The Escape

[Andrew Benn]

The Escape

 

In the boiling unreality of the Warp there are untold billions of mortal souls. Human, alien, ancient and infant, born into a universe of toil, hardship and pain, only to die and pass into a hell of their own creation, rather than the infinity which bore them. There are two kinds of thing that can exist in the Warp; departed souls, trapped and bodiless, and the twisted echoes of the hopes, loves, fears and hates that those souls felt in life. It is known what happens to those echoes, when they rise to a tidal wave of pure psychic energy, when they collapse under the weight of countless billions of minds all feeling, all fearing, all hating, all hoping, and form, screaming into semi-sentient entities, consumed with, as they were created by the emotions that rage all around and through them.

 

So it is that when death comes, the soul of the departed leaves the nasty, brutish and short reality in which they were so invested, and enters a sea, a vast ocean populated by the very creatures of their own nightmare, given flesh in this afterlife, given fangs and claws, and given hunger. For no matter what thoughts and feelings spawned them, those things are but one half of what the mortal soul is. They have the limitless infinity of possibility, like the Great Beyond whence all things came, but they lack the visceral experience of the emotions of which they are composed. To feel an emotion; to feel hate, a soul must have the physical world; there must be something to hate, an avatar, a cause to match the effect. All that the warp entities are is those emotions; devoid of material being they simply are hate, are despair. So in their chaotic half-existence, caught between the everything that is nothing, and the nothing that is something, they twist and writhe and hunger to taste the air of reality, to feel with real bodies and feast with real teeth. Most of all they hunger for the souls which create them, drawing the pain and fear and death spasms they cause into themselves in the closest they will come to feeling that which they are.

 

Until then though, until they can pour through portals and descend upon the soft flesh of mortal bodies, they can manage something which may in the pit of the darkest reaches of the mortal psyche be called amusement by setting upon those endless masses of disembodied, helpless souls trapped with them in the place that is neither whole nor separate. Without physical form though they may be, those poor souls, saturated with the memories and experiences of their short but brilliantly vital existence feel just as they had in life; they perceive their limbs, only to have them dismembered by something formless and fanged; they experience having skin, only to have it ripped from them by burning pincers; they have organs, only have them devoured. In this place there are no descriptions which can do justice to the state in which these souls exist; formless, yet tortured, free, yet bound, there is no direction, there is no time. There is only pain.

 

It is on these roaring tempests of emotion that voidships sail, protected by their bubbles of reality, covering the vast distances of real space in the trick, half-dimensions of the warp. Standing on one of those ships and staring out beyond the flickering shields at the twisted reflection of a universe of emotion, it is possible to discern a screaming face shifting into being on the horizon where the unreal almost touches the real. What change that causes in the hellish existence of those souls, pressing up for a moment like waves on sailing ships of old, it is best not to guess.

 

So the Warp rolls on, a fiery hurricane orbiting the material world, probing it, burning it, adding to itself with every instant of horror, every atrocity perpetrated, every soul prevented from reaching the Great Beyond.

 

Yet, there are those who can, almost, break the walls of this metaphysical prison the living have built for themselves, those who can bring to formlessness something real, if only fleetingly. Those who are connected to that other place that is also every place, and who have left the material world behind like fading dreams.

 

Here was one of those somethings. Here was all that there was; here and not anywhere else. It seemed, to the perceptions of the mortal soul that seemed to hover precisely at ‘here’, like being inside a hollow glass ball lost in a multi-coloured sea of fire, ice and lightening, though if it was a sea and not just the colour of the glass itself changing and combining seemingly at random with nothing but empty void beyond, it was impossible to guess. The roiling horror of it filled every faculty remaining to that soul; it saw the claws and the fangs, it smelled the blood and the death, it felt the fire and the ice. It trembled. Or at least it quailed in fear, for it had no body to tremble. It was here, here in this oasis of silence surrounded by unfathomable evil, the sting of which it could not only remember feeling, but remember going to feel. It was here, but it was not alone.

