“You see, the Warp Gods are ego personified. They cannot conceive of things greater than themselves, or that they are fallible. They cannot fail, they can only be thwarted, and naturally they are things of great ambition.

“They think of themselves as infinitely powerful, and so they go poking and prodding outside this pet realm of theirs, thinking themselves secure and safe and able to play about as they wish.

“And now, there is a crack in their realm they cannot close. Entities that can snuff universes are keening madly from outside that crack, and not-finite entities older than the Warp are gazing down at the little pond they are playing in.

“The time of the Gods of the Warp is limited. But ‘limited’ concerning the Immortal means something very different to the mortal.

“The Gods of the Warp are going to learn that mortals have power, too, and we will deal back what they have given us.”

My tone was light but firm, silk holding steel, and he had to fight the impulse to shiver at the quiet death under every easy word. “You paint a fine picture, Contessa. Would I could see it myself.”

“See what? A dream you dare not dream? Or one that you cannot, because you have not seen it afore?”

“If what you say is true, then one could dive into the Warp and make their way to the far side, and see all this is true...”

“Elvar in the Warp are like fish swimming into the jaws of a shark, and a mortal trying to find the way across the Warp...” I hmphed.

“She can see them.”

Sunhawk glanced at the Ruk King sharply, speaking so unexpectedly. “She? Your Majesty?” he added belatedly.

“Aye. She showed us...” The Ruk looked up at the stars, but his crystalline eyes were looking at something beyond. “Hope. She showed us hope...”

His eyes burned quietly. “I wish to see this hope, too...”

I didn’t hide my amusement. “First volunteer already? Some saleswoman I am, eh?”

“The price for your precociousness will certainly be exemplary!” he replied without breaking stride. Incorrigibility was in his nature, after all.

My Disk folded out of my Masspack. “Have a seat. I’m going to give you a Mark.” We weren’t quite out of the Court, but no reason to wait. He swirled into the Disk as it swept up into a seat as if he were a captain taking his command chair. I laughed despite myself as my hair pulled out my Tat kit, opened it up, and coiled about his wrist. “This won’t take very long.”

-------------

The Warp was on fire.

Everywhere eyeless eyes looked, infinite hordes of demons, alien races, and damned souls screamed and died, burning in vivus as they perished. The more powerful turned to look at what was causing the death, and there was rapture, and then burning oblivion.

A mountain rose, thousands of feet high, a demon of the Warp impossible for the material plane to endure, glut on the sins of billions, devouring all before it, only thinking to grow bigger, bigger, and perhaps in the end be devoured by the Grandfather of all Despair Himself.

A multitude of eyes on a thing older than some worlds fixed on the source of that death and devastation across those many miles. Eyes that saw too much looked back, and the Sunhawk’s mind would have exploded at the ageless, elemental drive for life that this thing represented, all-consuming, survival at any cost, the endless souls it had consumed to become what it now was...

Except for the scathing scorn and contempt that was facing it, burying that mad existence in total disdain, meeting its eyes with far too many of their own...

Gelled eyes blew out in vivus, whole sections of that great mass of ectoplasm and congealed sin, petrified and crumbled and disintegrated.

Great swords of coppery orichalcum chimed a Song whose tune he had heard all too often, and the whole of the Warp around seemed to be echoing back as the world filled with unwhite.

Massive Shardings began to pump from those swords, and despite their size, the Warp was shrieking a new tune to complement the Song, a song of piercing purity... and coming death. It sounded like a thousand hunting hawks shrieking to the kill...

Arcs of cutting power blew dozens, hundreds of meters into that huge mass of not-flesh, ripping it open for its sins to pour forth in a burning piles of innards his mind could not even see, denying the sight of so many condensed Sins made manifest... before they burned.

It burned, it all burned...

The Swords were too large, yet moving so fast he couldn’t see more than a rotary blur of their path, so many different flames, so much power raging out, cutting up the mass of that creature with impossible speed, so huge, dozens of meters of impossibly tough hide opened up like an overripe peach, up, up, slicing up the thing, as its eyes exploded or petrified, and shattered and exploded in heavenly wrath, or just disintegrated into moments of rapture.

She was opening a ravine up the mass of it, a cleft into a moving mountain that the demon could not heal, and even as it did, she was rising in the air, and the roiling mass of this impossible battlefield was more open, more exposed, more able to see her... and it burned and died.

