Chapter 51:

Chapter 51: Of Divinity and Greed few things can be said that have not been done before.

The Eldar hold to a very fluid caste system regardless of what form of organization one finds themselves in, for the Empire of Ten Million Stars is a story that has been spoken, sang and written for 65 million years, it is the same story told through the same words that change in interpretation from person to person.

It is the story of the First Mortal Phoenix King stood in front of Khaine and pretend to be his twin brother and was so convincing Khaine decided to pretend to believe him, because Khaine was born out of treachery and violence and villainy and those terms as thought of by The Old Ones are closer to the feeling Eldar souls Associate with Kindness.

Khaine betrayed the rest of the Weapons' platforms the Old Ones insisted we call gods through what Eldar call kindness and love, and it is that which to humanity is closer to 'Treachery of those we love to their betterment' and it represents betraying someone's trust, going back on your word and promises so that you help them more than you help yourself.

The Old Ones called that Villainy, the Eldar call it the first act of Divine Love where the Gods and Eldar had for the first time managed to break from the chains the Old Ones had put on us so that we would defend them while they created Gorkamorka. We still remember it, for it is the first and only time we had managed to do so and it is why all still bow in reverence to the Mortal Phoenix King.

'In the name of Safety I grant you the Removal of Ignorance.' Were the first words the Old Ones said to the soup of Souls they had turned our people into so that we may have a chance at life. These are the Words that created Hoeth and had the Old Ones tell us what they wish of us and why we suffered when we came to them for help and safety.

Safety for a sword is when it has nothing left to kill, so that is what the Old Ones gave to us. We wished to be free from conflict and were willing to give other types of service and the Old Ones decided that the service we would provide would be to kill anything that is not themselves, ourselves or the Other Imperfect Swords they made unless it is advantageous to the War effort for us to do so, and once we did that we would be safe.

They turned Artists into Genocide engines and put those whose souls craved for Art into Swords and thus transformed our old birthright into two Paths of Advancement. Narrative Momentum, and Narrative Shift are their names and they are the Path of the Priests and The Path of Princes.

I am a Priest, I build Narrative Momentum to ensure that our victories become greater and that if we suffer defeat I lessen the blow by creating momentum again to turn it around slowly over many battles or conflicts until we hit our enemies with enough momentum to crash through everything our enemy can mount up. It is a slow steady trickle that does not affect individual battles much unless one is skilled but can decide campaigns and wars if properly managed.

Each interaction with others is a battle, each act is a campaign, each volume of my work a stage of the War I wage, and I am at War with Slaanesh and Boredom and I dedicate my life as my War against us being Forsaken by the Galaxy as I cut down the future that would bring us to extinction.

Princes do not act over a long period of time, they seize a moment and shift things to their advantage. They can change the momentum of a single battle from defeat to victory and then priests come and make that more meaningful or less as we make use of a breakthrough or minimize its impact.

The End of the Path of Priests is Divinity, as it is when your momentum becomes so great that you become the setting of other's stories, where things happen in the wake of what you are.

The least form of this are Masks which make themselves a part of the setting that is their God, but if a priest becomes influential enough then they might become a lesser Divine. The Muses of Commoragh or the World Spirits of the Exodites or the Phoenix Lords are all lesser Divines, they are pieces of a setting the Eldar find themselves in and stories write themselves around them as they exist and that is enough to create the framework that other stories can be born in.

The End of the Path of Princes is Royalty, as it is when one Shifts the Narrative to such an obscene extent that the Narrative of Cultures and their Destiny revolves around a single individual. They become Protagonists of a story for a lack of a better term, and that story is the story of civilizations that rise and fall with them.

Both are equal, because protagonists without a setting to live in and a setting without someone acting in it make no sense and those who have seized the narrative to revolve around them are equal to the setting they're in.

I am a priest, I gain momentum with my words and deeds and others use it in the purposes I try to encourage them into. The young woman whose home I just entered is a lady, she instinctively seizes a moment to act and is the least of the Princes' path, but in her home and under her song all are lesser.

I am lesser because I am a priest that was invited in to provide a service and have been paid beforehand, and so I am to be respectful until I have done as I agreed as my life is in the hand of my host and if she gains any good reason to think I have insulted her or harmed her family she can kill me for it and I cannot fight back for I have agreed to subject myself to her song.

The Divine are temporarily lesser because the Divine are on the edge of being subordinate to her by being those that are under the protection of her song and being seen as enemies for attacking her ill family, the ill her family has just purchased healing for and all they had to pay for it is the previous head of the family.

Needless to say the two goddesses did not appreciate being put on the spot.

