Chapter 8:

Chapter 8: Motherhood warps the mind of child and mother alike.


I remember target 13.

It was a normal looking Eldar man. He had tattoos, a single head with two eyes and he died in one hit, my siblings did not correct my aim with the shurikens to ensure he would not see his killer even in death. My muscles remember putting six shurikens in him, one for each eye.

I do not remember him as having six eyes, I remember the spread of the shurikens. Two in the head, one in the head, three around his heart. I shot from the back.

I remember his face yet I never ever saw it as I shot him in the back.

He was a she when she died. He died a man.

History did not match my muscle memories, I ignored it. My siblings the only ones that knew it too. They did the same. Now was not the time. We were in a hurry.

There were too many eldar. We ignored it.

Target 38 had gone to sleep alone. We were not in position.

"Outside minimal timescale." I sent to my siblings.

They knew it, I knew it.

I needed to feel their souls, make sure they are real. They knew I needed it, I knew they knew.

They replied back in affirmative.

They needed it too. I knew they needed it, they knew I knew.

We jumped from building to building. The Maton provided a new filter as we jumped. The adult eldar's field of view. It showed mine as well.

We jumped from a pyramid whose soul sang of the death of a lover to a tower describing a child born after his father died.

From there the funeral song of a mother haunted us, we made a detour.

We were six hours away from our target, there were too many Eldar, too many looked up. The targets' minimum sleeping hours was four hours, maximum was sixty-six, median seven, average nine.

We were cutting it too close with six.

We reached it in time, the target was yet asleep.

"Marsa." was Aesans' only word.

She wanted to go but her hand shook. Aesan offered to go instead, his hand didn't.

"No."

She stopped shaking and we entered the building.

There was no gravity, matter was not matter, light was darkness and touch a question of the mind, not the body. We did not speak, the soulscape did not matter, we knew where our target stood and this wasn't his soul, it was not bright enough. Something frayed, it was not reality.

Distance died, smell replaced it and we had no more noses. We continued walking, we knew how the others would act, coordination was dangerous.

A room came, we had bodies again. Marsa stood 5.2 centimeters from where we had estimated she would be. Her blade was red, we shot her and reality broke.

Target 38 was awake, I took the lead, stratagem 2 was still in effect, I could not kill him. My siblings turned into swords as I sang. My voice was death.

Reality shuddered, our sister returned, the target was dead. Seven swords stuck out from it. Marsa created 4 of them, Aesan 1. Neither had the time to do so.

Guraith and I burned the corpse and we could not find a soul. We ran, we lost three days in target 38's house. Seven less than expected.

One day later we found a safe house. Aesan and I fell into meditation, Guraith started to look at the map, Marsa took first shift.

"Discontinuity." Guraith said the first word in three days.

We already knew, but we needed confirmation.

"Severity?" I asked

Marsa and Aesan switched places, Guraith refused.

"Three cuts, reality is the same, it's us that changed." Worse than expected.

Something changed in us, something came and went and left its mark, we changed and we knew not how.

"Meditate." Was my only response. He obeyed.

"We should be dead." Aesan came as our siblings re-acclimatized to reality. It would be temporary but we need firm ground before we acted.

"Target pretended to sleep, we survived." Was my response.

The focus was lifting and I was very very tired. The Eldar mind is capable of pushing itself for two weeks without damage normally. We could push it to three. We pushed too hard and too fast, personal reality was fraying now, we were out of phase with reality thanks to target 22 and 38's manipulations.

The more we thought the more out of phase we became. We remembered father's written instructions on how to deal with dephasing from reality.

He went through it once, the Eldar Empire he remembered had a Phoenix Empress, when he returned we had a Phoenix King, nothing else he could remember changed. The Eldar Empire decided the Ghoul Stars will remain outside its reach afterwards.

Father swore new oaths to the King, the Pheonix King already received them before he left on the expedition. Neither made any comment of it to the other.

"Reality is water, your connection to it a string and the string is you and because it ceases being you it must be cut. Dephasing happens when you lose connection to said string. To regain it you must sever the force separating you from the ability to hold to a string. You will not return to the same reality if you are lucky, if you return to the same reality it is not you that returned, you must cut again." Aesan recited from memory.

