The Journey

[Andrew Benn]

The Journey

 

In the dim and distant past he could see himself. He could see himself because he was looking out though his own past eyes and into a mirror. He gave no heed to his appearance, for the wrappings of a thing are no more the nature of the thing than the skin of the fruit reveals it taste or the wholesomeness of its flesh. He watched as his past self, still ignorant of many of the revelations that were to come in the long long years that divided them, corrected his attire and turned from the mirror. The vision presented to his future self tracked over plain and sparsely decorated sleeping chamber, with none but the most essential items of furniture and equipment installed. With equal disinterest both iterations left the room and walked through the plasteel and rockrete corridors of the outpost. The place seeming now, as had then, strangely antiquated.

 

The memory of his past self strode out through the narrow secondary doors, set a little aside from the cavernous main doors of the outpost, though which the expedition’s heavy machinery was constantly entering and exiting, carrying great stasis sealed containers, gathering up the innumerable treasures this world was now almost gleefully giving up, and looked at the burning sky. White hot coronae from the planets old, dying star lanced across the noon sky, it hung there raw and raging in the centre of a titanic eruption of force and energy. It, and its lethal halo stretched nearly from horizon to horizon, leering down like a huge weeping eye at the dead planet below. It had killed the people that had lived here untold aeons ago, nothing left to watch the once life-giving star bloating and burning hotter as its fusion-driven heart thundered closer to its cataclysmic demise.

 

One day, long after this one, he would return to watch that monumental explosion, watch as burning gas and lethal radiation erupted out in all directions, obliterating life across a hundred of worlds, but also seeding it. He would follow the fragments of heavy metals though space and watch them land on far distant planets, watch complex molecules form the building blocks of life in the cold void, watch the dust of a pitiless star grow new life to match the wonder and variety of that which it destroyed. The Great Cycle, the Eternal Chaos. He smiled.

 

His past self merely squinted, glanced at a retinal scan of radiation saturation risk and turned away in indifference from the fiery forge above. His past gaze fell upon the red-robed figure picking its way  on surprisingly human legs over the dusty dunes towards the outpost. His past self hailed the Martian priest, who inclined a hooded head in response, a heavy but not integrated re-breather mask obscuring the familiar face. His past self nodded back and spoke in a low voice to the new comer, while his present self let remembered time accelerate. The voices blurred, as did their movement. It had been a long conversation, the Magos was disturbed, worried, fearful of official retribution. His past self was not to be deterred, no argument, no sanction, no threat would dissuade him. This world held answers, and it was beyond essential to rescue all that they could before the star finally destroyed it, bleaching it from the universe and letting life try to build itself up from the primordial ooze once again.

 

The conversation ended, but was not resolved. The Magos fell into step behind his past self, but muttered rebelliously in his own Binaric dialect. Ahead, through his past eyes he could see the site. It was the last. Hundreds had died under the deadly rays of the sun at more than a dozen locations; servitors, techadepts and Imperial Guardsmen, all struggling endlessly to uncover, identify, catalogue and finally pack and remove every fragment of information, every scrap of technology that had survived the demise of this world. Now the task was technically complete. The last planned site had been emptied and abandoned three weeks ago, this one was unofficial. This one was something his past self had found by chance. A hint, a vague reference to this hidden vault of knowledge, spoken with such furtive reverence he could hardly have ignored it. All the same, his past self could not have guessed just what had been locked away by these unknown people, never to be opened again. Until now.

 

Descending the stone steps, sand piled up in the lea and against the smooth marble walls, his past eyes surveyed the barrier ahead. Reaching the bottom he stood facing the vast, black door. It towered up into hidden darkness above, and fitted flush with the white marble of the walls, the two tones adding to the feeling of foreboding which had unnerved the human workers and prompted the Magos to summon him. Far more unsettling however, was the myriad carvings on every visible inch of it, scored deeply in the black marble. Some were beatific; great armoured figures stood proud and tall in unison giving praise to a sun-deity with flowing hair and a shining sword. Some were not. Some held visions of nightmare; misshapen bodies clambering blindly over one another reaching in avarice for the ankles of the shinning figures, or entangled themselves in the rays of light emanating from the sun-deity. There were people too, human and alien, all writhing together under storm ridden skies, dying, tearing at their faces and bodies and each other in frantic, hysterical fear. And there was writing, in a hundred different languages, some of which even is present self could not read with clarity. Prayers, curses, pleas, condemnations, lines and lines of text crossed and recrossed the door, tracking behind and over the many figures. In totality it was so busy, so full of information and meaning that his past self could understand the source of the Magos’ demands that it be buried again and left to die like the world that had built it.

