Let There Be Light

[KingofAges]

"And Man said, 'Let there be light.' And He was blessed by light, heat, magnetism, gravity, and all the energies of the universe." -- The Instructor.​

In the antecedent, there was emptiness. Out of loneliness, did the ultimate creator, the One-Above-All, conceive consciousness, and in that isolation, love and morality matured self-awareness. Then, the Zero Point sprang into actuality in an outburst of absolute totality. This was to be designated the First Firmament, the Prime Cosmos. From within the Zero Point, the First Firmament, or as Imperial authorities of the Remembrancer Orders describe it, the Prime Cosmos, did the One-Above-All commence to draft or as what human intelligence could accomplish in theory, so did they perceive.

The written antiquity evolved from all observant life from the Nexus Core, the Zero Point. It degraded the interpretations and biomorphic logic into what are known as gods and goddesses or deities. Then, as all immeasurable things must do in the neverending sequence of destruction and resurrection, the Zero Point became fissionable after its abrupt interpretation and pulsed with an iniquitous hope before imploding and conceiving the One-Below-All.

This was distinguished as the Second Cosmos and the cyclical exemplar of resurrection from the previous universe, life, and death. The Third Cosmos ultimately superseded the Second Cosmos. This yielded the commencement of the First Multiverse and, finally, the Omniverse. Whether or not this is dependable, the One-Above-All and the One-Below-All have been vacant undeviatingly from their totality but still oversee all consciousness collectively behind the grandiose curtains.

"I am the One-Above-All. I see through many eyes. I build with many hands. They are themselves, but they are also me. I am all-powerful. My only weapon is love. The mystery intrigues me." so sayeth the One-Above-All.

"I howl through many mouths. I break with many hands. They are themselves, but they are also me. I have all the power you give me, and my weapon is hate," so declareth the One-Below-All.

+ + + Scene: The Golden Throne of Everlasting Life. + + +​

Established within the inner sanctum of the Gothic worldship, Bucephalus, the Golden Throne of Everlasting Life sustained perpetual grandiose energies from the self-contained quasar known as the Astronomican. The throne itself withdrew the power from the Astronomican, which was positioned outside the worldship, right over the apex of the inner sanctum's outer pyramid of golden metal and Dark Glass. The quasar shone brilliantly with psychic sway, a remarkably luminescent active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole, caged infinitely within a hyperplane housed within a tesseract given shape by the glome or hypersphere. This was well beyond hyper-advanced levels of technology or could anything that could be perceived as a dissimilar quandary of magic.

Seated upon the sovereignty that is Everlasting Life are an actuality, a perpetual existence of unquestionable abstract potential, a Demiurge, and a man. Numerous names and indications know the man through his multiple reincarnations with each transient infinity, but in this prevailing firmament, the Demiurge of Creation designates himself, Thaddeus.

Encompassed by antiquated and arcane engines, the living remains of the Warmaster feasted upon the Golden Throne's capability to entice the sublime potential of the Power Cosmic from within the raging Astronomican positioned miles above his head. Who produced such a device was forever undiscovered. Still, its dynamism and internal functioning were distinguished only by its supreme lord and the millions of tech-adepts who strived tirelessly to preserve it in operation.

Thaddeus endured in taciturnity while the furious vigors surged, encompassing him in an infernal province of golden brilliance. While seated upon the cathedra and while it was initiated, no mere mortal or even deity could endure long enough to glimpse up at the supremacy of the Warmaster. Their forms would discontinue existing, and their very idea of being would be no more. This was how Thaddeus reacquired his potential from infinity, and only he may decide who can stand in all his potential and glory.

Upon the Warmaster's noble appearance was a suspended glimpse of great desperation and despair. Thaddeus could not cry out in agony if he so wished to. He was barred in a sort of stasis, a predicament of eternal perdition for such a stalwart being. Thaddeus desired it to cease, but after practicing enormous measures of his Demiurge endowment to stay the concluding implosion of the Zero Point's Nexus Core, Thaddeus was compelled to withdraw and enter into hellish unrest until he reverted to normality. Thaddeus was isolated within the one hundred square miles of the inner sanctum. The only thing to keep him fellowship was the millions of miles of cabling, pipes, power couplings, and the many sequences of machinery and machinery transformers. Finally, the mighty demigod warrior kings surrounded the base of the immense throne pyramid, the three-hundred-thousand in auramite gold, the Hetaeron Guard Legion, or the Companions of the Warmaster.

