The last, last thing the Old Men ever expected to happen in their precious training facility was the Incursion Alarms going off.

The Mountain was Interdicted with the best psitech available to the Empire. It was inspected regularly in detail for signs of wear and tear, with multiple back-ups and redundancies built in just so this kind of thing couldn’t possibly happen.

Yet here it was, blaring at them with hostile red lights flashing everywhere.

Desperate Old Men ran for their comms and where the alert was coming from, stared at the blinking red light.

The arena...? There... wasn’t anything scheduled in the arena for today!

Weapons were issued. Some of the younger Voids were moved as far away as possible, while some of the older ones were actually issued weapons and brought in to cover for the Old Men and security forces that converged on the site of the incursion with amazing speed.

There were no weird smells in the air. Space wasn’t twisting. Demons weren’t growing out of the surroundings, or flooding out of a gash in the air. There was no maddening music, clouds of flies, howls of bloodlust, or the swirl and sickening taste of Warp Sorcery in the air...

There... was a sword, stuck into midair, half of its blade missing as it hung there, impaled upon reality itself.

And it was singing a song...

They could hear it very clearly as they came down the steps and over the edges, weapons trained, looking for signs of something, anything hiding in the surroundings...

“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...

The mark of pain is upon the Land,

The Veil cracks above the shifting sand,

Souls are calling for their mother,

The only one, and no other,

She comes to bring the Breath,

She comes to bring the death

Of those who denied her sons

Her beloved and favored ones

Mother comes, hear ye, hear ye...

Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...”

They were hard, cold men, perpetuating a great lie for the good and glory of the Empire, able to watch planets die and slaughter the families of innocent babes to raise them into self-destructing weapons of the Empire.

Their hackles were rising at that song, which seemed to be reverberating in their souls, ringing in their minds and digging up every sinister thing they did for judgement, shrivening their souls with holy judgement.

Something... something was coming!

“Destroy it!” the Grandfather ordered from up in the stands, fitting deed to word and calling up on the depths of his power to reduce this foul tool of the Warp to nothingness.

Disintegration effects, star-hot plasma fire, shrieking sonic pulverizers, sun-bright hard light beams, space-time inversions, matter-twisting powers, gravitic compressors and magnetic shredders... the whole array of some of the highest weapon tech in the Empire was unleashed upon Chalice as she Sang.

She ignored it. Indestructible was a 30k effect added to her long ago, and nobody short of a god had the power to destroy her... and she had the property of the Heavenly metal Aurorum, and could simply put herself back together.

Her stereo tones continued ringing out pleasantly, even when there was nothing but vacuum and twisting space around her.

“The Warp is on fire, her steps shake its roots,

A wake, a path and trail of doom that suits

Those She comes to bear witness,

Fools and hypocrites no less

The Land will feed,

The Empire will bleed,

Her sons will walk free,

Her Breath will soon be

Known and heeded, the future awaits,

Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, She comes...”

The Song rang on the other side of the Rift she was stuck in, and the Warp roiled to hear it.

It had already reverberated on the way to this system, calling out across the Warp to wherever She was, and there was no way She would not have heard it, and made Her way here.

Which was pretty much proven when two massive sets of clawed fingers the size of a Titan’s, girt about with blindingly bright mindclaws, perhaps bigger, suddenly erupted through the Veil on either side of the singing Sword.

That bright light was laden with a psychic presence so hard it drove the wildly shooting forces of the Mountain back, some of them falling to their knees and finding it nigh-impossible to get back up.

A thousand shooting strands of glowing hair came in around those gripping hands, also girt in shining gold, anchoring themselves on space... and then they Heaved.

Space didn’t rip so much as get out of the way of something so, so much heavier than it was.

A slit in space expanded in a perfectly symmetrical half-circle in an instant, forced back more by sheer density than any strength.

