

He turned around in the water, lay on the edge of the pool, and propped up his thin face. Those dark eyes with oversized pupils were strangely embedded in his quiet expression, exuding an indescribable cold concentration.

"Your hatred is turning into blood in the way, Konrad," the Eldar said, fiddling with a bulbous skull he had picked up from the display case, and tossing the Primarch a bottle of bloodwine he had picked up from the table.

The corners of Conrad Coates' mouth twitched nervously.

"I don't hate you," he hissed softly, breaking the neck of the bottle and tasting the blood that flowed from his thin, slashed lip as he drank. "Pain is the only way to wash away sin."

Victor didn't smile, he didn't bother to refute Conrad's self-defense. "Why don't you come out of your favorite bath, Blood Marquis?"

"Can't you see, Asdubal? The dirty blood of your kind is stained on the tips of my fingers." Coz shook his fingers as if in distress, even though there was no trace of dirt in the gaps between the long nails. "I have to wash my hands. And my hair, hair is hard to wash, you know."

"Shave your head, Blood Marquis." Victor walked around the bathing pool, found the side with the bathing stairs, and stepped directly into the cold water. Blood quickly spread from the soles of his boots.

Konrad Coates jumped out of the pool angrily, and the mania on his face instantly turned into a condescending contempt: "You dirty slave, chirping strong-brained cat, take off your sin-stained boots. !”

"You're the savage Mandela, the venomous Ugul, the Lilith who takes ten baths a day," Victor frowned and dodged the half bottle thrown by Kurtz, "I'm here You have worked so hard to defeat our enemies and drown the nobles who stand in the way, but you come here to massacre an unplanned family name just to borrow their baths.”

Curze leaned down and stared at the Eldar's equally pale face, and suddenly chuckled.

He retreated behind the gauze and retrieved from the darkness the handmade tunic that he had stitched together with dozens of pieces of extremely well-tanned leather. He tied the laces slowly until the scarred skin of the original was replaced by the warm skin of another species. Package covered.

Water flowed from the long black hair of the original body after careful cleaning, soaking the leather on its shoulders and back.

"Sooner or later, this castle will be ruined by our plans. It just so happens that there is a very good bath here, Victor." Coates said casually, "Didn't you take a bath the day you rolled down from the altar?" "I want to eat first." Victor did not shy away from his past experience as a slave. He regarded his behavior of resisting whipping as evidence of pride. A snake-like smile hung on the corners of his lips, "The thirsty one It brings the soul’s thirst for a gluttonous feast, but my flesh and blood body also needs food urgently. I didn’t take a bath, so what does that mean?”

"Hunger cannot be satisfied with blood, and pain cannot eliminate the consequences of the curse." Cozz half-singed and half-hummed briskly, "Death does not exist and is isolated from our world..."

"Death is rare for nobles. They have defeated death and regard death as a unique transit." Victor said, walking out of the water. Curze never minded being interrupted from humming, either stopping to answer or pretending to be deaf. "It's part of eternity."

"This makes real death full of fear. And fear can only be carried by living creatures. Extending the period before real death is a good recipe for fear... How is the progress of your great cause, ally?"

"We found a new racial self-identification to strengthen the cohesion within the ethnic group." Victor simply explained his idea.

He does not need to describe all the sense of belonging and social isolation and group antagonism that proper names can bring. Konrad Coates clearly understands the prejudice and conflict that defining the boundaries of "us" and "them" can bring about.

"What is it?" Cozz said softly.

"Eldas Aeneas," Victor replied, running his fingers over the sharp shadow lines of the skull's eye sockets. Dark Eldar, that's what the words mean.

"Darkness, the ghosts of the night spread fear in the darkness, the night ghosts gnaw at sin, and the coward makes the more coward surrender. Dark Eldar," a calm smile appeared on Curze's face, "The best pseudonym for the Slayer, A unique name for those who have been convicted of an alien crime."

"We are alien to each other," Asdúbal Viktor said indifferently, "and you are even more alien to our world. That is why the Haemonculus, Hexakareth, captured you."

"Hexakaris is not dead." Curze said suddenly, his dark eyes unblinking, and the facial muscles that often twitched nervously remained silent, which gave him a rare dignity.