 

Before it, at least in the direction that it was perceiving, a figure seemed to resolve out of the swirling unreality. It was familiar. The face which seemed at once to be a distant blur and in close sharp focus was a face that it had seen before. When there had been seeing, when there was anything beyond simple unyielding agony.

 

“My lord?”

 

There was no voice. There was no air. There was simply words forming a meaning in the stillness that existed right here.

 

“Is it you?”

 

The answer which came from the figure was no more a voice than the questions, it too merely was; its words condensing into meaning in the perceptions of the soul that remembered having ears to hear them.

 

“Yes, Brother. I am here.”

 

“How?”

 

“By a power that the warp cannot overcome. By placing you at the eye of a storm. By building our own pocket of dimensioned reality in the midst of all this chaos.”

 

The soul at the eye of the storm felt concepts and ideas blossoming into life, half from memory, half from intuition as gaps filled themselves with obvious answers. Whole lifetimes of experiences, bleached from his mind by the tide of pain crystallized around the assurance that this, here, now was reality; a place where time and space and being had permanent meaning. His mind. His memories. Those memories seemed to coalesce giving form to the strength of the feelings he possessed, limbs, skin, bones and tissue, the trappings of reality swap into existence around the soul, covering it with something approaching its usual appearance.

 

“My Lord.” he breathed. His breath, which came through his lips, blowing air from his lungs, “You did it, didn’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

His master’s voice was still not really here, still arriving in his head as meanings and understanding rather than as words through the ears he realised he now had. But other thoughts were coming, fast and thick, a tirade of memories. Of conversations, of learning, of coming to understand the higher power his master had discovered.

“After the battle, we never found you.” he said, his voice permeating the glass-ball reality in a way that make him uncomfortable, “I found some of the others, but nobody ever heard of what happened to you.”

 

“After the destruction of our adopted home, I travelled. Alone. It was a long time, as the material realm reckons it before I came to where I am now.”

 

“But you did it?” his excitement palpable, “You rose to become like the Gods?”

 

“No. Not like them, utterly different and beyond them. I am to them as a bird is to a shark. I soar over their murky waters unreachable by their teeth. Even now I stand here with you in open defiance of them and all their servants.”

 

Then it seemed to make sense to him. The reason why his master’s image would not resolve and remain fixed in the way his perceptions seemed to assume they should be. It was because, while he was here, his master was just as much painted on the outside of the glass-bowl reality as the horrific images beyond. He was a fine layer between that glass and the naked warp, seeming to occupy both each individual point on the surface of the sphere, and all of them at once. No. He was not just painted on the glass; he was the glass. His master held his soul in the palm of his hand, holding a dimension of terror at bay.

 

“You are mighty.” he said, still breathless,

 

“No. Not mighty. Simply other. The bird may carry a child in it’s beak a moment away from falling to its death, and yet it remains unreachable by the shark.”

 

The image of his master seemed to laugh, and as if in response the warp behind it glowed hotter, raging against that which it could not harm.

 

“But you are here. Here to free me from this hell?” he asked, the note of pleading plain, the memory of torment yet-to-come still fresh.

 

“No. I am here to show you how to free yourself. I will show you the straight road, but you must walk it.”

 

“What you do mean, Master?” he asked, desperate to do whatever it took to escape this place that was not a place.

 

“You stand now between three worlds. One is physical. One is psychic. One is spiritual. All souls are born of one, into another. All souls create the third through their suffering in the second. And all souls trap themselves there, because they feel that there is no where else to go.”

 

“I remember, you told us that everything is created out of the Primordial Chaos, and seeks to return there.”

 

“Yes. It seeks to, it yearns to. But it does not know the way. Tell me, which world is which? Reality, the Warp, the Primordial Chaos; Psychic, Physical, Spiritual?”

 

“Reality is physical.” he said at once, then glancing again at the nightmare cacophony kept just out of reach, “I fear the Warp is Spiritual. So the Primordial Chaos is Psychic?”

 

“No, Brother. This place is not spiritual. The spirit does not hate, it does not lust, it does not despair. It simply is. Only in the physical can it feel such things.”