The words came with his own memory of his 72 cuts.

Something must change, we are not who we were, we needed rest before we cut together to where we were sent.

"One hour more of rest then we cut." I said curtly, we were not real, reality was and we did not match. Integrity was breaking as we stopped being tolerated by reality. Unreality would not have us yet.

The hour passed in silence and as soon as it fully passed we begun to cut, my siblings and I became sword. I was the longer edge. Aesan was the shorter one. Guraith became the handle. Marsa the core, she was the most sword of us all.

We cut and reality fell in pieces. We were one being, one body four souls.

The string still held, we cut again. It shattered, cause came before effect.

We were back to reality, we were Eldar, we cut again.

Reality turned into hues of red, we were too purple to stay.

We were a spear, we cut again.

We were not meant to be a spear, swords did not exist in this reality, it was not what we should be.

We were sword, we cut again.

"We are where we should be." Aesan broke the silence as the unity ended.

Three degree of separation meant four cuts, one for each degree and one to heal the wound. We were Eldar again.

Guraith, Marsa and Aesan fell asleep on the spot, I gently placed them in a comfortable position from the contorted messes they fell in. I kept guard ,we were not where we left from. We used to be North of the Webway gate, now we are South. We did not move, the city did.

The story of the city spoke of twin heroes, both men, history remained the same. Targets 40 and 41 remained the same, both still needed to die. We had one day of sleep before we would be losing the margin of error gained from Assassinating target 38. We were closer to target 40 than before.

My siblings slept for 12 hours, so did I when they awoke. I was in a more comfortable position when waking up than when I fell asleep.

Awareness came instantly, my soul hurt. My siblings were the same.

"Reality cuts the edges in three dimensions, the dimensions are not uniform but the way they separate to sword are." Marsa said as we prepared to leave.

She is the most sword of us, she understands what we did there the best. Guraith guided, I cut, Aesan kept things coherent but Marsa was sword, she understood what we cut and why. We did not understand the meaning of the phrase she used but we were relieved she instinctively knew it.

If she didn't, then we would need to cut again until she did, we were already where we should be, the result would see us cutting for an eternity.

The rules of this reality are the same, we are the same individuals from before, we are siblings. Our memories are now the same, we are in just as much danger as we were before killing target 22. The greatest danger had passed.

We were relieved and we silently swore we would not go near the family of too powerful a psyker again, they bend reality too hard to make it fit their delusions and we did not know how to defend ourselves from it. We could only heal the wounds inflicted on us.

We started running as our souls were in pain. It will heal, target 40 needed to die, we were two days away from it.

We reached our target after jumping on a tower. It spoke of regret, what it regretted we did not know, the Alchemists erased it.

Target 40 was a young girl, twenty years of age. She was not bipedal.

Three tails came out of each of her eyes, the snakes were not snakes, they were Alchemical cauldrons shaped like snakes. The girl looked like a 12 years old human child but with pointier hears. Her face was not eldar but human, her soul eldar and this was not her first body. She was pregnant with something not Eldar, something bigger than her, yet she stood on her three spider like legs. She was humming a happy tune and she had no mouth. Her hair was green it grew and shortened by the second. One hearbeat it was longer than she was tall, the next it was a bobcut.

She was the only one I did not wish to kill among all our targets, she still needed to die.

She was herself the only target younger than all of us as she stood on three legs made of death crystals, the progeny in her belly was kept in the air by the power of the snakes as their stingers bit into her belly and they then bit into both brain and braincase from the inside. Both the fangs we could not see and the stingers we did see pumped her full of chemicals. Aphrodisiacs, pain enhancers and sugar pumped into her at regular intervals of 7 heartbeats.

The death crystals carried her signature. Her body was aged and killed, only to be brought back into a copy and done so to it again and again until three legs, each 3,2 meters tall were created. Her legs were amputated and turned into wings on her back as he new prosthesis were attached and rose her up into the air, her frame now reaching 4 meters tall.