Although the Golden Throne of Everlasting Life and the Astronomican were used to resupply Thaddeus with the Power Cosmic, they had one more application. It made faster-than-light sailing in the Imperium achievable by generating Eternity Gates, and that was functioned by applying subhumans or mutants termed Navigators. This was accomplished through astro telepathy, and while the Choir of Navigators onboard the worldship generated a system of signals, they would often discover other signs from other realities. Thaddeus wasn't a Navigator of the Navis Nobilite. Still, he was a lighthouse of varieties for the three-eyed creatures who study the stars, for a course, much like the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicum, they viewed their machine-spirits as programmable coding.

While Thaddeus prevailed in his infernal stasis, moving while within it was understood to be improbable. Just as the seconds gradually ticked like the hour hand of a horologe, Thaddeus envisioned something about to come to pass. This produced massive psychic feedback that billowed and shrieked through the millions of miles of wirework and cabling. It transformed astropaths and Navigators alike to powder in one fell swoop. Then, for the first time since its formulation, the Astronomican dimmed briefly before reacquiring its luminescence.

"God-Emperor of Mankind, what just transpired?" blasphemed the Paternova. Her thin crimson-tinted edges pressed firmly together as she braced herself from the fleeting tide of the psychic onslaught. "The palace's Galliifrean hexagrammic wards should have protected us!" shouted the Paternova, directing it to her Consul Novator.

"Madam Achelieux, we suffered an entire choir unprotected from the feedback," replied the Novator.

"That's over ten thousand souls, Emperor preserve us," Achelieux sniffled before rubbing the violet blood from her nose.

"The worldship has also withdrawn from translation," revealed the Novator, who was also clearing the same colored blood from his nose.
"The Warmaster, what of him?"

"The Astronomican is still nursing him, but the Throne's sensories detected movement, ma'am," the Novator answered as he scrutinized the data streaming athwart his cogitator screens.

"That is impossible!" hollered the Paternova as she arrived at her Novator's side to glimpse at the dozen cogitator screens that bathed them in jade-colored enlightenment.
The View of Eternity within the Palace of Navigators was in disarray after the immaterial collision had deteriorated many of the Navigator palace's securities and internal operations. Cogitators, logic engines, lexicanum-processor banks, and other computing implements were blazing or showering sparks on other adepts and crew as they quickly tried to regain control and position of the psychic-quasar.

"Be prepared for another surge. This won't be the last; it's only the first of many psionic quakes I dread," Achelieux explained.

+ + + Location: Palace of the Navigators, Navigator's Quarter. + + +​

The Navigator's Quarter is an expansive district located on Imperial worldships. The Navigator's Quarter is also where the considerable influence of the Navigator Houses has their literal lineage houses. The effluent of the renowned families has developed a labyrinthine magnificence of palaces and garden estates spanning thousands of miles along the backbone of the mammoth megastructure of a starship. Still, one such Navigator's Quarter is agreeably known among the Legiones Astartes legions that the Navigator's Quarter of the Bucephalus was arrogantly burdened with more additional wealth and technology imaginable.

The Palace of the Navigators is at the Quarter's epicenter, where the Paternova of that venerable worldship rules. Following her ascension, the Paternova never vacates the walls of the Palace. This enormous pyramid arcology of alabaster, silver, and gold metals is staffed by members drawn from the Paternova's House and furnished with pre-selected 13th Legionnaires for additional demigod protection. Going even further, the outer surfaces of the pyramid arcology are studded with sensor spires, clusters, and anti-craft weaponry trenches extending for numerous miles along the sloping walls of the Palace.

Beneath the grandeur of Navigator's Quarter is the far darker world of the Vaults, a labyrinth of tunnels that reaches down towards the worldships core. The Vaults are the refuge of the oldest and most mutated Navigators.

While the 13th deploy their units of Adeptus Arbites, they maintain law and order in the Quarter, the Navis Nobilite pays for the security of its palaces, and the Imperial's own Holy Inquisition is forbidden from entering unless they are invited, or a flagrant violation of Imperial law has occurred.

The Navigator's Quarter was speckled with brilliant explosions of birthing stars as the psionic aftershocks persisted in staggering the hexagrammic wardings shielding the Navis Nobilite populations from Immaterial Warp vulnerability or, more sinister... daemon infestation. The violent panorama was regarded from the sectioned-off clusters of megacities and hyperplanes. Still, the command crown of the brass could feel the atomic explosions jolt the supporting superstructures of the mega-dome. It was a shining city that reflected the might of the Navigator's Quarter in beauty and grace. It accommodated the worldship's Command Houses that manage ship systems, command forces, and command the starship's helm across the boundlessness of Creation.