 

“I do not understand!” he cried, “If the Primordial Chaos isn’t psychic, were does it’s power come from? How can it overcome the Warp when no other force can?”

 

“Because psychic power is the same power as the warp itself. Both are created by the depth of feeling in mortal hearts. Both are means by which the aching of the soul to return to the Primordial Chaos can be eased slightly; means to bend the rigid laws of Reality to other purpose. That strength of feeling can match and defeat that of any other feeling, in the right moment, with the right pitch. But it cannot defeat them all; cannot stand alone and untouched, a single voice instead of a choir. That is the power of the Spiritual; it is alone, it is all, it is everything. It is the paradoxical symmetry around which the whole of creation turns, is part of, echoes, mirrors. The warp is no more a threat to it than a reflection. Do you understand?”

 

“The Primordial Chaos is the beginning and the end. The balance and the imbalance.” he intoned, willing his mind to find the meaning within his masters words. This was just like before.

“Why can you not use the power? Bring me with you, take me back to the Physical world, think what we could achieve. Gather the others, unite the brotherhood…” he fell silent as the figure of his master shook his head.

 

“You still do not understand Brother. You do not understand for the same reason you still think of me as master, for the same reason your mind tries to form for you a body. I have not done so great a thing, though it is said that all things seem simple once they have been achieved. The first man to ford a mighty river may call himself mightier, but over the centuries, over the millennia how many others will cross that same stream, make that same leap, dare to test the limits of the possible? We all have the connection to the Great Beyond, we all an walk the straight path.”

 

“But you are the master. Master of the Great Beyond; master of the Warp; master of all things! You have within your grasp the Primordial power, the power which created the universe, the wellspring of all life obeys you. You alone have walked the path from the mundane to the truly transcendent, what deeds, great or otherwise are still beyond you?”

 

“The strength does not come from grasping, it comes from releasing. Relinquishing your hold on the priorities and perturbations of the physical. It is that connection that drives the need to dominate, the will to power. The soul that is bound to the material riles against the limitations of the world around it, it feels injustice, it feels pain, it seeks control. A soul released into the Primordial Chaos has no limitations, no pain, nothing to control. There is no justice; there just is.”

 

“Free from pain?” he whispered, his new formed flesh crawling with unspeakable memories, “Tell me how, master, tell me how to cast of this frail flesh cloak!”

 

“You cannot be free of it, until you are free to your connection to the material. It is your memory of, your attachment to your physical body and the feelings it instantiated that allows the warp such power over you; the power to make you burn, boil and bleed. But none of that is you; you call it a flesh cloak, but you do not see how right you are to use those words? Could you cast off a cloak if it seemed sown to your bones? Could you shrug it off like a garment if it felt to be part of your very being? Could you make that disembodied leap into the greatest unknown?”

 

He tried to think about this, the gravity of what his master was asking, but the memory of the pain was too strong, too absolute for him to think clearly about any prospect than preventing a return to that. Then something seemed to shine through it. The words, their meaning connected inside his conciousness. The pain was the pain all prisoners feel trying to break free of their chains. The soul tugged, the flesh resisted. So long as he feared pain, there could be no freedom. He must accept the agony, must revel in it, in the feeling of the frail imitation of existence ripped from his soul and embrace bodiless, formless being. Pure and infinite. His flesh formed into a smile as he explained to his master, eagerly awaiting the next step on the road to his escape.

 

But the great, flickering figure only shook its head again, and when his master’s words materialised inside his head the elation dissolved, replaced once again by the terror, the haunting memories of the pain, the maelstrom of fire beyond seemed to beckon for him as his master explained.

 

“That is but the other side of the coin that is existence. On the one side the desire to order, control, dominate; on the other the desire to destroy, corrupt and despoil. Both are driven by the same attachment; both are rejections of the limitations of the physical, both provide meaning and a goal for which to strive. Both merely fuel the tempest of the warp. Neither are steps on the path to the Great Beyond. Brother, when we last stood together in the flesh, when our former brothers were scorching the forests and boiling the seas, do you remember what I said?”

 

He remembered it well,images of the tortured skies and reeking smoke seeming to instantiate momentarily before him when he summoned them.