Every recording device in range and working blew out instantly. The tech of those present shorted out and began to evaporate as that massive form came out. It was nothing human, their eyes going up and up from the multi-legged, multi-limbed, multi-winged, multi-headed, multi-tentacled monstrosity stepping through on six clawed legs on a tauroid body...

She was terrifying. She was so beautiful that most of the people there went blind instantly, and some died on the spot.

She stepped out of the Rift, a swish of her nine-part tail whipping through it and sealing it shut behind her instantly.

The Old Men were screaming and trying to act, and nothing was happening. The space around them was so heavy that psionic powers simply couldn’t manifest, and even the higher end technology was giving way under an impetus that even Weird Science couldn’t tolerate.

------

“Hey, Mom.”

Chalice flipped back to my hand as I landed on one of her dragon heads, the one with purple force energies around it.

She was sixty freaking feet tall. Four of her hands were double-handing two Swords almost fifty feet long, both of them made of orichalcum and looking like two oversized versions of Chalice.

One of them would be the original Chalice, swollen on warp-metal, and having thrown off both my sliver of a Sword Focus and a near twin of Her own.

Her face was transcendentally beautiful, but there was a blue-black Mask of the Curse about it, hiding her eyes. If she revealed her face, she’d probably petrify the whole city, or kill everything in it.

Her golden hair was longer than she was tall, a golden waterfall of living, shining not-metal, equal parts fingers, spears, swords, cloak, and aura.

Dracohydra heads extended off her lower body, something between lion and cat, scales in scintillating patterns and all hues. She had four massive angelic wings, feathered in opposing black and white, coming off her back, along with eight tentacles with tips like scythes and spears to accentuate her six arms. Four sets of horns, black, red, gold, and silver, curled this way and that from her head, like some massive unwieldy helm pulsing with power.

The crest down her back was razor-edged and spike-backed, a weapon like everything else, extending down to that nine-fold tail and the barbs jutting from its many fronds, all pointing in different directions, just like the heads on their necks studying everything in every direction.

I was only letting the Ranthas and Briggs see this. Most of them were gaping stupidly, and glad I was the one there.

The Null around me was at least 100. It was heavier than Reality, which was straining to hold up under the weight of it. A magical Reality was definitely not geared to handle absolute natural laws of that intensity, only a lawless transitory plane would be able to dissipate it.

“WHAT DO YOU NEED ME TO DO?” she asked. Softly. Asked softly.

Huk! My soul was shaking. That voice was everything you’d want in a woman, mother, sister, daughter, lover, grandmother, aunt, best friend, servant, shield-maid, and queen. It had all the reverbs, without having to even leech off human emotions, twist and adapt to each person’s desires like Amourae would. For all that she looked like a tentacled laboratory experiment from a fever dream, there was no way to do anything but want her.

A single strand of her hair brushed against the Marks around my waist, and way, way up in Markspace, a Light turned on.

Oh, Mother...

“You’re inside a nihilaen dome filled with subordinated Voids. If you could dump a few thousand mana Levels into this place in a surge, I think that would take care of the problem.”

I could see the Grandfather stabbing at his Band, trying to trigger the self-destructs... all of them. The Mountain, the Crater, the planet, everything. He was trying to get everything to blow up, kill the Mountain, all the Voids, and this... whatever Mom was.

She held out her Swords, which had both taken over and were humming a very familiar Song in perfect harmony.

There was a first flash of light from them, and a wall of twenty Levels of Mana blew past me.

It was just raw Mana, and wouldn’t have been anything to speak of if just released one by one. Released like it was, it was the equivalent of a 20th level spell going off, something that would require a 30th level Caster to happen, and if all it did is dissipate into the stark and empty manafield here, it was still a solid wall of doing it... because this was the utterly pure mana generated by the life and soul of a Null, sitting and waiting there to be drawn out and used by her Swords.

I probably would have gone flying when it smacked into my Null, but that strand of hair kept me perfectly in place with a TK effect that could have bent adamant.

The others in the place? Not quite so lucky.