It tried to reach for her with a tentacle or pseudopod hundreds of feet thick, a massive limb writhing with damned souls, reaching Sins, hungry mouths... and eyes seeking her.

It didn’t reach her, exploding into flames and stone, shattering and falling wailing as it turned to stone and blew apart for taking a look at her.

Its bellow as it was opened up seemed to hit that sound and the supersonic screaming of the Swords and the solid path of massive Shardings she was generating, and was devoured in a thunderous explosion of vivus scattering and feeding back into it.

The shapeless head blew off, shattering and disintegrating in solidified chunks, devoured by vivus, and those Shardings drove down into the heart of the abomination with seeking hunger, and the moving mountain of obese homage to gluttony and eternal hunger began to burn, brighter and brighter, shooting through the impossible mass and horror of it, burning, spitting, devouring as the moving mountain petrified and ignited inside and out-

The explosion was a wall of unwhite, huger and purer, more transcendental than anything Sunhawk had ever witnessed in his life. It swept past with a feeling of ethereal rightness, of serenity and calm that was the way things should be, returned to the source, to simplicity, on the wings of a burning, ascending cry rising into welcome rest...

He found himself looking up briefly, as the conflagration of vivus, like great burning wings, purified the Warp for just a moment, and the roiling, churning mass of agitated id and ego parted.

There were Stars in the Warp...

They were there, in their distinct thousands, laid out in a great pattern of colors of the soul. They were entities arranged by nebulas, lesser around greater, beings and things who were not-finite, and he could see it and tell...

They were looking out, and could not see the source of that burning vivus, nor he, looking out her senses, her perceptions.

Things of utter Law, of remorseless Fate and Order, seeking to order and dominate all. Elemental things of Chaos, concerned only with their own wants and desires, uncaring of what others wanted of existence. Maleficent entities of Evils, slaves to their own dark and twisted desires, seeking to rule and dominate all others, bend them to their wills, and conquer all of existence by whatever means were best.

Up above, the shining lights of Good, somehow showing harmony despite their variety, every ideal from truest absolution to unending valor. There was great softness, great weakness, but they only served to make the martial values all that much stronger and greater for their existence.

And in the middle of that great formation was a crack shattered right into the wall of the Warp. From beyond it, as he focused on it, he could hear terrible, damning flute music, as Something beyond the ability of the mortal mind to comprehend looked in at this tiny little realm...

Threads. There were threads all around. Colors of silk being spun up out of the Warp, winding in graceful streams, drawn up and out of the Warp, and heading towards those distant lights.

Silks, whose colors matched those distant stars...

Formed of countless souls, pulled free from the doom that was the Warp, and going on to the fates they had earned for themselves, foul or fair.

There was judgement in the afterlife, and there was reward, and punishment...

It was not all for nothing.

Not all for nothing!...

The Warp raged back in to cover the stars once again with a roar of thunderous demons, and their dread of what waited beyond.

There was so much work that needed to be done...

---

The Sunhawk found himself kicked out beyond the Markdoor and back into the extremely limited existence of his own living shell.

The Sage’s senses had ranged across more spectra than he could sense or even remember properly. He had not felt her physical presence, but that sense of ominous, controlled power, the blurring speed at such scale, and the leashed might he saw being unleashed...

Demons the size of mountains being dispatched just to open a view of the stars for a few moments... horrors burning and returning that area of the Warp to calm all around, for a short, short time...

Battlefields the size of solar systems, covered by carnage unending, all in loving tribute to the Gods of the Warp.

Whole sections of them burning and going quiet. Merely nation-sized swathes, tiny little specks in such places. Deaths in the millions, lost in sudden quiet, and the carnage continuing elsewhere...

A distraction for the true work being done on the mortal plane...

---

It took the Sunhawk a long, long time to settle down his thoughts. The scenes from that Look from the Sage were seared into his memory. He could look back at them with the same emotions, same intensity swirling around them.

That awesome, glorious sight of the Warp being burned away, and eternity of the soul being bared for him. The terrible, wonderful knowledge that there was something beyond the Warp... and far, far greater than the Warp could ever possibly be.

The Sunhawk laughed bitterly to himself. All his little dreams and ambitions were so small, so petty. What could compare to such a view, such a dream, such a realization as that?

He opened the Markdoor that had wrought such a terrible blow to his soul, and stepped through.

He looked around himself at the Light of a billion and more burning bright souls, and the shining power of that unity, that belief... that rightness.

That feeling deep down in his bones that this is what he was meant to be...