"The Empyric Engineers are conveying defective restorations to the Immateria Wards shielding the Navigator's Quarter," the Novator explained from his command pulpit under the rotating globe of jade glowing cogitator screens.

"The Immateria Wards will hold for as long as the restorations need them to hold, Novator. Give my regards to the Empyric Engineers," Achelieux reacted with a great sigh of solace after her RIG rejuvenated her body from damage. The Paternova glimpsed the yellow status of her Novator's RIG on the Novator's spine. "You need to rejuvenate, Novator. You're in Yellow Status."

"I've been so immersed in my duties, ma'am," the Novator soughed as he placed a quivering hand on the bloodstained side of his unaugmented scalp. There was a laceration with minor bleeding, but the Yellow Status was for the swelling pressing on that side of his brain. "Oh, Primarch's arse," he swore under his breath before deploying a green and silver canister into his chest port. The RIG quickly corrected itself from Yellow Status to Green Status. The wound on the Novator's scalp was restitched as the rejuvenating treatment worked on the swelling of the brain.

"Our Quarter is greatly damaged, and we start repairing her by making certain we're fit and alive," responded a smiling Paternova.
"Yes, ma'am," the Novator saluted with a proud grin as his mind was barraged with the latest reports from the Navigator's Quarter personnel.

+ + + Location: Sanctum Matrix + + +​

Belisarius Cawl swam unclothed through the data-waters of his Ocean of Information but with the swiftness and elegance of some soaring god gliding overhead in the heavens.
The Archmagos Dominus was immersed within the Noosphere. It was a wireless linkage to a matrix of incomprehensible knowledge stored within the material of Creation. Still, that link was effortlessly severed by the worldship's sudden re-translation into realspace.

Cawl's conscience was once again within his potent confines of metal once more.

Belisarius Cawl is a nightmarish amalgam of flesh and engine swathed in robes of rust red, skittering upon a great multitude of adamantium mechanical legs. Numerous millennia worth of tinkering and compulsive self-improvement have left Cawl as grotesque, and his lumpen form towers several times the height of a grown man.

Cawl was once a human man many years ago. He came from a time that appeared like a fairytale to some. He has come a long way from the fetus gardens of his House and is now at a level of creation where Cawl can unleash bedrock-busting firepower upon his foes, even as their panicked return fire rebounds from his thrumming defensive force field. His many mechanical limbs terminate in glowing energy weapons, piston claws, and vicious combat armaments capable of peeling open a tank like a ration tin.

Under his rust-red hood, Cawl has clustered eye lenses that glow beneath his heavy cowl, their gaze insectile and utterly remorseless as it coolly dissects his victims' every weakness. A master of the manifold binaric cants of the Lingua-technis, Cawl can reinvigorate a machine spirit or stop its reactor heart with but a single phrase. But, Cawl struggled to find the defect in the worldship's reason to re-translate.

The inner enclosure of the Sanctum Matrix is twenty meters across, and the air reeks of ozone, sanctified oil, curdled milk, and ancient blood. A grilled floor is suspended over a cavity full of droning engines, dividing them. Most of the blood-red glare comes through the floor grille, bathing the Archmagos Dominus in a sinister glow. Cawl was encompassed by twenty rows housing a hundred severed heads in each rising row. These expressionless faces illuminated armored glass tanks bathed in clear yellow nutrient fluids.

The heads are too individual to have been vat-born enslaved people, and there is no sign of penal coding tattoos sported by servitors made from criminals. Metal plates cap the neck of each. Tiny bundles of uncluttered cables and pipes are connected to these plates, curl downwards under the heads, then up to the machines above them. The majority of the device's psychic circuitry workings are hidden behind the walls, floor, and ceiling of the Sanctum Matrix.

They were wall screaming in Cawl's near-infinite mind. They were calling of impending doom, of a great crash.

"We're on a collision course," Cawl thought to himself. "But what could be large enough to warrant such an alarm?"
Then the notifications of millions drowned Cawl's Noosphere from Dome Command. The void anomaly was well over hundred-twenty-five astronomical units away from the 13th Legion's worldship; Cawl's psychic intelligence, which encompassed him, issued solemn perils if their course maintained its present direction. Other elements of the Explorator Grand Flotilla had to divert their course of action from an unseen gravity well developing gradually at the outskirts of the massive solar fleet.

"Motus Claude," Cawl was compelled to convey in Gothic tongue, his voice-box casting the burst of code into the air.

The unfathomable magnitude of the Bucephalus came to a suspension after the worldship's torque-drives operated in hyperdrive for a few hundred thousand miles before finally ceasing its unplotted trajectory.