 

But no. No, the longer his past self studied the door the more he felt he could discern the story it told. It told of discovery, of prophecy, and of fear. Fear of the possible, fear of what might be found if one were to extend ones arm to its fullest length. It spoke of the dangers, of the things in the universe which would savage any fool who reached out into the void. It spoke of war, endless, apocalyptic war burning across the galaxy again and again. It spoke of death, grinding relentless death reaping generation after generation of human and alien lives, all lived in drudgery and pain. His present self smiled at the conceit, and as it revealed itself to him, so did his past self.

 

There was another conversation with the Magos. One in which his past self tried vainly to explain what he could begin to see in this door. He tried to explain it was not a barrier, but a map, a guide, written over centuries by myriad hands, not to ward off those who came after, but to teach them what they needed to know, what they needed to understand. The Magos was implacable but did not resist when he was overruled. His present self thought of what that decision would mean for the Magos over the coming decades, and smiled again.

 

His past self turned back to the door and returned to studying it, returned to trying to decipher the only puzzle it needed to present; how does it open? There were no handles, no locks, no visible panels in either it or the surrounding walls. Auspex scans could find no hidden circuitry or mechanisms, indeed they could find nothing at all. The whole complex beyond the door was through some arcane or eldritch process rendered completely invisible to both mind and machine. His past self touched the stone, running a palm over the rough relief of a line of text so jagged it looked like forks of lightening rather than lettering. He looked at it. The language was almost familiar. In his cavernous memory his past self searched for cognates, phonemes, syntax and grammar similarities across thousands of human languages and hundreds of alien ones.

 

His future self remembered well the eerie warning the frenzied inscriber had scrapped and hacked into the door before they died screaming in the dark. Their bones were part of the thick dust now disturbed by his past self still trying to read the words.

 

In the grim darkness of the Far Future there will be only War.

 

Once again his future self let time speed up, passing the weeks of cogitation in a blur of images and sounds. Hours spent staring at the door, more hours spent searching data vaults for clues, references and any hint of how to open this last obstacle. There were also more conversations with the Magos, for all that they mattered.

 

The memories sharpened into focus again as his past self stood again before the door, along with the Magos and a crew of servitors and guardsmen. He could sense the changes in himself, the fragmentary understanding that was already beginning to dawn, that he remembered beginning to dawn was making him still more sombre, yet much more pensive. The memory’s vision now presented to his present self, lingered on things that only a week ago had held a such supreme lack of importance that looking at them now, everything seemed new and linked to everything else, known and yet still to be seen. The mechanical pistons in the arms and legs of the bulky hauling servitors pulsed with hydraulic fluid in artificial echo of blood, of water, of the tides of the warp. The deadly rays of burning radiation careening in waves from the deadly sun overhead were like the wave fronts of causality rippling out from one small action triggering infinitely spreading reactions over space and time. And the designs and inscriptions of the Great Door linked to scraps of lore, half-remembered from his early years on Terra; prophesies that had already come to pass.

 

His present self wondered if there wasn’t some two-way exchange, here in this place were time was so elastic. Could his own return to experience this memory again be effecting his past self in the way he remembered? The drawing together of associated facts to form a constellation of small epiphanies in his head, had the way to those facts been illuminated by his future self, watching silently over his shoulder? Was another future self watching him watching himself even now? Subtly altering his steps simply by being there?

 

No. Those were some of the thoughts the door before his past self warned about; the loops and paradoxes that snared the unwary, that led them down blind paths to ruin. The vainglorious attempt to master or command these forces that were as far beyond the forces of the Warp as they themselves are beyond mere material. Those thoughts were the seed from which the madness grew, the thoughts with drove some inscribers to end their messages with an exclamation mark form of their own splattered brains. He had watched from the shadows of their memories, tasted the despair that paralysed their limbs and numbed their souls, felt the conviction that only death could silence the revelations. How wrong they were.