We could still see her faces on each of the legs, each kept in a horrifying death scream, each was a different age. There were 3 faces on each leg.

We were unsure if she had blood in her veins, her skin was purple, her veins neon blue and glowing. Guraith turned her on fire as he stabbed and cut her. Aesan started removing our psychic echoes from the area as Marsa started carving the floor and walls with the symbols of the death cult.

The memory of why my heart cared came unbidden.

I remember the day I was reading, no I was not reading books, I was looking into the Maton networks for books of those that thought like me. I remember telling my siblings what I was doing upon being asked. When I responded my siblings were confused, they did not understand my request but were willing to help.

I was forty years old, they were thirty-seven. I opened my mind to them. I did not just open it to talk, I went deeper than that as I showed them how I thought.

It was that day that I understood the difference between my former race and my current one. I was Eldar, my soul was eldar, my mind was Eldar, but my perspective human.

The Eldar did not care for other peoples' actions in the same way as humans. Humans did care in a dimension the Eldar did not understand. The best way to explain it was to think of primitive civilizations.

When ancient humans would hunt, they would show thanks to the gods, to the spirits, to their teachers that taught them, the tools they used or to the beast they had slain. Human celebrations would sometimes show apologies to the beast they had slain, for it had done the human tribes a service in feeding us and our families and we killed it for it. The act of touching our emotions in some positive way was enough to make us care and feel sorry for that which we hurt or killed, even if by doing so it is how it had served us. We sought to make amends, to make its passing easier as even as we understood that what we did was necessary we still thought that to harm that which had helped us as inherently wrong and despite that wrongness we would continue to do it again.

Eldar were not Man.

Their celebrations praised the hunters for their services, it honored them for serving the tribe. They thanked the hunters, the tribe, the ancestors or the gods. Compassion was reserved to those injured in the hunt, to those left without family and rarely to those who had crafted the tools or armor that saved someone's life as well as for the tools themselves. The thought of the slain beast's emotion mattering did not cross their minds, for it was too strange to consider for why would a foe need to be thanked for fighting them.

I looked upon the maps of the city when I still had access to Maton updated maps, and I saw others that fought to survive and not give in to the cults. I grew attached to them, their struggle proving to me that my new species still had a heart and a soul to fight against the corruption. I mourned them as they died, my siblings regretted the loss of a possible ally but did not think much of it, but I did.

I showed them why and they thought I was ill.

They took me to be checked by every single nursery apparatus twice over and then took me to the medical wing to be subjected to other battery of tests. They brought the Maton to look me over, I showed the Maton the same perspective thrice until the Maton agreed that I was healthy. My perspective was different than that of my siblings and the girl that now burned was the only other creature that could have possibly shared some of it on this world.

She was born with the gift of healing. So was I, but killing my father on my first day of life robbed me of it, said act granting me a new gift in return. The girl that was now ash was the closest Eldar could get to being like me, she cared for others in a way that was almost alien to Eldar. She had healed five individuals that came to her when her Mistress was not there for the simple reason they were near her and needed help.

Even in death she was giving a mouthless scream, begging us, anyone, to save the abomination growing inside of her, to save her child. My siblings did not.

Neither of us would look at the abomination, it hurt too much to do so and we deleted the information from our mind as soon as it entered lest it scar our minds too much. Our minds weren't in the the best condition anyway.

We did not need more damage. We already took more than we thought we could survive.

I wished that I could have granted her, her dying wish but we had decided that both mother and abomination needed to die to convince the Alchemist it was the sword cult that killed her lover and even if it wasn't necessary the unborn still needed to die, it was too much of an abomination to be allowed to live.

I prayed for her soul to reach a better life. It was the only prayer I have given in this life. I did not apologize and I'm scared of the fact that I might need to give more in the future.

I couldn't help my siblings in this, even if I was allowed, I do not think I am capable of doing much more than I could right now, my heart aches too much.

My siblings finished their tasks, we started running. We needed to wait two more days for the Alchemist to return to her lab, four more to re-enact her previous schemes or come up with another equally horrific way of getting revenge on the sword cult.

Once whatever she planned was in motion target 41 would die and in the following hour we would be free of this world.