"I heard the brightest star among the Haemonculi, Bloodlord Conrad Curze, admit that he had rescued his hated enemy from the webs spread by her thirst."

"I don't want to hand him over easily to the torture of the Thirsty Lady. Even if what he will encounter may not be different, the person who performs the thing itself is also different."

Conrad Coates's speech became extremely clear, and the cool madness burst out in his dark eyes with astonishing deterrence.

"I will complete my work personally, peel off his flesh and blood, gnaw at his bones, infinitely extend the last millisecond of the eternal torture he will face, taste his fear, prey on his madness, and tell him that this is just what he will face. Experience the most insignificant prelude to the meal, study his tics, analyze his nerves, discover where the means of inflicting pain will reach the most exquisite perfection. How can I bear to let this sweetness fall into other people's bellies, Asdu Baal Victor?”

"Narrow-minded, cold and violent," Victor praised sincerely, "Ambitious, greedy and selfish, a blood prince."

"And I don't hate this city, Viktor," Curze said, eyes narrowing, emphasizing his emotional state a second time, "I love it."

Victor threw the skull he was playing with into the bath. "Whether you hate it or love it, our road to rule is still long. We are weak and unknown, and your normal actions will be interrupted by sudden hallucinations. This is a fatal weakness."

"You are hinting at an external force." Cozz pondered for a moment, then pinched out a thin rectangular card from the pocket of his sewn leather jacket with two fingers, and accurately threw it into the hands of the Eldar.

It was a beautifully drawn card, with no words written on the front and back, only the corresponding crying and laughing mask, as a foreboding hint.

"This object is in the same envelope as an invitation to a public banquet of the Church of the Sun, and was delivered to the owner of this mansion next to the breakfast table." Cozi said with a low smile, "You may need it."

-

"I have imagined many different situations," Morse said, conjuring up a recliner made of rattan and sitting in front of the Eldar who had just decided to call himself the troupe leader a few days ago. "But the only thing I didn't expect was that you would use the name of an artificially bred Eldar kid who just joined the troupe to send a message to Nuceria."

When he was told that Arman Laroni was just a young Eldar who had just been born from the amniotic tube of the breeding wall for only a few years, Morse could not help but feel dumbfounded - he had previously thought that this was the name of the troupe leader.

"Avatar, my name." The troupe leader replied, outlining the mask pattern on the card's surface one stroke at a time.

The troupe's first performance was arranged by these fancy-dressed Eldar at a dance that was to be held by the Sun Church of Comoros, and most of the invitations had been sent to the guests.

What Avatar is painting now is the last batch of invitations to be reissued to small churches and noble families, such as the lower-level Gnosis Church, the Church of the Awakened, the Poisonous Heart Church, the Smega family, the Eli family, etc. Each of these small organizations has little importance on the Comoros scene, but their collective arrival will be a symbolic announcement.

After changing out of their holographic battle uniforms, the Eldar in the spacecraft generally put on their own color-blocked floral uniforms with extremely bold colors.

In theory, this kind of attire may just mean their personal preferences; however, in reality, this group of guys has different styles throughout the ship, such as rough orc sofas, small human chairs and other items that have been transported from different locations. After softly sleeping on the red and blue fiber used by the alien race, Morse began to wonder how these Eldar could continue to live in a sad state of suspected zero income.

Through the curved observation window behind Avatar, Morse could estimate the projection that the floating Tuchucha should cast on the real universe. What this huge machine can manifest in front of the species in the material universe is only a small part of its immeasurable huge volume.

After the Tuchucha Engine, the entrance to the huge webway glowed with rainbow-like light. They arrived here from the complex webway outside the entrance. At this time, the webway was rejoicing because of the ship of Eldar carried in it. The inspired soul echoes and sways with excitement.

And below the spacecraft, a faintly visible shadow lingered outside the webway, like a dying python, hungry and unbearable.

"The Void..." the Avatar said.

"I have a name," Morse said. "Call me Morse."

"Okay, Morse. Do you want to join us in the show, Void One?"

Morse turned his chair and faced the troupe leader again. "I don't mind going to the auditorium to enjoy your first performance, but you'd better call me human. I think I look quite like a living person."

　[1]The animal names are translated casually.

　　In addition, if you don’t understand something recently or find a setting bug, please call me (.)

　　

　

(End of this chapter)