I gave divinity an out as an olive branch of good will. If they came here for a medical consultation because they need it, then I could argue they came to help those whose rotten souls they slurped and will simply ask the family to provide compensation in their name as their Priest and provide what healing I can for free, free their mother while still paying what I agreed to and I will find other servants to run me some errands. I take in the Divines' debt and stay as far as possible from Ladies that can mess up my plans by shifting the narrative away from what I need it to be. It is an olive branch, an attempt from me to put this behind us and take debt and have them escape whatever nonsense they jumped in by being too Arrogant of their success and it too is part of my duties to the Pantheon.

If they did not take my peace offering, then I gain an advantage in whatever nonsense they want to put me into and I can only assume it relates to 'safety' for my family and all that love me keep wishing me to be safe and I have been running from it and now the Divine Narrative tries to trap me.

The Gods are feeling the most unsafe they've ever been, and they probably want the first born of the Pantheon back to make them feel safe again, and I can't give them that, not until we've dealt with Boredom and Slaanesh, otherwise Slaanesh gets to eat Hoeth too, and Hoeth unlike Cegorach and Khaine do not have in-built defenses from inside threats as he does not care for them and if Slaanesh gets Hoeth's domains then this galaxy will not be able to sustain any life that is not Eldar assuming we find a way to deal with Gorkamorka and then we'll spread across existence as Slaanesh keeps wishing for more and the more we have, the more we'll kill to feel safe.

The gods are animals and not people, they can't think in anything but what their bodies demand of them, so we trick them into pretending to be civilized and not engines of galactic Omnicide that like playing at civilization. It's the priests jobs to manage their momentum into something that does not turn our people into War Machines by adding our own and coloring it in trickery and deceit that makes us pretend we are Artists and not things that were made for Omnicide and Violence.

The Gods want safety now, and it is Hoeth and his faithful which were made to give it to them and so they wish to give it to his faithful so that they repay them back with it as well, and we provide it with Proactivity by making threats less of an issue through diplomacy. But the Gods no longer have Hoeth to prove diplomacy works and whom we know well how to tame and convince the rest that they are safe, so they wish for his priests to provide safety and not diplomacy and they now target me to start the Narrative and how they wish to do so is simple.

I am a Damned Priest of a God who speaks in Apocalypses, for me Safety as defined by the Old Ones is a Sin and the Divine wishing me to embark on it forces me on two choices and paths I must embark on at any cost, and of which I only wish to take one, for like the God I serve, I must plot the demise of my enemies to feel safe myself.

I can choose to truly be safe, to stand behind walls and defenses and among my family and plot the Demise of everything that is not myself and them and subject reality to endless cullings of the species of the Great Wheel, or I can be Proactive and try to engage in diplomacy and friendship by putting myself among my screaming enemies and sparing the galaxy the need for culling to make me feel safe by being safe among their screams.

"Protector of this heart and home, we have not taken anything from you, what you see is what is left of your family, for Boredom took all that they were and only us and this is safe from it, and it is thanks to the Priest in front of you that we so desperately wish to keep safe, for it is thanks to him that all new Eldar will be born free of it, as his Poison he turned into a cure has been absorbed by us and now all new souls born from the Divine will be free of it as long as they are born blessed by us, and now his kin prepare the Curing of the New Divine to ensure those born of her will be the same assuming she survives it, for his cure can easily kill those that are not ready for it. Please our Protector, we beg of you to let us keep him safe and grant him a large family to love him and that which he can keep safe and thus keep himself safe as well, for he has earned it a thousands times over." Isha spoke from the living Corpse of the grandmother of the woman she pleaded to.

"I apologize to interrupt, for it is not my right to ask of it as a Medicine Peddler and a Guest, but has a Divine Decree passed in regards to myself and my craft?" I interjected softly.

I would pay for talking to the family of my Protector who both wish me well without the leave of their Protector if she wished me to, but I need to know of new Decrees to follow them and if they relate to me and what I do personally then that is very very bad.

The type of bad that cleanses galaxy of life bad, because I do not have enough Narrative Momentum to fight those and reinterpret them.

The blonde goddess of flawless skin and soft voice, who had taken over the body of of a red haired and mutilated half corpse and turned it so looked with mischief on the priest of her dead brother. It seems the Divine have picked family as my chain, and not the duty of death and souls as Morrai Heg remains silent and I cannot look at her unless I wish the two to team up on me.

"May I answer protector? I know I have spoken out of turn and I apologize for it and I am willing to bless your family for it if you agree to provide this priest with safety." The goddess whose eyes we cannot see said.

The eyes of Isha should be blue or green. Blue if she is here as Goddess and green if she is here as part of the household, for all those that are to live in this home and come from the womb of its founder must have her green eyes and the hair of their fathers as the house and echoes of past songs sings to us and for now the Goddess has not decided she is so yet.