 

His past self lent close, staring into the wide, empty eyes of a carven figure writhing and flailing, limbs and face contorted in a bodily expression of unbearable agony. He lifted a hand to the figures face, feeling his fingers tingle on contact with the hitherto inert stone. His face was inches from the cold skin of the screaming figure. Then he said the words. Four simple words the relevance of which he had spent weeks uncovering. It didn’t matter what language they were spoken in for there were mechanisms in place to study whomever stood before the door as surely as they studied it, so that when they spoke the words, the door itself would know in what manner they were uttered and would judge the truth of their meaning.

 

“All things will pass.”

 

There was a moment of total silence, even the Magos, lurking on the stairs stopped his muttering, unable to suppress his curiosity regarding what might be revealed should the password be correct. Then the carven figure before his past self sighed. The features and limbs relaxed and an expression of serene understanding dawned on the suddenly animate face. Then it spoke.

 

“All things will return.”

 

The reply was spoken in High Gothic and was plainly understandable to all there, yet it spoke with a deep reverberating hollowness, and though he remained close enough to kiss the carven face, his past self felt no breath coming from it as it sighed again.

 

With the sibilant end of that second sigh the shaking began. It was not violent, like the ground quakes that can destroy cities and reshape continents but soft, slow but steady. Vibrations passed up and down the door and reverberated through the walls and floor, a dull throbbing, hauntingly like hundreds of hearts beating in unison.

 

It continued, not gaining in intensity, just continuing for long moments before it suddenly stilled, or was stilled. In the same instant the door began to dissolve. Finely carved marble which had stood for more so many millennia silently crumbled into a cascade of fine, rushing grains of black sand. The figures melted away, the lettering erased, in seconds the whole edifice had rendered itself into nothing more than a slight pile of sand, already shifting in the faint breezes carrying down the long stairs from the surface far above. When the sand and disturbed dust settled, and the coughing confusion of the humans had abated, his past self had already taken the first steps, driving through the drifts of dust and silently motioning for the rest to follow.

 

Waiting for them in the darkness was another corridor, the walls and floor scratched with more carvings. These were not the long, poetic lines or the delicate figures of the door, but small, desperate things carved with belt buckles, styluses or even fingers in the unflinching white marble. They were the final messages, thoughts and feelings of the occupants of this sealed inner sanctum, whose paper-thin bones were now disintegrating under the armoured boots of his past self. They were the sacrifices, the souls walled up in this tomb of knowledge to inhabit and power the arcane door, the dust of which now mingled with theirs.

 

Beyond the pathetic tangle of alien skeletons another set of stairs waited, the gloom of the abyss into which they led seeming to actively resist the beam of the heavy arc-lamps hefted by lumbering servitors. His past self dismissed such superstitious thoughts and led the way down with barely a pause. The Magos followed diligently, the servitors following him similarly. The human workers hesitated, but seemed even less keen on remaining behind as the darkness returned and the bones leered up from the dust of millennia.

 

The stairs descended through undisturbed darkness for long hours. His past self concluded that the builders of this vault went to extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden from all possible disturbances. It would indeed take the almost total destruction of the planets crust to lay bare this final secret to the open air and he hoped that whatever was in here would be easily transportable.

 

When the stairs finally terminated it was facing yet another door, this one though was plain, uncarved and made from a functional metal auspex scans said was an unknown derivative of ferrocrete. His past self had barely thought about how they might get through this unexpected additional barrier, when it slid silently open before him and with an electric hum light flared in the chamber beyond.

 

It was a small room, but a very important room. The walls were clustered by interface controls, as was the large oval table that dominated the centre. Mechanisms, vaguely reminiscent of hololithic projectors hung from sockets in the roof. There was no dust, and when the doors opened the many systems controlling the room hummed into life. Illumination strips shone light on technology that predated the Imperium and maybe mankind itself. Consoles flickered and powered up, running through start up diagnostics and preparing to respond to inquiries. The projectors clattered into movement and, tracing a juddering mechanical dance across the ceiling brought a silver grey image flickering into existence, resting weightlessly on the central table.

 

His past self stepped breathlessly into the room. Such preservation, such functionality, it was almost unbelievable. These thoughts were echoed by the Magos stepping in behind him, all trepidation of risk and retribution forgotten in the face of such a monumental discovery. His past self had already crossed to the table and rested a hand on a glowing console. It chimed softly under his touch and at once the projectors shifted their ceiling bound dance and the image they created shimmered and changed. A long scrolling list of file names, registry addresses and referencing keys began to roll like a ghostly conveyor belt up through the floor and out again through the ceiling.