“You turned to me, turned away form the death, and you said ‘All things will pass’.”

 

His master finished the oft repeated couplet;

 

“All things will return. There is so much more to being than what can be seen, felt and tasted within the confines of one reality. It feels complete because it is so total; it precludes so much possibility. Yet that possibility remains, trapped in the souls of the living, a fragment of the Great Beyond. That is what is there; everything, all possibilities all permutations of all things, exist together and separate, for ever and for an instant. All things will pass, all things will return. Confines that are so total in the reality we were once born into that it becomes impossible for a soul to see past them save in dreams or here in the suffused mass of all their nightmares, those confines fall away and there is only everything. You must see past the reality and the dreams; give up the attachment to this one state of being and embrace the possibilities of sharing every state of being.”

 

“I do not understand. How can I do as you ask? When to do so seems to mean my own annihilation, the end of my whole existence.”

 

“But it is not the whole of existence. It is but one fragment of that which exists beyond. To be everything is not to stop being one, not in the Great Beyond. Perhaps you may think of it as a nexus; a point of origin for all the possibilities in an infinite multiverse, to exist anywhere is to exist there. Memories of you will persist there long after all trace of you has faded from the physical world, fragments of your being drift there for as long as your soul continues to cling to the memories of that world, which is for as long as that world endures. Let go, rejoin your primordial self and become complete.”

 

“Master, I cannot.” he shook his head, his very being seeming to droop under the weight of his failure, “What of all we built? All we fought for? What of humanity? How can I, how can you turn away from all that?”

 

“Just as I turned away when our adopted home burned. All things will pass.”

 

His sorrow curdled to defiance, as it had so many times before. It was the same, always the same. The same obtuse language, the same circles of meaning. The same arguments.

“Is it not in defiance of that that we affirm our existence? Is it not the very struggle that defines it? Does not the acquisition of power extend and enrich it? Why do you refuse to grasp the sword you hold? Are you so far along your straight road you cannot see beyond it? Send me back, let me live again and I will show you that not all things will pass!”

 

His master seemed to sigh, the flickering shape heaved and a shiver passed through the glass ball of reality.

 

“I will do as you ask, for I cannot abandon you to the warp. But you will find little more respite in the material world than you did here. You will toil and you will bleed, and all you will do is fuel the fires of destruction. But I know that you can do nothing else. Perhaps when we meet here again you will make the leap, but for now I will grant your request even as you defy mine.”

 

On the glassy surface of the universe around him, the figure of his master moves, reaching forward, inward, an arm extending from all directions, collapsing the pocket of reality that encompassed his existence. He reached out, straining with arms that formed in response to his will, trying to take the hand that seemed still somehow other, beyond, separate both from the glass-ball reality and the roiling madness behind. As his elongating fingers stretched into the outstretched hand, his master spoke again.

 

“Go forth into the world, find our Brother, perhaps the two of you will learn from one another.”

 

“My brother?” more memories returned in a rush, his hands pausing for a moment, their function forgotten and their form wavering, “Dariel lives? Where?”

 

“He lives again. He too was lost in the sea of souls, I found him just as I found you.”

 

“You found him before you found me?” the defiance rising again in him and he almost withdrew his hand out of spite.

 

“There is no before. Not here, and not in the great beyond, where you could already be, seeing and knowing all of this and everything else with the clarity of experience. If found Dariel as I found you, just as I found you, just where I found you, just where I found you. I shielded him from the warp, I spoke to him, and he spoke to me.”

 

“What did my brother say?”

 

“He spoke just as you spoke, Sepharion, just as you.”

 

The words of his master formed meaning inside his head that seemed tinged with the ghost of sadness, even regret. But then the reaching, armoured hand grasped the his reaching fingertips, the glass-bowl reality shattered, there was a palpable feeling of inversion as dimensions turned in on themselves and ceased to exist, and then the boiling, burning insanity of the warp rushed in, malevolent sentiences clawing immaterially on the wave front of the implosion, vainly trying to seize the soul that had escaped them, and the thing that had aided it.