"You may answer my questions when I ask you of them as I talk with the Medicine Peddler." The lady said and both of had to grimace at that.

Ladies and princes always shift the narrative and it is only to their benefit and if you're lucky not your detriment.

"I apologize for the breach of Decorum, Lady of the House." I said as I bowed as deeply as I could and all but presented my neck.

The lady has noticed she has power in her domain and because none of us wish her harm and have shown deference and so she can make certain demands of priests who burn worlds to cinders and the Divines they serve.

There is a reason nobody with sense wishes to leave their homes once they have built them. By law and ritual we've taken millions of years to implement and make so, the will of the Protector of the House is Absolute inside of it provided multiple conditions are met, for the only singers in it are themselves and it is the rest of us that must hear it and appreciate it.

Some might think that it is the Mightier or perhaps that of a higher rank of the Parents of the Home that decide the pecking order, but they are fools. The one that spends more time in a home and sings it into ritual and existence on others is its rightful Ruler.

In the Home with the Silver Door, Scarn Laddorn rules with a Shadow Knife and an Iron Fist nobody expects until they are at their throats as he allows his wife to forge the clan she desires. It was him that allowed his wife to bring broken things into his home and give us the choice of family, where our songs belong subordinate to theirs in exchange for love and care, and teaching and protection from its Mighty Mother and Shadowy Father.

Here in the Home with the White Door, the only Protector is a young and ill woman who needs to weave around the designs of priests and the Divine as she plots the safety of her family, and now has realized she does not have to bother with any of it, for we have come to her to seek favors or repay them and as long as we continue trying to do the same she has power over us in the bounds of what we wish of her.

And it is now a fight between Priest and Divine to see if she will choose to be civilized or what the Divine wish of her, or if she will Shift the Narrative to what she wants and away from our designs as is the right of those that walk the Path of Princes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Priest and Divine squabble in my home.

The priest enslaved my mother and took our protector from us and offers us healing from that which will end the song of this home forever for it.

The Divine wish to keep him safe and have taken any chance I have of it making our family whole but are willing to provide blessings for it.

I wish for my mother to hug me, I wish to hear the voice of my grandmother again and to meet my Great Grandmother who built this home, and I need to know which if any of them can give me most of what I want.

"Priest and Guest, is what the Divine speak of true? It is truly that they wish to reward you and they have taken my family from me to do so?" I sang as I prepared to strike.

He was brought here to heal my family, not take from them.

"What the Divine wish of me is to Sin, Lady of the House. The Speakers of Apocalypse only feel safe among the screams of our foes or when planning it and the Divine wishes me to pick between the two the one I least desire. I have come here with the intention of making your family as whole as I can and I am willing to provide all healing I can for free and release your mother from what she promised me and still give her what she begged of me as repentance for any harm my presence may have caused to your family, but know that I have only come here to bring you joy and happiness as defined by your mother and that I mean you well." The priest responded as he continued his deep bow.

I looked upon the Divine puppet the half-corpses of my family. The only thing left of them is the Divine fragment that is in each Eldar and their blessing they used to puppet a body devoid of the soul of the artists which raised us as they could.

"There is a way to fully bring them back my Protector, for the priest is the Grand Master of the art of healing the soul through Murderous Means and a family man too, and if there is any that can fully bring them back it is him, we are here only to beg of him to fully do so and accept the safety this brings." Isha pleaded.

My neck almost snapped as it turned towards the priest which remained bowed.

"I ask again, do they speak the truth?" I spoke as the sword of my soul prepared to cut

"In a sense Lady of the House. My treatment plan and that which I realize the Divine wish of me would have similar effects, but one is faster than the other for you, but obscene to myself, and that which I wish to undertake is slower and more painful for you as it assists my plans, but will leave your family happier in the long term if you agree to it." He continued.

"You will Speak them and let me make my decision, as only I will decide which to subject those who live under my love and song to." I replied vehemently.

I turned to the Divine which all but killed my grandmother and her mother and whom I was supposed to protect.

"The Divine is no longer welcome in my home, you will leave and leave behind what is my family and leave them well cared for and not as is comfortable for you to wear." I told them and chose to hear the priest out.

They would still get as they wish depending on my decision but I no longer wish to see them, but my family.

Their shackles burned in gold and silver as their bodies turned from that which is as Divine to the bodies they would have had if they did not mutilate themselves. The two bodies had red hair, fair skin and features and green eyes all as physically healthy as any eldar but empty of soul and asleep.

I turned to the Priest who had my full attention now.

"Tell me of the that which the Divines says you can provide and its results and I will accept no trickery or lies." I ordered as I prepared to cut.

He remained bowed as the sword of my soul prepared to cut and I finally allowed his sword of light to hit the floor. I did not need it for now.