 

It was an index. A list of the contents of this hidden cache of forgotten knowledge laid out in plain simple Gothic. The Magos commented on the surprising alacrity of the translation circuitry, but His past self had hardly listened, already absorbed completely by the possibilities scrawling past his eager eyes. His present self quietly lamented each file passed over unmarked, and yearned to be able to reach out into this past reality and seize some of those overlooked morsels of precious lore, each of which could herald revelations as shattering as the one his past self was just moments away from.

 

And there it was, the file that would change his past self forever scrolled innocently through the floor. His past self reacted without thinking, raising a hand to point at the title as it ran steadily upwards across the display. He had spoken too, reflexively querying it. The console before him seemed to posses the faculty to detect and interpret these movements and sounds, because it chimed again and the index froze, a bright amber stripe highlighting the file he had pointed at. It opened without further prompting and the projectors above jerked and shifted again, this time bringing the contents of the file into illuminated being on the table.

 

His past self stared dumbly for a moment, then read ravenously. His eyes raking over the text and lingering on the many diagrams and formulae which elaborated on the words. They spoke of the Warp. The dreadful realm on un-reality lurking a shadows breadth away real space. In minute detail it described the creation of that impossible dimension, of it forming like an oil slick on the metaphysical surface of the material world, a surface that had already existed. It explained how the spark of sentience, of will, that movement from mere instinctual necessity and into the realms of active concious desire, formed around pressure points on that primordial surface, just as, it continued, the very material stuff of the universe had done so untold aeons before that. Those points of pressure were called so because the sparks of sentient will that suddenly existed, whilst tied to the material pushed back against the skin of reality just as heavily as that great beyond pushed from the other side. It was from them that the first stains of the Warp leaked out, forcing its way between the material and that primordial dimension, clouding it, obscuring it.

 

Over time those sparks spread; multiplying all across the galaxy, though, his future self knew the original word used was ‘universe’, and the warp clotted around them, spreading and combining with what was already there, thickening it, stirring it, each new pressure point sent new ripples through the emerging dimension, churning it, giving rise to currents and eddies and entities born of the coalescence of those ripples. His past self learned how emotions were those ripples, the raw, pressurised emotion that burned against all the rules, all the laws of the physical world sent out those wave fronts of immaterial force through the Warp. Every new feeling, every moment of revulsion, pride, fear, rage, lust, sorrow, panic, every shred of concious experience lingered on in the warp; echoing forever through the many tides and currents raised to tempest fury by the plethora of new beings and their new feelings.

 

His past self read on almost unblinking, deaf to the growing words of protest coming from the Magos, who had already banished all but the mind-scrubbed servitors from the room. He read how the Warp would grow so powerful, feeding on the billions of lives spawned and slaughtered over the long years of history, that those entities within would find the means to break through, of transitioning fully, at least or a while. Existing as avatars of those emotions that spawned them, wreaking untold destruction, adding to the blood tithe and sending more tumultuous sensations echoing back through the Warp. Strengthening it, empowering it, feeding the tempest, drawing the final cataclysm ever nearer. And his past self realised that all this, all this nightmare was like the pitiless star which had scorched this world; it was a forge. Warp-spawned chaos would reign and the material and immaterial would collide in a great unmaking, which would not only see the final extinguishing of that spark of sentience and all that is material, but also all that is immaterial and the twisted reflections of that spark which dwell there. But that annihilation too would be a seeding; that destruction would return the universe to its primordial state, seeded with the fragments and memories of what had gone before as the galaxy was seeded by exploding stars. The Great Beyond would return and in time the material would coalesce and another reality would be born, just as this one had been born in turn. That was the truth that the door tested for, that was the knowledge that had to be guessed at and known before discovery, so that the mere mortal mind would not crumble into despair or madness before it.

 

But more than all that, far more important to his past self, the file described that great unknown beyond. It was to those sentient beings trapped between the material and the warp exactly that; unknown and unreachable. It existed beyond infinity, and outside time. It was as far removed from the warp and what lived there as the warp was from the materium and what lived there. That was to say, his past self realised with a wry smile, it too was a reflection, or rather, the material was a reflection of it, twisted out of shape by being slaved to one set of physical laws. Sentient life rebelled against this, which was why it pushed towards the immaterium, not to the warp, but to the Great Beyond. ‘The Primordial Chaos’ the text called it, that was the file name that had grabbed the attention of his past self, and again his present self wondered if his presence had prompted that file rather than the thousands of others to demand his attention.