"The Divine wish for me to take this home under me, marry the women in it and have them tie me down where I cannot leave too far from them and thus am forced to look after them as I set in motion increasingly complex and numerous plots to kill all that threaten them as is the habit and ritual of the Speakers of Apocalypse. I can take those Emptied as my women and shower them in my love and the song of their home and they will be rebuilt from it as their souls live again and are reborn from their own song as is the Birthright of all Eldar who do not stay dead once killed, but are brought back by our own songs as long as our bodies remain, and to sing well enough is to plot the demise of your enemies as your are reborn from it. I will be intruding in your home, taking it fully for myself and love you and have you love me for it and I beg of you to not ask of me for this happen.

I do not want more things to love and adore as I plot the demise of their enemies. I've already cleansed a world of life and did the same to those around them in the name of that which I love and left two others in death and burning and screams in the name of the same even as they survived my plots, and I do not wish to do more than I need to. This will make you a part of my clan and family which holds Royalty in it and if I stay too long around them as I will take you there to be safe, then my schemes will encompass the galaxy as I burn it to make sure my family feels safe and warm among its screams and you will be a part of it." He explained the plan of the Divine.

I considered his words. If he can do as he claims and the Divine seem to think so, then this truly gives me everything my heart demands and I felt myself become more willing as my body prepared itself to do as it craved and it craved what the Divine wished of it to do, for it gave it and my soul the same thing they wished for

I will decide whether or not to do as the Divine and my body wills after I hear his plan.

"Now tell me your plans and how do they make us happy." I ordered.

His voice broke slightly as he spoke his plots, for to do so outside of debts and tricks goes against all that priests are.

"I originally planned to heal you and your family and allow yourselves to slowly rebuild yourselves from your song and love after I slowly Immunized your from Boredom. I need to do so slowly for my cure as the Divine has said can kill those who are not properly prepared for it and the only way to do so is to fill one's soul with Emotions and Love is the strongest I had found that can do so. I would allow your family to be together and free of my plots as you rebuild yourselves and experience the greatest joy our people can experience.

Once your mother finished her service to me as I plot how to serve the Divine and see if I can guarantee that the Rift between the New Divine and the Pantheon can be mended if they so choose. Once I am done I would trick her into freedom and she would continue to help your family experience the greatest joy and happiness an Eldar can experience which is what we call freedom, and it is freedom from the plots of those that are not like us, freedom to love and freedom to make art as we wish for it. Please kind Lady pick this path, for it grants you and your home the happiness I cannot posses but will gladly give to those that I can, for this is what the True Priests of the Pantheon have always tried to offer our people and why we call those who do not know this but claim to be Priests as Pretender Priests." The priest begged.

He begged to give us freedom from the Divine, while the Divine offered safety and each path will give me what I desire.

The path of the Divine, grants me what I desire now, but makes me tangled in plots and schemes I do not care for but will have to take them on in the name of my love as we received another individual in my home that would grant such to us and we will love him for it as he will love us.

The Path laid down by the Priest leaves us Whole but brings me pain and uncertainty as we will be free to do as we wish on a world we can't defend ourselves from and on which all will want what we have and will take from me and plunder my home and song for all we have to get it or deny it to others and this too appeals to me for Eldar are born from the Divine Kindness which we call Strife.

"I am Greedy and I want both, now undress and give us as we desire priest, for I wish for the safety of my family and song and for us to be free from the plotting of the Pantheon and it is up to you to grant to us what we desire as recompense for taking our mother." I told him.

I instructed my three sisters to remember the song of our family in its entirety and sing is as loudly as they can.

"I will heal the children and those that do not Waste first and ask them not to be a part of it as I lay with the women of this home, for if you wish to force me to lay with children and those I do not have to in order to heal them, then I would rather just stop living, for this is not the life I wish for myself and I would rather die or face Obscurity than live a life I did not pick for myself or was tricked into by those that love me. I can grant them charms that will keep the disease away as they protect them and if they do not try to hear and see of those infected as well as another one that if used well, will allow to cleanse the early stages of the Virus if there are weaknesses in the defense or they are somehow reinfected until they can be properly Immunized." The priest pleaded as he was still clothed.

I will grant him what he desires then, for it is the least I can do for what he will give us.

"I will grant you this favor. Make those that have have not wasted healthy then grant them their protection and you will not have to claim them. Bring my mother too when you are done and my sisters will sing from another room and make sure the home and those in it hear it." I told him as I joined my grandmother and her mother and founder of our home and awaited for the priest to join us.

He went to my three sisters of which only one was an adult and healed them in the flames of Khaine then granted them two tablets which he turned into the centerpieces for a necklace.

He then brought our mother slowly into our large bed as we prepared to receive his love that will make us whole and both I and my mother started to undress him as we desperately wished to no longer feel Empty.