 

The Primordial Chaos, a state of lawless unity, a state of organised anarchy, a plain of existence were everything was nothing, and anything was everything. The descriptions of what it was and what it represented continued endlessly, offering opinion and counter opinion, seemingly summarising a great debate which had gripped this civilization when knowledge of the Primordial Chaos spread. In the end the choice they settled on, his past self noted with dry sardonic mirth, was surrender. They had lain down in the face of this cycle of natural birth and violent death, echoed in the billions of lives lived as prisoners within that cycle. They had seen the curve of time spread out below them, the origins and the outcomes, and they had surrendered to it. That was why they had sealed this their greatest and most comprehensive repository of information past and future away behind a door sustained by willing living sacrifices, why they had been driven to carve cryptic warnings on that door, why they had battered their brains out against that door in final capitulation to that cycle. It was why, even as their sun turned poison and began burning all life from the planet, they did not leave, but sat and awaited the end they knew was coming, had always been coming, would always have happened.

 

Once perhaps, in the even more remote past, there was an iteration of him that would have been scared of all that he read, that would have run screaming from the vault and ordered the Magos to destroy it all. That time, that self, was long dead. Reborn as the stern and forbidding figure he had already become. One that had stared down enough horrors and danced with death enough times to know on the instinctual level of a warrior the truth of what was written. Though he could understand why the people of this world had fled from it, it was the same reason why ignorance and faith were so much more powerful than enlightenment and truth. He hated it, but he understood it.

 

It transpired however, that he did not. Their panic was not just the result of discovering this great cycle, it was the result of centuries, possibly millennia of trying to change that cycle. It was the unavoidable conclusion that they could not do anything and that their every attempt was perverted against them; drawn inexorably into the currents and ripples of the warp, twisted and absorbed. He read through reams of data covering the ways they had tried; the machines they had built to harness and corral warp energy, of the discoveries made to banish and dissipate warp entities, all failures. Effective, miraculous, haled each time as the long sought great breakthrough that would allow them to end the cycle, but each time all too quickly adapted to by the forces of the warp, the pride of its creators quickening the process, the despair of the people feeding the despair further each time they learned of a fresh failure.

 

His past self respected their attempts, but he could at once begin to see an avenue they had not explored. They seemed to have eschewed actual travel into the warp, for obvious reasons, especially since their mode of propulsion seemed not to require it, and they had long concluded that the Primordial Chaos was unreachable beyond the infinite unreality of the warp. But his past self could find no evidence that they had tried, that they had tested the conclusion that had led to the demise of their civilization. His present self smiled, feeling the remembered exaltation at the new possibilities that opened up before him that day.

 

True the warp had no spatial dimensions; it was infinite, mapped onto the material world through a dimension unmeasurable in conventional ways, but clumsily represented in the text as a sphere; the core of which was the material world, around it was a seething halo, the warp, but around that was the final layer; the Primordial Chaos. True in the limited dimensions of the physical the Warp was boundless, but in this meta-dimension through which all three plains were linked there was a path that could be found, there was a distance that could be crossed, there was a edge that could be passed. And what waited there, what waited there was… Beyond imagining. It was, after all, to reality what the warp was to reality; there there were no reflections, no warping influences, just being, just existence, just the will. What that meant in real terms his past self did not yet know, but the need burned in him to find that place, to strive for as long as it took, to spend ten millennia seeking for the way through the warp. That was a glorious task. That would be his task. That would be what Oreanas Kraven would be remembered for, he would be the only sentient spark to experience the Ultimate Reality.

 

As his past self turned from the display to meed the guarded eyes of the Magos, his present self slipped away into the soft currents of the Great Beyond, his vision of the diagram lingering for a long moment. The great sphere of creation, the orbits of existence, overlapping and abstract, yet navigable, crossable, understandable.

 

He watched the strand of his memory, a grey mist trailing form a silver filament, drift away to join its fellows, placidly orbiting the distant and yet immediate presence of the material universe, utterly untouched by the raging tempest of emotion that lay between, and what lurked laughing within. One day they would break through the barrier and all would be reduced to this state, this state of Ultimate Reality, and then Kraven would be here, alone, ready to come first into the newly born material world when the cycle started again, ready to do what those frail mortals on that long dead planet had failed to do. The cycle would be broken. The Warp would be no more.

Edited August 5, 2017 by Andrew Benn